Ep. 355 pits Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency—McCain’s flip-flops on healthcare, Sessions’ firing, Scaramucci’s meltdown, and Kelly’s ascension—against Democratic scandals: Obama’s surveillance unmaskings, Clinton-Fusion GPS collusion, and Awan’s fraud. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer fantasy crumbles under Vermont-California failures while Venezuela’s collapse is blamed on Obama-Clinton’s Chavez embrace. The host mocks Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel (LA premiere: 8 attendees) and praises The Emoji Movie as cinematic void, then clashes with Father Coffin over natural law’s hypocrisy—condemning birth control but not post-birth infant killing, mirroring Omelas’ moral dystopia. A third path emerges: tradition without exclusion, but the left’s "saving" marginalized groups risks tearing society apart. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time for another episode of President Chaos and the Keystone Congress.
In our last exciting installment, with health care reform nearly dead, Donald Trump demonstrated he had the skills to be a good president by cat-wrangling the Keystone Congress into reviving the bill.
Enter Senator John McCain.
As you remember, during the 2008 election, Senator McCain suspended his campaign because of the financial crisis, rode off on his white horse to Washington, where he accomplished absolutely nothing and thus lost the election to Barack Obama.
Well, it turns out McCain just kind of enjoys riding a white horse to Washington for no reason and losing things.
Because last week, he left his hospital bed, rode his white horse to Washington, voted to vote on the health care bill, then voted it down because that's just how he rolls.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, after proving he can do his job, stopped doing his job, rushed into a phone booth, and swiftly changed into his alter ego, Max Chaos.
Instead of shepherding the health bill through the Keystone Congress, President Chaos instead began publicly insulting one of his most loyal allies, Jeff Sessions, by accusing him of not being one of his most loyal allies, Jeff Sessions.
He then surprised the Pentagon by tweeting out a new rule about boy soldiers who want to be girl soldiers, saying they have to continue to be boy soldiers, though a little dab of perfume behind the ears might not go amiss on those particularly hot and sweaty days in the Middle East.
Then, still instead of shepherding the health bill through Congress, President Chaos made furious Sean Spicer furious by giving the top communications job to Anthony Scaramucci, the only New York Italian nicknamed Mooch who's too disorganized for organized crime.
Mooch then called a left-wing reporter at the New Yorker and revealed that Steve Bannon is attempting to perform oral sex on himself, proving that at least one member of the administration is working on something important, a technological advance that would improve the lives of America's men by allowing them to have sex without paying for dinner.
Finally, just as White House Chief of Staff Reines Priebus was beginning to wonder what all these changes meant for his position, his position became out on the street as President Chaos replaced him with General John Kelly.
So there are now so many generals and family members in the administration, the country has begun to look like Venezuela, except without the Civil War.
Last time I looked outside.
Meanwhile, on the Democrat end, new information became public showing that President Barack Obama spied illegally on almost everybody.
Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to get dirt on Trump.
Chuck Schumer has given up on capitalism.
And Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been up to God knows what with a Pakistani IT guy.
Digital Stamps Simplified00:02:43
That's right.
President Chaos and the Keystone Congress are still doing a far better job than the Democrats.
So that's good news, I think.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Life is ticky boom.
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Hoorah!
This is why we can't have nice things.
I go away for three days, the government explodes, everything falls apart, and everybody's out of a job.
All right, we have Michael Knowles is here.
He was at Politicon, where I was not invited.
I was not invited to Politicon, but Michael Knowles, who wrote a book with no words in it, was invited.
But I, who know all the best words, was not invited.
All right.
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Post office does a good job, but you get there, it's closed, you have to bang on the door, you kick in the door, you go in, and then there's a long line, and then they shut the gate, and you just as you get to it.
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What you do is you go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Claven.
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Single Payer Failure00:13:01
So here's the thing: the chaos in the administration, I mean, unbelievable chaos in the White House last week, right?
I mean, Trump is yelling at sessions, and he brings in Scaramucci, and Scaramucci gives this incredible, vile language interview to a left-wing reporter at the New Yorker saying all this stuff about Steve Bannon.
Then Reince Priebus gets fired and replaced.
Here was Ron Priebus giving his reaction to not working at the Trump White House anymore.
I don't think he reminded that much.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing you really have to ask yourself: is, you know, all this chaos is, of course, echo-chambered in the press because the press know they know all these people, right?
They talk to Reince Priebus.
They're on the phone to all these people and people they know.
So they're going, it's chaos.
It's chaos.
The thing you have to ask yourself is: how does this affect your life, right?
Do you care that Reince Priebus is out of work?
