Ep. 348 dissects the GOP’s self-sabotage in 2017, where Senate Republicans failed to repeal Obamacare despite Trump’s promises, with Rand Paul and Mike Lee blocking the Better Care Act over taxes, while Democrats mocked Trump with absurd rhetoric—Maxine Waters comparing him to Hitler. The episode ties this chaos to Venezuela’s socialist collapse under Maduro, citing 100+ riot deaths and Congresswoman Ilana Rose-Littonen’s push for sanctions, contrasting Sean Penn’s praise for Chávez as blind worship of a dictator. It warns that leftist policies—from Bernie Sanders’ socialism to Al Gore’s climate hysteria—threaten freedom, framing Trump as the only bulwark against global tyranny, while urging Republicans to focus on economic wins over culture wars. [Automatically generated summary]
The Republican Party seems to be in big trouble after the collapse of their attempt to replace Obamacare.
Recent polls by Democrat organizations that have been reported by Democrat news media show that Donald Trump has a historically low approval rating with Democrats who hate Donald Trump, and that Republicans are universally despised by Democrats who despise Republicans.
But what about the Democrats themselves?
Some prominent voices in the Democrat Party maintain that the party is doing fine, including the New York Times, editorial board, CNN, Ral Castro, and a lunatic in Times Square who claims Jesus was a black guy.
But others feel the Democrats are having a hard time deciding what their message should be as they head into the 2018 midterms.
Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer says, quote, we must get out the word that Donald Trump is stinky and has cooties, and that he is so mean he made the Statue of Liberty cry.
This is not the America I know and love, but an America where statues cry giant bronze tears because of the president's cooties.
If I can say this on television again and again while doing absolutely nothing to move the country forward, I feel sure Democrats will win the vote of everyone who is against stinky cooties and doesn't want to see ladies' statues cry, unquote.
Over in the House, Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement saying, quote, it's not true the Democrats don't have a message.
Our message is clear.
President Bush must return my car to the place where I'm almost sure I parked it, or the public will hold him personally responsible for this lipstick stain that somehow got on my forehead.
Never before in the history of whatever country I'm in have so many words that didn't make sense caused me to accidentally lock myself in the bathroom.
With this message, I know we can win if winning is what we want to do.
Otherwise, we cannot win, unquote.
California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who has become a hero to the anti-Trump resistance by staunchly sticking to her position of blithering insanity, says she will continue to hammer her message home until they take her back to the ward.
Congresswoman Waters told reporters, quote, Donald Trump would be Hitler if Hitler owned black slaves and was named Donald Trump and had no slaves and wasn't Hitler.
His election marks the end of our nation as we know it, the death of democracy, and a tremendous explosion in which everyone is killed with blood and body parts flying from one end of my brain to the other.
This is my message to anyone who can hear the sound of my voice through these padded walls, unquote.
Another left-wing darling, Senator Elizabeth Warren, added, quote, message sent by smoke signals across field of tears to great spirit of white father who weeps no more forever, unquote.
The Democrat confusion and division seem set to continue, providing Republicans in Congress with a perfect opportunity to chicken out of all their promises and accomplish nothing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Bowl and Branch Sheets00:03:13
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So I heard something happen with the Senate health care bill, like just a massive explosion.
It has been destroyed.
It was already on the edge, right?
They only had 50 votes because Rand Paul and Susan Collins had already kind of opted out.
And now who else joined them?
Mike Lee from Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas.
This is kind of interesting because Rand Paul, I'm not in favor of this kind of, what can I call it, parading your principles around as if your principles mattered if no one was going to vote for you.
This is Rand Paul before this happened talking about why he wouldn't vote for this thing.
The real problem we have is, you know, we won four elections on repealing Obamacare, but this bill keeps most of the Obamacare taxes, keeps most of the regulations, keeps most of the subsidies, and creates something that Republicans have never been for.
That's a giant insurance bailout super fund.
That's not a Republican idea to give taxpayer money to a private industry that already makes $15 billion in profit.
So if this bill does not pass, what happens?
Well, you know what I've suggested to the president, and I talked to the president again, you know, when he was in Paris just this last weekend, or I guess on Friday, and I've told him, I think we can still, you know, if this comes to an impasse, I think if the president jumps into the fray and says, look, guys, you promised to repeal it.
Let's just repeal what we can agree to, and then we can continue to try to fix, replace, or whatever happen afterwards.
