Ep. 342 – Are There Two Trumps? dissects the absurdity of gender-identity narratives while contrasting Ben Shapiro’s idealism with the host’s cynical pragmatism over Trump’s legacy—praising his Warsaw speech and judicial wins but dismissing leftist critiques like Linda Sarsour’s jihad-framed resistance, which glorifies a WTC co-conspirator. The episode warns of extremism in both far-left and far-right movements, defends Trump’s policies despite flaws, and frames America as a flawed paradise worth preserving through conservative economic solutions and cultural defense. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time for our monthly visit to our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
A monthly visit that feels exactly like visiting a woman who has PMS if the woman happens to be incredibly stupid and complains all the time about stuff that doesn't matter.
This month on Everyday Feminism, we find a moving personal tale by one Kendra Lee entitled, My Partner Came Out as a Man and I Struggled with Losing My Lesbian Identity.
In other words, this is a story about a lesbian who thought she was in a relationship with a woman until the woman decided she identified as a man, which meant the lesbian was no longer a lesbian, but just a normal heterosexual living with a confused person.
Now, some of you might laugh when you hear a story like this and slap your knee repeatedly while you choke on your own hilarity and roll helplessly across the floor, occasionally pounding the carpet with your fist as tears of mirth stream down your cheeks.
But that would be wrong.
What sort of cruel, heartless human being would turn a serious story like this into a joke?
We're about to find out.
Kendra Lee writes that she bumped into her girlfriend slash now boyfriend Amy, quote, in a lesbian bar surrounded by women doing jell-o shots late on a Sunday afternoon, unquote.
This is a very strange coincidence because it happens I had a dream about a lesbian bar where the lesbians were doing jell-o shots on a Sunday afternoon, though in my dream all the lesbians were naked and secretly hoping a straight man would walk in.
So I'm guessing it was probably a different lesbian bar.
Anyway, Kendra and Amy fell in love, moved in together, held a marriage ceremony, and had a child.
But then the shocker came when Amy announced she identified as a man named Simon.
So actually, this is a little bit more like my dream after all.
Kendra now found herself in the painful position of having to decide whether she was a lesbian who lived with a woman, or a straight woman who lived with a man, or a lesbian who lived with a woman who thought she was a man, or possibly a woman visiting a man who kept the stuffed body of a woman in the cellar of his roadside motel so that the woman needed to get out of there fast before something absolutely terrible happened.
I'm sure you'll be glad to know that Kendra and Simon, formerly Amy, decided to stay together, and now Kendra identifies as a lesbian who went to bed with a woman but woke up with a man, but is still a lesbian because otherwise she'd be a straight woman and would want to live with an actual man.
And then what would she do with the stuffed body in the cellar?
All of which only goes to show that sometimes, even in the whiny, dissatisfied world of everyday feminism, stories have a happy ending, though not as happy as my dream about the lesbian bar.
Trigger warning, i'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin shows a ringing, also singing, Hunky Dunky shipsy tipsy, topsy.
Daily Wire Debate00:11:20
The world, is it bitty zing, it's a wonderful day hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing, oh hoorah hooray, All right, we are back from Texas and, you know, it's kind of a bring down because we were just in Glenn.
Glenn Beck was so nice to let us use his studios at the Blaze and incredible facility that Glenn has in Dallas.
And always, you know, Glenn has got some of the happiest people working for him and some of them have been working for him forever.
He's one of those guys that when you work for him, you love it and you don't want to leave.
And so people just work for him forever.
He's got these beautiful facilities.
Come back.
Our studios, which are under construction, are not quite finished.
So they've got us in this back room.
You can see we've had Cynthia put up the wonderful Andrew Clayton show logo behind me.
I've got this little guy on my shoulder.
Like he looks like he's about to bite my head, a little draw chalk me sitting there about to bite my head.
I feel like Donald Duck.
Remember, Donald Duck would have the angel and the devil Donald on his shoulder.
I feel like I've got him whispering in my ear.
It's a little bit strange.
Anyway, it was a great, great trip.
It was terrific.
We're traveling with the whole upper management of the Daily Wire and Ben and Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire.
And as I say, we don't call him that because he has any relation to God.
We simply call him the God King of the Daily Wire because he sent out a memo saying, you know, you now have to call me the God King of the Daily Wire.
I don't know what that's about.
Maybe he's getting out of hand.