I mean, does it mean anything to you or your freedoms or your constitutional rights?
And of course, it doesn't.
But, but the important thing, the important thing is the politics.
Because I mean, you can defend Trump, and I don't care if he fires Reines Priebus.
It does mean that he's cutting himself off from the Republican Party, but we don't really, we're not that thrilled with the Republican Party right now.
But in order to get anything done, he's going to need the Republican Congress.
And by getting rid of Reines and by picking on Jeff Sessions, remember, Jeff Sessions is former senator, and they all get along and it's very collegial.
By doing this, he is making himself a total outsider.
Okay, fine.
But while he's doing this, they're voting on this health care bill.
And, you know, John McCain, and I wish him good luck with his illness.
I think it's, you know, it's very sad that he's so ill.
But he has really been a lousy senator for the right.
I mean, he really has been.
I mean, if you think about the McCain-Feingold Act, which we had to work so hard to gut finally, it finally got gutted in the Supreme Court.
But that really was an anti-free speech act, you know, limiting the way you could spend money in, spend money on campaigns.
I mean, money is speech in a campaign.
It's the same thing.
You can't just say, oh, you have free speech, but you can only hold a cardboard sign next to the freeway.
So that was McCain's big contribution.
He blew the election, the 2008 election, you know, by basically deserting Sarah Palin, who made his campaign work.
Sarah Palin made his campaign work.
That's the numbers show that.
And he was, you know, he kind of ditched her because the press didn't like her.
And then he did that thing where he suspended his campaign.
He has been just a net loss for conservatives.
And he was again when he voted down this health care bill with no, he had no excuse.
All it was doing really was sending this bill to a reconciliation debate with the House so they could keep talking about it, keep it alive.
He voted to do that and then voted it down saying, well, they might have made this the law and it was not a good law, but everybody knew it wasn't a good law.
They guaranteed him they were going to change it.
They knew they had to reconcile it with the House.
He's just like, does this stuff.
The accusation against him is that he's always playing to the New York Times, that he always loves being called the Maverick, the outsider.
And of course, they're slapping him on the back and all this stuff.
But at the same time, the chaos, that is not what Donald Trump should have been doing during that vote.
He should have been on the floor.
He should have been calling these guys.
He should have been talking to McCain.
You know, during the election, I said nasty, the campaign, I said nasty things about you.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Just making it work.
That's his job.
That is his job.
And he showed he could do the job by getting them back on the floor.
And then he dropped the ball.
If he wanted to fire everybody, if he wants to pick on Jeff Sessions, if he wants to start all this controversy, not the time to do it when your central legislation of this term is on the floor.
It's bad politics.
So again, ignore the press.
I mean, the press went nuts, right?
This chaos.
Peggy Noonan, I love Peggy Noonan.
I think she's one of the best political observers out there.
And I always say what I love about her, she writes like a girl.
She has a different way of looking at things than most male columnists and most female columnists who are pretending to be male columnists.
Peggy Noonan has a kind of much more intuitive, much warmer, much gentler way of looking at things, and it really does frequently make her more accurate.
But she just lost it on Trump last week.
She wrote a column.
Did you see this column?
Awesome.
Oh, my.
Enlighten me.
Listen to this.
Listen to this.
The president's primary problem as a leader is not that he's impetuous, brash, or naive.
It's not that he's inexperienced, crude, and outsider.
It's that he's weak and sniveling.
It's that he undermines himself almost daily by ignoring traditional norms and forms of American masculinity.
He's not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and determined.
He's whiny, weepy, and self-pitying.
He throws himself sobbing on the body politic.
He's a drama queen.
It was once said sarcastically of George H.W. Bush that he reminded everyone of her first husband.
Trump must remind people of their first wife.
Actually, his wife, Melania, is tougher than he is with her stoicism and grace.
With him, it's all whimpering, accusation, and finger pointing.
Nobody's nice to me.
Why don't they appreciate me?
His public brutalizing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn't strong.
It's limp, lame, and blubbery.
Ouch!
It's like, yeah, hell hath no fury goes right down, you know, right below the belt for the guy.
And there was a lot of that going on, just a lot of just absolute impatience on the right with Donald Trump.
He finally, finally went too far.
The Scaramucci thing went too far.
I got to be honest, I don't care.
If he's a chaotic manager, I don't care if he's an efficient manager.
I don't care as long as the health care bill gets passed.
We start to get rid of Obamacare, not just because I want to get rid of Obamacare, but because I think that what the left is doing is they're using Obamacare as a stepping stone to government health care.
And I think government healthcare is a disaster.