But the one thing we should do is try to repeal as many of the taxes, as many of the regulations, and as many of the mandates as we possibly can.
I still think the entire 52 of us could get together on a more narrow, clean repeal, and I think it still can be done.
Okay, so that's Rand Paul, and everybody goes, oh, more principal.
This is great.
He's got principal.
He stands up for repeal.
They said they were going to repeal.
They said it and said it for seven years.
Why didn't they do it?
Come on, let's go and do it.
So that's Rand Paul talking about repeal.
And Mike Lee, you know, the thing about Mike Lee is Mike Lee usually is a team player.
Mike Lee usually will go along.
He was working with Ted Cruz to craft an amendment he thought would save this, but he put out a statement after conferring with trusted experts regarding the latest version of the Consumer Freedom Amendment.
I've decided I cannot support the current version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act.
In addition to not repealing all of the Obamacare taxes, it doesn't go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families, nor does it create enough free space from the most costly Obamacare regulations.
So now, Mitch McConnell, who at this point must be ready to eat some of these people for dinner, Mitch McConnell says, all right, we'll have a vote on repeal.
So what happens?
And the president is also, Trump is tweeting out about three different things at once.
He says, yes, we should repeal it.
What did he say?
Republicans should just repeal failing Obamacare now and work on a new health care plan that will start from a clean state.
Dems will join in as if.
Where that came from, I don't know.
But then he also tweeted, we should just let it fail, which is what he's kind of been saying from the beginning.
That was his political instinct from the beginning.
Okay, so now moderate Rob Portman from Ohio, do we have this cut?
Did we get the report?
Great.
Let's put on what he says about full repeal.
So I'll have to look and see what the so-called repeal bill entails.
But if it is a bill that simply repeals, I believe that will add to more uncertainty and the potential for Ohioans to pay even higher premiums, higher deductibles.
So we'll have to see.
Obviously, we would look for a CBO analysis of that to see what it involves in terms of not just premiums and deductibles, but coverage.
So I'll take a look at it.
But I'm concerned about something that would simply repeal and its impact on costs and choices in health care.
Ruttro, suddenly, these, now remember, these guys, 48 of the sitting senators, I believe is the right number, 48, voted for repeal like two years ago.
So who is this good for?
It's great for talk radio.
It's great for right-wing talk radio, because right-wing talk radio sells outrage.
Because outrage is like cocaine and they know you're addicted to it and you know it feels so good to be outrageous.
They lied, they lied.
I have to break this to you.
Remember when your mom told you that a fat man comes down your chimney on christmas?
She was lying too.
When politicians do this stuff and, by the way, it's not the politician you're yelling at, it's the voter.
It's the voter.
That's why he won't do it.
That's why they won't repeal it.
They won't repeal it because their voters will throw them out of office.
They're trying to save their jobs.
Now you, you say that.
You sit there and you say well, they said this and the principal, and we want freedom.
And they said that, and they lied, and all this stuff.
My question is this, where is the so-called realism that that right-wingers are always bragging about?
Right, I hear people saying, well, you know if, if this were Ted Cruise it's not Ted Cruise if we didn't vote for Donald Trump, we did if Donald Trump weren't present.
He Is.
You know, so what's you know, I because I got the reason this gets to me is I get this letter every single day because what I said and what I still say is they should have given Trump the win.
They should have given, that's all Trump cares about.
You know, is this Trump's fault?
In a sense, yes, of course it is, because Trump doesn't care about policy.
He doesn't care about ideology.
He told you this when he was running.
He cares about the win.
He wants the win and then he'll move on and he wants the economy to take off and he wants you to like him for fixing things, which he feels that he's good at doing.
He said this was going to be easy.
He didn't realize it's not so easy.
And when you don't have the thing about Obama, Obama was a visionary.
He had a vision of a weak America buried under socialist regulations where the elites told you what to do and you did them.
That was his vision.
Crap vision?
Yeah, but it was a vision.
He was willing to sacrifice the majority in Congress to get his vision through.
He was willing to do dirty deals.
He was willing to, you know, do anything just to get that legislation through because he knew once you give people stuff, they won't give it back.
Once you give people, people, we were talking about this yesterday.
People will sell their freedom for free stuff.
This is not new.
This is the law of human nature, okay?
Remember your Bible, right?
