Ep. 381 dissects Trump’s DACA flip-flops, mocking his "massive border security" demands while Schumer-Pelosi deny deals, and praises Kurt Schlichter’s pragmatic Trump support over Never Trump purists. Cruz shuts down CNN’s sex-toy smear, but the host pivots to Ben Shapiro’s Berkeley appearance, framing leftist violence as a free-speech threat—while dismissing The Onion’s satire as cowardly. The episode ends with a defense of Confederate statues, arguing modern erasure violates Western traditions of contextual history, all while teasing Shapiro’s potential cancellation as a podcast boon. [Automatically generated summary]
So if you've been watching or listening to this podcast, not a single thing that's happening in the political world today is surprising you at all.
I told you that when the healthcare vote failed, Trump was going to start to make common cause with the Democrats.
I told you no president would sign on to mass deportations.
And by the way, I hate to say this because it makes people angry, but no matter what you think, you wouldn't like it if they suddenly started mass deporting people.
Once you saw that on television, it wouldn't be as much fun as you think it would be.
So anyway, if you're surprised you weren't listening, and shame on you, you should be listening.
But really, with all the stuff I told you and everybody saying I told you so, and the Trump hating and Trump making excuses for Trump and people laughing at people who like Trump, the only real question is, is what's going on good for the country?
Which means, is it good for freedom?
So we're going to be talking about that today, and we've got Kurt Schlichter on to join the conversation.
Plus, we'll talk about Shapiro's trip to Berkeley and some great Confederate stuff I like.
But first, you know, men can't do a lot of things that women can do.
We can't bear children or talk complete nonsense and get away with it because we're cute.
We can't even stand with our hands on our hips rolling our eyes and tapping one foot at the same time because it just looks silly when we do it.
But at least we can spend a little time each month feeling out of sorts and depressed by visiting our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
Everyday Feminism is the site that empowers women and minorities by making them feel angry over every little thing so that they're never satisfied with anything and ultimately end up alone in their room sobbing because people are sick and tired of hearing them complain.
This month's best post on everyday feminism is entitled, quote, Coming Out as Queer is Even More Complicated for a Fat Person, unquote.
Now, that title may strike some of you as hilarious, but that's only because you have a sense of humor.
To most of the readers of everyday feminism, fat queerdom is a deeply serious matter, which of course only makes it that much more hilarious for the rest of us.
The post begins, quote, I came out as fat to myself about five years ago.
Now, let me stop right there.
I find this sentence fascinating.
The woman who wrote this post had to come out to herself as fat.
One day, she sat down with herself in a chair or two, looking herself in the face, and she said, I hate to break this to you, but I'm fat.
Whereupon she answered herself by saying, yes, I've suspected you were fat for a long time, but I'm glad you finally felt comfortable telling me.
After that, she hugged herself and some tears were shed and she was able to move on.
It was a very touching moment.
Dr. Carla Pfeffer, an assistant professor of sociology and women's and gender studies, or nonsense as it's technically called, explains, quote, people assume that since fatness is so visible, there is no need for fat people to come out as fat.
But some people view coming out as fat as a way of taking back and reclaiming the discourse around fatness, unquote.
I have no idea what that means, but I'm sure Dr. Pfeffer doesn't either.
Otherwise, she'd be doing something more useful than teaching gender studies like standing on one foot balancing a pencil on her nose.
But coming out as fat is apparently not so easy if you have to come out as queer at the same time.
The post continues, quote, gay, fat, cis men are deemed feminine because they are fat.
Lesbian fat cis women must deal with the narrative that they chose lesbianism because their fat bodies make it impossible for any man to ever be attracted to them.
This paragraph raises the all-important question, why does it never occur to anyone at everyday feminism that with just a little bit of courage, you don't have to care what people say about you?
So you might want to lose some weight.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Step Up Your Watch Game00:03:23
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is it easing.
It's a wonderful day.
It's the brink of the Klavan-less weekend already.
Man, that was like fast.
That was fast.
Yeah, that really was fast.
And, you know, I'm a little worried about the, because we got Ben Shapiro going to Berkeley and Tifa, I guess, getting ready to welcome him.
So soon, we should have the biggest podcast on the Daily Wire.
That's great.
No, no, I do not want a Clavenless weekend.
I don't want a Clavenless weekend to become a Shapiro this weekend.
So we got Kurt Schlichter coming on, hilarious guy, great writer, terrific writer.
Also, you know, we have this new thing coming on called the Conversation, which will start on Tuesday the 19th.
I guess that's this coming Tuesday.
Yeah.
This coming Tuesday at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
It lasts for a whole hour.
It streams live on Facebook.
It'll start with Ben.
