The Jihadis Next Door provokes by equating anti-Nazi resistance to racism, mocking appeasement of Islam via segregated airport wudu rooms and CNN’s "overreaction" framing while praising Trump’s bluntness. Henry Olson warns Republicans risk collapse by ignoring working-class voters, citing Georgia’s 6th district shift despite Trump’s 47% support, and argues Reagan’s New Deal-adjacent conservatism—community over abstract liberty—could win immigrants. The episode pivots to Robert W. Service’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew, a 1907 Yukon ballad immortalized in film, before teasing a mailbag of "life-changing" trivia. A chaotic blend of culture war satire, election autopsy, and poetic mythmaking. [Automatically generated summary]
This is D-Day, the day of the Allied forces' invasion of France in their attempt to destroy the Nazis.
We here at the Andrew Clavin Show strongly oppose this violent and hateful attack on our fellow human beings.
It will only anger the Nazis and cause more of them to become violent extremists.
It's divisive and intolerant at a time when we should all come together and coexist with a big swastika for the S to show how tolerant we are of Nazis.
What will invading France accomplish?
France never attacked us.
What are we going to do?
Just go marching from France to Germany, killing people?
If the Nazis kill people and we kill people, then how are we any different from the Nazis?
Aside from our whole freedom thing and they're exterminating and enslaving people and stuff like that.
We have our culture and the Nazis have their culture and who are we to say that our culture is any better than theirs?
What are we going to do?
Go around imposing our way of life on other people?
Isn't that what started all this trouble in the first place?
Sure, you can say that the Nazis murder millions of human beings and roll tanks into other people's countries and shoot anyone who opposes them and then enslave the survivors.
But what about the bad things we did to like the Indians or someone?
And what about the Crusades?
I've heard of those and they sound very bad to me.
Is what the Nazis are doing any worse than that?
Aside from the gas chambers and tanks and slavery and so on?
Look, we all know that America is racist against blacks and Native Americans and those funny-looking guys in the turbans who drive taxis, whoever they are.
Our Nazi-phobic hatred of the Nazi race is just one more example of this long, sad history of Americans attacking people simply for the color of their skin and their fascism.
If you don't think it's right to say black people are bad, then how can it be right to say Nazis are bad?
What's the difference when you come to think about it?
Well, when you come to think about it, okay, there's a difference, but still.
The Nazis aren't slaughtering and enslaving people because some guy named Hitler came to Earth and said things.
Of course not.
It's because there aren't enough jobs for young Nazis and because we haven't managed to assimilate the Nazis into our communities and because they're Nazis.
So let's forget all this militaristic, heteromacho, cisnormative, rapist-like talk about invading places, because if we kill the Nazis, the Nazis win.
Europe is just going to have to get used to the new normal of Nazis slaughtering and conquering people.
The best thing we can do is just go about our business showing that we're not afraid and holding candlelight vigils and tweeting our thoughts and prayers at each other until they've murdered us all.
So let's try to have a loving and peaceful D-Day.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I feel hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Who I hope to sing?
Hooray!
All right, a loving and peaceful D-Day to you all, and it's mailbag tomorrow.
Hey, so get your questions in now.
If you are a subscriber, you must be a subscriber to thedailywire.com for a lousy eight bucks a month, and you can ask any question you want.
Get $10 Off ProFlowers00:04:11
Relationships, religion, politics.
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Also, by the way, we talk about the culture here a lot.
There's a new website called smashculture.com, which is trying to fight for conservative culture.
And today it has its essential authors.
It begins its essential authors list.
Essential author number one is this guy.
This guy, yes, absolutely.
So go to smashculture.com.
And today we have Henry Olson, who is just an amazing commentator.
You probably haven't heard of him because some of you haven't heard of him because he's kind of a wonk, but he's at National Review.
He's got a new book coming out called The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism.
But he is just an amazing observer, one of the few people who said the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was going to be close, almost too close to call, as he said.