Moses God brought plagues down on Egypt, massive, miraculous, incredible plagues that had never been seen before until Pharaoh let the people go.
They ran out and the army came after them.
They hit the Red Sea and Moses parted the water.
The water of the sea moved apart.
They went through the sea on dry land.
The armies followed and the armies were destroyed.
And then they said, We're starving, we're hungry, we want to go back to Egypt.
When we were slaves, we had food.
That's what people do.
They will give you their freedom for food.
And they don't even think like, well, you did all these miracles.
You don't even think like American freedom made us the richest, most powerful, freest, best country on earth.
Maybe we should just stick to that.
It's like, you know, we're going through an economic slump.
We want free stuff.
That's what people will do.
And that's who these senators have and congressmen have to go back and face.
So they're going to be cynical, they're going to be calculating.
They're going to do what they think will get them re-elected every single time.
And if you're going to be outraged about that, if you're going to live in your outrage, well, that'll feel good, but you won't get anything done.
You know, I just want to know where the realism is.
I am a rock-ribbed conservative.
I think this health care bill should be thrown out, burned.
I think the people who passed it should be tarred and feathered.
I think we should have a free market healthcare.
I think it would work.
I think there should be some provision for the poor.
I think there always has been provision for the poor in America.
But I think there should be provision for the poor, but I think normal people should have to pay in a free market for their health care.
Not going to happen.
Not now.
Not now.
If they had passed something, they could have then engineered a new free market that would have sucked the energy away from the Obamacare structure.
But it ain't going to happen now.
I mean, and this is why, this is why the left is gloating.
Here is Chuck Schumer standing on top of the Obamacare bill and exulting.
Okay, that didn't work out as well as he thought.
But look at, if we want to really go to the spokesman of the Democrat Party, let's go to Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, because it's really the media that runs the Democrat Party now.
Let's look at him gloating over this.
The greatest risk to Donald Trump, the greatest risk to the Republican majority may not be the Russian scandals.
It may not be the indiscriminate tweeting.
It may not be the unpresidential behavior.
It may not be the questioning of checks and balances.
It may not be actually throwing aside every sacred tradition in the United States government over the past 240 years.
It may be the inability to get things done because Donald Trump's chief promise above everything else was I can make Washington work.
It's broken, but don't worry, I'm a deal maker.
This is easy.
We're going to do so much and we're going to win so much that you're going to get tired of winning.
And what he's actually finding is, as somebody said earlier this morning, that it's easier to stamp your name on buildings, on stakes, and on online university courses than it is to actually run Washington, D.C. and get significant legislation passed.
Skillshare For Skills00:02:36
And this was quite the failure, Mika.
And Mika is smirking so much that her facelift started to bleed again.
Okay, don't laugh at that.
You just encourage me when I say things like that.
You know, we were talking, I was talking yesterday to Michael Knowles, King of Trolls, Michael Knowles, and we were talking about the fact that he and I are doing one of my new novel As a Podcast are going to be doing that.
And, you know, so much of what I do, I was reflecting after this, and so much of what I do for a living didn't exist when I started working.
I mean, so much.
I mean, I've invented apps or I've helped invent apps doing podcasts.
There were no podcasts.
What, 10 years ago, there was no such thing as a podcast.
So much of what I do, all I ever wanted to do was write novels, and I still write novels.
But let's face it, they've become a little bit archaic, a little bit buggy whippy, you know, so that I've gone into new ways of telling stories and new ways of expressing myself as the technology existed.
And on the way, I've had to learn new skills.
And that is why there's something Skillshare, because on Skillshare, what Skillshare is, it's an online learning community with over 15,000 classes in just about anything you can think of, design, business.
There's stuff on photography, on marketing, on entrepreneurship, and then stuff on just hobbies you might want to have, like music and calligraphy and things like that.
You can learn just about everything on these tapes.
They're very short, little classes, and you can take a whole series of them, and you get unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price.
It's not one of those things where they have, what do they call them, in-app purchases, where you get into the class, and halfway through they say, oh yeah, that'll be another 10 bucks.
You pay for it on the part of the community, and you can take just any class you want.
I've tried them out.
I've tried out the ones on writing just to see because I thought I probably know a lot about writing.
I'll see if they're any good.
They really are marketing, something that I'm not as good at, but I've had to learn as I've gone along, as the internet has become more of a thing.