We'll be doing it this time.
And anybody can watch on Facebook, but you have to be a subscriber if you want to ask questions.
Now, yesterday we had the mailbag.
We solved so many problems.
I mean, now all those people, all those people who were depressed before are now happy because they were subscribers for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
That's all it costs, a lousy 10 bucks a month.
You get to ask all the questions you want.
And if you subscribe for the year, it's only 100 lousy bucks and you get the leftist tears tumbler.
And with Hillary Clinton doing her book tour, the leftist tears tumbler is going to come in handy.
Watches.
That's what you're thinking about, right?
You're thinking, stop talking about DACA, start talking about the Dream Act, stop talking about politics, talk about watches.
You know, there is this place.
I love watches.
I absolutely love watches, but I am one of those guys.
I don't mind spending money, but I don't want to spend too much money on something that is basically, you know, it's not a car, it's not a house, it's something that you wear and you like and it makes you feel good.
But I love watches.
So movement, which is spelled for some reason, MVMT, MVMT, all the vowels and other letters are just left out, but it's MVMT.
Movement has figured out a way to give you really stylish, beautiful watches inexpensively by selling them to you online.
That's the whole thing.
The company started by two broke college kids who were the same as me.
They loved expensive watches, stylish watches, but didn't want to pay a lot of money for them.
And so they built this company with watches that start at just $95 that if you were in an apartment store, they'd cost you $400, $500.
Movement figured out that by selling online, they were able to cut out the middleman and retail markup, providing the best possible price.
Over 1 million watches have been sold in over 160 countries.
And if you go on their website, you'll see why.
You'll just take a look at them.
You'll understand why they're selling so well.
Get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns by going to movement.com, M-V-M-V-M-T dot com slash Andrew.
Watch has a clean design.
I've got one now and everybody loves it.
It's really nice.
It's the time to step up your watch game.
Go to movement.com/slash Andrew, M-V-M-T dot com slash Andrew.
Border Issues00:14:59
Join the movement.
So Trump had dinner with Chuck and Nancy last night.
And Chuck and Nancy came out and said, oh, we've got a deal on DACA.
We're going to increase border security.
And ha ha ha, we've heard that before.
And then we're going to let all the dreamers stay and no wall.
Forget the wall.
You know, it's not that there's not going to be a wall, but just that that was not part of the deal.
Trump immediately says, no, that didn't happen.
There's no deal.
He says no deal was made last night on DACA.
Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent, would be subject for a vote, right?
So he's talking as he's leaving Florida to visit the flood victims and the flood scenes.
They're shouting questions on him.
You have to listen kind of carefully.
We've got it pumped up loud enough.
You should be able to hear what he says, but the chopper, the presidential chopper's flapping around and back there.
And they ask him, now we're going to play these cuts out of order here.
So the first one is number four when he talks about whether there's a deal and what they're looking for.
We want to get massive border security.
And I think that Balsancy, Pelosi, and Jeff Schumer, I think they agree with it.
But we met last night with, as you know, Humer, Pelosi, and a whole group.
And I think we're fairly close, but we have to get massive border security.
Is there anything?
Oh, I think he's on board.
Yeah, Mitch is on board.
Paul Ryan's on board.
We all feel, look, 92% of the people agree on DACA.
But what we want is we want very, very powerful border security, okay?
I don't know where that 92% number comes from, but he likes that number.
He's used it before, 92%.
So somebody says, what about the wall?
And let's remember, right, the wall is what made him the candidate he was.
Build the wall.
We're going to build a wall.
Mexico's going to pay for the wall.
Every time anybody said something, the wall got higher, the wall got taller.
You know, well, let's hear what he says.
Let's play the cut on the wall.
This is number three.
No, I'm sorry, it's not.
It's number two.
The wall will come later.
We're right now renovating large sections of wall, massive sections, making it brand new.
We're doing a lot of renovation.
We're building four different examples of the wall to see which one we're going to use.
And the wall is going to be built.
It'll be funded a little bit later.
So, okay.
Now, at the same time, he's tweeting, does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?
Really?
They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own, brought in by parents at a young age.
Plus, we're going to get big border security.
That's his tweet.
It's just different.
You know, we'll play cut number six.
It's really different than what he was saying during the campaign.
This is where that famous moment when he was talking to Chuck, whatever his name is, on the plane.
Executive order gets rescinded.
One good thing.
If I rescind, you'll rescind that one too.
One good thing.
You'll rescind the dream order.
We don't have to.
We have to make a whole new set of standards.
And when people come in, they have to come to their families.
You're going to deport Chuck.
Chuck.
No, no.
We're going to keep the families together.
We have to keep the families together.
But you're going to keep them together.