But anyway, it was great.
And this place, in all seriousness, this place, the Daily Wire, I have had the weirdest work history of great places to work.
Not only great places to work, but places where the people I worked with were immense talents, all of whom went on to better things.
I worked in a small town newspaper where all the reporters went on to be big-time reporters, one of them, one of the top reporters at the New York Times, which at that time was a newspaper.
And, you know, I worked at, where else?
I worked at WR Radio, which was one of the most prestigious news organizations in New York at the time.
All those people went into network television and everything, all the people, and they were great people.
I mean, it was not just that they were talented.
Then I was at PJ TV when Steve Crowder and Bill Whittle and Zoe Rachel were there, just enormous talents, all of whom have gone on to have their own careers and everything.
And now to be here, you know, with Ben Shapiro and even I'll give a little credit to Michael Knowles, talented, talented people, but all really nice people, including everybody else.
Maybe Austin, that guy's running the show now.
He's a little bit dicey.
No, no, they're all like incredibly nice people.
And it really is a gift.
And I have to say, I think of all the places I've worked for, this is the place I really like the best.
And it's just a well-run, happy shop.
And that's because of the people who are here, except obviously for me, a bitter, angry, nasty, acidic person.
But, but, I'm a little happier than I would be if I had to wait online at the post office.
And that's because I don't have to do that because of stamps.com.
I do.
I hate waiting online.
I also hate waiting inline.
I hate wearing inline skates.
I hate being online, inline, or wearing inlines online.
I hate the whole thing.
Anytime I have to stop my day and get in my car and drive to the post office and stand online and just hope the place is open, all of that, pain in the neck.
Don't do it.
Go to stamps.com.
You get everything, everything that a post office could give you except for the line right on your computer.
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Put the envelope in your printer, comes out with a stamp on it.
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They'll even send you a digital scale so you can automatically calculate the exact postage you will need.
And stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
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And when they fall on your foot, it's a disaster.
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Right now, you two can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without long-term commitments.
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Go to stamps.com and enter Clavin, and you will never have to go to the post office again.
One of the true pleasures of this trip was driving.
We started out in a town called Slayton, then we drove from Slayton to Dallas, then we drove, I'm sorry, Slayton to Cisco, where our founders and supporters are, great people who are the backers of the Daily Wire and some of the visionaries behind the Daily Wire, which was just terrific.
Really wonderful visit there.
And then we get in the car and we drive to Dallas.
So it's me, it's me, Ben, and Jeremy in the car with poor Jonathan Hay, who is like, I have to say, I felt bad for the guy, because all we do is we argue about Donald Trump.
It's just constant.
All we do.
And when I say argue, it's not an angry argument.
It's a friendly argument.
And the weirdest thing, the weirdest thing about me and Shapiro arguing is that we almost always see exactly the same thing.
We're almost always talking about the same facts.
It's never like, you know, he'll say, well, this is happening, and I'll say, no, that's not happening.
It really is almost all attitudinal.
I think that Ben is more idealistic than I am, and he sees what could be, and he thinks like, ah, that's not good.
You know, we're beneath where we should be.
And I see what could be in the bad way.
And I think, well, we're above that.
And so we're actually just arguing about our attitudes.
But, you know, it is interesting.
Ben does this thing about good Trump, bad Trump.
And I was on Dennis Prager's show the other day, sort of promoting my PragerU video about the media, what is fake news, which you can see on PragerU.
And Dennis was saying to me, Dennis has been a big Trump supporter.
He basically got online, and a lot of people have attacked Dennis saying, oh, you know, how can you be?
You're the man about values.
And, you know, you're abandoning your values.
There's a lot of this stuff going on on the right where people are arguing over Trump.
And Dennis said, you know, every human being is a package.
And you take the good with the bad.
And some of the good stuff we're getting with Trump and a lot of good stuff, you know, Gorsuch and the rollback of Obama's incredible regulatory overreach, the stuff in the foreign policy stuff we're getting now, which has really been terrific.
The complete wiping out of ISIS, the annihilation, to use, I think it was Mattis' word, of ISIS.
All this good stuff that's coming down the pike.
The Congress has not stepped up yet and really given us some big legislation that we can bang our chests about, but a lot of good stuff.
And then, you know, every now and again, Trump does something that is kind of, you know, makes you shocked.
And the question that I wanted to ask is like, is this, is this necessary?