You want to see the left at work.
I got to play this guy.
This is an amazing cut.
You have got to listen to the logic, but you've got to listen to it closely.
Comrade Bernie Sanders is on with Jake Tapper, and he's pushing single-payer health care.
He says that while the right is failing to do anything about Obamacare, and they are failing, while the right is failing to do anything about it, the left is preparing a big push on single-payer health care.
And so Tapper says, well, wait a minute, if single-payer is so good, why can't left-wing states like Vermont, like your state, Vermont, and California, which just kind of failed to push this thing through when they saw how much it was going to cost, why haven't they succeeded in having single-payer health care?
Listen to this carefully.
Here's Tapper's question and listen to Sanders' answer.
It's an amazing piece of left-wing chicanery.
Let's talk about single-payer because it was attempted in your home state of Vermont and it didn't work because they couldn't get the funding because it would be too expensive, the Democratic governor said.
And then recently it failed in California as well.
Democrats, again, not able to come up with a way to pay for it.
These are cobalt blue states, Vermont and California, where people wanted single payer and there were problems because it would cost too much.
How do you make it national if you can't even get it into Vermont?
Well, I thought it.
No, Let's be careful about this.
All right.
A single payer health care system, in my view, and according to studies that I have seen, would save the average family significant sums of money.
And what Republicans sometimes do is confuse the issue, and they say, well, you're going to pay more in taxes.
What they forget to tell you is that if you are a family of four now paying $15,000 or $20,000 a year in private health insurance, you're not going to be paying that at all.
So think about that.
If you were watching, that was like a magic trick.
It was like they had to be watching it to see what was going on.
Jake Tapper says California tried to pass it, but they realized they couldn't afford it.
They were right there.
They had the votes and everything, and they got back the budget estimate, and it would have bankrupted California.
It's three or four times over, right?
It just would have driven us into the sea.
Vermont, same thing.
They can't afford it.
There's no money there.
And Sanders' answer is, oh, yes, but you'll be paying less.
You'll be paying less.
In other words, the federal government can hide that debt, that amazing debt, for a little bit longer than a state government.
A state government, that's why you want all your governing to be done at the state level.
The federal government can print the money, basically, but ultimately that leads you to become Greece.
You become like this ruined, debt-ridden country with no services, nothing going on.
But that's his answer.
This answer, it'll be cheaper for you.
We'll go bankrupt as a country, but you'll be paying less.
It's absolute, absolute chicanery.
And then, oh, I have to stop and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
The reason I have to do that is because we give you like the first 15 minutes of the show free on video.
But if you want to watch the whole show on video, you've got to do it over at thedailywire.com, which you can do by subscribing.
Subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month, $100 for a year, and for a year's subscription, you get the leftist tears mug.
I mean, come on.
You cannot keep going without your leftist tears mug.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can listen to the rest of the show.
Even if you don't subscribe, subscribe and you can watch us.
So over on Knucklehead Row, we have David Brooks, who is also just completely.
Because these guys are knuckleheads, they easily get swept away in the chicanery, right?
So we can't afford health care.
Healthcare, well, let's let David Brooks say it.
We can't afford healthcare, but that doesn't matter because healthcare is here to stay.
Here's Brooks reacting to the failure of the Republicans to pass this bill.
This was a bigger thing than Donald Trump, though.
It wasn't only one bill that lost.
It was four bills that lost.
And it wasn't only a six-month effort.
It was a seven-year effort.
And you could say, you could go back to Newt Gingrich.
Think of all the ways the Republicans have tried to trim entitlements like Medicaid or cut government.
Name a signal victory.
There's not a victory.
They haven't been able to trim one agency, cut back one entitlement.
They failed every single time.
And that suggests the failure is an intellectual failure.
It's not a failure of whether Mitch McConnell had the right strategy or not, though.
That was lamentable.
It's a failure of trying to take things away from people.
People are under assault from technology.
They're under assault from a breakdown in social fabric, breakdown in families.
They've got wage stagnations.
They just don't want a party to come in and say, we're going to take more away from you.
And so Republicans have to wrap their minds around the fact that the American people have basically decided that healthcare is a right.
So the logic there, okay, is we've got societal breakdown.
We've got wage stagnation.
We've got jobs disappearing.
Whose fault is it?
I mean, who has been in charge for the last eight years?
It has been because of bills like Obamacare, because of policies like Obama's, because of the left.
I mean, the societal breakdown is almost all from the left.
Republicans have been holding the society together by main strength all these years, but we can't possibly take it away from people.
Everybody's miserable, but we don't want to stop and change.