But they have to go.
What if they have no place to go?
We will work with them.
They have to go.
Chuck, we either have a country or we don't have a country.
So we have a country.
We don't have a country because of if the borders are open, you don't have a country.
So this really, this really did appeal to people.
Remember, build the wall, build the wall.
This was basically the signature of his campaign.
And he is now, I mean, the kind of surreal thing is now he is moving to do something that neither Bush nor Obama could get done, which is get this Dreamer Act done.
And remember, when Marco Rubio tried to do this, Marco Rubio tried to make a deal with Chuck Schumer to do this stuff.
He was lambasians.
It's the reason he didn't become president because Trump pulled this on him.
Now, I was telling you, I don't want to say I told you so, but I just do want to remind you that I was telling you all the time that he was not going to do anything else but what all the other candidates would do, which was maybe hopefully increase some security, but then these people are not going away and nobody wants to, I'm telling you, I know people get angry about this, but you turn on your TV and they're carrying these children out of the country and the people are crying and screaming and grandma's losing grandchild.
You're not going to want to see it.
Nobody's going to stand for it.
It's just a political thing.
I'm not talking about the principle of it.
I get it.
We want to enforce the law.
And the ignoring of the border law is a tremendous insult to the people of this country.
This is true of Bush, and it was true of Obama.
Ignoring your own laws, ignoring the laws for political purposes is an absolute insult to the way of life, our Constitution, everything, everything about it.
But there's a political price to pay for dragging people out over the border.
Ain't going to happen.
So here is Steve King, right?
He is Congressman Steve King, I guess from Iowa.
He is one of the big fighters against open borders.
He hates this.
So he is the guy when Trump is tweeting, nobody, does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, and accomplished young people.
Let me pause here for a minute, by the way.
The truth about the DREAMers is good, educated, and accomplished young people.
You know, most of them have small jobs.
They are employed, and they do have to keep, you know, they're obviously going to be bad ones among so many.
It's like something like 700,000, 800,000 people.
But most of these people are people trying to make their way in the world.
But they have small jobs, you know, paying like in the $1,500, $16 range.
So those are coming away from people who are here legally.
Those are coming away from people who are struggling, poor people in America, and Americans and people who are trying to get in.
And, of course, they broke the law.
So there are people waiting to get in that and they came and took their place.
But here is Steve King really upset with what he heard from Trump.
No, I don't think 92% agree on this at all.
I'd say about 80% of his base agree with me that we cannot reward lawbreakers.
If we do that, then we get more lawbreakers.
And here's the irony out here is that in 86, Ronald Reagan led with amnesty.
And in about 2006, Bush 43 led with amnesty.
The Obama administration and the gang of eight led with amnesty in 2013.
Every one of those initiatives failed because the American people know we need enforcement.
And if you give amnesty first with the promise of enforcement second, you got what Bush 41 got when he said, no new taxes, read my list.
You got the taxes and not the spending cuts.
You've got to have the important things up front and then have the honor to follow through if you're going to make the deal if amnesty comes later.
That doesn't come for me.
I've worked for 30 years to restore the respect for the rule of law, especially with regard to immigration.
And we were on the cusp of doing that until the Trump announcement the other day on DACA.
And now it looks to me like things are going downhill pretty fast and we'd better put it back together.
I mean, it's a really good point that, you know, that you've got to get the good things first.
If you're going to get E-Verify, I mean, E-Verify, if you ask me, E-Verify, which means that you can't get a job unless you can prove you're here legally, much better than a wall.
Much cheaper, much better than a wall.
If you force businesses to use E-Verify when they hire, no jobs, people go back to Mexico.
They self-deport.
You know, that is much more effective than a wall, much more effective than dragging people back and forth.
The wall, too, by the way, Trump doesn't have to pass a law or pass legislation to get the wall.
He's just got to squeeze the money out of Congress because there's already walls there.
And he says we're still building that.
So I don't know.
I'm just talking about the way his base feels.
Me personally, I don't care if there's a wall or not.
I truly don't.
I do care that our laws are enforced.
And I don't care if our laws are made more lenient if we need those workers.
If we need those workers, make the laws more lenient.
I don't care.
Just obey the law.
So the guys who are in a rough place right now are guys like Sean Hannity.
And I like Sean a lot.
I mean, I like him both as a person, the few times I've met him, and I enjoy his show.
But he went in on Trump 100%.
He went all in on Trump.
And so one of the things he kept saying was that, you know, Trump was going to build this wall.
He was going to do what he said he was going to do.
So when he heard this, and remember, Trump is saying there's no deal, but what he's saying sounds very much what Chuck and Nancy, as we now call them, Chuck and Nance, I guess we should call it.