Skillshare.com has stuff on all of this so that as you go forward and as things change under your feet, you don't get caught short.
Skillshare is giving my listeners a month of unlimited access, absolutely free.
I always feel when I'm talking about this stuff, you know, like you don't have to be that smart to take advantage of free.
Free is like cheap, you know, it's free.
So go to www.skillshare.com slash Andrew and you'll get a free month.
You can test out all the trials, www.skillshare.com slash Andrew and get a free month of Skillshare, a lot of stuff to learn.
Mailbag is tomorrow.
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Did I overdo that?
Fighting Trumpers and War00:15:31
Oh, yes.
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We'll see you over there.
So what I'm trying to say here, what I'm trying to say is that Lord, act, and rule, okay?
The Lord, act, and rule is that we who believe in freedom are always in the minority.
And the way you fight in a minority is different than the way you fight in a majority.
You say, well, we have the House, we have the Senate, we have this president, the White House.
don't.
We don't, not the people who believe in freedom.
Once you start giving, look, at some point people want or will sell their freedom for free stuff, right?
We know this from the Bible.
We know this from all of human history.
That happened basically here during the Great Depression.
Suddenly it was, were there no graves in Egypt?
You know, there was a Great Depression.
They suddenly wanted all these programs.
They voted in FDR.
FDR took advantage of it.
We lost that argument right there.
We lost the argument about whether there was going to be a welfare state.
Once there's a welfare state, there are two parties.
There's the party that wants to grow the welfare state fast because they want power.
That's the evil party.
And there's the power that wants to slow them down because they're paying lip service to freedom because they need that contingent to get elected.
That's the stupid party.
That's us, okay?
We, we who would like to see all of this swept away, who would like to see freedom come back, we are in a minority and we have to fight like we're in a minority.
And it entails compromise.
It entails linking up with other parties, other contingencies, other contingents in the party to get a majority.
It entails a lot of frustration and a lot of anger.
But if we just are peddling outrage because we're not getting what we want, we're not living in reality.
And I think that that is what's happened.
I think that's why guys like Rand Paul kind of get up my nose.
You know, I watch Rand Paul and I hear people saying, oh, he has so much principle.
But what's his principle?
What has he accomplished?
What has he done to help Republicans govern?
When 2018 comes along and they've done nothing, or if Obamacare collapses, because they're going to get blamed for that too, I don't understand how we maintain a majority.
We probably won't lose the Senate.
But look, listen to Newt Gingrich.
He's telling the truth.
He's saying if they don't get stuff done, they're going to be voted out.
We represent prosperity, economic growth, higher take-home pay, more jobs, or not.
Trump, you just had him the president a minute ago talking about what he wants to do to make America great again.
I think that he's in the right general direction.
I personally believe they ought to do as much as they can on health care right now, but they shouldn't spend the whole rest of this year on one issue.
They have also got to pass, I think, by Thanksgiving and get signed into law by Thanksgiving a very large tax cut retroactively designed back to January 1 to make sure that we have enough economic growth in 2018 that Republicans can run as the party of prosperity, of jobs, of higher take-home pay, and of economic growth.
And I would say the highest focus ought to be on getting the tax bill through, because if we don't have economic growth next year, I think we're in real danger of having Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2019.
If we do get enough economic growth, I think, frankly, we'll probably get reelected.
I think he's right about that, but the problem is that the tax cuts were built into the tactics were built into the savings of the health care bill because that way you could get it through with this reconciliation process.
As long as Mitch McConnell keeps the filibuster in place, he's giving a lot of power to the minority to obstruct, and we know they will obstruct.
So he can't do that.
And plus, I'm not sure the tax cuts will unleash the kind of prosperity they used to.
I think what we need is tax reform.
And with this group of cats, I don't see how they're ever going to get themselves together to do real tax reform, which is going to be just as hard, if not harder, than health care.
So I think they're making a mistake here.
I really do.
I know everybody's charged up about the principle of the thing.
And I know that they've promised full repeal.
They were lying.
I told you they were lying.
I told you they were going to continue to be lying.
They're not going to stop lying.
It's politics.
When you go to sleep and you wake up 25 years from now, like Rip Van Winkle, they're still going to be lying.
So, I mean, you're going to have to learn to deal with that.
If you just want to drink your outrage, that's fine, but it's not going to get you anywhere.
So anyway, I think that going forward, it's going to be really interesting.