You know, the old, I mean, C.S. Lewis, I think, said it.
If you're going in the wrong direction, progress means turning around and going back.
You know, I think this is the thing.
You've got to get rid of this stuff.
Healthcare, when you say that health care is a right, you are saying that the labor of other people belongs to you.
And you are saying also that there is some place.
You know, we just saw Baby Gard die in England, death by government health care.
We are also saying that the government is going to be in control of when you die, when you live, how much health care you should get, what level of the health care it should be, where a free market would solve so much of this.
And when people bring up, well, why is our health care?
That's the other thing that Sanders is always saying.
Why does our medicine cost more?
Our medicine costs more because we're paying for all these places that don't pay the freight.
Here's the thing about the left: that it really is, when I was joking in the opening, that as bad, as chaotic as Republican governance has been at the opening of the Trump administration, it's not just Trump's fault.
I mean, Trump is bringing the Trump brings the chaos, but it is the GOP Congress that has brought the betrayal and cowardice and dishonesty and failure.
They're the ones who have brought that stuff.
And Trump, you know, a more masterful president, a more experienced president, a more controlled president, might have got them into line, maybe, maybe would have gotten them into line, would have gotten something out of them.
Connected Equipment Controversy00:05:39
But that's not happening.
But for all that, for all that, the Democrats are so bad.
Roger Simon, my pal Roger Simon over at PJ Media, has a great summary of all the scandals that are being unleashed on the Democrats.
I mean, it's just incredible.
The unmasking scandal, which all of and all of the stuff being buried in the press, it now turns out, I'm reading Roger, it now turns out that a record number of unmaskings revealing U.S. citizens' identities during foreign intelligence surveillance by the Obama administration, well over 100, took place during and after the election.
Most of these unmaskings seem to have been illegal and were of people connected to Trump.
And we know, we know that Obama did this because of his IRS corruption.
We know that he used the power of the federal government to destroy and to mess with our election.
We know that the worst assault on our election rights came from Obama in the White House.
Many of these unmaskings appear to have been instigated by Samantha Power, who was the UN ambassador and had no business doing anything.
And that's another thing.
This collusion story.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, the Donald Trump Jr. meeting and what a big deal that was going to be.
And oh my gosh, we finally got you.
Notice how that's disappeared.
Partly that was Donald Trump Jr. going in and saying that nothing happened, but partly it was because one of the guys at this meeting seems to have been connected with that fusion GPS thing.
And the Fusion GPS is an organization that you hire to get dirt on your opponents.
It's like a freelance organization of former journalists that you hire to get dirt on your opponents.
And some of the dirt they got was they hired this British ex-British spy.
I think he had some spy name like Christopher Steele or something like that.
He actually sounded like a James Bond character.
And he got all that stuff on Donald Trump, which now seems to have been wrong, the stuff about the prostitutes, you know, urinating on him in Moscow, all this crazy stuff.
And that seems to have been paid for by the Hillary campaign, or at least someone connected to the Hillary campaign.
And now it seems that Fusion GPS was connected to Putin.
So it's like the Putin collusion story is kind of blowing up on their faces.
And then there is this guy, Imran Awan.
Well, let's get the story from the mainstream media.
Here's how the mainstream media is reporting this story.
All right, move on.
Nothing to see here.
Please, it's burnt.
Nothing to see here, please.
All right.
They're just not covering.
They're not covering the story, except the New York Times covers the story.
Trump fuels intrigue surrounding a former IT worker's arrest.
I mean, this is a huge story, but we don't know what it is yet.
This guy, this family of IT workers in Congress, right, they started investigating them for billing, for double billing or something like this.
They arrested one of them.
The wife escaped with cash.
The husband was about to escape.
This guy, Imran Awan, is about to escape.
They busted him for bank fraud as he was trying to get away.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been not only protecting these people, everybody else fired them.
These are the guys working in the computers, right?
And they're working with national security stuff, big stuff.
I mean, this is not like, you know, just the regular old files.
They're working with actual stuff.
Let me see if I can just find where this guy was.
He had everything.
The guy was looking at really serious, classified stuff.
Wasserman Schultz is still paying him.
After he's been exposed, the Capitol Police got a hold of one of her computers, and she, when she was a Congresswoman, she was yelling, she was holding a meeting on funding the Capitol Police, and she threatens the guy.
If you don't give me back your computer, my computer, we're going to shut down your funding.
Here's Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
This is a few months ago.
If a member loses equipment and it is found by the Capitol Police or your staff, and it is identified as that member, member's equipment, and the member is not associated with any case, and that that is their equipment, it is supposed to be returned.