And he was just, he was like a Cassandra-like prophet telling people, telling Republicans that they had to start paying attention to these white middle-class people out of work in the Midwest.
We didn't listen, but Trump did.
And we remember last week I was talking about my anniversary, my 37th anniversary.
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All right, you know, when I was a kid, when I was a kid in seventh grade, okay, I had what was then called a social studies teacher.
I don't think they call him a social studies teacher anymore, and I cannot for the life of me remember his name.
But he was kind of, he was a real character, a real eccentric.
He was always flirting with the girls and all this stuff, and maybe doing a little bit more than flirting, as far as I could tell.
He was really, but he was very, very personable and charming and all this stuff.
And I remember one day out of nowhere, he started to describe his experiences in the invasion of Normandy Beach.
And I can remember to this day, I mean, this is now 150 years ago, I can remember to this day him talking about the running over a carpet of bodies, a carpet of bodies, because they were invading an impossible beach.
Islam, London, and Terrorist Attacks00:15:00
The hills, if you go and look at the pictures, the hills, the sheer cliffs they had to climb with Nazi fire just pouring, pouring down on them.
You know, you've seen, I'm sure, the saving Private Ryan.
It was worse, apparently.
I mean, it was just this kind of wave after wave of guys who would die on the beach, and then the next wave would come until they reached the gun placements and drove them back and saved, saved the Western world from the Nazi threat.
And you've got to ask yourself, if we had to do it today, would we do it?
Because these were boys.
They were mostly British and American boys.
You know, I know Reality Winner wouldn't have been in favor of it.
A reality winner.
25-year-old woman who was, you know, the NSA was using a firm they hired, and she has just been busted for leaking documents about Russia's attempts to hack into our elections.
And she loved Iran.
She said, if we go to war with Iran, she tweeted out, we will support you.
First of all, whose name Reality Winner?
What does that say about your, you know, I mean, if that's, it's classic of the left.
Everything the left does comes out the opposite.
So there's a woman who's not living in reality and not much of a winner since she's probably going to go to prison.
But she loved Iran and she said white people are terrorists and had all these curse words for Trump and all this stuff.
And it's like, who, you know, she didn't make that stuff up.
White people are terrorists, right?
Somebody taught her that stuff.
Somebody told her that this is true.
And, you know, it's not just her.
It is this entire culture that we're watching unfold in Europe in these terrorist attacks.
There was another apparent attack at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris today.
But this stuff in London, during this recent attack, they ran into a pub.
And while they're in the pub and they're knifing people, these Islamic terrorists, while they're in the pub knifing people and killing, some guy shouted out some nasty remark about Islam while they're knifing people.
And another guy in the pub says, shut up, stop saying that.
Stop saying, you know.
And it's just an amazing thing to me, this kind of suicidal idea that has swept over the West.
And when we look at Donald Trump, you know, Donald Trump is being hit of all his tweets.
This is all anybody cares about, Donald Trump's tweets.
And some of his tweets seem dopey to me.
I mean, attacking the mayor of London, I'm not that thrilled with the mayor of London, but the president doesn't attack a mayor.
You know, it's punching down.
You don't attack like some other country's mayor of a major city.
It's just a dopey thing to do.
And when I say Donald Trump needs to learn when to shut up and what to shut up about, that's not saying that he needs to shut up.
See, people always, people who support Donald Trump confuse those two things.
We don't want Trump to shut up.
I like the fact that he's a big mouth.
I like the fact that he's belligerent.
I like the fact that he throws it in the face of the media and throws it in the face of the left and throws it in the face of the people who are so politically correct they can't see what's in front of their eyes.
It's just I want him to do it at the right time and not about himself all the time.
You know, he was talking about the travel ban.
Look, the travel ban, a travel ban or some kind of vetting over the people coming into this country is just a necessary thing.
And it drives the left crazy when he says it because of how necessary it is and because it is destroying this fantasy world they're living in, this fantasy world the left lives in where the biggest danger is not from terrorism, it's from sunshine, you know, it's from the climate, it's all this stuff.
