Andrew Clavin dissects the 2017 NY truck attack by Saipoff, a Diversity Visa Lottery recipient who shouted Allahu Akbar before being shot by NYPD, framing it as ideological terrorism ignored by media like CNN’s Jake Tapper, who downplayed its religious context. He clashes with Mayor de Blasio’s "cowardly" label, arguing terrorists are losers, and defends Trump’s immigration critique while slamming Schumer’s defensive response—contrasting it with Democrats’ gun-control push post-Vegas. Clavin accuses the media of sanitizing Islamist rhetoric, comparing Allahu Akbar to Nazi slogans, and warns Western secularism clashes with Islam’s rigid texts. The episode spirals into free-will debates on suicide, feminist role models, and Fusion GPS’s biased dossier, culminating in a scathing attack on mainstream media as a "partisan empire of lies." [Automatically generated summary]
CNN, Jake Tapper's angry at me, because he said something dumb yesterday and I told him so on Twitter and now he's unhappy.
It's me whom everyone else loves.
I can't understand it.
You'd think he would be grateful.
You know, meanwhile, we had an Islamist attack people in the name of Islam, shouting, Allahu Akbar.
We may never know his motive, but that's what was happening in New York yesterday.
It's a sad story, but the thing I want to look at is how it is being covered and covered up by the media and by politicians and how stupidly we talk about these things.
But all importantly, it's Mailbag Day.
So you know how you used to have problems?
That part of your life is over.
They will all be solved today because trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky bean.
Shipshape, tipsy topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it is mailbag day.
And we've got some great questions, but we can all, can we do mailbag live as well?
Yes.
How do they do that?
Right in on the comments section on the Daily Wire page.
The comments section on the Daily Wire page?
Yeah, where they're watching the video.
Okay, where you're watching the video, because in order to ask questions on the mailbag, you got to subscribe to the Daily Wire.
It's a lousy $10 a month.
I mean, why would you have, you have $10 and all your problems, or you can give up the $10 a month, and all your problems could be solved.
I mean, that is a clear, easy deal to make.
If you subscribe for a year, it's only $100 lousy bucks, and you get the leftist tears tumbler.
So not only will you have no problems, you'll also have a tumbler full of leftist tears.
It is a good deal that will come up after we break away from Facebook and YouTube.
So you'll have to come over, if you want to listen, you'll have to come over to thedailywire.com.
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So, you know, when these terrible things happen, like the terrorist attack in New York, which I have to admit, New York is kind of, if I had a hometown, it would be New York.
I've traveled all over, but New York is kind of my hometown.
When these things happen in New York, they do bug me a little bit more than other times.
Schumer's Gun Attack Claims00:15:14
I always try not to do too much commentary about things like this, and there's a reason for it.
There's not that much to say.
I mean, obviously, it's a terrible, it's tragic for the people who have lost someone.
But, you know, and I hate piety.
I hate the kind of solemnity that it requires.
Obviously, I am solemn about the people who died.
But there's not that much to say.
So what I really do want to talk about is the way we talk about these things.
I mean, this is a guy.
His name was Safulo Saipoff, 29 years old.
He drove a, he rented a truck at the, what was it, Home Depot.
He rented this Home Depot truck, drove it onto one of these bike paths they have in New York right around where the World Trade Center used to be, or actually still, now the new one is, ran people down, jumped up out with shouting Allahu Akbar, and started running.
He had guns, but they were not actual, it turns out they were not actual pistols, a paintball gun and stuff like this, but those obviously are dangerous as well.
Let's listen to Mayor de Blasio's, this is the first comment he made, not the comment on Betting Galaxies, number six.
Very painful day in our city.
Horrible tragedy on the West Side.
Let me be clear that based on the information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror and a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians, aimed at people going about their lives who had no idea of what was about to hit them.
We, at this moment, based on the information we have, we know of eight innocent people who have lost their lives.
So let's start right there with cowardly.
They always say this about terrorist attacks.
There's nothing cowardly about them.
They're evil, but they're not cowardly.
Courage is an amoral virtue, right?
You know, Adolf Hitler had courage.
He won the Iron Cross in World War I, but that didn't stop him from being evil.
In fact, it's even worse when somebody has courage.
What the guy is, Trump got this exactly right.
The guy is a loser.
He is a loser.
He has nothing to contribute to society.
He has nothing good to build.
It's easy to kill.
It's easy to destroy.
It's impossible to build up.
You know, when I saw them fly the planes into the World Trade Center, my thought was, okay, you're dancing in the streets and you're congratulating each other.
Let's see you invent a plane.
Let's see you build a building.
Let's see you do something that matters to humankind because anybody, I mean, it's like a kid in a playground who sits there and builds this elaborate block structure and the bully comes over and kicks it down.
Bully may not be a coward.