I hope they do bring full repeal to a vote.
I doubt they'll even be able to get it up for a vote, but I hope they do bring it up for a vote so you can see that it's not going to happen.
If they bring up repeal and they repeal Obamacare and they actually repeal Obamacare, I'll say I was wrong, because that would be terrific.
I'll be really, really surprised.
You know, one of the things we're having right now, on the right, especially, is we're having a problem between perception and reality.
You know, there's this thought going around.
I've now seen it at least three places.
I saw David Gerlenter wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
I saw David Limbaugh.
Is that Russia's brother's name?
David Limbaugh?
Yeah, I think so.
I know him, I should know.
But he wrote a piece for us.
Yeah, David wrote a piece for us saying that conservatives failed to fight against Obama, and that is why we needed Donald Trump.
Evan Sayette, who's a good pal of mine, writes a piece in Town Hall, very smart guy, right-wing comedian.
He writes, My leftist friends, as well as many ardent never-Trumpers, constantly ask me if I'm not bothered by Donald Trump's lack of decorum.
They ask me if I don't think his tweets are beneath the dignity of the office.
Here's my answer.
We right-thinking people have tried dignity.
There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.
We tried statesmanship.
Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized collegiality as John McCain?
We tried propriety.
Has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?
And the results were always the same.
This is because while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality, and propriety, the left has been for the past 60 years engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.
The left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the children of the 60s.
To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.
It has been a war they fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one, the violent takeover of the universities till today.
The problem is that through these years, the left has been the only side fighting this war.
While the left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality, and propriety.
With Donald Trump, this has all come to an end.
Donald Trump is America's first wartime president in the culture war.
And we've talked about this a lot, obviously.
I'm not against fighting a tough.
I am against fighting for stuff that isn't conservative.
I'm against shutting down free speech.
They can shut down free speech and we can't.
They can shut down free speech and we can't because we're the good guys.
That's the hard part about being the good guys.
You can't do what they do because you stand for something.
You know, but let me just point out, the never-Trumpers, who keep telling us they're not never Trumpers anymore because it was just for the election, say that this is all untrue, that we've actually been winning.
We stopped Obama from passing any legislation after Obamacare, basically, and he had to do everything with his pen and his phone, and that's why Trump was so, it was so easy for Trump to repeal so much of it, to get rid of so much of it with his pen and his phone.
Okay?
It cost them 1,000 seats across the nation.
We've won states.
We've won state houses and local governments, and we've won all the majorities.
And so the Never Trumpers are saying, no, we had it.
We were winning.
We were fighting.
Here's the problem with that.
If you've got to explain to people that when you called yourself a never-Trumper, it didn't mean never, it didn't mean Trump, you've got a problem communicating.
And if and if you were watching TV every day and watching movies every day and listening to college professors every day, as all of us are, and you're seeing this message, this anti-American message coming out and the indecency, and Evan is right, the indecency with which they treat our candidates.
Because remember, they say terrible things about Trump, but not just as terrible as they said about George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, the nicest person in America, the single nicest person in America.
They just completely slandered him.
There's something wrong with this.
There's something, there's a problem here.
You can't say, well, we're winning here and we're winning there if every day we're getting hammered over the head.
Here's what Evan is talking about, and here's why I think he has a semi-decent point, even though I disagree that we didn't fight.
I think we did fight.
We fought as who we are.
We fought as people of principle for principle.
We fought of people who think about policy for policy.
But we didn't understand.
We didn't fully understand that the media, it's not enough to shrug off the media and say, well, you just have to get used to the bias.
The media has created this pervasive, toxic cloud of anti-Americanism.
We were talking about this yesterday, this war for the planet of the apes.
How can they make a major motion picture in which the national anthem is portrayed as a vehicle of evil?
How can we let them make movies like this?
Not let them, they have the right to do it.
But why should this be a major summer picture in which the alpha and omega of Christ is portrayed as evil?
It's because we have lost.
This is the thing we have lost, and this is the thing that people like about Donald Trump.
Let me just read you this piece, this amazing piece from Knucklehead Row over on the New York Times.
We really need a music sting for this.
I'm going to do this once a week.
I think I want something like, hey, hey, hey, ho, ho, ho.
Here we go, go, go to Knucklehead, Ro, Ro, Row.
Because I'm just making it, I'm making this up off the top of my head.
So here is a piece.
