Donald Trump’s 2017 Middle East trip is framed as a bold counter to Barack Obama’s 2009 apology-laden Cairo speech, with Trump’s "kill every one of you" threat allegedly rattling Saudi leaders while Melania’s headscarf-free stance symbolized defiance. The episode slams Obama’s Iran nuclear deal as naive, contrasts Trump’s alliance-reassertion, and mocks universities as credential mills with negative ROI, citing absurd peer-reviewed papers like "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." It also praises Sands of Iwo Jima’s tough leadership over Saving Private Ryan’s "leadership from behind," warning that abandoning tradition risks chaos—positioning America’s future as a choice between Deadpool’s anarchy or Captain America’s order. [Automatically generated summary]
With President Trump visiting the Middle East, we here at the Andrew Clavin Show thought it would be interesting to compare Trump's Middle East trip with that of the last president, what's his name?
Obama.
Right.
Sorry, it's hard to remember now that his legacy has been dumped like kitty litter into the deodorized trash bag of history.
So where was I?
All right, comparing Trump's trip to President Pajamas.
When President Osama traveled to the Middle East in June of 2009, he bowed so low to the rulers there, it looked as if he were engaging in some sort of submissive sexual act.
Journalists trying to explain away the president's fawning servility in the presence of tyrants twisted themselves into complex positions that actually were submissive sexual acts.
So the entire visit looked something like a daisy chain on a sadomasochistic porn site.
Not that I've ever been on a sadomasochistic porn site, but I've heard about them.
Conversely, at the start of Trump's trip, an image of the president several stories high was projected on the front of palaces where obscenely wealthy oligarchs live in garish luxury.
Trump then left Mar-a-Lago and headed for Saudi Arabia.
When President Bahama gave his famous speech in Cairo, Egypt, he apologized for American arrogance, saying, quote, I am so, so sorry that we thoughtlessly built our World Trade Center in the exact spot where devout Muslims were trying to fly their hijacked jets.
It was a typical example of how capitalist imperialism colonizes even the airspace that is being used by native cultures, unquote.
The media praised Obama's speech for extending the open hand of friendship to people who are only trying to live in peace with all mankind after they first slaughter the part of mankind they can't live in peace with.
Donald Trump struck a somewhat different note in his speech saying, quote, Islamic extremists must be destroyed and you better take care of this because you don't want the task to fall to me because look in my eyes.
I'm crazy.
No, seriously, read the New York Times.
I am completely out of my mind.
And if you annoy me, I will kill each and every one of you and spread your radioactive ashes to the wind.
No, I mean it.
I'm nuts.
Just look at me, booga booga, unquote.
The assembled Saudi leaders reacted by stampeding the exits, trampling each other underfoot in their desperation to escape the by now raving commander-in-chief of the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
Finally, when Orama visited the Middle East, his worldly, sophisticated wife Rochelle, whatever the hell her name was, wore a headscarf to demonstrate that we as Americans are open-minded enough to degrade ourselves in tribute to oppressive cultures that wish to destroy us.
Melania Trump, on the other hand, wore nothing on her head but that amazingly silky cascade of golden brown hair while showing off her mind-rattling figure and heartbreakingly shapely legs.
And frankly, after watching that shameless display of profligate feminine freedom, I think it's possible we elected the wrong Trump.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Islam vs. Ziprecruiter00:10:41
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby's in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, directly back from his trip to the Middle East, Troll King Michael Abdul Knowles is here to discuss the craziness on campus as our students graduate to Gotten through the world and find out they know absolutely nothing about it after four years in college.
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So, I think, you know, Trump is now in Israel, but I still want to talk about it.
One of the things that happens with Trump is everything goes by so fast that by the time you want to talk about one thing, it's new news.
But I think it's worth taking a look back at this speech that he gave in Saudi Arabia.
And the first thing I want to talk about is Melania.
I have to say, you know, I usually keep first ladies out of all my commentary because I think that being a wife is hard to begin with, and then you're stuck being the wife of the president, and everything you do is representative.
But, you know, when Donald Trump had that line, when somebody said something about Putin is a bad guy because he kills people, and Donald Trump said, well, we all kill people.