He's just a thug.
He's a loser.
He has nothing.
He can't do what that kid who builds things can do.
And that's what these are.
These are guys from failed societies and they're failed for a reason that we will talk about.
But to call them cowardly, it just doesn't resonate because they know they're not.
We know it's, you know, when you just sling insults at people, it doesn't matter.
They're not cowardly.
They're evil and they're losers.
And that was what Trump was right about.
We should celebrate the NYPD.
We've got to celebrate this guy, Ryan Nash.
He was a uniformed police officer.
This was like out of blue bloods, you know.
It was like this guy, a uniformed police officer.
He's out looking for what they call an EDP, an emotionally disturbed person, probably somebody wandered off.
And he sees this guy with his two weapons running away and he shot him.
Now, you think like, okay, well, that's what he's supposed to do, but you've got to think about it, put your imagination in there for a minute.
This guy doesn't know, is he a drunk driver?
He doesn't know if he's like, you know, what he is.
And he has to make that call.
And as we know, if he makes the wrong call and he's a white guy, for instance, and he shoots a brown guy, you know, I mean, the guy can be crucified.
So he really has to make the call, and he did.
And he, you know, kept this guy from getting away.
He kept him from hurting other people.
Really, so that's Ryan Nash.
And the Wall Street Journal had a point when they said, you know, when they said most New Yorkers regard it as a small miracle that terrorism's success in the city has been minimal, but it's not a miracle.
Protecting the city's sprawling tableau falls to the New York City Police Department, and it must be noted that its record in the years following 9-11 has been stellar.
The NYPD's anti-terrorism unit is a model of relentless vigilance and cooperation with security agencies in the U.S.
And in Europe, vigilance and cooperation are the two indispensable tools in ensuring that the terrorist world remains abnormal.
And, you know, I just want to add to that that they have done this with the New York Times and other liberals, dragging them down for everything.
They exposed the fact that they were surveilling mosques and working to get informants and mosques, and they went after him for this.
And they stopped, you know, they've got the lawyers after, just like they did with Stop and Frisk, this very successful program that was taking guns off the street.
And we know that the New York Times hates guns, but it's not, but it's okay if the guns are in the hands of criminals, if the criminals are in some kind of identity that they approve of.
They had this excellent thing where they would, you know, listen, a cop, I've known a lot of cops, I've talked to a lot of cops.
A cop can tell if you are holding a gun.
He can tell it from a mile away.
You stand with a cop, and he will say, strapped, strapped, strapped.
He knows when the guys have guns.
They just do.
You know, they can see the weight.
They can see the way the pants are there.
And so they were letting people, you know, if the guy was acting suspiciously, they could go up and question him and then they could search him.
And they deemed this stop and frisk and they hammered them and went after this.
And eventually, the NYPD has compensated for it and they've kept it from raising the murder rate, but it could have raised the murder rate and it may yet.
And I think they've also done everything they can to hamper the surveillance of mosques and Muslims and getting informants in the Muslim world.
And I think all of that stuff, everything the NYPD is all the more miraculous because of the relentless attacks by the Times and other leftists in New York.
So Donald Trump, who I think is our president, came out, he started tweeting and blaming Chuck Schumer.
The terrorists came into our country through what is called the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, a Chuck Schumer beauty.
And I want merit-based immigration.
You know, Schumer's trying to wiggle out of being responsible for the Diversity Visa Lottery Program.
He was, in fact, one of its main sponsors while he was then in the House, I believe.
But this is back in the 80s and 90s.
And, you know, Trump's larger point is right.
His larger point is right.
But the thing that got me about this is Schumer immediately said, oh, you're politicizing a tragedy, which is to laugh.
And the media picked this up.
Joe Scarborough, he's immediately, this is terrible.
This is cut number one from Scarborough.
That they were united with him.
And so here you have the President of the United States now, Donald Trump, 16 years later, using a terrorist attack when we should all come together to take cheap political shots against members of the opposing party.
Now is not the time.
Now is not the place.
And this is not what Americans need from their president.
Not just this president, any president.
We need somebody that can bring us together in these times.
Let's go back into the vast distances of time, like a month ago after the Vegas attacks that we still don't know what we still don't have really an idea what the motive, if anything, was there.
Here's Joe Scarborough then.
Nine out of ten Americans, nine out of ten Americans support background checks, enhanced background checks.
Would that have done anything here?
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe not.
It would make America a safer place.
might keep hands out of guns out of the hands of people who abuse their spouses, might keep guns out of the hands of people who abuse their children, might keep guns out of the hands of terrorists.
Certainly something that law enforcement officers, the cop that protects you wants.
So here's, you know, obviously the hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy is big in this one.
You know, the hypocrisy is huge.
You know, Chuck Schumer, all the Democrats immediately politicized the Vegas attacks, immediately went for the gun control thing.