And it's destroying this fantasy world that we live in.
And when conservatives are constantly picking on Trump, what I ask myself is, weren't we serious when we were complaining about political correctness, when we were complaining about the biased media?
I mean, suddenly I hear conservatives saying, well, it's life.
The media is biased to the left.
But, you know, it's not life.
It doesn't have to be this way.
And it is destructive.
You want to see how destructive it is?
You want to see how destructive political correctness is?
I'm sure you heard about this, but it is amazing.
One of the people in the terrorist attack in London, in London Bridge, was in a documentary, was in a documentary about called the Jihadis Next Door.
So I asked the guys here, Austin and Bailey, to cut out a piece of this from YouTube.
And I sent them a YouTube clip just so I could show you a little piece of this documentary with the terrorist in it.
And at the time I sent it to them, it had disappeared off YouTube, is that right?
It was gone from YouTube.
They're cutting it down.
They took it off Netflix.
And Netflix, they were playing some, what was it?
They were playing, a Batman movie or something.
They cut out the word terrorists.
This instantaneous appeasement.
I'll talk more about that in a minute.
But first, just take a look.
Here is, they're talking about this guy, Muhammad, who is an activist, a radical Islamic activist in London.
And the picture of this guy, Butthead, or whatever his name is, his name is literally Butt.
I mean, his last name was Butt, you know, because at least he was aptly named.
It was like reality winner was not aptly named.
This guy was aptly named, this terrorist.
His name is Butt.
And he was one of the faces that you see in this scene.
Muhammad won't worship in the mosque today.
Instead, he leads his group for a prayer session in Regents Park.
Anyone got a compass?
Guys, determine the kibbla, please.
Come on.
Somebody determine the kibla.
Anyone got a smartphone?
He's just going to find out the direction for prayer.
This way, lads, lads, lads.
Come here, come here, bitch.
Come here.
The group displayed the black flag of Islam, a symbol associated with Islamic armies for the past 1,200 years, but one that's regularly adopted by extremists, including ISIS.
I can't help but think that he's being actively provocative.
The real life is the life of the akhira, not this life.
This is not the real life, my dear brothers.
This is a passing time for us.
So this is a type of jihad for you that you came up to do da'wah, enjoining good and forbidding evil.
And don't be dijud.
As-salamu alaykum wa ta'ala.
And you can see there are close-ups of the face of this guy, but who's like later on killing people.
So my question is this.
In England, I know they have laws now about supporting ISIS, but in England, if you go out and say, Islam is a hateful religion, I hate Islam, you can get arrested.
They'll come to your house.
If you tweet that, the police will show up at your house.
Why can't they show up at this guy's house?
I mean, if they can arrest you, we have the First Amendment, so that protects a lot of hateful things as well as a lot of great things, but they don't have a First Amendment.
They have anti-hate speech laws, so why isn't this hate speech?
Why isn't an Islamist calling for the death of England as much a hate speech as when you criticize Islam?
You know, Fyodor Dalrymple, just an excellent, excellent writer.
He writes for City Journal a lot.
He's in the Wall Street Journal today.
He was a psychiatrist in prison.
And it was where, so he's not a guy, the left can't make fun of him as a guy who never reached out to anybody.
But while he was in prison, he started to learn that criminals have a very interesting mindset.
You know, they have this interesting mindset of like entitlement and they don't know how to think beyond their own desires and all this stuff.
And he's talking about, he wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal today called Terror and the Teddy Bear Society, referring to the teddy bears that people show up and they put on the spaces where people have been murdered by these Islamic terrorists.
And he says, we have gone in for what a Dutch friend of mine calls creative appeasement.
Authorities make concessions even before one suspects there have been any demands for them.
Thus, a public library in Birmingham, one of the largest known to me, has installed women-only tables, a euphemism for Muslim women only.
Whether there was ever a request or demand for sex-segregated seating from Muslims is probably undiscoverable.