It sounds the same as what they're saying, but he says we haven't closed the deal, fair enough.
And Sean Hannity says, tweets out, I blame the Republicans.
They caused this.
They wanted him to fail and now pushed him into the arms of political suicide, if what Chuck and Nancy are saying is true.
This is what Sean Hannity says.
Now, the problem with this is I agree that the Republicans put Trump in a position where he was going to go over to the Democrats.
But I believe that Trump is a kind of whirlwind of unprincipled narcissism.
So I blame the Republicans for not dealing with reality.
I blame the Republicans for not saying, oh, we have this tornado coming and we ought to play pinball with him a little bit.
And we won't get everything we want, but let's see if we can bumper car him into doing some of the things we like.
But instead, they dithered, they disagreed, they lied, their lies came to the fore.
We all saw that they promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, didn't do it, not going to do it.
And so Trump now went over to the Democrats.
So it's true what Sean Hannity says, the Republicans misplayed this, but it's not true in the way he thinks it's true that because, you know, that Trump was this principled guy, he was telling us he was, you know, I mean, it's a really, really different thing.
Now, now we have to pause here for just a moment to talk about something important, which is probably the biggest expenditure you'll ever have in your life, which is your house.
Your house is probably the biggest thing you will ever buy.
A lot of your savings is going to go into it.
And when you go to do this, and I have done this, I know what this is like.
You go in and you go into a bank and you try and get a mortgage.
And the guys explaining to you, when you sign a mortgage, the pack of paper, it's like this.
You could stand on it and just like, you know, go over the top of the wall at the border, especially now.
But, you know, it's so complicated that nobody ever thinks to shop for it.
What you're doing is shopping for money.
You're buying money, borrowing money at a price.
But you can actually save $20,000 or more, right, if you get banks to compete, if you find out the different prices.
80% of people only get one mortgage offer.
And if you just go to your bank, it's not that you'll get ripped off.
Yeah, you'll get ripped off, but you'll only get ripped off not because they're being dishonest, just because you haven't shopped around.
Lending Tree doesn't want that to happen.
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Go ahead and shop and you'll see how much you can save.
All right.
So all the different reactions.
The reaction that I think was my favorite was on Fox and Friends, because Fox and Friends is like Trump's favorite show.
And they're trying to get out of, like, they're trying to get Trump out of this.
And some of these people are just going to make an excuse for him no matter what they do.
So I like this take.
Is the wall, maybe the wall is just a symbol.
Listen to this.
Has the wall almost become symbolic?
I mean, I know the president ran on it.
It was a mantra, but at the same time, border crossings have gone down dramatically.
And you were talking about how the wall exists in certain forms and there's money to go to it, has to come from Congress.
But do you think we're going to get to the point where maybe they won't build a wall?
Look, what Donald Trump has done is proven that he has the political will to actually enforce the current law.
Yeah, that's not, you know, you got to go back to campaign Trump here for a minute.
It's cut number two.
I'm sorry, cut number three.
My mistake.
We're going to build a wall.
It's going to be a real wall.
It's going to be a wall that's powerful and that people aren't going to be going under or up or around or anything else.
It's going to be a real wall.
It's going to be a real wall.
It's not a symbolic wall.
We're not talking about a symbolic wall.
It's a real wall.
Then there are the reactions from the Never Trumpers.
I have to say, some of the Never Trumpers are really good people that I really like.
I mean, they're very, that's where a lot of the intellectual conservatives are.
But the reactions of the Never Trumpers are to laugh at everybody who believed in Trump.
So I'm not in that position because I never really took Trump seriously.
You know, in terms of what he said, his words never matched his actions.
But they're laughing at these people, but still, it really was a binary choice.
There's no question about it.
And did you want this woman in the White House who is going to be sitting there doing single nostril yoga breathing?
But you know, you do hold and you breathe through one and you hold it and then you exhale through the other and you keep going.
So that would have been your president if you hadn't gotten Trump.
So Trump is still better.
For me, look, all I care about is what's good for the country.
I don't think, I think there are some real moral hazards in letting the dreamers stay.
I think that makes an incentive for more people to come over.
I think it means it shows people that the president's word is no good.
I think it really can be a problem in those terms.
But in the terms of that, like people like Ann Coulter, who really feel that this is this onslaught, or the people like Candidate Trump who thought these, you know, mostly rapists and killers coming in, I really don't think that's as big a problem.
We have handled immigration before.
Pardon me, we've handled immigration before, and we can handle it now.
Kurt is the author and senior columnist at townhall.com.
He is a name partner at a growing Los Angeles trial law firm, a retired Army infantry colonel with a master's in strategic studies from the United States Army.