The difference is, the difference is that gun control won't stop attacks like the Vegas attack.
We know that.
And political approaches do apply to Islam to Islamic attacks, Islamic terrorism, because this is a political issue.
This is a political, religious issue.
Now, I think that the one thing I will score Trump on is he shouldn't have gone after Schumer.
You know, Chuck Schumer doesn't want there to be terrorist attacks.
He may be wrong about stuff.
And it's right.
His larger point, Trump's larger point, that we need to look at our immigration system and all these things meant to stop us from controlling immigration, controlling our borders, and keeping out people who don't like us, who have philosophies that are antithetical to what we believe in.
He's right about that.
But yes, I do not believe he should go after Chuck Schumer.
But Lindsey Graham points out that he had just talked, had a conversation with Trump, and he points out that the thing about Trump is, as opposed to Barack Obama for eight years, who wouldn't even say the word Islam, Donald Trump understands what's going on here.
The one thing I like about President Trump, he understands that we're in a religious war.
And to the American people, we're fighting people who are compelled by their religious views to kill us all.
They kill fellow Muslims who don't agree with their view of Islam.
They kill Christians and vegetarians, libertarians, Jews, you name it.
So we're in a war.
And for the last eight years, the Obama administration turned the war into a crime.
So I talked to the president tonight.
He is right to make sure that when somebody comes into our country from a place where radical Islam, and that's the enemy, thrives, that we're going to ask extra hard questions.
He's also right to look at this as a war.
The last thing I want this guy to hear tonight is you have a right to a lawyer.
The last thing he should hear is his Miranda rights.
I've been a military lawyer for 33 years.
There's enough evidence to believe that he qualifies as an enemy combatant under the law of war.
He can be held by our intelligence community as long as necessary to find out, did he act alone and was he part of a bigger plot?
So, I mean, this is much closer to reality than what the Obama administration was selling us for eight years.
We are in a war of philosophy, a religious war.
We have, listen, we have this tolerant openness to religions, to various religions, but there is such a thing as a religion that will not fit into that structure because it doesn't tolerate other religions.
You know, this is the thing that is in Islam.
There is a political aspect to Islam, not radical Islam, all Islam.
There is a political aspect.
It is meant to be a political religion.
And that will not fit into our secular world, our secular governance.
Our government is based on Christian morals, but it is not itself Christian.
Because in Christianity is the idea that you render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and you render unto God what belongs to God.
In Christianity is the idea of secular governance.
But we have to look at what I have to get to, and this is always what drives me a little nuts, is the way the media covers this.
It's the opposite of honest.
Do you remember Faulty Towers?
Does anybody remember Faulty Towers?
Am I the only guy who remembers this?
John Cleese, after Monty Python, John Cleese had this hilarious show called Faulty Towers about an incompetent innkeeper.
And one time in Faulty Towers, this German group comes to the inn and he becomes panicked that somebody is going to mention World War II in front of this.
And that's if you ever hear the kind of meme, don't mention the war.
This is the scene that it comes from, where he's telling people, don't mention the war in front of the Germans, but he can't stop doing it.
Don't mention the war.
I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.
All right.
So, it's all forgotten now, and let's hear no more about it.
So, that's two egg mayonnaise, a problem goebless, a Hermann Göring, and 12 COVID seven.
Now, wait a minute, well, I got a bit confused here.
Sorry, I got a bit confused because everyone keeps mentioning the law.
So, could you?
What's the matter?
It's all right.
Is there something wrong?
Will you stop talking about the law?
Me?
You started it?
We did not start it.
Yes, you did.
You invaded Poland.
That was one of the funniest shows ever on television.
It really was.
So, don't mention the war.
Don't mention Islam.
That is the way the news reports.
Chris Matthews, here's his reaction to what happened.
As in Uzbeki, why would he have an animus toward the United States?
Do we have it as anything to do with geopolitics over in the former Soviet Union, like those Chechnians who created the horror at the Boston Marathon?
Way too soon to answer that question.
A good question.
You know, he was earning a living here in the United States, earning a living as a truck driver, seems to have been integrated into society.
We've talked to one person who says he was a friend of his, saw no sign of this, didn't hear him spouting radical propaganda, seemed to be a friendly person.
So that's just a complete cipher at this point.
It's a chin scratcher, all right.
The guy's from Uzbekistan.
Did we invade Uzbekistan lately?
Is that what it is?
I mean, as we do something wrong in Uzbekistan.
What the hell is he talking about?
Is there some kind of geopolitical something that may have, you know, the guy got out of the car shouting Allahu Akbar?
And nobody wants to report that either.
They kept saying, oh, he said, God is great.
God is great.
You know, it's like, that's not what he said.
He said, Allahu Akbar.