Truth seldom emerges from a public authority.
But the justification would almost certainly be that without such tables, Muslim women would not be able to use the library at all.
The Birmingham Ham Airport has set aside a room for wudu, the Muslim abolutions before prayer.
No other religion is catered for in this fashion.
So the impression is inevitably given that Islam is in some way favored or privileged.
Again, it would be difficult to find out whether they received requests or demands for such a room or merely anticipated them.
In either case, weakness is advertised, and that is true.
They are caving in even, you know, sometimes I think Islam would understand most decent Islamic people would understand if they were treated no differently than the rest.
But I was in, when I was traveling to Afghanistan years ago, I was in London.
I was in a London airport.
I was in Heathrow, I believe it was.
And I went into the chapel to pray, and there was a Muslim guy there praying at the top of his lungs in this guttural Arabic so that nobody could think, nobody could do anything.
He was just monopolizing the space.
And that kind of thing does not have to be appeased.
It does not have to be recognized.
And neither does their treatment of women, which is obscene.
You know, we're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube today so you can hear Henry Olson.
And we're going to call him in just about one minute and we will talk to him.
He is one of the great political observers of the day.
But I just want to show you how this translates here too.
Here is this moment on CNN that I could not believe.
I wanted to play this yesterday and I ran out of time.
This is Richard Louie, who is one of their anchormen, talking to a reporter on the scene in London while these terrorist attacks are taking place.
And of course, the British armed police, not all British police are armed, but the armed police showed up within eight minutes and shot these guys down.
And by the way, by the way, the speed with which they arrest people after these things take place testifies to the fact that they know who they are.
They know who they are and are doing nothing.
Why didn't they arrest them before?
If you can arrest me for criticizing Islam, why can't you arrest these guys for criticizing the West?
So Richard Louie is talking to a reporter.
Listen to one of the stupidest questions ever to appear on CNN, which is saying something.
What is the risk?
There's certainly a risk of underreaction, but is there any risk of overreaction, of deploying too much?
You know, as we've been watching all of this live coming into our satellite center here in New York City and then beaming it out from London, is there ever a point where you go, well, that's too much, or you shouldn't be applying that amount of force there?
Oh, well, you know, in the city that's experiencing the attacks and when there's multiple attacks, really, I don't think the response can be too large.
You've got to pity the reporter who doesn't want to say, what are you, an idiot?
There is no response too large to people killing people.
You have to kill them back.
And, you know, this is the thing.
This PC, I mean, look, CNN has become like some kind of school for idiots.
I mean, I don't say idiots like an insult, like a schoolyard insult.
I mean, between like tweedle-dumb Don Lemon and tweedle amazingly even dumber Chris Cuomo, you know, this is a place, a low IQ station because only people who are not thinking clearly, who are not using critical thinking skills, can buy into this idea that we're supposed to surrender to these medieval crazies.
You know, it's just incredible.
And as I said yesterday, whatever else you say about Donald Trump, he has at least broken this barrier.
He has broken the barrier of the climate change religion.
He has broken the barrier of the non, you know, of the multicultural, let's not talk about Islam religion.
And for that alone, if we can think back before Trump and remember what a serious problem that is and how it is still resulting in people being killed today, I think for that alone we can thank him for just, you know, for all the problematical things he sometimes is that he is not politically correct is a huge, huge deal.
Henry Olson writes at National Review.
He is a fantastic observer and wonk of political wonk observing election results.
He has been a prophet in terms of what kinds of groups are going to vote for whom.
Has a new book coming out called The Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, which makes the case that Ronald Reagan was in the tradition of FDR, not the opposite of FDR, a really interesting case, and we'll talk to him about that.
Have we got him?
Henry, are you there?
Hello.
Hello.
How are you?
I'm pretty good.
How about you?
All right.
All right.
Well, it's been a while.
The last time we talked, it was before the election.
And I remember you were one of the very few, vanishingly few, who were predicting it was going to be close.