Yes or no?
Depends on the circumstances.
And if the circumstances are.
I don't understand how that's possible.
Members' equipment is members' equipment.
It is not, under my understanding, the Capitol Police is not able to confiscate members' equipment when the member is not under investigation.
It is their equipment, and it's supposed to be returned.
Well, I think there's extenuating circumstances in this case, and I think that working through my counsel and the necessary personnel, if that in fact is the case, and with the permission of through the investigation, then we'll return the equipment.
But until that's accomplished, I can't return the equipment.
I think you're violating the rules when you conduct your business that way.
And should expect that there would be consequences.
There will be consequences.
He's threatening this guy, and this is at a hearing controlling his funding.
She is still a congresswoman.
She was the former head of the DNC.
That's what I was trying to say.
This guy had electronic files of members of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees.
I mean, I don't want to go down the conspiracy route, but it sounds very much as if she were being blackmailed, as if this guy had something on the DNC and she was paying him.
She's still paying him as they're arresting him.
So all this stuff.
And one last, we'll get to Michael Knowles in just a second, but one last scandal is this stuff that's going on in Venezuela, right?
Ben's Movie Begins Today00:08:32
Venezuela is on the brink of civil war.
And of course, we're barely covering it, but this is the legacy of Ugo Chavez.
Now they've got the strongman, his inheritor, Maduro, is about to form, he's about to stack Congress so he can basically take away their rights, destroy the Constitution.
People are rioting.
People are complaining.
Mary Anastasia Grady, who's like the only person at the Wall Street Journal, only person in America who's covering this, points out that this is all engineered by the Castro regime in Cuba.
And she says that one of the things they've done is they've taken over the Venezuelan office that issues national identity cards and passports.
This is the Castro intelligence coup carried out with Hugo Chavez's permission.
So they are now, Cuba is now deciding who has a passport in Venezuela.
And who are they giving it to?
They're giving it to Islamic extremists.
They get Venezuelan passports, so they have false cover when they're crossing the borders.
And of course, anyone who supports the regime will be able to go in and vote, and people who don't support the regime will not be able to go and vote.
And I just wanted you to remind you that this was Obama and Hillary Clinton's policy of engaging with these people that gave them legitimacy to this absolute horror of a regime in Cuba that is working against our interests in Venezuela and against the interests of freedom in Venezuela.
And that, too, is the Democrats.
So all I'm saying is, yes, it's chaos in Washington.
It is absolute chaos in Washington.
But we better hope they get it fixed because there is no place else to go.
There is no other party to turn to.
And if the Democrats were in power right now, things would be a lot, lot worse.
Knowles, you there?
Here I am, fresh from Politicon.
You know, I understand that you were invited to Politicon.
Well, Drew, the reason I was invited to Politicon is because I'm a best-selling author who works in the realm of politics.
Yeah, so I don't understand.
Wait a minute.
I mean, what the hell?
You wrote a book with no words in it.
But I wrote one book with no words, and you've written all of the books with all of the best words.
So, therefore, why on earth would you ...
No, do you know how I got an invite?
This is a real story.
All right, let's hear it.
I, a Daily Wire subscriber, decided to tweet at Politicon and say, hey, is Knowles going?
And he kept tweeting at them, and it was this ongoing campaign.
It was one guy, one guy.
And finally, they tweeted at me.
They said, all right, already, follow us and we'll send you a message.
And they invited me to do a book signing.
I just want to tell you, when this thing started, I think it was like two years ago, three years ago, something like that.
Yeah, about three years ago.
One of the organizers called me up and said, would you be interested in doing this?
And I said, because I'm a team player, you know, I believe in the team.
I said to him, I swear this is true.
I said, you know, I'd be happy to come, but really, we're starting this new thing called the Daily Wire.
So why don't you invite us all?
And me and Shapiro and Jeremy, I don't think you were there yet.
We'll do a panel.
And he said, great, got in touch with Shapiro, invited Shapiro, and never invited me again.
Well, you know, it's funny, because I think we were having dinner or a cigar or something, and I got the call from Politicon to see if I wanted to go.
And then there was a Michael-shaped hole in the wall.
I just sort of sprang out on my way to the Pasadena Convention Center.
I said, everybody's out for himself.
So how was it?
Because you may not have heard this, but I wasn't invited.
So I'd like to know how was it?
How'd it go?
It was good.
I will say, a lot of people were asking for you.
And every time it was funnier than the next to explain that, no, no, no, you say I, I, who have done nothing, I'm here.