And by the way, Robert Spencer, who is an anti-Islam guy, but he's also a very scholarly guy.
He says media outlets routinely mangle the true meaning of Allahu Akbar, the ubiquitous battle cry of Islamic jihadists as they commit mass murder.
The war cry is mistranslated in the Western media as God is great, but the actual meaning is Allah is greater, meaning Allah is greater than your God or your government.
It is the aggressive declaration that Allah and Islam are dominant over every other form of government, religion, law, or ethic.
Now, that's Robert Spencer talking.
He knows what he's talking about, but he also has a very, a very central point of view.
But CNN, I mean, CNN outdid itself.
And this is getting to where I got into this little squabble with Jake Tapper on Twitter.
But CNN, the guy is reporting the story.
This is cut number three.
And he gets information, and he won't tell the people the information.
Listen to this.
What I'm told is, as he was driving, he eventually maybe perhaps tried to get away and he struck a school bus.
And at some point, police encountered him and shot him.
And so now he's at Bellevue Hospital.
Police know who he is.
They have a description of him.
I'm not going to share that at the moment, but they know who he is.
He is alive at the moment.
And basically, it looks like they're going to try and talk to him.
And I'm going to stop right there in terms of all the information, but that is what we can report at this moment.
I'm a journalist.
My job is to give you information.
I have information from an official source.
Custom Comfort Mattresses00:02:33
I'm not giving it to you.
That's what he said.
You know, back in the 80s, the New York Times, afraid that people would blame, when it was still very high crime in New York, the New York Times got afraid that people would start to notice that a lot of the criminals were black, so they stopped giving that information.
So they would give you the description from the police, but they would leave that out.
Now, if you think about it, what good is a description of somebody?
You know, he's on the run, he's on the loose.
Be on the lookout for a guy.
I'm not going to tell you what color he is, but he's tall.
He's really tall.
And you know, I mean, he has kind of a big nose, but don't can't tell you what color he is.
I mean, that's what these guys are doing.
Why doesn't he want to give you the information?
Because the guy was an Islamist.
We're going to talk about this, and I'll tell you about how I got into the squabble with Tapper.
I mean, Tapper really did kind of outdo even CNN.
But first, let us talk about something else that people argue about, which is their mattress.
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If you're like me, you'll need a comfortable mattress because you're going to be up all night.
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Why The Bible Speaks Sometimes00:07:24
We have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You can come on over to thedailywire.com, which you will want to do because we will be answering the questions in the mailbag.
And there might be one that helps you, but if you subscribe for 10 lousy bucks a month, you can ask your own questions and then we'll definitely help you out.
come on over.
Okay, so now finally the truth comes out.
CNN can't hide it anymore.
They actually are forced to give you the information.
You know, they're a news organization forced to give you the news.
And Jake Tapper gets the news that this guy said Allahu Akbar.
And here's his reaction.
Police have now talked to, they're telling police that they heard this driver saying, yelling, Alo Akbar, Alo Akbar, during this incident, which is now leading authorities to believe that this is as a result, that this is now a terrorism case.
And I'm just getting an update now.
The FBI is taking over this case because it appears now that this is terrorism.
The Arabic Chanda, Ala Akbar, God is great, sometimes said under the most beautiful of circumstances.
And too often we hear of it being said in moments like this.
So I went on Twitter and said, yeah, there are very fine people on both sides, you know, because this is exactly what Donald Trump did.
And that, you know, they misconstrued what Donald Trump said.
He was talking about the people in the statues, and he said they're very fine people on both sides of the statue issue.
They misconstrued it to mean that he was saying they're very fine people among the white supremacists.
But as I said at the time, he did make a mistake.
When somebody has been killed by a white supremacist, the question is not whether they're nice people who want to keep the statues up.
That's the time for the president to come out and say, hey, these white supremacists stink.
It stinks.
It's a sin to be a white supremacist.
It's a sin to be a Nazi.
That's the time to say that.
When a guy just ran down eight innocent people, killed eight innocent people, and injured over a dozen more, you know, that's not the time to point out that Al Akbar sometimes said, so when I attack him for it, he said, I said the words can be said in beautiful circumstances.
This is him responding to me.
Weddings and births, and also too often at times like this.
And he called, actually, you know, Roger Simon wrote about this, so he was really calling, Roger Simon kind of misquoted him on the Twitter thing, and so he was calling him a liar.
But then he started calling me a liar.
And I thought, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Nazis say things at beautiful occasions too.
They say Zig Heil at weddings, maybe.
You know, what the hell does that have to do with anything?
It's because the left is committed and the press is committed to conflating, to conflating identity with philosophy, okay?
It is no sin to be any color that God makes.
It is not a good or bad thing to be any color that God makes.
It is part of God's handiwork.
Your philosophy, you choose.