Within, as I recall, you said it was going to be within two points, I think, when everybody else was just saying Trump was going to be blown away.
Yep.
Yeah, you get to sound like that.
Well, yeah, I put out a prediction memo on the Sunday before election that said it was likelier that Trump would win than Hillary wins by more than three.
And for about 48 hours, people thought I was the biggest fool in America.
You know, it's funny.
I read that, and I was going to come on the air and say that I agreed with you, and I lost my nerve.
I did not have your courage.
But you were also, I mean, I referred to you as a Cassandra, as a prophet that nobody listens to, when you talked about the fact that the GOP especially was ignoring the Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar, mostly white guys who had voted for Reagan but were normally Democrats.
And that's really what happened for Trump, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
He's the first Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the first term when he was basically running as Reagan's stepchild, who's connected with these people.
It's been over 30 years since the last time a Republican presidential candidate got these people excited.
And it's because Trump was focusing, albeit a little bit crudely, on some of the same themes that government stands behind the average person, the average person's assault of the American economy, not the business person, and that he had their back.
And, you know, his crudeness bothers me too, and yet somehow I feel that maybe his crudeness is part of what is, you know, connecting with people.
It could be.
Or I think it also might cause him more problems with other types of voters that off-balance some of his support that he gets.
But the fact is, polls show that the things he was talking about, voters of this group, the working class, normally Democratic or independent voting person, had all of these ideas before Trump stepped on the steam.
That they were suspicious of immigration, they were suspicious of trade, they didn't want Social Security and Medicare cut, they wanted jobs.
And what Trump did was feed a demand rather than create one.
So I think if somebody had been as strongly in favor of those views without the crudity, it actually could have helped.
Uh-huh.
Do you think that this is going to transform the electorate over time?
Do you think this was a transformative election or just a glitch?
New Conservatism Rising00:11:25
I think that's the choice we have.
I mean, what we know is that there's this voter bloc that is large and strategically situated in the upper Midwest who controls states who don't want what both parties were offering before Donald Trump.
And I think a Republican Party that says, okay, these people are part of our coalition, and we're going to let them have some of the things they want and bring them into the tent, which is what Ronald Reagan said.
I think that party becomes the new majority party for the next 10 to 15 years.
Republican Party that says, nah, actually, we're going to do the same old, same old, then I think the voters will still want those things, but they won't have a home and they'll be casting about.
And that's the next transformative election.
Well, this is the thing.
One of the, obviously, since you're at National Review, you know this as well as anybody, one of the big arguments going on is whether Trump is actually destroying conservatism.
Do you think that that's a danger?
I think what we need to do is think the way Reagan thought, which is that conservatism contains many different definitions, that it contains social conservatism.
It contains what now would be called economic nationalism.
It contains small government conservatism.
And to think that any one of those parts is the whole destroys the opportunity.
Conservatives love to talk about the founding.
Well, the founding combined 13 different colonies into one country, and they said one of the flags is that famous snake flag.
We all hang together or we all hang, hang by the news separately.
And I think that's true of conservatism today, and it's time that free market conservatives understand that.
So you've written this book.
It hasn't come out yet, but it's this month, I think.
Yeah, it comes out at the end of the month.
Excellent.
You can pre-order it right now on Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, or through the HarperCollins website.
I will do that very thing.
The working-class Republican Ronald Reagan and the return of blue-collar conservatism.
Now, the argument is basically that Reagan was in the tradition of FDR.
Is that right?
That's right.
I mean, when you take a look at the arguments that split the early conservatives from FDR, Reagan, on the decisive issues, was more in favor of what FDR was saying.
He believed that government, even the federal government, had a role to play in making sure that no person suffered from want, that every person had an opportunity to advance as far as their abilities could take them.
He even told many audiences, including the television audience listening when he endorsed Barry Goldwater, that nobody in America should go without needed health care because of a lack of funds.
And that meant that he was willing to tax and spend to get it.
And that put him more in the FDR tradition than in the Hoover or the early libertarian conservative Bill Buckley tradition.