But Andrew Clavin, he's, no, he's not going to be able to make it, unfortunately.
I sent those guys to ask for me.
Where's Claven?
It was great.
There were about 10,000 people there.
It was a really big turnout.
That isn't the craziest number, though.
I have been told in the last two years, it was 80% liberals, lefts, Democrats.
People who set it up were liberals, I think.
People who set it up are liberals.
It was actually, I think the founder of it has no connection to politics.
He just did a lot of rock concerts and realized this would be a fun event.
You know, I guess it's the only, it's modeled after Comic-Con, and it's the only place where you get both parties to come to a convention.
It is a kind of novel idea, and you get Tommy Lauren to debate Chelsea Handler, Ben, and Shank Uger.
And so there were 10,000 people as a big turnout.
But it was not 80-20 Democrat, Republican.
There were a lot of MAGA hats at this place.
Nice.
When you pulled up, there was a honk for Trump set up, and I thought it was facetious, and they were dead serious.
MAGA Hats galore.
If I had to estimate, I would say at least half the people were conservative, maybe even more than that.
I ended up doing a panel with a podcast called Conservatively Unplugged.
There was one heckler.
I was praying there would be more hecklers.
The whole time I was begging for more, there was only one.
The rest were conservatives there.
And then for Ben's debate, 3,000 people showed up to watch Ben debate the Young Turks guy, Shank Uger.
The line wasn't just out the door or around the courtyard.
It was down the street.
There was a line moving.
They had to move it to their big auditorium there.
Ben against Shank is kind of a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
I will say, Ben is going to probably be hearing from the International Court for Human Rights.
What he did was unforgivable there.
Some truly inhumane and monstrous things occurred at the time.
I would have loved to have seen it, but you know, I wasn't invited.
By the way, you said this was based on Comic-Con.
I was invited to Comic-Con.
Maybe that's it.
I'm just a cartoon character.
They must.
Well, I will say one guy came up to me in the debate hall.
He said, You're Michael Knowles.
I said, Yeah, yeah.
He said, You wrote the fake book.
I said, Yeah.
He goes, I can't believe you're real.
I thought you were a figment of my troll imagination.
I didn't know you were a person.
So, speaking of which, your show begins today.
It does.
It begins today.
Ben has named it, God Help Us.
Thank you very much.
It is.
We begin today.
And I'm so happy the timing worked out because for our first episode, we're going to start with Saint Al Gore, the patron saint of the polar bears.
I saw that Godforsaken movie, the convenient sequel.
I saw it on Friday night or Thursday, Thursday or Friday night in L.A.
It was incredible.
I'm glad I saw it actually.
At first, I thought it was just typical Andrew Clavin sadism that would bring me out to one of those places.
But I go there.
It's only playing at two theaters in all of LA on its opening night.
There were eight people, including me and sweet little Alyssa, in the auditorium.
The rest of them had been killed by global warming.
They were the victims.
They were the victims.
It was so awful.
How was the film?
The movie, I went in there sort of trying to be fair-minded, fair-minded, knowing it would be total nonsense, but maybe a good movie.
The first one was a pretty good piece of propaganda, even though it was riddled with lies.
But this movie was terrible.
It was so bad.
It read like a bad nonprofit fundraiser video.
No joke, at the end, it kind of petered off, and they just had hashtags and go to our website and Facebook page.
It wasn't even about global warming.
I think he's kind of given up that.
He knows that there were so many errors in that first movie, which we'll talk about on the show today.
There are errors in this movie, which we'll talk about.
But it just became about Al Gore.
It was just this pathetic trying to remain relevant, and it didn't work.
There was one brief appearance by Justin Trudeau, which was pretty funny in that Justin Trudeau way.
I don't think he's a real person either.
But the movie itself, I mean, there's a reason.
Nobody is seeing it.
I think the emoji movie probably has a higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Have you seen the emoji movie?
You know, I saw it last night because I said I haven't punished myself against them enough this weekend.
It is a once-in-a-generation terrible movie.
Wow, really?
I really mean it.
Yeah, I previously thought the worst movie I've ever seen is a movie called San Soleil by Chris Marker, which is about absolutely nothing.
this movie is about less.
It is, it's actually...
The review should just be like a pile of poop, you know, a picture of poop.
Yeah.
Voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart, yeah.
The movie is, it's not fun bad, but it is interesting bad.
I think it's almost worth seeing for this reason.
It has no plot.
It has no ideas.
It's vaguely leftist, but not even powerfully leftist.
And the reason is it's a movie about something that isn't language.
It's about that we're like weaning ourselves off language.
We're using these stupid smiley faces.