You choose your philosophy, and there are good and bad philosophies.
And so when people say, hey, you know, there's a problem.
Here's, you know, there was a book called Islamic, what was the name of the book?
It'll come to me.
The point of the book, and it was written by an Islamic guy, was that Islam is different than Islamic exceptionalism.
That's what it was called.
And the point of it was, is Islam is different from other religions in two ways.
One is that it has a political element.
So you can't essentially be an Islamic person without believing that Islam should have a political role.
And of course, the radical Islamists, the guys who are in favor of Sharia law, those are the people who are a problem.
You know, it's not a problem if you just want to go and pray.
Nobody cares in America how you pray.
Zero people care how you pray.
They may want to convert you to their religion.
They may want to preach to you.
Their religion is better, but nobody is going to hurt you because of how you pray, except the worst evildoer.
And every country has evildoers.
But it is a problem if your philosophy is antithetical to Western governance.
That's a problem.
And that is the stuff that should be debated, whether Islam itself is antithetical to Western governance or whether it's only radical Islam.
And how many Islamic people can we have in before that becomes an issue?
Because the other thing about Islam is they worship the very words of the Quran.
You know, the Bible, people sometimes say the Bible is the word of God.
The Bible is not the word of God.
In the Bible, it says that Jesus is the word of God.
The Bible, people reporting on what the word of God did.
So we do not worship the words in the Bible.
And that's why I'm always fighting with people who say, well, it says here, it says this here, it says this here.
And I think, yeah, well, but what is Jesus saying?
What happened there?
That's the story.
But in Islam, the actual words in Arabic, you can't translate the Quran in Arabic are what they worship.
So there's no debating it.
There's no talking about it.
And that is a big problem.
All right.
I mean, so that's why I was arguing with Jake Tapper.
I mean, ever since he went to CNN, I think he's kind of lost his way.
It's just that place.
It's kind of like with Brett Stevens going over to the New York Times.
I think after you're just surrounded by those people, ultimately it starts to seep into your consciousness.
The mailbag.
All right.
From Noah, dear Andrew of the House Claverian, first of his name, the unburnt king of the Andals and the first men, Khalesar of the Great Grass Sea, breaker of chains, and mother of dragons.
I've been making a real effort to find the good in the ideas of people that I disagree with, which is not natural for me.
But as a longtime fan, I know it is for you.
As a natural, albeit cockeyed optimist, I wonder, is there a single positive thing you can say about the legislative legacy of President Obama?
No.
You know, I'm glad he killed Osama bin Laden.
I'm glad bin Laden got killed on his watch.
I disagreed with Obama and I disliked Obama because of his corruption, but I disagreed with him because of his politics.
I mean, everything he did increased the power of government.
Everything he did set the Middle East on fire.
He was a bad president.
He was an incompetent, and he was corrupt.
And I think that those two things together are really bad.
But let's generalize this a little bit more and talk about the left.
I do think the left has a purpose in that they hate this country and they're constantly criticizing this country and the country is imperfect and sometimes their criticisms are true.
So sometimes, like for instance, I think the fact that they're always harping on inequality, I don't think equality is a good goal, but I do think that this economy, as it's currently structured, has left people out.
And I think how to get people back in is what that's what President Trump ran on, and that's why he won.
That's part of the reason why he won.
So I don't think we should stop listening, even though we can stop listening to leftist solutions, we can't always stop listening to their complaints, because one of the things that constant critics do is like a stopped clock.
They can be right twice a day.
All right, from Luke.
Hey, Andrew, my father found himself in a very depressing situation recently.
An old hunting friend that he had lost contact with over several years took his own life back in February.
Last year, he had made some effort to reconnect, but was unsuccessful.
It wasn't until last month when he redoubled his efforts to track him down that he found out about his death.
He couldn't help feeling that if he had been more persistent in his original efforts to find his friend, it may have changed the way he felt about his life and that he may still be alive today.
What advice can you offer my father?
Thanks, Luke.
Feminine Wisdom Matters00:05:56
Yeah, well, first of all, it's very natural.
One of the terrible things about suicide is it leaves everybody feeling very guilty.
It leaves everybody feeling that they should have done something.
But that is making the same mistake that people make when they look at, for instance, an Islamist and they say, what did we do to offend you?
We didn't do anything to offend them.
They have chosen a philosophy.
People are full actors with free will in their hearts.
I've worked with suicidal people off and on for many, many years.
And the one thing you have to grant them is that in the end, it's their choice.
I mean, if you're working with a suicidal person and you lose him and he goes home and kills himself, you know, it's a terrible, terrible thing.
But in the end, people have free will and it's their choice and they make those choices.
And so it has nothing to do with what your father did.
You know, having said that, I will say this, that death is very final, and you do want to keep in touch with your friends.
You know, that's not going to save anybody's life.