These are the stupidest people in America, but they're also really wicked.
Here's a piece called When is Speech Violence in the New York Times, a former newspaper, by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Imagine that a bully threatens to punch you in the face.
Oh, this is a, she's a psychology professor.
A week later, he walks up to you and breaks your nose with his fist.
Which is more harmful, the punch or the threat?
The answer might seem obvious.
Physical violence is physically damaging.
Verbal statements aren't.
Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
But scientifically speaking, it's not that simple.
Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system.
Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain, even kill neurons and shorten your life.
If words can cause stress and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech, at least certain types of speech, can be a form of violence.
But which types?
The answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.
A culture of constant casual brutality is toxic to the body and we suffer for it.
That's why it's reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hate monger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school.
He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse.
Now, scientifically speaking, let me ask you that.
I found eight years of Barack Obama stressful as hell.
I mean, scientifically speaking, would it be all right to silence him?
Would it be all right to keep him off our?
You know, I mean, these are the people we're fighting against.
And if you don't think they're ready to go all the way, let us just take one quick look at what's happening in Venezuela, okay?
Remember, we had Hugo Chavez, now we've got this guy, Maduro.
He's trying to basically destroy the Constitution.
The people are coming out, they're holding plebiscites, they're rioting.
Over 100 people were killed recently in riots.
Let us just not forget, okay, this is socialism.
This is Congresswoman, Ilana Rose-Littonen.
She was on the Brett Baer show last night.
It was sad.
She was thanking Brett Baer for having her on because no one will listen to her.
And she's calling for sanctions and she's talking about what happened in Venezuela, right, in our hemisphere, because of socialism.
Listen to this.
Venezuela, you've got to remember, all of you viewers, was one of the richest, most productive, most powerful countries, freest countries in all of Latin America.
It was the breadbasket for Latin America.
Now, they don't even have wheat.
They don't have milk.
They don't have diapers.
They don't have medicine.
It's a basket case.
So it went from a breadbasket to a basket case.
Why?
Because socialism and communism does not work.
And so the people are saying, what is ahead for us?
And that's why I respect what they're doing.
They're demonstrating peacefully in the streets, but they're also going to the ballot boxes and they're saying yes.
So they're doing everything.
Now it's up to us in the United States to sanction those human rights abusers in Venezuela and say, I know you like to come to Disney World and visit Mickey Mouse.
Well, guess what?
If you trample on people's human rights, you're not going to be able to come to the U.S. We're going to freeze your bank accounts.
We're going to confiscate your luxury condos and your yachts.
And you decide, treat the people with respect, or you will not be able to come to the United States.
Okay.
Now, Trump is backing this.
He's saying he's threatening sanctions and all this stuff.
You know, the Democrats are always screaming, if you pass this, if you do this, people will die.
People are dying.
They are dying in Venezuela because of socialism, because of Hugo Chavez, and now his, you know, his inheritor, Maduro.
Is that?
Yeah, Maduro.
Now, I just want, these are the people in our country that we are fighting against.
Let's start from the outside, okay?
We're going to start from the outside, the radicals, and move our way in.
Let's remember what Sean Penn said about Hugo Chavez as he went over and slapped his back and shook his hand and supported this.
He is one of the most important forces we've had on this planet.
And I will wish him nothing but that great strength he has shown over and over again.
I do it in love.
And I do it in gratitude.
So I just want to say that from my very American point of view of my friend President Chavez.
It is only possible to be so inspiring as he is, as a two-way street.
And he would say that his inspiration is the people.
All right, so you can say that's Sean Penn, and then they give him, you know, he's basically, he is basically standing there worshiping at the shrine of a dictator of the worst, the worst kind of oppressive dictator.
Now, Sean Penn doesn't stop him from getting an Oscar.
If that was a right-wing dictator, you can bet he would be out of the movie business.
He's not out of the movie business.
He's easy to cast.
He's going to win awards.
He deserves awards.
He's a great actor.
But that is what Hollywood is selling.
It's selling it in the War of the Planet of the Apes.
It's selling it every day in their messages.
But let's move closer to the center.
Socialist Tyranny00:10:40
Let's move.
Here is Bill Maher interviewing Bernie about socialism and how great it is, how well it works.
My question to you, I guess, is the word socialist.
I want to get right to this because I want to help your campaign.
I want to see you get that on that issue.
want to see you do this.