Well, gee, you almost convinced me to see it, but the.
New Relationship to Natural Law00:09:58
Just maybe a little harder.
All right, so your show begins today.
When does it go online?
It's only like five minutes.
I got to get out of here.
All right, get out of here.
Good luck.
Break a leg.
Thank you very much.
It's great talking.
Oh, boy.
But it sounded like Politicon was fun, but I wouldn't know.
You know why?
I wasn't invited.
I can't send it.
All right.
So I have to go back and talk about Patrick Coffin, or as I called him, Father Patrick Coffin.
I ordained him a priest accidentally.
He was the Catholic answer man who was on our show on Thursday, and I thought he was great, really interesting.
I disagree with him a lot, as I made clear on the show.
But I got a lot of reaction to this.
A lot of people were really happy that he was on, and they were really happy that he got to say what he said.
But I got a bunch of people emailing me and tweeting me saying, oh, you should never, you shouldn't have let him on.
You know, you should have challenged him.
You should have gotten on his face.
And my whole point about bringing people on is letting them speak.
You know, I mean, obviously, obviously saying something evil.
Somebody said these are dangerous ideas.
I love that idea.
What is a dangerous idea?
A dangerous, you know what a dangerous idea is?
Nobody thinks an idea is dangerous to them.
They think it's dangerous to other people because they think they're too smart to be hurt by an idea.
But other people are stupid.
All those other people are stupid.
The only dangerous idea is the idea that other ideas should be shut down.
The only dangerous thought is what Chesterton, I think, called the thought that stops thought.
So what Coffin was saying was he believed, like a good Catholic, a devout Catholic, that sex has a purpose.
The purpose is to create children.
You shouldn't use birth control.
You should have a loving marriage in which every act of sex has the possibility of life.
And this is based on Aristotelian natural law.
The idea is that everything has a purpose.
Human beings have a purpose.
The eye has a purpose to see and all this.
And you use things for their purpose.
And the purpose of a human being is to become united with God.
All these things are interesting.
And I actually believe in natural law.
This is the reason, this is the reason I get along with Catholics, but also disagree with Catholics.
I believe in natural law.
I believe in the premises, but I don't believe in their conclusions.
And the reason I don't believe in their conclusions is they are suspiciously convenient, okay?
You say that every act of sex should have the possibility of life.
And you say, well, what if two 60-year-old people get married or two people are married and the wife stops being able to have children and they go on having a wonderful sex life?
Well, that's okay because you're not trying to stop the baby.
And you say, okay, well, you're not trying to stop the baby if you're two guys.
Or you're not saying, no, but that's no good.
That is no good.
And then you say, well, okay, well, what if you're a married couple, but you like kind of sex that doesn't leave the possibility of, no, that's no good.
And you just think like, well, wait a minute.
You know, it just always comes out to be the way you want it to be.
You know, there's things that you approve of and things that you disapprove of.
And I'm not talking about religion at all here, okay?
Like, when it comes to religion, I believe that you should be praying to God about everything about your life, including your sex life, and he will inform you and reading your Bible, and you will be informed about what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing.
That's not the point.
The point is basically your life.
And the thing about sex is that sex is a really difficult subject, obviously.
Well, let's start with this.
Let's start with this.
Something is terribly wrong.
with our attitude towards sex.
And let me read you something from a British paper, all right?
Killing babies, no different from abortion, experts say.
Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are morally irrelevant and ending their lives is no different to abortion.
A group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued their article entitled After Birth Abortion, Why Should the Baby Live, argued the moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.
These are guys associated with Oxford University, a great, great university.
Something is terribly wrong, all right?
Something is terribly wrong when we have people arguing like this.
It makes you think that the only problem with Adolf Hitler is he was ahead of his time.
You know, the left always, whenever you disagree with the left, they call you Hitler.
It seems like their only problem was not that Hitler was bad.
It was just he, too soon, Adolf, too soon, you know?
I mean, that is a Hitlerian vision that this guy, that these people are selling.
So something is terribly, terribly wrong in our relationship to our bodies and in our relationship to ourselves.
And I think it's very natural for the church to say, oh, you've left us behind and you have to come back to us.
And I think that there's the guy has a right to make that argument.
I'm not quite so sure.
I believe that the only way forward is through.
The only way out is through.
But the problem, there's a short story by Ursula K. Leguin.
And it was on stuff I like.
So maybe we'll make it stuff I like again.
It's called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omalis.
The ones who, and I'm going to tell you the story because it's not really a story.
It's really a philosophical musing, so there's not spoilers in it.