It's not going to stop anybody from committing suicide.
But death does come to us all, and you don't want to let people slip away and find out too late that you haven't done it.
That is a totally different issue.
Your father has nothing to be guilty about.
This guy made his own choice.
It's a terrible choice.
It leaves everybody feeling terrible the way he feels is natural, but it's not on him.
From Sarah, although masculinity is attacked by our culture at every turn, an aspiring man can find numerous strong and virtuous examples to emulate, including such great men as George Patton, Charlemagne, and Marcus Aurelius.
But femininity is also under severe assault.
Excellent point.
And it seems that good models are in shorter supply for us women.
Who would you suggest as examples for the feminine types among us to look to?
Well, I actually think, with respect, because I think it's a really good question, a really good point, with respect, but I think you're making a, you have a false premise in there.
Men look to famous people.
All people look to famous people not because of the people they are, but because of things that they do in their life that represent good qualities.
They actually look to them almost as literary figures.
I mean, I'm watching the World Series.
There's a great World Series going on.
There's this terrific player, Altuve, terrific player.
He's five foot six, so he's a little guy for a baseball player, and he's a great, great hitter.
And I find that very inspiring, that he goes out there and you can just see, he's just like a little bundle of testosterone, and he's got a great, his swinging form is a beautiful thing to watch when they slow it down.
And so I admire that about it.
I don't know anything about it.
I hope he's a great person.
I'm sure he is a great person, but I don't know nothing about him.
I'm not admiring him as a human being.
I'm just admiring this one thing.
There are plenty of women in history who might be interesting to you from Queen Elizabeth to Maggie Thatcher to Florence Nightingale.
But that's not the point.
The point is that femininity, the things that make femininity so valuable to society, don't make you famous.
They don't make you famous.
The entire idea of being famous may in fact be a masculine drive.
What Milton called the last infirmity of noble minds may in fact be a masculine drive to be famous.
You may not be looking, if you're looking for someone to emulate, you may be looking for someone who lives around the corner.
You may be looking for your mom.
You may be looking for someone, the lady next door.
The idea that you need famous people to emulate is in fact false on the surface of it.
I mean, any famous person can teach you something interesting about life, whether it's a good lesson or a bad lesson.
But if you're looking for role models, what you really want to look to is the people in your life who are wise and smart and in this case, feminine.
I think, you know, that femininity itself is a quality that is so medicinal for the world, that does so much for the world.
And I believe you're absolutely right that it is under attack in and of itself.
All you hear women is being told to be strong, be strong.
And they mean strong in a masculine way.
They don't mean strong in a feminine way because there is indeed a feminine form of strength and courage.
But, you know, you keep hearing that.
What they really mean is like, you know, play baseball, build your muscles, show you, you know.
And I just think that that is an absolute stupid value.
I think it's a stupid value.
I think femininity is something that is genuinely a good thing in the world and an important thing in the world and a thing that makes men better and makes women better.
And I think you've got to find people who exemplify it and learn from them, but they may be just the person around the corner.
In keeping with this, from Garrett, what is your most feminine quality?
My lacy underwear, I think.
No, I'm just.
I'm sorry.
I couldn't help myself.
All writers have, all good writers have the feminine quality of being intensely aware and interested in other people's emotional lives.
And I think that that is something that is a reason.
I think it was the poet, don't hold me to this, but I believe it was the poet W.B. Yeats, the great Irish poet, terrific poet, who said that if there were no women, there'd be no one for poets to talk to.
And what he meant was that poets and writers are interested in an emotional life in a way a lot of men aren't.
And so it is entirely, I am entirely capable of having conversations, especially with individual women.
When I'm in a crowd of women, I start to feel a little bit like the odd guy out.
But when I'm talking to an individual woman, we can actually talk about that because that is something that writers are interested in that a lot of guys are not, the emotional lives of other people.
So I would say that is my most feminine quality and the lazy underwear.
Okay.
From Susan, dear Mr. Claven the Omniscient, I am an avid listener of your show as of the last few months.
I rarely experience a Clavenless weekend because I am now going back and watching all of the shows you've produced over the past few years and they're fantastic.
You also want to try another kingdom narrated by Michael Knowles.
It is our new fantasy serial podcast that is very, very successful.
Go on iTunes.
Faith, Funding, and Divorce00:05:33
Please subscribe to it.
By the way, please subscribe to it.
And please, if you're enjoying it, because it's getting a lot of downloads, tell your friends about it.
Tell your friends about Another Kingdom.
It is a really, people are really enjoying the story.
All right, my question is this.
How do I convince my best friend and her husband who live in London to maintain the United States citizenship?
Why?
Why would you tell them to do that if they don't want to do it?
I mean, if you think that there's a reason they should do it, tell them that reason.
But it's their choice whether they want to or not.