He's also just a terrific writer.
He's got two novels we're going to talk about, and you can find him on Twitter at Kurt Schlichter.
Army Col's Take on Publishing00:08:03
I have to ask you this.
Are you the person who coined the term Filonia pantsuit to describe Hillary Clinton?
Filonia von Pantsuit.
Yes, in fact, I am.
Well, it's an honor.
It's an honor then to have you on my show.
That is one.
I mean, I keep using it, and it's brilliant.
So at least we're not dealing with Filonia von Pantsuit.
I lost him again.
It's not president.
Yes, that's right.
She is not president.
No matter how bad it gets, she's not president.
Listen, turn your sound down a little bit because it's echoing here.
I was having some.
Okay.
There we go.
All right.
All right.
Better?
Let's see.
Is that better?
Yes, it is.
A little better.
So you have been a kind of a supporter of Donald Trump in the sense that you don't jump on him no matter what he does.
You haven't listened to the never Trumpers on the right.
On a day like this, on a day like this, when Trump seems to have spun a little bit out of control to come back to his Democrat instincts, how are you feeling?
What does this make you think is going to happen?
Well, let's put it this way.
At about 6.30 a.m., I wrote up a thousand-word column for town hall, which is now up called Read My Lips, Schumer's Playing You for a Fool.
So look, I was a cruise guy until he became the nominee.
And then it was either him or her.
I'm a military guy.
You play with the pieces you're given.
You come with the army you have.
He was the army we have.
I have felt my attacks on him during the primary season were brutal and accurate, and I don't withdraw any of them.
I thought that my best role was over the last year or so, since he got the nomination and eventually elected, was not to go pick apart the things he's doing wrong.
And there were plenty of them.
There are plenty of other people doing that.
Mine was to point out the things that he was doing right, to help keep the base's morale up, to point out why, you know, the sky isn't necessarily falling.
And even today, the sky's not falling.
Okay.
Hillary is not our president, no matter what happens.
And of course, you and I are both personally to blame, along with the rest of the universe for that, everything but her.
So, you know, but sometimes you just have to say, wait a minute.
And I'm not mad that he's quote unquote betraying me because I always knew he was a 70% guy.
Reagan, 90%.
Cruz, 95%.
He even likes the kind of sexy librarian, you know, out of entertainment that, you know, most of us agree with.
But, you know, I knew that Trump, 70% of the time, I was going to go, hey, cool.
Blah, the climate scam fraud.
That's good.
But then he was going to do something else like, well, you know, Ivanka really wants family leave, and I'm not going to like that.
But you know what?
The majority of Americans don't agree with me.
Yeah.
So I'm going to take what I can.
You know, what is kind of surreal is that this is the way before Barack Obama, Washington used to work.
You know, people lied and they went in and they made deals and they compromised and then people followed their personalities.
It's amazing that an offbeat president like Trump, a really outlandish president like Trump, is actually bringing us back to normalcy after the Obama years.
I mean, we've been sold this idea that Obama, Obama was a terrible president and he was an ideologue.
And now suddenly things are moving.
Things are flowing a little bit.
Look, I think that, look, guys like you and me who follow this stuff and are emotionally invested, I get angry when he doesn't do something that's super conservative.
Sure.
Because I'm conservative.
But you know, I've been listening, you know, I listen to some talk radio, listen to some normal people.
And there's some people out there going, well, you know, I'm a pretty conservative guy, but I like that he's getting something done.
And there are people out there who don't have my agenda.
And one of the things I've learned in the last two, three years is a lot of Americans don't have my exact agenda.
And I think a lot of people in Conservative Incorporated, of which I am a member, forgot that normal people have a little bit different interests than we do.
And, you know, for instance, free trade.
I love free trade.
But was I thinking about the guy at the carrier plant?
He's 58 years old and suddenly gets told your job's going to Juarez.
You have a kid in college.
You got a mortgage.
Maybe you should take up coding for $8 an hour if you can find a job because Milton Friedman says so.
Yeah, well, that's exactly right.
And, you know, conservatives, in fact, people who love freedom, who put freedom first, are always in the minority.
We always have to find friends who have other, you know, who have other interests to join with us.
And we always have to make compromises.
And actually, there's so many on the right who do not understand that simple fact that we are the minority.
Being a conservative is like being a fan of a really good band that hasn't signed yet and nobody else knows about.
And it's like, well, you know, you got your nickel back, but I'm, you know, I'm listening to, you know, I'm listening to, you know, the electric prunes too, the quickening.
So it's just so when you look at the never Trumpers now, I mean, you have been really hard on them.
You have really kicked them around the block.
And it's been hilarious, by the way.