You know, everybody kills people.
Like, I really went after Trump for that.
I thought that was really, so far, was the low point of his presidency because it misunderstood the difference between them and us.
What is the difference between them and us?
No, we don't, you know, our journalists, as much as we may hate them, do not get defenestrated, right?
They don't go out the window like Putin's enemies do.
So, but then when Nancy Pelosi went to the Middle East and she wore a headscarf, she said the same thing.
She said exactly the same thing.
She said, oh, well, you know, we only just recently let women do anything.
You know, I mean, it's nonsense.
We are different.
And as Melania is representative of the ladies of this country, and as representative of the ladies, she's representative of all of us.
I'm really glad that she did not kowtow to wear the headscarf.
Obviously, that's a decision that probably goes right up the line.
Everybody has to sign on to that decision.
She looked marvelous, I thought she looked absolutely, and I was proud to have her there.
And you know, this is true of everything about the Obama administration.
Looking back, is we score Trump rightly when he said, oh, well, we kill people too.
But that was Obama's entire attitude.
His entire attitude was, oh, yes, we've all made mistakes, but now I'm here.
You know, now I'm here.
It was not that as America is an example to the world in human rights.
It was, I am an example to the world in human rights, but the rest of us have all made mistakes.
So when we look at Trump's speech, we have to think first about what he is walking into.
You can't judge something unless you know what it's for, right?
You have to say, you can't say, oh, this, you know, this wine, this corkscrew is a good or bad corkscrew until you know it's meant to pull the corks out of bottles, right?
So what was Trump trying to do?
And you have to remember that Obama left the Middle East in a shambles, and it was on him.
I'm not saying that he could have brought the Middle East to peace.
I'm not saying he could have solved all the problems, but he made everything worse.
And how did he make it worse?
He made it worse because, like the little ponce of a college professor he was, he had a theory, and the theory had nothing to do with reality.
And when he found out it had nothing to do with reality, he demanded that reality adhere to his theory.
His theory was that all we had to do was make nice with Iran.
And in order to make nice with Iran, that meant you had to leave our allies in the dust.
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, you had to diss them because what we had to do is bring Iran into the pro into the process.
Once we bring Iran into the process, once we negotiate this wonderful new nuclear deal, they're going to see that we all, you know, we're all together in this.
The problem is, is that is complete narcissism.
The idea that people don't act for their own reasons have perfectly, the people in the Middle East who want to kill us have perfectly good reasons in their mind why they want to kill us.
It has nothing to do with how we behave, except for the fact that we don't kowtow to them.
So Obama's idea was he was going to turn his back on Israel, going to turn his back on Saudi Arabia, and basically no problem with Islam.
Anybody who says anything is wrong with Islam is nuts.
And he turned Iran into this raving nuclear-bound power that has everybody terrified.
Now, the good side of that, of course, is that because everybody's terrified, suddenly Israel doesn't look so bad.
Suddenly America doesn't look so bad.
Suddenly they're thinking, hmm, maybe we ought to rearrange this.
So Trump is going over there to remind people that he is going to redirect America's feet to the Sunni side of the street.
I shouldn't have said that.
That was terrible.
But if you just look at his speech for a minute, what you see was that he was trying to reestablish, right?
It wasn't, I don't think it was a great speech.
It wasn't a tear down that wall speech.
He was just trying to reestablish that we are going to be in alliance with Saudi Arabia.
And everybody said all this stuff.
I was watching the commentary.
On the right, the commentary on the left was, well, okay, it wasn't as bad as his campaigns.
His campaign was, oh, I hate Muslims, I hate Muslims.
But now at least he didn't say that, blah, But on the right, it was, well, he said it's not a clash of civilizations, but it is a clash of civilizations.
But of course it's a clash of civilizations.
And of course it's about religion.
But what do we gain by going over and saying that?
Because the thing about a clash of cultures is it's not going to end with one of our cultures disappearing.
It's not going to end with Dresden in ruins and the Nazis surrendering and all this stuff.
That's not what's going to happen.
You will know who wins this clash.