Is there some way, is it really good Trump, bad Trump, or is it just all Trump?
I mean, is the good stuff and the stuff that makes us uncomfortable, is it all just part of the same package and somehow necessary?
So Trump is over.
Yesterday he gave, I just thought, a terrific, terrific speech in Warsaw and Poland, just reaffirming Western values.
We're going to talk about it a little more today because some of the reaction from the left was insane.
But I think that, you know, now he's meeting with Putin.
So this is the big thing.
He's in the G20 conference, which is 19 countries and the EU.
That's why they call it the G20.
And it's basically economic leaders of the world.
The people are rioting.
I have no idea why they're rioting.
I don't know what they're protesting.
They're basically, it's the left going out there and just starting fights with the police.
And some of them, look, a lot of people there to march and all this stuff.
And some people, it's always the small number of troublemakers who start the fights.
And then it looks like a big riot on TV.
And, you know, their protest is called Welcome to Hell.
So they're not there with good purposes.
But, you know, I don't even know what they're protesting.
Are they protesting that we're too rich, too free, you know, that the too peaceful?
What is it?
You know, like we want to destroy the G20 because it's made the world too wealthy.
I mean, there's some kind of idea that if we're wealthy, somebody else must be suffering.
And I just think that that is like absolute, you know, absolute nonsense, obviously.
But the big thing is that Donald Trump is going to meet with Putin.
He had a meeting.
Well, just take a little clip.
It's not really anything.
This is the stuff they do for the cameras before they go back behind the curtain and start actually doing the arm wrestling stuff.
Everything is going very well.
We've had some very, very good talks.
We're going to have to talk now, and obviously that will continue.
But we look forward to a lot of very positive things happening for Russia, for the United States, and for everybody concerned.
I'm delighted to be able to meet you personally, Mr. President, and I hope, as you have said, our meeting will yield positive results.
And if you're not watching it and you're just listening to those look at the cameras, million cameras going off, and of course, the press goes nuts every time they shake hands.
What did that handshake mean?
And was somebody snubbed?
And all this stuff is going on live and in person.
So, of course, none of it means anything.
You shake hands with the guy you're there to meet.
And so nobody can say anything.
I get a little worried when Trump is meeting guys like Putin because Putin is a genuine murdering dirtbag.
He's a bad, bad fascist guy who has been running rampant because nobody has had the guts to stop him.
He's one of those guys.
He's not a Hitler, but like Hitler, he can feel the weaknesses of his opponents.
He knows how far they'll go.
He looks at them and he can assess them and think, well, this guy is not going to fight back.
And that's what he looked at Obama and thought, and think, I can take Ukraine, I can take Crimea, maybe I can even move back into Eastern Europe.
You never know.
And it's funny, but I do worry when Trump goes to meet him, because Putin actually murders journalists, you know.
And I don't want Trump to suddenly get any ideas.
I know he's not any friends to journalists, but I want to make sure we're all talking about the same rules.
We don't want people sticking plutonium into Chris Cuomo and no other poisons either.
I want to make sure we're getting this very straight.
This good old-fashioned American bashing the press.
The press deserves it.
They have become intellectually corrupt, incredibly biased, but no injecting plutonium into Chris Cuomo.
I think we have to, no throwing reporters out of windows.
I sometimes feel I should send a little card to our friend John Nolte, who's a real crusader against the press.
I just feel like he should have a little card, no throwing Chris Cuomo out the window, no defenestrating Chris Cuomo.
So I want to make sure we're all playing by the same rules.
It's one thing, good American stuff criticizing, no killing reporters.
We don't want that going on.
So I don't want Trump listening to Putin going, so, huh, plutonium.
And you inject that.
I get that.
No, we don't want that.
But what we do want is we do want Putin to look at this guy and think, I don't know what he's going to do.
I don't know who he is.
Naturebox Snack Choices00:04:00
He's a wild man.
I'm not going to make any moves.
We want Putin nervous.
And of course, the press, well, you know, Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, he's on the plane.
He gave a very sane interview just saying, you know, we're trying to improve relations.
This is diplomacy.
Here's Tillerson.
I think the important aspect of this is that this is where we've begun an effort to begin to rebuild confidence between ourselves and Russia at the military, the military level, but also at the diplomatic level.
So I think it is an effort that serves both of our interests as well as the broader interests of the international community.