We have to teach Americans what this is.
We do.
And I don't know if we're doing that yet.
I don't think most Americans realize they're already socialists.
In certain respects.
Okay.
Let's start off with what?
It is not what we want to change.
We want to deal with the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in America.
Very few people think it is acceptable or moral that the top one-tenth of 1% owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%.
That we have seen a proliferate.
See, Bernie, you always say that.
And I think even the Republicans are not for income inequality.
They hear that, but it doesn't compute that that's going to be solved by socialism.
Socialism is the programs they already like.
They like Social Security.
That's socialism.
But here they like Medicare.
They like the VA.
They like the military.
That's exactly right.
It's already a socialist country.
See, this is the pernicious argument that once you have a welfare state, this is the pernicious argument you're going to have.
You like these programs.
You already sold part of your freedom for these programs for free stuff.
Why not sell all of your freedom for free stuff?
I hear leftists say to me when I go off about regulations, they always say, well, you want your meat inspected, don't you?
I want my meat inspected, but I don't want the lake in back of my house to be regulated as a waterway for the EPA to tell me when I can cut a tree down or when I can build something.
I don't want to have to get a permit.
I don't want to have to ask the government for permission to live, which is basically what they want, what socialism is.
So that is a mainstream, a guy who almost won, would have won probably the Democratic nomination if they hadn't plotted against him.
That's a guy, remember all those kids we saw yesterday saying socialism is great?
I don't know what it is, but it's great.
But here's the thing.
Venezuela is about Cuba.
And this is something that nobody is talking about.
Venezuela, what happened in Venezuela was engineered by Cuba and is being held in place by Cuba.
This is they want.
Let me read.
I'll read it from Mary Anastasia O'Grady.
There have been a lot of articles about this recently, but Mary O'Grady, who I hope we'll have on the show soon, is a Wall Street Journal, is the Wall Street Journal columnist about South America, okay?
And she says, Cubans, not Venezuelans, control the levers of power.
Havana doesn't care about Venezuelan poverty or famine or whether the regime is unpopular.
It has spent a half century sowing its ideological revolution in South America.
It needs Venezuela as a corridor to run Colombian cocaine to the U.S. and to Africa to supply Europe.
It also relies heavily on cut-rate Venezuelan petroleum, which brings us to oil and energy.
This is what tyranny runs on.
This is what the Arab tyrannies run on, the Muslim tyrannies run on.
It is what Putin's tyranny runs on.
It is what Cuba and Venezuela, their tyrannies, run on, on oil.
And the guy who has unleashed fracking, who has cut back on regulations so we can produce more energy and bring our energy levels up and start to export energy is Donald Trump.
It's the right that wants to do this.
On the left, on the left, these environmental agencies, these environmental organizations that fight against fracking, that fight against oil, all of them, they're funded by Putin.
Putin peddles, pushes dollars into them.
George Soros pushes dollars into them.
And Al Gore is their spokesman.
And he comes on TV and they worship him.
And he sells, he's got his new movie coming out, the inconvenient sequel.
I think it's called Everything I Said Was Untrue.
Is that the new?
No, maybe that's not it.
It's an even more inconvenient truth or something.
So here's, play the first Al Gore cut.
He's on the Today Show.
First of all, the climate-related extreme weather events have become more destructive and a lot more common.
Here in the U.S., we've had 11 once in a thousand year downpours just in the last seven years.
So that's, wait, we've had 11 once in a thousand year downpours.
Now global warming is causing the rain to fall, the small rain it down to fall.
When did we start measuring rainfall?
A thousand years ago?
A thousand years ago?
Is that when we started measuring rainfall in the year 1000?
I remember.
It was the monk, the monk Al Gorius, who was measuring rainfall a thousand years ago.
So, you know, he doesn't even know what he's talking about.
He just says stuff.
It's just stuff comes out of his mouth.
Here's my point.
All of this stuff, all of this stuff points in one direction.
It points to slavery.
It points to socialism.
They talk about Don Trump Jr. taking a stupid meeting with a stupid lawyer who had nothing to say from Putin.
All of these guys, they essentially work for guys like Putin.
All of these guys who want to stop our energy flow, they essentially are serving Putin.
All these guys who want to bar free speech, who do they work for?
What are they looking for?
They're looking for tyranny.
They're looking for socialism.