I'll tell you how you'll know.
When rich guys in Silicon Valley start saying, you know, I've become a Muslim recently.
You know, I really find that Islam is, you know, I'm not a radical Islam.
You know, when guys like Mark Zuckerberg start becoming Muslim, you'll know we lost, okay?
When women in Saudi Arabia can wear skirts, you'll know we've won.
And that's how this works.
So a lot of this has to do with persuasion.
And what Trump did was he essentially sought to isolate the terrorists within the context of their being Islamic terrorists.
He called them, he said he didn't, they said he didn't mean to say Islamic extremists.
He meant to say Islamist extremists, but he said Islamic extremists.
And this is, let me just, let me talk about how he talked about it.
Play cut number four.
That means honestly confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds.
We must stop what they're doing to inspire because they do nothing to inspire but kill.
And we are having a very profound effect if you look at what's happened recently.
And it means standing together against the murder of innocent Muslims, the oppression of women, the persecution of Jews, and the slaughter of Christians.
Religious leaders must make this absolutely clear.
Barbarism will deliver you no glory.
Piety.
to evil will bring you no dignity.
If you choose the path of terror, your life will be empty, your life will be brief, and your soul will be fully condemned.
You know, I'm sorry, but that is good stuff to me because what he is saying is, you know, they're funding in Saudi Arabia to keep the fat cats in power and keep the people quiet.
They funded these Wahhabi mosques that preach this nonsense to people.
And he is saying, no, you have got to stop.
You've got to start preaching that this is not part of our religion.
You know, he's, to go over there, to want him to go over there and say, you know, we have to wipe Islam off the face of the earth.
It's just not realistic.
It's silly.
But he did isolate that this was Islam extremist.
He essentially said, this is a problem in the house of Islam.
Now, I've always said there are two possibilities of that Islamic extremism is either a natural outgrowth from Islam itself, or it's a cancer on Islam.
It's one of the other.
One or the other, I'd like to hear it debated by experts.
My instinct is because every Islamic country is oppressive, every single one tends toward tyranny.
My instinct is that it may in fact be a natural outgrowth out of the Quran, but I won't say it.
You know, I think there's still an open question.
I'd like to hear it debated.
Why You Should Dress Better00:02:38
That's my instinct.
But I don't want him to go over and say that.
I don't think that accomplishes what he needs to accomplish.
I think he needs to reestablish our relationship with Saudi Arabia, that we're going to have to get together and work on this, and we expect to see this from him.
Trump is a natural isolationist.
He wants to stay out of foreign wars, which is an old conservative principle, the way conservatives used to be before neoconservatism.
And I think he is willing to stay with that as long as that's a realistic thing.
I want to talk a little bit more about this, but first, I want to talk about the lousy way you're dressed.
I mean, look at yourself.
But put your chin on your chest and look down at yourself, especially if you're a guy.
This is one of the things I have noticed in this office, I have to say.
But I've noticed, actually, a lot of my friends have said this, is that women come to work and they dress.
They look nice.
They know that you are judged on the way you look.
And guys, especially guys just out of college, it's not true as they get a little older, but guys just out of college come in with the sneakers and the hoodies and all this stuff.
And I get it.
I get it.
We don't wear suits and ties anymore.
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You look better in a suit, and you look better if the suit is tailored to you.
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Speeches at Commencement Ceremonies00:15:18
You'll look a lot better.
So let's just finish this up and then we will get to Michael Knowles.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come on over to TheDailyWire.com, and while you're there, subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month, and then you can watch the whole thing there.
So finally, the last thing that Trump did was he reestablished that we are isolating Iran.
Now this is not an act of moral courage in Saudi Arabia where all they want is to isolate Iran.
But, you know, this is after eight years.
Remember, again, this is after eight years of a guy who thought that we could make friends with these people and that if he could just, oh, all he had to do was give them nuclear weapons and they'd be happy.
No, he pretends, he pretends that he has, Obama pretended that he was stopping them from getting nuclear weapons.
We know that's not true.