We hope that this is going to be the beginning of other important areas that need to be addressed in order to strengthen our relationship.
But we're at the very beginning, and I would say at this point, it's difficult to say exactly what Russia's intentions are in this relationship.
And I think that's the most important part of this meeting, is to have a good exchange between President Trump and President Putin over what they both see as the nature of this relationship between our two countries.
So of course the press, we're going to talk about the press reaction to this and the left's reaction to this was just hilarious.
But first, we should talk about naturebox.com because if you are like me, listen, I eat very well.
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I try to take care of myself.
But when it gets late at night, you know, I don't sleep much and I'm still awake when everybody else has gone to bed.
And that's the time, that is the time when I might like pour myself a drink and just reach into the cabinet and get whatever is there.
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I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe because this is it.
It's coming to the point on July 10th when we're going to raise our rates.
Right now, it's still just a lousy $8 a month.
Pope And The People00:15:07
After this, you have to pay by the word, and it's Ben Shapiro's word, so it's going to cost you a fortune.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So the press, of course, is setting up Trump to lose whatever happens.
Here's the...
The New York Times, a former newspaper, here is their coverage of the Trump-Putin meeting before it takes place.
For Russia, Trump-Putin meeting is a sure winner.
Whatever the outcome of the encounter, the Kremlin is betting that Mr. Putin can stage manage the event so that he comes out looking like the stronger party.
If nothing much emerges from the meeting, analysts said the Kremlin can repeat the standard Russian line that Mr. Trump is weak, hamstrung by domestic politics.
But if Mr. Trump agrees to work with Mr. Putin despite a list of Russian transgressions beginning with the annexation of Crimea and ending with its interference in the 2016 presidential election, he will also look weak while Mr. Putin can claim that he reconstructed the relationship.
What they're telling you, they're not telling you about what the Russians are going to say.
They're telling you about what they are going to say because nobody cares what the Russians say.
Nobody believes the Russians.
Everybody knows that everything they say is propaganda.
But the New York Times, this is the way they're going to play it.
On their op-ed page, or as we call it here, Knucklehead Row, they are going to sell this thing as a loss for Donald, whatever happens.
You know, it's just going to be a bad thing.
But I don't know.
I just think it's got to be better than it was.
And in his Poland speech yesterday, he was very tough on the Russians.
And most importantly, and look, look, this is going to send a chill through even Putin's heart.
He said to Poland, I don't want anyone to have a monopoly over your energy.
And that is speaking right into the heart of the Russian bear because everything that Putin has is based on petrodollars.
That's all they got.
And if we, with our fracking and our new technology that's producing all this energy, all this new energy, if we get into that market and get Europe off the hook with Russia, Putin's got nothing.
He has got nothing.
And so Trump, look, Trump is the art of the deal.
He knows the art of the deal.
He knows that he is holding a very strong hand.
Putin, with the exception of his nuclear arsenal, Putin is a paper tiger.
He has nothing.
There's no way he can pay troops long enough to sustain a war.
And if Trump threatens to undermine him there, he can get places.
That Warsaw speech, I got to say, as far as I was concerned, it was a titanic success.
And a lot of people said so, and they really should have.
It was really good.
And, you know, it was really, you know, I heard Krauthammer talking about it, and he was saying it was different than his inaugural because it wasn't America first.
It was America among the world.
But I don't think that's actually a conflict.
I mean, I hate to disagree with Krauthammer.
He's a brilliant guy, but I don't really think that's a conflict.
I think that when we put America first and you retrench and you make it stronger, then you can, in fact, make better alliances.
I mean, that's just it.
We are the leader of the free world.
And unlike Obama with this lead from behind stuff, you know, if we have to lead by leading, we don't have to lead by doing what they say.
Here was the moment that Trump really hit the ball out of the park.
When he was talking, first of all, he was talking about the oppression in Poland, the Nazis, and then the Soviets.
And then he talked about the day when the Soviets were kind of forced to invite Pope John Paul II to Warsaw.
Here's, let's listen to a little of Trump.
Your oppressors tried to break you, but Poland could not be broken.
And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down.
They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II's sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer.
A million Polish people did not ask for wealth.
They did not ask for privilege.
Instead, one million Poles saying three simple words, we want God.
That was, by the way, I remember this in 1979.
This was an amazing, amazing moment.
Now, you have to remember, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, nobody, none of the experts, nobody.