I've been hard on a class of never Trumpers.
I don't, a guy who opposes Trump, Ben Shapiro is the ultimate.
He opposes Trump when he thinks Trump is wrong.
He supports Trump when he thinks Trump is right.
And he's rigorously fair about it.
That is what he does.
Now, I don't pretend to be rigorously fair.
I avoid criticizing him intentionally because I think other people are filling that role.
And I'll tell you that.
You never criticize Trump.
Well, it's not never, but mostly I don't because that's not, I'm not a critic.
I'm an advocate.
I'm a trial lawyer in real life, and I do dress like this.
And, you know, I want my side to win.
And I think I best serve it by advocating.
Now, a lot of the never Trumpers, though, I think are mad because Trump and his movement, which is really bringing in to the Republican Party, which was very concerned with being on the right, they're bringing in now an anti-establishment axis.
So we really, it's an uncomfortable coalition between people who are primarily right-wing and people who are primarily anti-establishment.
And they're upset that their sinecures are being upset.
You know, now maybe, you know, we're not maybe selling as many cruises as we used to.
Now people aren't listening to me or reading me as much.
And I think there's some insecurity out there that's driving some of this.
There are a lot of guys who would like to go back to the Obama years because they were perfectly happy in the minority, kind of in the minority, though we had Capital Ill.
It really didn't matter much.
No, it still doesn't.
And I think there's a lot.
One of the things I've noticed is there's a lot more personality going on than you would have thought.
You know, the conservatism is not a rigorous debate of ideas.
It's human beings in a giant high school.
And some of us are on the debate team and some of us are jocks and some of us are never going to make it out with a cheerleader.
Yeah, I've come to terms with that, Kurt.
Tell me about your novels.
You have written novels that you have been publishing.
You published yourself, but they've done tremendously well.
What was the last one called?
The last one was called Indian Country.
The first one I published, a traditional one, you were one of the guys I talked to.
And you were one of the guys who said, look, you got to get a traditional.
You got to just do it.
And Mike Walsh was another guy when I was talking to people like you who'd been established doing that.
Important If You Hurt Feelings00:09:35
So I did it.
And Conservative Insurgency is a quote-unquote real book.
And I got a real publishing contract, which was really crummy, like most publishing contracts.
And I decided to use, I had done some previous things on Amazon.
I decided to use a new technology and do novels.
And I could do them my way on my timeframe with my royalty rate.
And I could put them out fast.
You know how long it takes for these guys to do a novel.
I could finish a novel, have it proofread, copy edit it, and have it up in a matter of days.
I mean, days.
And then it's selling.
And I'm getting the check two months later.
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Tell me quickly.
I'm going to have to go, but tell me quickly what the book is about.
Both books, People's Republic and Indian Country, are adventure novels.
You got an operative in a world where the United States is split into red and blue states.
And he goes into the blue states and has various adventures.
And there's lots of humor.
There's lots of shooting.
All the guns are explained in great detail because, Andrew, I know my audience.
And people are really responding.
Well, I'm selling a ton of them.
That's great.
Kurt, it's great to see you.
Great to talk to you.
And we'll talk to you again another time.
We need to do lunch soon.
Soon.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Kurt Schlichter, you can find him at townhall.com.
He's a senior columnist there, and you can find him on Twitter at K-U-R-T-S-C-H-L-I-C-H-T-E-R.
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All right.
I have to play, there's just one thing I have to play before we start talking about Ben.
That cut of, you got to see this cut of Ted Cruz.
It's all this stuff.
There's a Democratic senator on trial, Menendez, on trial for corruption.
Nobody's talking about that.
There's a Democratic mayor of Seattle to step down because he's been accused like five times of molesting children, gay guy, right?
And he's been, he's stepped down.
They covered that, but they don't mention he's Democrat.
They just don't use the word Democrat.
They do the same thing in the Menendez trial.
But some staffer on Ted Cruz's Twitter feed liked a porn movie.
And that's the question on CNN.
Now, I want you to watch this.
I think it's Alison Camerada.
Ted Cruz calls her a knucklehead to her face on CNN, and she doesn't even hear it.
Listen to how subtly he does this.
It's great.
You appreciate the irony that you once defended a Texas law banning sales of sex toys?
No, actually, actually, that's a good example, Dana, of where the media runs with things that are just totally false.
What's false about that?
So, what is false about that?
So, I've read online, you know, Cruz supports banning sex toys.
No, no, no.
That's complete sales.
I just reread the brief this morning.
So, the sale of it.
All right.
I spent five and a half years as the Solicitor General of Texas.
I worked for the Attorney General.
The Attorney General's law job is to defend the laws passed by the Texas legislature.
I get it.