And some people complain that Trump hasn't backed away from the Iran deal, but there's no point in backing away from the Iran deal because Obama diabolically set it up so we gave them everything up front, all the cash, everything they wanted, all the taking away of sanctions.
We gave them all that up front, and now everything is what we get from them.
We have nothing to take away.
There's no reason to get out of the deal because we're the only ones who can get screwed.
So, I mean, so number five, Trump number five is him isolating Iran once again where they belong.
From Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, Iran funds arms and trains terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region.
For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.
It is a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death to America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this very room.
So this is, I mean, this is a, he's pressing the reset button, as Obama would have said, after eight years of a mishandled situation that has left the world so much more dangerous than it was.
And Trump did a good job.
I'm not going to say this is Reagan-esque or anything like that.
But let me also comment on what I thought was the best aspect of this trip.
You know, first of all, he's going off to Israel.
This is the first time, I think, the Middle East, I think, the first time a president made his first trip to the Middle East, and certainly the first time that he made his first trip to include Israel, which is also a good thing.
They're looking really happy to see him over there.
But the other thing about this is it put a pin for a minute, a little bit of space in the hysteria that the press was ginning up over the firing of James Comey.
And the wonderful thing about getting rid of hysteria is it gives us a chance to see once again that I am always right.
This is an important thing because sometimes in the midst of hysteria, we forget that I'm always right.
You know, we can get unsure.
We can think, is Clavin always right?
And then we see, then things calm down and we see, yes, I was right.
All of this was nonsense.
This was what I call the hysterical wave technique, where you hit people, you get unconfirmed anonymous sources to put forward a story.
Oh, James Comey has been fired and it's all a form of obstruction of justice.
And all the Democrats go on the media and they perform their histrionics and the media give them a complete free echo chamber.
Oh my god, it's obstruction of justice, obstruction of justice.
And then you start to think, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, this guy works for Trump.
He can fire him anytime he wants over anything he wants.
But too late, because we've got a new story.
Now Trump said this.
We've got anonymous stories saying this.
And the hysteria builds and builds.
And then, and then as each new thing gets thrown away, as each new thing is exposed as being a kind of nothing burger, or at least not as important as they were saying it was, then they start to say, after a string of scandals, after a strong, oh, it's a string of scandals.
So now you don't even go back and think about it anymore.
It's just a string of scandals.
It was a lot of, I won't say it was nothing.
I won't say it was nothing.
Trump is a problematical guy in a lot of ways, but it was certainly nothing that would cause us to talk about impeachment or obstruction of justice.
One of the best pieces on Trump I have ever read on this situation is written today in the Wall Street Journal by a Democratic strategist.
He's been a Democrat strategist for years.
He's now kind of disaffected with the Democrat Party.
His name is Ted Van Dyck.
I think it's pronounced Ted Van Dyke.
Let me just read just a little bit of this.
The political and media hysteria surrounding the Trump administration lies somewhere on the repulsiveness scale between the Jacobin excesses of the French Revolution and the McCarthy era.
Thus far, the public knows of no presidential action that would justify impeachment.
What about discussions between Trump campaign advisors and Russian and other foreign leaders?
Don't they count as high crimes and misdemeanors?
No.
Such conversations take place all the time in national campaigns.
Remember, this is a Democrat.
What about the firing of FBI Director James Comey?
Wasn't that suspicious?
No.
Mr. Comey disregarded the Justice Department chain of command and the normal properties of his office, as you heard on this show.
He made public statements about ongoing investigations.
He allowed it to leak that the president had suggested leniency for Mike Flynn, the former White House advisor now under investigation.
A presidential suggestion of that nature would be neither illegal nor unprecedented.
What about Mr. Trump's disclosure of classified information during a meeting with Russian leaders?
It's a tempest in a teapot.
The president has the authority to classify or declassify information as he wishes.
I have witnessed other presidents doing it.
What about Mr. Trump's executive order declaring a short-term pause on immigration from countries with active terrorist movements?
It may have been poorly handled, but other presidents have done similar things.
What about all Mr. Trump's flip-flopping?
Shouldn't a president be trustworthy and reliable?