It was just like Donald Trump's election.
Nobody knew the Soviet Union was going to fall.
Everybody thought it was going to be there a year beforehand.
Some of the oldest hands in the foreign policy business thought the Soviet Union was there forever.
It was just the way things were.
Then the Vatican appointed John Paul II, the first Polish pope.
And suddenly the Soviet Union was in trouble because what do they do?
What do the Poles do?
Do they invite him over and risk that he'll be a thorn in the side of the administration, the administration, the tyranny?
Or do they look weak and like, oh, we can't invite the Pope office.
So they decide, well, the better thing to do is invite him over.
He's not going to start any violence.
He's not going to start any trouble.
He's going to be careful.
John Paul II stepped off the plane and he kissed the earth.
And I mean, it was an incredibly moving moment.
The people thronged it and they're shouting, we want God, we want God.
And I can't quote the exact words, but John Paul II said something like, I'm here to remind you of who you are.
You have forgotten who you are.
I'm here to remind you of who you are.
And his signature line was always, be not afraid.
Be not afraid.
The cameras were panning over the security guys, the Soviet, you know, the Soviet, the Polish security guys.
And they just, you could see in their eyes, oh no, oh no, we are in trouble.
And Ronald Reagan knew it too.
He said, this is going to be their downfall.
It's religion that is going to be their downfall.
And it really, it really was a turning point in the history of the world.
You know, Catholics, obviously, they get so tired of hearing of the sex scandal and all this stuff.
But, you know, I don't think it's an accident that two of the greatest popes in history were operating for the freedom of humanity at the same time the scandal was breaking.
I believe there is a force, a supernatural force.
I really believe this that is opposed to humanity and opposed to freedom.
I believe there is an evil in the world that is opposed to those things.
And I think that the Catholics, instead of not wanting to talk about it, they should get into their church and just pull it up root and branch because it is in the, when that stuff gets into the church, it weakens, you know, John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, who was another guy who was reminding, reminding Europe that we are, this Western civilization stands on the rock of Peter.
It stands on Christianity.
So here's the left with listening to Donald Trump talking about this stuff and reminding people in his way that this is who you are.
And it's a, look, there's some cognitive dissonance here.
I know that.
Donald Trump is not the most religious guy in the world.
And you feel this is the guy who's reminding us?
Yes, this is the guy.
This is the guy we got.
He is there to remind us of who we are.
It's an amazing, weird thing.
It's kind of like Melania.
I will look at Melania overseas and I'm proud of her as the first lady in a way I haven't been.
I'm always a little easy on First Ladies.
They kind of are stuck in this horrible job that they didn't ask for.
But you think about, well, she posed nude in pictures and all this stuff.
Like, she wasn't working for me then.
She's working for me now.
She's doing a great job.
So there is some cognitive dissonance with Donald Trump being the guy who is reminding us of who we are, but he's the guy and he is doing it.
And Peter Beinhart in The Atlantic writes, this is a leftist writer.
He writes, the racial and religious, this is the headline, the racial and religious paranoia of Trump's Warsaw speech.
This was an almost great speech, and I say that comparing it to like the Gettysburg Address.
It wasn't the Gettysburg Address, but it was a very, very, very good speech.
The subhead is, when the president says being Western is the essence of America's identity, he's in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people.
This is the left's big lie, okay?
That you have some identity that excuses you from Western values when you're living in America.
Maybe it's like the people I was joking about in the opening.
Oh, your identity is a lesbian or something.
So somehow you are outside.
Well, the West has marginalized you.
Well, you're going to marginalize the West right back.
That is a big lie.
No, indeed.
It is the West that has freed you.
It is the West that has elevated you to the point where you can write your stupid articles at everyday feminism.
And if you don't support those values, you're going to lose those rights, believe me.
And I'll show you why in just a minute.
So here's the article.
Let me read a little bit of the article.
In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to the West and five times to our civilization.
His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means.
It's important that other Americans do too.
The West is not a geographic term.
Poland is further east than Morocco.
France is further east than Haiti.
Australia, so and so and so on.
The West is not an ideological or economic term either.
India is the world's largest democracy.
Japan is among the most economically advanced nations.
No one considers them part of the West.
The West is a racial and religious term.
To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian, preferably Protestant or Catholic, and largely white.
Where there is ambiguity about a country's Westernness, it's because there is ambiguity about or tension between these two characteristics, being Christian and white.