I mean, he always said that.
He always said that I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me, right?
And that he had been an FDR guy.
He always talked about that.
He always did.
And what I think my book does is show the meat to that.
And I think a lot of people have kind of said, yeah, yeah, yeah, but look at all the anti-government stuff.
But I think what the book does, by going back and listening and reading the speeches as far back as 1958, it says what he meant by that, how he could be both anti-government and pro-New Deal, and that those weren't, in his mind, inconsistent with each other.
So, okay, so this is really interesting, because one of the things I feel is that an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is not the beginning of anything.
It's the end of something.
And I see a possibility of a new conservatism rising up out of this when the, you know, I feel like it's kind of like we're in zero gravity and the furniture is flying all around the room and we don't know where it's going to land.
What would you like to see a new conservatism look like?
I think a new conservatism has to be based on the love of the average person.
It has to recognize that the average person wants dignity and self-reliance, but the average person also wants a help and a helping hand up.
That's why they support basic entitlements for people who need.
That's why they support well-funded public schools.
And they prefer those things to abstract liberty or even low taxes.
And a conservatism that is based on the idea that we're all in it together, but for real, not in the way the liberals define it, which is we're all in it together, meaning that some people can take from others regardless of need, but that we have an obligation and the society to help people achieve what they want to the degree they can, not to bail them out, but not to leave them on their own.
That's a new conservatism.
That was Ronald Reagan's conservatism, and that's a majority conservatism.
If they're on the negative side of that, if there were some ideas you could say, if you could get conservatives in a room and bang their heads together and say, look, here are some ideas you need to drop.
Are there any?
Or do you think, like, let each guy fight his own corner?
You know what I would say?
When Ronald Reagan was endorsing Barry Goldwater on television, he said that liberals, our do-gooder friends, as he called them, always say that we're against something.
They'd never say we're for anything.
And then he said what he was for.
And what he didn't mean was, I'm for liberty, or I'm for a free market.
I'm for government getting out of the way.
What he said was, here's what government should do.
And he distinguished what support for needy people from one-size-fits-all programs that treat everyone the same regardless whether they need it or not.
And what I would tell conservatives is, what are you for?
Let's answer Ronald Reagan's challenge from 1964.
Are you for a safety net?
Let's fund it.
And then let's reform it for the people who don't need it so that we can both take care of our obligations and, as he said, at one point Reagan said we can take care of our human needs without ignoring budget constraints.
And I think that's what we need to get to.
But that means saying what we're for in terms of what government can do.
Okay.
Well, that's really a good point.
Like, in other words, not talking about what we're for in terms of the great abstracts, even though they're important and underlie our philosophy, talking about what we're for literally in terms of governance, in terms of what the government is supposed to be.
That's right.
And I think a conservative view of the New Deal is much more restrictive than the current progressive view.
It doesn't mean that everyone should have single-payer health care.
It does mean that if you can't afford needed medical care, there should be some sort of subsidy.
It doesn't mean that there should be the same Medicare program for everybody.
Ronald Reagan supported federally funded health care support for needy seniors in 1961.
He opposed Medicare because he said 90% of seniors don't need it.
And when we're talking about entitlement reform, let's take that principle and say, here's the people who need it and we'll fund it, but here's the people who can pay more on their own.
And maybe we should ask them to do that rather than going off and jetting to Peru and sticking the kids and the other people with the tab.
So it's too early to make predictions, but since you're the best predictor I know, and I've got you here, I have to ask you some of this.
And I let you off the hook beforehand that you're not to be held responsible this far out.
But what are you thinking about the midterms?
How do they look to you now?
Midterms do not look good to me right now.
You've got a president who won a presidency with only 46, 45 percent of the vote.
He seems to be holding on to that.
But of course, that means that there's 52, 53, 54 percent who aren't with him.
He seems to be driving the potentially persuadables into the Democrats' camp.
And we're seeing in special elections across the country that whether Democrats win or lose, they're way outperforming Hillary Clinton's numbers.