Yes, but when Mr. Trump has reversed his campaign pledges, it has mostly been for the good.
Now, here is the thing that he says as a Democrat, but fair enough.
He says, President Trump, it is true, lacks the knowledge, experience, and temperament for the office.
His crude narcissism is grading.
He has carelessly contributed to his problems with heedless public statements.
He nonetheless was duly elected and should be given the leeway that new presidents are traditionally afforded.
That is the whole point.
And the point is that anyone who does not allow him that leeway but causes this hysteria is doing something wrong and doing it in the name of something wrong and doing it in the name of a philosophy that's wrong.
So I think that Trump deserves the support of the Republican Party.
And I'm really sorry they made this mistake of appointing a special counsel.
Maybe it won't work out as badly as I fear it will.
Nobody knows the future.
But we know the immediate present.
And in the immediate present, we are now going to turn to King of Trolls Michael Knowles, who is visiting us from his woodland home under the bridge.
How you doing, Michael?
I'm doing well.
I had a delicious billy goat for breakfast, and I think I'm ready to go for this segment.
Excellent, excellent.
So you were scanning the graduation ceremonies.
I unfortunately sat through half a dozen or a dozen of these awful speeches.
The biggest one, the one that's in the news right now, is of course Vice President Mike Pence.
Mike Pence spoke at the Notre Dame commencement ceremony.
And, well, I'll lead with this.
100 students walked out.
I would lead with the speech, but the students didn't wait for the speech.
The students walked out the second they announced him.
But they weren't protesting anything specific.
Oh, absolutely not.
It's just his existence.
They were protesting his existence.
Some people think it's because Vice President Pence holds the same view of marriage that the Catholic Church holds, and they were at a Catholic university.
And I don't really know where we're going with this.
But anyway, here is a great piece from Mike Pence's speech after they had already walked out.
This university is a vanguard of freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas at a time, sadly, when free speech and civility are waning on campuses across America.
Everybody who needed to hear that statement at the ceremony.
But there's 100 people, I mean, you can find 100 idiots anywhere, basically.
That's true.
It's disheartening because these students ostensibly have been educated for four years.
They've been educated at a serious institution.
Notre Dame is no slouch school, and they walked out basically evidencing that their education hasn't been worth very much.
Well, it's encouraging to think that by the time they're 40, approximately 73 of them will realize what idiots they were and the rest will be working in journalism.
That's exactly right.
That's right.
They'll have shows on ABC or something.
But it does speak about their education, doesn't it?
It does.
And so I looked around at all of the other commencement addresses, and the jarring thing about all of them is that, with a few exceptions, obviously Mike Pence, some statesmen and politicians give speeches, they were almost all celebrities, almost to a man.
I mean, or celebrity business people.
So Tim Cook, Howard Schultz, Deepak Chopra.
Oh, you're kidding me.
Will Farrell?
No, really?
Where did Will Farrell get?
You know, first, I've got to play you.
I've got to play you the insipid twaddle from Deepak Chopra's speech.
Do we have that cut?
I would like to ask you, what is your story?
What is your backstory?
What is your current story?
Where do you intend to go with your future story?
What will happen when you get to the mountaintop?
And will you come back to inspire others?
Because a life that is not in code there.
What the hell was that about?
It's like he just took, he went to the store and bought up all the platitudes and then just made a stew out of them and served it at the commencement.
But, you know, Deepak Chopra, obviously, is totally oblivious and gave this nonsensical commencement speech.
But Will Farrell was very self-aware.
He gave a great speech at USC and he acknowledged how crazy it is that he's there.
I would like to say thank you, graduates, for that warm welcome.
I would also like to apologize to all the parents who are sitting there saying, Will Farrell, why Will Farrell?
I hate Will Farrell.
I hate him.
I hate his movies.
He's gross.
Although he's much better looking in person.
Has he lost weight?
So Will Farrell.
That was pretty good, yeah.
He at least, and by the way, his speech was one of the better ones that was on offer this year.
And he at least acknowledged how crazy it is that he, a comedian and a movie star, was giving a speech to this graduating class.
I looked a little bit into the history of commencement speeches.