Is Latin America Western?
Maybe.
Most of its people are Christian, but by U.S. standards, they're not clearly white.
Are Albania and Bosnia Western?
Maybe by American standards, their people are white, but they are also mostly.
I mean, this is the voice of self-hatred.
This is the voice of a guy who does not know the rock he is standing on.
And to see why we have to defend these values, we only have to look at our old friend, Linda Saussure, who has become sarsur, who has become the voice of the left, one of the top voices on the left.
This is her.
This is the woman who goes out and leads the women's marches.
You know, and the women show up in their pink hats and they're listening to Linda Saussure.
She made a speech over the weekend over the July 4th weekend to the Islamic Society of North America.
Okay, here she is talking about her struggle against Donald Trump, except struggle is not the word she uses.
There's a first cut.
Sisters and brothers, it's been 16, almost 17 years since the horrific attacks of 9-11.
And we still as a community find ourselves unprepared in so many moments.
Why, sisters and brothers, why are we so unprepared?
Why are we so afraid of this administration and the potential chaos that they will ensue on our community?
And we already saw their potential when they come out every few weeks, Muslim ban one, Muslim band two, Muslim band three.
They are relentless.
They are persistent and consistent and want to see how much we as a community can endure and want to see who our friends are and how hard we're going to fight back against this administration.
And I hope that we, when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers, not only abroad in the Middle East or in the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.
A call to jihad.
And of course the left is letting her off the hook.
Well, it's jihad as an emotional struggle.
Look, she knows exactly what she's saying.
She knows exactly what she's saying.
This is a Sharia-supporting woman who pointed to an alleged terrorist in the audience, one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the first World Trade Center bombing, a guy who showed up and testified on behalf of the blind sheikh who organized that bombing.
And she pointed to him and said he was one of my favorite people.
When she uses the word jihad, she ain't kidding.
And that is ridiculous.
I know Shapiro was talking on his show about the fact that George W. Bush used the word crusade and everyone went nuts, a word that has had nothing to do with the crusades for centuries.
Jihad, we know what that means, and that's nonsense.
And listen to her go on.
Listen to what she then says next.
This is amazing.
We have to stay outraged.
Do not criticize me when I say that we as a Muslim community in these United States of America have to be perpetually outraged every single day.
When I wake up in the morning and I remember who's sitting in the White House, I am outraged.
This is not normal, sisters and brothers.
Those people sitting in the most powerful seats in this country is not normal.
So do not ever be those citizens that normalize this administration because when the day comes that something horrific happens to us or to another community, you will be responsible for normalizing this administration.
Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our communities.
It is not to assimilate and to please any other people in authority.
Our obligation is to our young people, is to our women, and make sure our women are protected in our community.
And our top priority, the even higher than all those priorities, is to please Allah and only Allah.
So don't assimilate.
That's what she's telling people.
Do not assimilate.
Our obligation is not to assimilate.
If you follow the logic of this speech, she says it's been 16 years since the World Trade Center bombing and our condition hasn't gotten any better.
She didn't say it's been 16 years and we haven't weeded out the terrorists among us.
It's been 16 years and we haven't gotten the radicals out of our mosques.
She didn't say that.
She said it's been 16 years and the West still isn't being nice to us.
How many times do we have to kill them?
How many times she doesn't want to assimilate as far as I'm concerned?
The minute she said that, two ICE agents should have come in and picked her up under the arms and thrown her out the door.
You know, I mean, if you don't want to be here, you don't have to be here.
And when she says we have to protect our women, who's we?
Who's our?
You know, it's not us.
It's not the West.
And so here's the thing.
Here's the thing I want to say.
On the side of the people, and this is true in Poland too.
I mean, Poland has made many great contributions to Western society.
It really has.
Copernicus among them.
You know, some really great, but there has always been a big problem with anti-Semitism in Poland.
During the Holocaust, Poland did many, many shameful things, as well as being oppressed by the Nazis.
Some of the people in Poland were oppressors of the Jews.
Flaws of Allies00:09:50
So what I'm saying is among the people who love Western civilization, who love the Christian basis of Western civilization, there are also people who are bigots among those people.
That's going to happen.
Obviously, every movement has its extremes.
And so we have to say, and listen, sometimes the same people who oppose Islam and the problems Islam is bringing into Europe might be the same people who hate Jews.