I mean, I lived in England for seven years, and after six and a half years, I just decided I wanted to go home.
England was not my home.
But maybe they feel it is.
I mean, there are plenty of people who give up their American citizenship and become English British subjects.
It's a great country.
I think it's a mistake.
But if you have a reason you want to tell them, tell them.
But maybe it's not their reason.
I mean, why is that your concern?
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, sorry.
All right.
Let's see.
From Jonathan.
Mr. Claven, I have been enjoying the show immensely.
Recently, President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national health emergency, which was then decried by the left, is not going far enough, even though the problem has been building for years while President Obama did nothing.
I am personally in recovery from opioid addiction, good for you, and have been drug and alcohol-free since 1989.
Go, pal.
My question is: do you think that the plan for addressing the opioid crisis should include funding to faith-based treatment institutions as long as it didn't go solely to organizations with a specific religious affiliation?
I'm very wary about funding for faith-based organizations from the government because once you take the king's shilling, you tend to be dependent on the king.
I know that religions have wonderful programs, and they do get government funding.
The Catholic Church in New York, I mean, just gets all this funding.
And when they threaten to cut it off, they threatened to cut the Catholic Church's funding off in New York.
I think it was over the gay issue.
The Catholics said, go ahead, just try and supply, you know, the kind of functions we supply.
So, look, yes, I think if they're funding things, that they should fund everything, and it shouldn't be about faith-based, it shouldn't be about whether they're faith-based or not.
I think there is a danger, but it's a moral hazard that the church has to face, and I think that the government should not penalize a good program simply because it is based on faith.
Having said that, having said that, I do believe that faith is a powerful, powerful enemy of addiction, as a powerful solution to addiction.
And I believe part of what you're seeing with this opioid addiction is despair.
And part of that despair is coming from our drug-based society.
You know, we have these antidepressants that solve the problem of happiness, but they create a new problem, which is the problem of despair.
You're unhappy, you take a pill, you feel happier, but now you've reduced yourself to a bag of chemicals that can be manipulated to have feelings, and you've lost touch with your spiritual life.
And I think it is the spiritual life, it's living the spiritual life, it is committing yourself to the spiritual life, and not in becoming not becoming a monk, but simply becoming or a nun, but simply becoming a person who lives life as a whole person and not as a physical entity all the time, who's not just thinking about where you're going to get your next sex and where you're going to get your next food, but how are you going to get yourself closer to God and how you're going to become a more full and loving person?
That is the path that leads away from these drugs.
So I think that that's an important point too.
But I'm not against funding religious organizations.
I just think it's a danger that the religious people have to pay attention to.
What do I have time for one more, you think?
You do a quick one.
Quick one.
All right.
From Dana Hale, Mighty Lord Claven, my mother started going to church recently and is very worried that Matthew 19, 9 means that by being married to my father after divorcing her first husband, she's committing adultery.
What do you think about this and what can I do to help assuage her guilt?
Thank you, Dana.
You know, I actually don't agree with that.
And, gee, I'm kind of out of time to express it.
Even God can't do the impossible, right?
Can't do something that makes no sense, that is illogical.
As C.S. Lewis said, just putting God's name in an irrational statement doesn't make it any more rational.
Jesus was speaking into the marriage system of his time, and he very specifically in Matthew 19, 9 is talking about men basically tossing their wives away, which they were allowed to do under that law.
And he was saying, you know, he was protecting the rights of women.
He was saying, you know, because women had nowhere to go.
Once they were gone, once they were thrown out, they were destroyed.
They lost all their rights.
They lost all their income.
They lost everything.
And he was saying, you know, you can't do that unless your wife has been cheating on you.
I am very opposed to divorce in almost all situations, but not in all situations.
I don't know why your mother got divorced.
You know, there are good reasons to get divorced.
There are reasons where you have to get divorced.
And I think that Christ is definitely not judging her on the basis of first century morality.
He was speaking to the rights of people and how you treat people.
And I do not think that you're committing adultery by getting married again.
I mean, I have a lot of problems with divorce.
I don't know why, what that story is, but the story is over now.
And moving on and moving into a new marriage is not, in my opinion, in my theology and in my reading of the gospel, is not going to constitute adultery in the least.
Why Fusion GPS Matters00:06:24
And you can tell her I said so.
All right.
It is time for Tickety Boo News.
So, you know, I want to talk, I've been talking a lot about this.
You know, they were talking about this Fusion GPS and the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are selling this idea that the fact that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats paid for the Steel dossier that Fusion GPS collected, which was a British agent,
an ex-British spy collecting from Russian agents, that that somehow is not the important news, even though what Paul Manafort was just indicted for was for running an organization that was a Russian front and talking to the Democrats.
So all they want is to get a Trump.
All anybody wants to get a Trump.