It was not always this way.
The earliest commencement speeches at Harvard in the 17th century and later on at the other universities, the students were the ones giving the speeches.
They would give the speeches in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
That looks a little different, yeah, yeah.
And the other students understood that.
And the other students would understand it.
They would have disputations.
They would have debates and arguments during the commencement ceremony in all three of these tongues.
Over time, the students stopped learning this and taking it as seriously.
And so, over time, eventually, certain professors would give speeches.
Here are the titles of some of the early commencement speeches.
I can tell you're breaking my heart already.
Let's hear them.
So, this is from Stanford.
Stanford chronicles all of their speeches.
In 1893, history professor George Howard, The American University and the American Man.
Next year, The Education of the Scientific Man.
Next year, Specialization in Education.
Hamlet, the transition from the contemplative to the act of life.
The following year, the passing of Plato.
The scientific method and its limitations.
The gospel of work.
So, my heart turns sour in my head.
By the way, Deepak Chopra gave none of those speeches.
Then, you know, over time, even the attention span for those professors' speeches started to wane.
All of those speeches were in English, by the way.
So, more politicians and statesmen started creeping in.
You know, even in 1948 at Stanford, we had the role of the educated is an interesting speech.
And, of course, the Marshall Plan, Secretary of State George Marshall, instituted the Marshall Plan for post-war Europe at a Harvard commencement address.
Is that right?
Still, that is right.
1947, I think.
Now, after that, when you look up the titles of commencement addresses, you can't find any titles.
You find that the speeches are given increasingly by businessmen, social activists, celebrities, and artists, but you can't find any titles.
You can't find any titles because the speeches have no point.
Their ability to make an argument has fallen away from the university.
The early university was a central skill that you learned there was oratory.
That's why these students were debating all the time.
That's why the commencement speeches were so serious in nature and really gave you a message.
Over time, that's completely fallen away.
And I think it's because universities are a business and they're responding to market dynamics.
And as the quality of your commencement speech falls down to nothing, to a comedian making some jokes, the quality of your degree and the value of your degree has probably diminished immensely as well.
It's got to be true.
I mean, it's got to be true.
What we have is a credential that gets you in places, but it's actually not worth anything.
And by the way, if you go to a prestigious university, the top universities in the country, you will earn, on average, $17.5 thousand dollars more per year than if you only had a high school diploma, which is an okay ROI.
The return on investment at those universities is anywhere from 11% to 17.5%.
So that means it'll take you approximately 15 years to make back the cost, depending on your student loans.
Absolutely.
Now, the return on investment of a 20-year Treasury bill is 3.5%, 4%, right?
So there are many less prestigious universities that not only don't match a 20-year Treasury bill, they have a negative ROI.
Some of these universities have a double-digit negative ROI, as studied by Pew and a couple research institutions.
So you heard it here first, kids.
Don't go to college, just buy yourself a savings pump.
That's right.
I mean, better yet, you know, dig a hole in the backyard and throw the money in there for a lot of these universities.
But happy graduation, everybody.
Thank you very much, Michael Knowles, King of the Trolls, and an excellent, excellent report.
You know, I have to just put a coda on this because I have to talk about this hoax that was played by a group of writers, a couple of writers, who decided to write, it was Peter Bogozian and James Lindsay.
They decided to write a completely nonsensical speech and see if they could get it published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
The Conceptual Penis Hoax00:02:37
So they wrote a speech called The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.
And yes, indeed, they did get it put into the journal.
And here's just a little bit.
Oops, I just lost my, I lost my, there it is.
Okay.
Okay.
Here's just a little bit.
It says, the androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
But then he goes on and he says, we conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ or as a male reproductive organ, but instead is an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations.
The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender marginalized groups, other gender marginalized groups beside women and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
So, you know, I want to add with this this piece that was in, that was published in the Women's Studies International Forum, which was exploring why at one Canadian university students were rejecting feminism.
It says, this paper explores, this is the abstract, this paper explores student resistance to feminist course conduct in social science courses, cross-listed with women's studies as an example of social reproduction at work.