They may be the same people.
And listen, anti-Semitism, you've heard me say it before.
It is like, you know, we're talking about the devil before.
We're talking about Satan.
Anti-Semitism is like the devil's flatulence.
When you see it, when you smell it, you know he's standing next to you.
That's how you always know.
That's how you know when the left went bad.
That is how you knew.
You knew when they abandoned Israel, when they started to want to disinvest in Israel and support Palestinians and terrorists.
That's how you knew.
They support this lady, this woman, who we know is a Sharia law, terrorist-loving woman, when they support her, you know they are the enemy.
That's the enemy of the West.
But we also know that among the supporters of the West, there are bad guys.
You know, that's, of course, of course.
You know, some of these things, you know, on the alt-right, we talk about the alt-right, and it's a word that's almost lost its meaning.
But some of these guys that I hear denying the Holocaust now, which is just a code word for anti-Semitism, there's no denying the Holocaust.
It's not a real thing.
It's like the Pizzagate thing.
It's just a made-up garbage way of attacking Jewish people.
That's all it is.
That is all it is.
Make no mistake about this.
When you hear people talking about this, millions and millions and millions of Jews were murdered in this industrial way during the Holocaust.
It is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, tragedies in Western civilization.
And people wouldn't deny it.
That's just Jew hatred.
And so we know these people are there.
We know they're there.
And we know that during the campaign, Trump was a little slow.
He's been much better as president, but he was a little slow to condemn them, a little slow to say, no, I don't want these guys and all this stuff.
And so you ask yourself, when I sign on to our traditions and to the religion that is the bedrock of our ideals, all the things you love about America, even if you're on the left, all the things that you think dropped out of the sky, like the gentle rain from heaven, they all come from one place.
Well, no, that's not true.
They all come from two places.
They come from Athens and they come from Jerusalem.
They come from the Bible and they come from the Greeks.
That's where they come from.
And they have grown up together.
These two things have become welded together into what we think of as Western civilization.
And that's the bottom of the Jenga Tower.
You pull it out and it goes away.
But, but these are the people that sometimes cluster around Trump.
And I'm not going to name them because I don't want to attack our side.
But you know who they are.
You know when you hear them and they start saying, you know, kind of making anti-Semitism cute or hatred cute or bigotry against black people cute.
It ain't cute.
It's not cute.
And I think the thing is, you know, the thing is that if this is part of the package of Trump, and by the way, I'm not saying it is and I don't think it is anymore.
But if this is part of the package of Trump, we've got a real problem.
But, but if it simply means, if it simply means that in celebrating freedom, in celebrating freedom, we have to tolerate some of this.
We have to know that these people are around.
Then I think I want to remind you of one of my favorite quotes from Lord Acton.
Lord Acton was the great historian of freedom.
And he wrote, and I've quoted this before, but it's worth repeating, at all times, sincere friends of freedom have been rare.
And its triumphs have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own.
Okay, I just want to unpack that just a little bit.
In other words, those of us who believe in freedom, who believe a man has a right to be left alone, you have a right and I have a right.
You have a right to do your work and speak your mind and say what you have to say and to enjoy the sweat of your brow, the work of your labor, to keep the money that you make, which is your time.
It's not just money.
It is the time of your life.
You have a right to that.
That's yours.
That does not belong to the people.
It does not belong to the state.
It does not belong to the common good.
It is yours to do with as you please and should not be taken away in great gobs to support whatever latest thing they're buying votes with.
So those friends of freedom have always been rare and they always have to link up with people who have other goals that support them, right?
So sometimes, Lord Acton goes on, this association with these other people, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.
In other words, if they can tar us with the brush of anti-Semitism, if they can tar freedom lovers with the brush of bigotry, with the brush of hatred, then they can attack us with some kind of justification if we link up to these people.
And that is why, that is why people like me, you know, it's not about Donald Trump.
I mean, it may be if he does something terrible, but so far he hasn't.
He's been really good.
I think he's really actually been doing an overall good job at being president of the United States.
That is why we're always a little careful.
We always want to say, we always want to say where the bad stuff is.
Now, I don't believe that, I don't believe that this means we have to pick on every tweet he says or everything he says that's untoward or the fact that sometimes he's a rough-hewn guy.
You know, sometimes he talks like a New Yorker.
I grew up among New Yorkers.
I know how they sound.