One of those laws was a law restricting the sale of sex toys.
It was a stupid law.
Listen, I am one of the most libertarian members of the Senate.
I think it's idiotic, but it's an opportunity for knuckleheads in the media to claim, oh, isn't this ironic that Cruz wants to ban these toys?
I can't believe I'm going to say that to be able to do that.
I can't believe I'm going to ask you this.
But so you're officially saying Ted Cruz is okay with people buying sex toys?
I am saying that consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in their bedroom.
So they said the headline was: Ted Cruz is okay with sex toys.
But actually, it's Dana Bash.
I said Allison Camarada.
They all look alike to me.
It's Dana Bash.
She says to him, Isn't it ironic that you back this?
And he said, No, it gives a chance for knuckleheads in the media to call it ironic.
And she's still looking at him like, you know, wait, did I just get called a knucklehead?
I'm not sure.
Yes, you did.
Anyway, Ted Cruz absolutely handling that brilliantly.
So let's talk about Ben.
Ben Shapiro is going to Berkeley and there has been, he's now been, he's now become the news.
You know, he has become the news because I'm reading about him in the New York Times and reading about him in the Wall Street Journal.
There's an editorial today.
And every time I see the story covered, it says Berkeley braces for Ben Shapiro.
Berkeley braces for the arrival of Ben Shapiro.
And I keep thinking, you know, we here at the Daily Wire, Ben arrives at the Daily Wire every day.
We never brace for him.
Why?
Because he's a perfectly pleasant, decent human being who comes in and does his work and chats with everybody amiably and then goes home like the rest of us do.
There's no reason to brace for Ben Shapiro, and that's not what they're bracing for.
They're bracing for the leftist thugs who create violence when people try to exercise their right to free speech.
That's what they're bracing for.
And it's just an incredible example of the leftist tendency of media, even on Fox News, because they're all in the same kind of bubble together, no matter what their opinions are.
They're all in the same kind of bubble where they're saying, oh, they're bracing for Ben Shapiro.
They're not bracing for Ben Shapiro.
They're bracing for Antifa.
Yesterday, I tweeted that, you know, they're not, Ben never hurt anybody.
They're not bracing for him.
And people were actually tweeting back at me.
You can't say Ben never hurt anybody.
He hurt people's feelings.
And that's important.
No, it's not.
It's not important that you hurt people's feelings.
It's important if you hurt your wife's feelings.
It's important if you hurt your children's or your friends' feelings.
But when you're a thinker and a speaker, people are coming to you to seek for truth.
You may not be right.
You're just seeking for truth.
Everyone who speaks and seeks for truth is going to hurt someone's feelings.
Martin Luther King hurt people's feelings.
You know, everybody who seeks the truth is going to hurt people's feelings.
That's what free speech is about.
You don't have to go to these things.
You don't have to go.
And you know, the New York Times, Barry Weiss in the New York Times, which is a former newspaper, you may have heard of it, you know, she writes this thing where she says she supports Shapiro.
She says the brouhaha over Ben Shapiro is significant, not because of what might go down Thursday at Berkeley, but because it is a perfect exhibition of a much broader phenomenon, increasingly apparent in the wake of Charlottesville, the sloppy conflation between actual white supremacists and well-run and run-of-the-mill conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals, whose main beef is with some on the left who seem like they'd rather do without the First Amendment.
And that, first of all, is not sloppy.
The New York Times does it on purpose.
Most of the mainstream media does it on purpose.
They link us together.
We have to answer the question.
Any conservative, especially a senator, has to answer the question, do you support the neo-Nazis?
But none of the senators and none of the congressmen on the left have to answer whether they support Antifa, who are fascists.
They call themselves anti-fascists.
But so what?
I call myself a gazelle.
That doesn't make me a gazelle.
They're fascists.
And I just think that this is, you know, this is an example.
I disagreed with the New York Times because it's not about the fact that Ben is a decent guy putting forward a perfectly reasonable opinion.
Even if he weren't, even if he weren't, he'd have the right to free speech.
Your feelings don't matter.
He has the right to free speech.
This is how we find the truth, by listening to one another or refusing to listen to one another and staying home.
This is how mankind moves forward the only way.
We've tried everything else.
This is the way that works.
My favorite reaction to this has come from The Onion, which says, there's an article in The Onion, college encourages lively exchange of idea from Boston.
Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college's academic mission, Trescott University President Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea.
As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it's inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time.
And when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogenous opinion, said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus.
Quote, whether it's a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.
It's a lively exchange of idea.
All right, let us have things I, stuff I like.
Stuff I like as we head into the Clavenless weekend.
