Andrew Clavin dissects Trump’s presidency through satire and pragmatism, mocking media hypocrisy over Matt Lauer’s firing while defending tax reform as a policy triumph. He argues voting for Trump in California was a moral stand against Clinton, despite his flaws, framing leadership as a trade-off between character and consequences—like torture or police misconduct. Comparing A Christmas Carol to biblical wisdom, he ties Eliot’s Christian vision to eternal meaning amid political chaos. Clavin also speculates left-wing figures like Lauer escaped scrutiny longer due to cultural bias, exposing double standards in media outrage. Ultimately, he champions Trump’s economic wins but warns his Twitter persona risks undermining foreign credibility, especially with North Korea. [Automatically generated summary]
Matt Lauer has been fired from NBC after apparently assaulting a staffer.
Here's the video.
Bring it in, ladies.
Again, Matt, really?
It's the third time this week.
Did your mommy give you those?
You're making me lie to you.
Get it while it lasts.
That didn't seem so bad.
Insiders say Lauer had had many affairs with staffers before, but those were consensual.
News that women had actually consented to have sex with Matt Lauer sent a thrill of hope through the hearts of untalented, turtle-faced leftist narcissists throughout the country.
Meanwhile, in news, North Korea fired off an intercontinental missile that could destroy Washington if it gets there before Washington destroys itself.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un issued a statement after the test saying, quote, now I'm not just a short, fat little psychopath whom women laugh at behind his back, but I can also kill people en masse.
I'm so happy, unquote.
Chinese President Zhe Jingping said he had meant to help President Trump deal with the North Korean leader, but he had a manicure appointment that day and it slipped his mind.
It's Mailbag Day here on the Andrew Clavin show, so say a fond farewell to all your problems.
We're about to solve them.
Trigger warning, I am Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is to get healthy, also singing, hunky-dunky-dooky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoora, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, mailbag day.
You know, we have a mailbag question today, which kind of hits to the core of everything that we've been talking about, or at least one of the cores of everything we've been talking about.
And the question is, when you're making political decisions, what's more important, the character of the person you're voting for or the results you're looking for?
And I think that this is really some of the stuff we're dealing with with all the sexual material, but it's also something else.
There's a great line in the poet T.S. Eliot.
Let me see if I just, I just want to make sure I get it exactly right.
It's from his Four Quartets, which is his lesser-known poem because it was written after he converted to Christianity.
So, of course, the critics love the wasteland because it's about the wasteland, how meaningless everything is, but they never go to Four Quartets, which is a beautiful, very personal poem he wrote after his conversion.
And at one point, he's listening to the birds in this garden, and he says, the bird says to him, go, go, go, says the bird, humankind cannot bear very much reality.
And one of the things we are seeing now, right now, is that Trump has mastered the fact that the conversations that we have, so many of the political conversations that we have, don't take place in reality.
They have nothing to do.
I mean, Scott Adams, who we spoke to a couple of days ago, he's been talking about this, that people don't act rationally, but it's more than that.
See, this world that we are in, that you and I are in right now, this world of commentary, of radio people talking and giving their opinions, doesn't exist in reality.
This is not reality.
In this world, there's moral certainty.
In this world, outrage sells, outrage sells, because it makes you feel so good about yourself.
In this world, you know there are good guys and bad guys, and people will tell you Donald Trump is the great man or he's an evildoer and all this stuff.
None of that is true.
None of it is true.
But truth, with its nuance, with its shades of gray, with its difficult moral decisions that taint you when you make them, that world is not so popular.
It doesn't sell as well.
I can tell you this because I've been living in that world and writing that world all my life, and I can tell you, you know, one of the biggest selling thriller writers, I mean, I've written crime fiction all my life.
One of the biggest selling crime writers in the world, and I'm not going to name him, is one of the worst writers.
And he is one of the worst writers.
Listen, there are some great best-selling crime writers.
I'm not saying anything about that.
But there's this one guy, and he is, and I hear he's a lovely person, and his books sell by the millions.
And I have never been able to get past page 10.
Why?
Because the villains in his piece are so villainous, and the good guys are so, they're always, the good guys are always kissing their grandmothers and bringing them pie and all of a sudden.
I just think, like, you gag me with a spoon, you know.
But this is what we're all hungry for.
And what Trump has figured out, as we're going to see today, we're going to talk about today, is he's figured out that he can play both things at the same time.
He can play a different game in reality than he's playing in this kind of, what do we call it?
The sort of make-believe-over verse, you know, the fantasy verse.
He's playing two different games with his tweets and with his actions, and it's working out really well for him because while everybody's commenting hysterically, he is having, he is on a roll.
He is doing really, really well right now.
So I got, there was a tweet today about one of our, my favorite sponsors, Man Crates, where somebody tweeted me how wonderful he'd got a man crate for his dad and how great it was.
But he forgot to put in our My Name to get the discount.