The people who want to fight this, who saw in this last election that we were in a desperate moment, a desperate moment where we were in danger of losing everything, they were right.
They were right.
Is Donald Trump a flawed instrument, as we have said repeatedly from the very beginning, a flawed instrument of that fight?
Absolutely.
But he swept everybody else away, and that should tell you something about the message of the Republican Party and the way the Republican Party is run.
And we're seeing that as the health care bill collapses.
And these guys, I'm sorry, you know, some of them are people I admire to the hilt, but these guys who sit around going, I told you Donald Trump was no good.
They have to answer why, why he knocked all those candidates down like nine pins.
They have to answer why the people look at them and say, you're not helping me.
You're not doing what I need you to do.
It is not enough to be right.
You have to win.
You also have to win.
Trump only cares about winning, but the rest of us have to care about winning as well.
The Republican Party needs to get a lot smarter.
We really are the stupid party, and they showed it today.
And I think that the people who are screaming that the opposition is really, really bad are absolutely right.
It is so much worse than Donald Trump and anything that he has done or is likely to do.
Which leads me to stuff I like, politically incorrect masterpieces.
This, you know, I think I may have read this book when I was in high school, but I thought I saw it and I thought, I'm not sure I read this, so I read it again.
It's a book called Darkness at Noon by Arthur Kessler.
Arthur Kessler was a Hungarian-British journalist.
He was born in Budapest, and he was educated in Austria, and he joined the Communist Party of Germany until Stalin came in and he resigned in 1938.
I think he was put in prison at one point.
In 1940, he published a novel, The Darkness at Noon, it's called, about a communist official being put in prison during the Stalin purges of the 30s.
During the 30s, Stalin just started to kill the old guard, randomly, essentially, kill the old guard.
He believed in terror, and he'd give quotas for how many people should be killed, and people would be arrested for, you know, basically for picking their toes in Poughkeepsie, because they would say, you know, oh, I think the best thing to do would be to use this kind of equipment to drill for oil.
And they would say, ah, well, Stalin says now you're anti-the party because Stalin says you want to use this equipment and they'd kill you.
They just take you and shoot you in the back of the head.
This happened to some of the people who had caused the revolution.
They were just carted off in this random madness.
And Kessler wrote this novel about a communist in prison basically being charged with being against communism during the 30s purges.
And it is unbelievable.
It is an unbelievable, beautiful, unbelievably beautiful piece of work that tells you everything you need to know about the psychology of left-wing tyranny.
Everything you need to know.
It is just spelled out so beautifully.
This idea that you know the future because you figured it all out and you are the progressive, so you know the future.
So anything that you do to preserve the future is justified.
So if I kill you, it's fine because I'm preserving the future and you were against the future.
Remember, that's what Obama said when Trump left the Paris Accords.
He's against the future.
He's against the future.
Well, how do you, you know, you don't know what the future is.
The future may look more like Donald Trump than Barack Obama.
The future may look more like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington than Barack Obama, let us hope.
So, Arthur Kessler was pretty well universally acknowledged to be kind of a jerk, and there is some evidence that he was an actual rapist.
There is some, one of the most recent biographies of him claimed that he actually was a serial rapist.
And when I say that, I don't mean somebody who grabbed women off the streets, but I mean if you were like his secretary and you walked into the room and you were alone, he would actually rape you.
So, they've actually been taking down his statues and doing everything they can.
Doesn't matter.
The guy may have been the biggest jerk in the world.
This is a beautiful book.
Darkness at Noon is very short.
It won't take you long to read, take you a few days to read it.
It really is worthwhile.
And just remember, just remember, the same people, the Bill Mahers of the world, the Sean Penns of the world, the Bernie Sanders of the world, Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in a slave state.
He went to a slave state to support it.
He believed in it.
These are the same people.
They are back today.
They're still supporting tyranny.
They have always supported it.
And Arthur Kessler in Darkness at Noon wrote an answer to them to show them what this was, how this God has failed.
This is a bad idea that has stayed alive in the hearts of these people.
And really, it really is the fight that we're in.
It is not a fight about Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting.
It really is not.
It is not even a fight about Donald Trump's tweets.
It's not a fight about Donald Trump's incompetence, his inability to get the Senate and Congress in line.
It is a fight between freedom and liberty, between freedom and slavery.
And, you know, we're just going to have to play it a lot smarter than we've been playing it.
Tomorrow, the mailbag.
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