I suspect that the Democrat John Osoff will win Georgia 6 very narrowly.
And if that happens, that will be proof that a district that Trump carried with 47 percent of the vote, if she only gets 48 percent of the vote, it means the people in the middle decided to give the Democrats a chance.
And that'll send shockwaves down Washington.
I mean, do you think there's any possibility that those shockwaves will actually penetrate the skull of Donald Trump?
Well, Trump got where he is in life by being strong-willed and by being flexible.
And if he can see that he needs to be both in this case and not throw away the flexibility, then I think he can adapt and move on.
If he, however, stays, looks and says none of this matters and just drops a rigidity that he actually didn't have in his business career, then I think it'll be very bad for the Republican Party.
Interesting, interesting.
One last question.
You know, after this Paris Accord thing, Obama talked, to my mind, hilariously about people rejecting the future, which is hilarious only because it posits that he knows what the future is and we are rejecting it.
But you have also talked a lot about demographics.
I mean, you've talked about changing racial demographics and have indicated that you feel that they're somewhat predictive of outcomes.
Is the future progressive by nature in your mind?
I mean, is the Republican Party fighting a losing battle against the changing racial makeup of America?
No, I don't think so at all.
I think the people who are recent immigrants come from a non-English tradition.
Almost all of the immigrants come from countries that have stronger degrees of ideas of society and community than the founders of America did.
But they also want things that all immigrants do.
They want an opportunity to rise.
They want an opportunity to provide for themselves.
They're here because they see our country is giving them something the home country did not.
A Republican Party that asks them to basically become descendants of 18th century Scots-Irish or Englishmen and adopt that view of individuality is one that will have no resonance with them.
But one that says, look, we agree with you that community has an obligation, and here's how we interpret it in a way so that you get the best of both worlds, the stability that you want and the opportunity that you crave.
Well, that's what the New Deal offered.
That's what people said the New Deal offered.
In the hands of the progressive, it doesn't offer that, but in the hands of the conservative, it's what should attract the new immigrant, the Asian, the Hispanic, and over time, even attack the African American, who at heart really wants that, even though they distrust the Republican Party's ability to provide it.
Henry Olson, author of The Working Class Republican out this month, the working class Republican, Ronald Reagan, and the return of blue-collar conservatism.
Henry, where should people look for you aside from on Amazon and the rest?
I can be found on Twitter at Henry Olson, EPPC.
I have a website, HenryOlsonPolitics.com, and I am at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I'm a senior fellow.
Well, thank you very much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back as we get closer to the midterms.
I'd be delighted to come back.
Thanks for having me on, Adam.
Thanks a lot.
The Shooting of Dan McGrew00:07:05
Guy is really a civilized and intelligent observer.
I keep referring to Cassandra, probably.
Nobody knows who Cassandra was, but Cassandra was the person who warned the Trojans not to take the Trojan Wars.
But she was cursed with never being listened to.
She was a prophetess, but she was cursed with never being listened to.
All right, well, let us move on to stuff I like from there.
I think we'll go right to stuff I like.
Yesterday, we were talking about narrative poetry, and the thing I love about narrative poetry is it really gets you into an entire story, gives you poetry, gives you some kind of beautiful use of language, and takes you away into a whole complete tale in the course of five to ten minutes, often five to twenty minutes.
And people were pointing out, I was talking about the highwayman, this really romantic story about a highwayman, and a lot of people wrote to me yesterday to say that Lorena McKennett has a musical version of The Highwayman, which I listened to and is really quite lovely.
But you really have to read the poem first because you can't really get the language out of it.
It's very musical and very beautiful.
She has a lovely voice.
So today I want to talk about another one.
And this is, I think this is a genuinely great poem.
It's by a British Canadian who wrote about the Yukon, right, which is the far west wilderness of Canada.
His name was Robert W. Service.
He was called something like the Bard of the Yukon or something.
And this is called The Shooting of Dan McGrew.