Drawing on both interviews and anonymous student course evaluations, student resistance to feminism is examined from the layered perspectives of faculty, teaching assistants, and students in these courses.
Now listen to this.
This is the argument of the paper.
The author argues that a regime of rationality still operates in the academy and is made evident when feminist course content is met with continual dismissal or disavowal.
It is the oppressive regime of rationality.
In other words, reason is why they reject these things.
And so we have to get rid of reason in order to have feminism.
And you know what gets me about this is think this through for just a minute, ladies.
What do you think is going to be there when reason is gone?
Okay.
What do you think you have when reason is gone?
You think you have this fair world where everybody is treated well?
Why don't you have just violence and rape and pillage?
What's your reason?
Oh, wait.
You can't have a reason anymore because reason is gone.
Ryan's World of Madness00:09:27
You know what?
This is the thing that always gets me.
What do they think when they get rid of gender?
They're going to get rid of gender and everything's going to be fair.
Everything's going to be good.
What do you think is going to be left when there are no strong men to be manly for you?
What do you think is going to be?
You think it's just going to be fair?
No, it's going to be the bad guys whose men are perfectly strong and perfectly able to come and kill all those pajama boys sitting around saying, oh, well, you told me not to be a man anymore.
So now I'm not.
I mean, this is the thing.
When you take away all these load-bearing walls, the ceiling comes crashing down.
And that is the thing that was so appalling about the way that Obama tried to lead this country.
This idea that this country, you know, it really does get me because I really did unleash on Trump about this thing about, well, we all kill people, because it was such a stupid thing to say.
But that's all Obama ever said.
All Obama ever said was, yes, we're just as bad as they are.
You know, I even think, do we have that collage of Obama apologizing?
Just run this through for just a minute.
There have been times where America's shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.
The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history.
We've at times been disengaged, and at times we've sought to dictate our terms.
We have to acknowledge potentially we've made some mistakes.
That's how we learn.
Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions.
In other words, we went off course.
Hey, I mean, eight years of that, eight years of that, and you wonder why people elected President Trump or just a potted plant with an American flag on it.
I mean, God, that's debilitating.
You know, at our worst, at America's worst, we're Deadpool.
Remember Deadpool?
He said, I'm not a hero.
I'm just a bad guy who beats up worse guys.
I mean, that's us at our worst.
We're Deadpool.
But at our best, we're Captain America at our best.
So for stuff I like this week, I'm going to do Memorial Day stuff I like and some Memorial Day stuff I don't like very much.
And today I want to talk about a film called Sands of Iwo Jima.
And Sands of Iwo Jima is a 1949 John Wayne film, which is always put forward as the quintessential John Wayne film.
And one of the things that really disturbs me is even conservatives who like John Wayne have never seen real John Wayne films.
What they've seen are those old, those last series of films he made when he was kind of an old fat guy, always wearing the same outfit with the vest and all this stuff and the kind of big rifle that he would carry around.
And those films just weren't that good.
He was really good in his old films.
He wasn't a great actor, but he was a great behavior.
And his films are much, much more complex than anybody gives them credit for.
And Sands of Iwo Jima is about a very tough sergeant in World War II named Stryker, I think his name is.
And it's about how much they hate him and how he saves their lives and what a messed up guy he is.
You know, it's not about, oh, he's a hero.
And yet, I mean, he is a hero, but it's not about what a perfect person he is.
It is just about what you have to do to live, to survive in this horrible, you know, cauldron of war.
So here is the scene where Sergeant Stryker steps forward in Sands of Iwo Jima, a terrific film.
If you want to watch a really fun, exciting war film for Memorial Day, take a look at Sands of Iwo Jima.
Here's the introductory film where John Wayne comes in and introduces himself to his men.
My name is Stryker, Sergeant John M. Stryker.
You're going to be my squad.
A rifle squad.
Three of us have seen action.
Corporal Dunn, Charlie Bass, and myself.
You're going to learn from us.
In boot camp, you learned out of a book.
Out here, you got to remember the book.
I learn a thousand things that have never been printed, probably never will be.
You got to learn right, and you got to learn fast.