Battlefields of Understanding00:05:42
You know, we had Victor Davis Hansen on last week, and I was talking to him about taking down Confederate statues, and he was, you know, he's a historian, and he was talking about, you know, the fact that these things are not just, don't just represent what the person who was memorialized represents, but they represent history.
And you can be an adult and discuss history and understand that you might represent someone's, you might be representing a moment in history without agreeing with the thing that that person stood for.
But, you know, and he mentioned, while he was talking, he mentioned Joan Baez's recording, famous left-wing protest singer, country folk singer.
He mentioned her recording The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is about a working-class guy in the South lamenting, remembering the day that Dixie fell and how his brother died and he's a working man.
His name is Virgil Cain.
And she basically plays out that thought.
And this is largely considered one of the great rock songs or folk songs of all time.
It constantly makes those lists, you know, of like the top 20 or top 100 songs.
It was absolutely iconic in its time, even if people have forgotten it.
And the thing is, it is part of a tradition that the West that has been with the West from the very beginning.
When you go back to the earliest, take the Iliad.
The Iliad, you know, is written by a Greek, but the Trojans, it's about the Greek-Trojan War, but the Trojans come across as noble people.
Hector is really the most heroic person in the Iliad.
The Persians, right, they beat the Greeks, beat the Persians, and then Aeschylus wrote the Persians, where he looked at things from the Persians' point of view.
The Trojan women by Euripides, the same thing.
In the Middle Ages, they had the Song of Roland, which had the Muslim hero Saladin.
It was about the Crusades.
Roland went on, he was a crusader, went off in the crusades, but he talked about Saladin, the great Muslim hero on the other side, and he's represented as a noble person.
At the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln exemplified that tradition by welcoming the South back without wanting to impose on them terrible fines, without really wanting to crush them.
Basically, if you come back, you're back.
And many of the people who fought on the Confederate side were buried in federal graves.
So they were celebrated as American soldiers.
And that is part of the tradition of the West.
So these clowns who are going around attacking the Confederacy, pulling down Confederate statues, and of course already moving on to Thomas Jefferson and the rest, these people are violating one of the most important principles of the West, the principles of preserving history, of understanding the other guy's point of view.
I mean, that is essentially what the West is about, is understanding the other guy's point of view, even as you fight for and stand for your principles.
You know, there was a movie called Gods and Generals came out in 2003.
I think they, I can't remember if they put it on TV first and then released it, but it had Robert Duvall playing Robert E. Lee.
And there's this wonderful speech where he looks out at the Potomac and somebody says, oh, that's where George Washington crossed the Potomac.
And General Lee says, never mind that.
That's where I met my wife.
And he starts to talk about what the land means because Robert E. Lee was offered the generalship of the Union troops and he turned it down because he was loyal to his land.
And this is this great speech, Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee talking about what the Yankees can't understand about the South.
There's something these Yankees do not understand, will never understand.
You see these rivers and valleys and streams, fields, even towns.
They're just markings on a map to those people in the war office in Washington.
To us, oh my goodness, there.
Birthplaces and burial grounds, there.
Battlefields where our ancestors fought.
Places where you and I we learned to walk, to talk, and to pray.
Places where we made friendships and, oh, yes, fell in love.
And they're the incarnation of all our memories.
Mr. Taylor.
And all that we are.
All that we are.
See, that kind of loyalty to the land is something we remember about people and something that makes people noble.
And we understand, we even understand this of some of the Germans who fought for the most horrible philosophy ever.
We understand that some of them fought for their country because they didn't catch on that maybe their country had left them.
We know that not all of the people who fought and died on the side of the Germans were Nazis.
You know, this is something that we understand about the past and why we honor people, even though they stood for something that we now find reprehensible and unacceptable.
That is the whole point of the West is to understand.
Because when you understand things, you can build, you can go forward.
And that's the same thing as listening to people you disagree with.
You know, when you understand the guy you disagree with, you can start to see what you're trying to move toward.
Even making the argument, even making the argument makes you a better person, a more thoughtful person.
All right, the Clavenless weekend is coming on.
At least there doesn't seem to be a hurricane on the way.
But I hope it is not a Clavenless weekend for Shapiro in Berkeley.
I hope he comes back, even though I would seize the title of biggest podcast on the Daily Wire if he doesn't.
But no, I really hope he does.
I hope you all stay safe.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Claven Show.
Survivors of the Clavenless Weekend will gather here again on Monday.
Like my father before me, I'm a working man.
And like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand.
Yankee Laid Him Down00:00:41
Well, he was just 18, proud and brave.
But a Yankee laid him in his grave.
I swear by the blood below my feet, you can't raise a cane back up when it's in defeat.
The night they drove old Dixie down and all the bells were ringing the night.