And it was written in 1907, and it's, what's the word I'm looking at?
An idiomatic.
It's an idiomatic poem.
It's a poem written in this New World English that is not British English, that is not classical English.
And it's just beautiful in its use of that language.
And if you pay attention to it, it's 1907, so it's really before any Western movies come along, but it is the scene in the saloon where the guys are playing the music and playing cards and all this stuff.
And the guy walks in and suddenly the music stops and all this.
And it's these guys, they're in a mining town, and there is a guy named Dan McGrew, Dangerous Dan McGrew, is playing cards.
And this stranger walks into the bar and the music stops and everybody looks around.
And we know that there's something between Dan McGrew and this guy, but we never really realize what it is.
And there's this beautiful girl named Lou, the lady known as Lou.
And I'll just read you a little bit of it and talk about it a little bit more because it's become part of American mythology.
And a lot of these things used to be something like if you could make a joke about the shooting of Dan McGrew.
There's an old movie, wonderful, wonderful old movie called The Spoilers with John Wayne.
And the Spoilers is famous because it has the largest fist fight in movie history, the longest fist fight in movie history.
Maybe not anymore, but back in the day, it did.
And I always used to compare growing up in my house to being in the spoilers because, you know, it was four brothers, and every now and again, somebody at the door would fly up, and somebody would be like flying out, and there'd be a fist fight and all this stuff.
So it was like the spoilers.
And there's this line in it where the woman in it, who is, oh, gosh, I'll have to look it up.
But she's one of the really famous movie actresses.
And she's the singer in the saloon.
And I'm just looking up the, I just want to make sure I have the name of the Marlena Dietrich, of course, Marlena Dietrich.
And she's walking around this saloon in the Yukon.
It's a gold, you know, gold rush town.
And she says, oh, there's Robert Service.
Mr. Service, are you writing a poem about me?
And he says, no, I'm writing a poem about a girl named Lou.
So he's writing the poem, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, which at the time the movie was made, everybody would have known.
So let me, I'll just read you the opening, and you can go and look it up.
It's very short.
Take you 10 minutes to read it.
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon.
The kid that handles the music box was hitting a jagtime tune.
Back of the bar in a solo game sat dangerous Dan McGrew.
And watching his luck was his light of love, the lady that's known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was 50 below, and into the din and the glare, there stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog dirty and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse.
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue.
But we drank his health and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.
So we knew there's something wrong with this.
It goes on.
It has some beautiful, beautiful poetry in it.
And it's really a mysterious and interesting and haunting poem, really worth reading.
And I will end.
Let me remind you before I go, the mailbag is tomorrow.
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Get in your questions.
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But another famous movie that mentions Dan McGrew that I'll end with playing this is this great, great film called Gilda.
Gilda is one of the great femme fatale movies and the femme fatale was played by Rita Hayworth, one of the most beautiful actresses who ever lived.
She was a very sad lady who got married like five times, and she complained once that men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me.
Because in Gilda, she is so fabulously beautiful and so sweet looking.
And it opens, there's the opening line where you first meet her, is she's out of shot, and she had a face.
I mean, she had a face that would launch a thousand ships.
And she's out of the shot, and somebody comes in and says, Gilda, are you decent?
And she throws back this mane of hair and she says, Who me?
Just, you know, if you see this and you're like 12 years old, it's like, oh my God, this is what women are supposed to be like.
So she sings a funny song called Put the Blame on Maim.
And the idea of the song is that all the things, all the disasters that happen in life, like the San Francisco earthquake, really were the fault of MAME because MAME was so hot that she would do the shimmy and shake, and that's what caused the Frisco quake, okay?
And she is singing the song, and she finally talks about the fact that Dan McGrew wasn't really killed by Lou, but you can put the blame on MAME.
We will leave it at that.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show mailbag.
Tomorrow, be there.
They once had a shooting up in the Klondike when they got Dan McGrew.
Folks were putting the blame on a lady known as Lou.