Sometimes he sounds like that.
I don't have to pick on him for all that.
You know, this is where Dennis is right.
A person is a package.
And when you're allies and friends with a person, you don't have to pick on all his flaws.
You overlook some of his flaws to get at the good things of these people.
And there's a lot of stuff.
You know, who was writing it?
It was Gerlenter was writing in the Wall Street Journal.
He said, he was talking about all the good things.
He says the people who protest his rough hewnness, he says, so what if Trump has restarted the large pipeline projects, scrapped many statist regulations, appointed a fine cabinet and a first-rate Supreme Court justice, asked NATO countries to pay what they owe, reestablished solid relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia, signaled an inclination to use troops in Afghanistan to win and not merely cover our retreat, let us out of the Paris Climate Accord, plans to increase military spending, although not enough,
is trying to get rid of Obamacare to the extent possible, propose to lower taxes significantly and revamp immigration policy and enforcement.
What has he done lately?
So yes, there is a lot of good stuff that comes with Donald Trump.
And some of it, I think, comes with that scrappy, rough-hewn thing that is going to make him say things that people who want the right to be an intellectual shining city on a hill, that's going to upset them.
But all of these things, I believe, are of a piece.
And I truly believe that the stuff that causes him to get into sometimes petty feuds or maybe say things that he shouldn't say is part of this scrappy attitude that is causing him to take on the people who despise Western civilization.
Is he a flawed vessel?
Of course he is.
Of course he is.
Who isn't?
But so far, so far, has he shown any indication of living out our worst fears?
I don't think so.
I don't think he has.
And I think that this, you know, people say he's lowering the office of the presidency.
I don't know how much lower the office of the presidency can get after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Barack Obama, who turned Washington into Chicago, a corrupt Chicago machine.
You know, I don't know.
Look, I like to see people be classy.
I like to see people be elegant.
I like to see people speak.
Our leaders speak well.
But, you know, he's saying the things that need to be said.
And I think it is all, it's not good Trump, bad Trump.
It's all one Trump.
And yes, I think sometimes we do have to overlook the flaws of our allies.
And especially those of us who love freedom, who are always in the minority, always have to go to make alliances.
And what I would like to see, because the fact that Trump wiped away every opponent in the primaries, I mean, he just mowed them down like nine pins, you know, just bowled them away.
Substantial people like Ted Cruz, I mean, real candidate, powerful candidates like Jeb Bush, just wiped them away.
means that something is wrong in the conservative movement.
We have not been speaking to the people that Trump is speaking to.
And I don't think that what's wrong is that we weren't tough enough on Obama.
I think that's nonsense.
You know, we were plenty tough on Obama.
We did everything we could.
We did had a lot of success against Obama.
He lost almost a thousand seats of Democrats across the country.
You know, we did well against that.
It wasn't that we weren't tough.
It's not that we don't know how to fight.
It is, I think, that we don't know.
Henry Olson is right about this.
It is that we have not spoken to people in pain.
You cannot bring people, and people can't eat your ideas.
They can't eat your fine notions.
They can't send their children to school with your fine notions.
We have to remember that when people are suffering, we have to figure out free market, free solutions.
Or the guys who say, here's some stuff from the government, they will win.
So I want to end with stuff I like.
It's great, great album, one of my favorite albums, Phil Vassar.
He was a terrific songwriter in the year 2000.
He put out him singing his own songs, one great song after another.
The album is just called Phil Vassar, V-A-S-S-A-R.
And big hit, great song.
Just Another Day00:02:04
And one of my favorite songs on it is Just Another Day in Paradise.
And it's about marriage and having children and not having enough money and how it's chaos and it's hard and it's difficult.
But really, if you see it through the eyes of love, it's just another day in paradise.
And that's the way I feel about living in America.
It's chaos, it's nuts, it's dangerous.
There are moral hazards everywhere.
But if you see it through the eyes of love, every day in America is just another day in paradise.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
The Clavenless weekend begins.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
Baby, don't kick it.
By myself, fix it.
Only about a million other things.
My child's so nice.
It's just another day in paradise.
Where there's no place that I'd rather be.
I wouldn't trade it for anything.
In an ashlord, every night.
We're just there.
I guess we'll never make our dinner day.
At the restaurant, you start to cry.
And maybe we'll just improvise.
Well, plan D looks like diamond pizza in the candlelight.