But Omalis is a beautiful community and a country that works great.
Everything goes well.
Everything is beautiful.
It's peaceful.
It's prosperous.
Everything is fine.
And as long as you're a child in Omalis, you don't know anything else about it except everything is just absolutely great.
But when you reach majority, they take you down into a cellar and you find that there is one child who, in order to get all the evil out of society, has to be tortured and abused.
And this one child is constantly tortured and abused.
And that's what keeps Omalis running, okay?
And the ones who walk away from Omalis don't, we don't even know where they're going.
And as the author says, she says, the place they're going may not even exist, but they can't bear the fact that this injustice on this one child has to be maintained in order to keep Omalis working as well as it does.
Sex is a little bit like that, okay?
Because you'll notice that great societies at their peak tend to be sexually conservative.
If you look at the Victorian era, one of the greatest eras ever in the history of any nation, the British Victorian era, of course, we know the Victoria, the Victorian era is almost a byword for being sexually conservative.
If you look at the 50s in America, when America really did rise from a great power to the greatest power, that was a very sexually conservative time.
If you look at the Augustan age, which is universally regarded as a time, even though Augustus disassembled the machinery of the Republic, the Roman Republic, and instituted an empire, the Roman Republic was essentially dead.
So Augustus was doing the only thing that could be done.
And there was then really a golden age, even of freedom, even though there wasn't political freedom.
There were all other kinds of freedom.
But Augustus was very sexually conservative.
And it tends to work well for a society to be sexually conservative.
If everybody's getting married, if everybody's taking care of his own kids, if nobody is throwing their children onto the state as a burden, the society tends to work better.
But down in the cellar are the people who don't fit in, right?
This is like the child in Omelas, the people who don't fit in are down in the cellar being forced into lives of hypocrisy, being forced into lives of being an outsider, of being excluded, of being rejected by the society in which they live.
The gay people, the weird transgender people, the oddballs, the sexual oddballs, they are the ones who are down in the cellar.
The left, the left are usually the ones who walk away from Omalis.
The left are usually the ones who say, yes, the society is prosperous, it's free, it's safe, it's great, but wait, wait, the poor little person here is being tormented.
Let's destroy the society in order to save this one person.
The right are usually the people who say, no, everybody has to get in line and make this society work.
And if somebody has to be down in the cellar, that's the way it's got to be.
I actually do believe that there is a third way.
And I do believe that while I believe in natural law, I do believe that creation, God's creation, is so various, so full of variety, that there are people who don't fit into the categories that natural law provides to the human mind.
I mean, I know that sex is best done in marriage.
I know that married people have the best sex.
I know that, you know, remembering what sex is about, that it's about creation and about love, is the way to run your sex life in a way that will make you happy.
I understand that.
I also understand there are people who are different, troubled, maybe just created in a different way.
And this is not a religious point.
I'm not talking about what God thinks of them.
I'm not talking about what God thinks they should do.
I'm talking about you and me as tolerant, loving, forgiving people living that life that God told us to live in which we pay attention to our own sins and not the sins of others.
I think there has got to be a new relationship to natural law in which we take the individual into account and the tension between our differences with natural law, our difference with the kind of ideal idea of a human being.
That tension somehow creates a path to God, which is really what I think does happen when people are left alone with love.
I do think that in a society, you're going to have to elevate the norm.
You're going to have to elevate people who are married and have children and all that stuff.
And you're going to have to respect them at a different level, possibly.
But that doesn't mean you have to torment and torture the rest of people.
And it doesn't mean that everybody can live according to the same prescription.
And that's where I disagree with Patrick Hoffman.
But I certainly think that he should be able to make his argument and come on without being shouted down.
I'm going to bring him back because I thought he was terrific and I thought he has a lot to say about other things as well.
I think, you know, I think we're coming to the end of the show.
I think instead of rushing through anything else, I'm going to leave stuff I like to be the ones who walk away from a malis, even though I've done it before.
It's Ursula Kay Le Guin, and you can get it for free.
I think you can get it online.
Roger Kimball's Argument00:00:31
And if you can't get it online, this is terrible to do because I am an author.
I love those royalties.
But if you download a sample of her short stories, a book of her short stories, I think it's like the first story, so you get it for free.
You don't have to load the rest of the book.
She's a wonderful writer, so it's worth reading.
All right, tomorrow we have a guest.
We have Roger Kimball.
Finally, finally, we have Roger Kimball going to talk about the culture.
He's going to talk about why, as one of the brightest men in America, he nonetheless is a big supporter of Donald Trump's.
So that's going to be a really interesting conversation.