And any man that doesn't want to cooperate, I'll make him wish he hadn't been born.
Before I'm through with you, you're going to move like one man and think like one man.
If you don't, you'll be dead.
Now, you guys have had a nice, easy day.
I hope you enjoyed it, because it's the last one you're going to get for a long time.
You joined the Marines because you wanted to fight.
Well, you're going to get your chance.
And I'm here to see that you know how.
If I can't teach you one way, I'll teach you another.
But I'm going to get the job done.
So as he's making this speech, the camera's panning around at the faces of the Marines.
And you can see that some of them are absolutely appalled, but they're also riveted that he's got them.
They will follow this guy into the mouth of hell.
But you also see the rich guy who tells the story, who kind of looks down on Stryker, and the guy who thinks he's tougher than Stryker and all this stuff.
So you get this whole reaction to this leadership.
But the point is that the leadership is meta.
It's above his personal flaws.
It's above the niceness factor, the moral factor.
It is leadership to keep these men alive as they fight for the United States of America.
Now, compare that to a film that I deeply dislike, Saving Private Ryan.
Now, Saving Private Ryan is really interesting because Steven Spielberg, somebody once said that Spielberg was the greatest second unit director of all time, and a second unit are the guys who filmed the action sequences.
This is true.
Steven Spielberg is a visual genius.
I mean, there has really been, he has revolutionized the way certain kinds of scenes are filmed, and his movies about his childhood fantasies like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are beautiful, beautiful movies.
Jaws, terrific, terrific movies.
Once he started to think, he revealed himself to be kind of morally flatulent.
I mean, I think that Saving Private Ryan and the other one, the Schindler's List, are really bad movies that are made really, really well.
I'll talk about Schindler's List another time and why I think it's a bad movie about the Holocaust.
But Saving Private Ryan, the first 30 minutes of it, are epoch-making.
No one can ever film a battle scene again without taking from Saving Private Ryan.
It's a brilliant, brilliant battle scene.
But now there's this scene in which the men start to get so angry at one another that they actually come to blows and it looks like they're going to one of them is going to kill the other.
And Tom Hanks, as the leader of the platoon, has to exert his authority.
So listen to the difference.
This is the way that Tom Hanks is portrayed as the leader of these men.
I'm a school teacher.
I teach English composition.
This little town called Abley, Pennsylvania.
Last 11 years, I've been at Thomas Alva Edison High School.
I was a coach of the baseball team in the springtime.
Back home, and I tell people what I do for a living, and they think, well, now that figures.
But over here, it's a big mystery.
So I guess I've changed some.
Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much.
My wife is even going to recognize me whenever it is I get back to her.
And how I'll ever be able to tell her about days like today.
Ryan, I don't know anything about Ryan.
I don't care.
Man means nothing to me.
It's just a name.
But if, you know, if going to Rammel and finding him so he can go home, if that earns me the right to get back to my wife, well, then that's my mission.
So he's leading from behind.
He's just one of the guys, and he's just going to, you know, he's just reminding you of our common humanity.
That would have gotten everybody killed in that unit.
I mean, in fact, I think that's the way the movie ends, with everybody getting killed with this completely meaningless mission.
It's just a stupid thing.
There's so many stupid things in Saving Private Ryan, including Spielberg's theory that he expresses both here and in Schindler's List that the Nazis hated the Jews because they represented their feminine side, which I think is so offensive to Jews and such a stupid, you know, that's Spielberg's analyst talking.
That is not actually historic wisdom or accuracy.
You know, this is the kind of thing, this discomfort with manhood, with leadership, with strong leadership.
What do you think is going to be there when you take that stuff away?
When you take that stuff away, it is not a happy world where everybody's equal.
It is not a world where we all get along.
It is a world of madness and murder.
And so, you know, as much as it may be difficult for people to accept manhood, as much as it may be difficult for them to accept the conceptual penis, you know, that's part of what we need in a world of cruelty and evil.
The week, the Clavin week begins.
Thank heavens.
You know, I thought, God, we were all going to perish in the Clavenless weekend, but we're back.
We'll be back again tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show, and we will see you then.