And I just want to talk a little bit about why I feel that this thing with Fusion GPS is a little deeper than they say it is.
I mean, there was a piece, you know, let me see if I can find this.
The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece recently saying that they thought that Robert Mueller should shut down, should quit his investigation.
He should resign because he was too close to Comey and he was too close to this whole thing.
And in this, they attacked Fusion GPS.
And everybody went nuts because they had stepped out.
Now, I disagree with this, by the way.
I think Mueller should finish his job, do what he's going to do.
I think he should, you know, I think we can hold him to account.
I don't think we have to trust him.
I don't think we have to believe in him.
But so far, I haven't seen him doing anything except in his appointments because it seems like he's got a lot of Democrats on his team.
But so far, I haven't seen him doing anything egregious.
And let's find out what he's going to do.
Let's let him finish because otherwise it's just going to make Trump look like he's covering up.
But the Wall Street Journal points out that they say our sin against media, our other sin against media decorum, has been asking questions about the role played by Fusion GPS in the 2016 campaign.
And they were an opo research firm.
They went out and got dirt on your opponent.
He says, we learned last week that Democrats financed fusion, which then paid Mr. Steele to come up with his dossier that included dubious information about Trump-Russia ties.
Fusion tried to keep the names of its paymasters secret from congressional investigators and even fought a subpoena.
One of the dirty little secrets in Washington is that fusion is a longtime source for journalists, planting political hits that fusion is paid by third parties to dig up.
Now the press corps is defending its meal ticket, often without reporting honestly about fusion and how it works.
One example, and this is an incredible story.
He's an example, a story by Jason Schwartz at Politico on Monday, attacked the Wall Street Journal for their Mueller editorial.
Jason Schwartz quoted Neil King, okay, and he said he's a former Wall Street Journal editor who slammed the Wall Street Journal, saying, I don't know a single Wall Street Journal alum who's not agog at where that edit page is heading.
But Mr. King is, he joined Fusion GPS when he left the Wall Street Journal.
So essentially, Politico is quoting an employee of Fusion to attack the Wall Street Journal for criticizing Fusion.
That is what's happening, okay?
And even better, Mr. Schwartz didn't tell his readers that Mr. King has worked for Fusion.
Mr. Schwartz also failed to point out that Mr. King's wife, also a former journal reporter working in the Obama, worked in the Obama White House.
Now, this whole thing with Fusion just speaks into a way that we don't follow who these reporters are, and we don't follow what they do, and we don't know who their sources are.
And when they say anonymous sources, we don't know what they're selling.
You know, I frequently pick on the press for taking Donald Trump's quotes in the worst possible way.
And Trump's not that articulate, and he speaks brashly and all this stuff.
But I'm always pointing out this thing that they did to him at Charlottesville, where he was talking about the, and I said it was clumsy, it was stupid, he shouldn't have done it, but he was talking about the people who didn't want the Robert E. Lee statue to be taken down.
We have the cut, right?
It's number 16.
Let's just play Trump doing this.
And you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
You had people in that group.
Excuse me, excuse me.
I saw the same pictures as you did.
You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
So obviously, it's really obvious when you hear what he's saying that he's talking about the very fine people who are trying to protect the statue.
I don't even know if there are any there.
And I agree, just like with Jake Tapper, I agree.
That was not the time to bring this up, just like it wasn't time to bring up Muslim weddings after the guy runs over.
Not the time to bring it up.
But headline in the New York Times was Trump gives white supremacists an unequivocal boost, right?
That's the headline in the New York Times.
The piece is written by Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush.
And what I want to point out, I talked about Maggie Haberman earlier.
She is described in Cheryl Atkinson's new book, Smear.
There were memos from the Democrats saying, we have had Maggie tee up stories for us before, and we've never been disappointed.
Maggie Haberman is an ideal, friendly journalist willing to generate positive press for the Clinton campaign.
And Glenn Thrush, let's not forget, remember when they were leaking John Podesta's emails?
One of them was Glenn Thrush sharing his stories with Podesta and asking him to basically approve of them.
So Glenn Thrush was also basically a Democrat operative.
So when you're reading these stories, you are not reading the news.
You are reading Democrat operatives with press cards delivering this stuff.
And that is, as we go forward, and as I assume the Mueller investigation is going to produce more indictments and all that stuff, that is something just to remember as you're reading about it.
Look, it doesn't mean Trump is always right.
It doesn't mean the Republicans are always right.
It doesn't mean the Democrats are always wrong.
It simply means that we are dealing with an empire of lies, which is the mainstream media.
I believe it's crumbling, but it's still there.
It's very much in place.
These guys are all connected with each other, and they are selling a line.
They are selling a line.
And that's why you got to come here.
That's why you got to come here.
You can come here and listen to The Andrew Clavin Show.