So he didn't get the discount.
Now, this is bad twice.
First, it says something about the intelligence level of our audience.
You know, I said to him, I tweeted him back, I said, you didn't know how to spell my name, right?
Because we never tell you how to spell my name.
But he didn't do this.
And you have to do that because it helps us.
Because otherwise, our sponsors don't know that I'm the one sending you there and they will leave us.
And then I will be sitting here talking and there won't be a camera in front of me.
I'll just be talking to myself.
So you want to help us out by supporting our sponsors.
Supporting our sponsors not only gives you stuff, but it gives us stuff.
It keeps us on the air.
And this is an easy one for you to support because we're giving you free food.
I mean, what does it take, people?
You know, free food.
I mean, you know, my audience, I always worry, they go like, do I want free food or do I want to pay for food?
You know, because I know, you know, what happens is the smart people listen to Shapiro and I get you guys.
You know, that's the problem.
But Blue Apron will give you free food, plus it is good food.
Blue Apron is a service that delivers ingredients to your house, all measured, all cut up for you, and then you get a little card with very simple instructions.
I know they're simple because my wife says these are simple as she makes these because they're not simple enough for me.
But you can cook in your house.
You can cook meals, the kind of meals that you would usually get in a restaurant.
And they really are good.
And they're really different.
And they're fancy, you know, it's like it's home cooking, but it's home cooking that you would get in a restaurant.
Let me see if I have a list, if I have some of the, oh yeah, I have pictures.
I should have sent you the pictures so you could put them up on the wall, but it's like these things, I can't hold them up.
It's like butternut squash pasta with kale and brown butter walnuts.
I mean, that's a classic LA thing.
You would go in and order seared steaks and garlic butter with oven fries and romaine salad.
They have these great big French fries, barramundian mix, mushrooms with jasmine rice and Napa cabbage.
I'm looking at the pictures of these things.
They look great.
I should have sent them in so you could put them up.
But, but you got to use the code.
Blue Apron is treating my listeners to their first dinner a $30 value for free if you visit blueapron.com slash Andrew.
Think you can handle that?
Come on, come on.
So check out, prove, you got to prove to our sponsors that you can do this.
So check out this week's menu and get your $30 off with free shipping at blueapron.com slash Andrew.
It's a better way to cook.
It comes right to your home.
You do it in your kitchen and you get a restaurant level meal.
Meeting Schumer's Dilemma00:10:39
All right, let's talk about Matt Lauer first because this is obviously a big story.
I mean, it's only one of many big stories.
One woman complained, and he's out of there.
He is gone.
And the rumor spread by the New York Post, I believe, was that while he was at the Olympics in 2014, he forced himself upon a woman.
Now, they said, I was joking about it before, but he said that they said that he had had many, many affairs with staffers, and people didn't like him, apparently.
They really were just only too happy to get off his show if they could.
But he had many affairs, but those were consensual.
This wasn't.
Variety, the showbiz trade paper, and the New York Times were both apparently working on the story and closing in.
And NBC said that's enough.
Matt Lauer immediately joined with John Conyers, the Democrat in Congress who's been assaulting women, and Al Franken, the Democrat in the Senate, who's been assaulting women, and they gave a three-person press conference together.
A maid?
A maid?
Everybody ought to have a maid They ought to have a serving girl A long thinker about the dustbin Specially when she's just been dating about Oh, oh, wouldn't she be delightful?
Lifting ingiving.
You know, I can tell we're going to start to get letters that I'm not taking this seriously.
But I think this attitude is just about, it's just about done.
So let me just play Savannah Guthrie as co-host, coming on and tearfully delivering the news.
And Hoda, I mean, you know, for the moment, all we can say is that we are heartbroken.
I'm heartbroken for Matt.
He is my dear, dear friend and my partner, and he is beloved by many, many people here.
And I'm heartbroken for the brave colleague who came forward to tell her story and any other women who have their own stories to tell.
And we are grappling with a dilemma that so many people have faced these past few weeks.
How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?
And I don't know the answer to that.
First, just don't get in the elevator with them.
There's one thing.
You know, this is only, this is one of a spate of left-wing people in the media who are going down today.
National Public Radio chief news editor David Sweeney left after being accused of sexual harassment by multiple women.
And Garrison Keillor, who could be the least funny human being in America, he did that Prairie Home Companion that leftists were always sitting around going, oh, it's so witty.
It's so witty.
And you would listen to it, and it was just like having someone take a blanket and put it on your head and then leave you there and pour water on top of the blanket.
It was just awful.
But apparently he is gone.
He says the story, he says he was fired over a story that I think is more interesting and more complicated than the version Minnesota Public Radio heard.
But he is gone.
And, you know, who was it?
Jim Garrity over at National Review.
Smart guy.
He tweeted today, picture traveling back in time a year and telling people that by November 2017, sex harassment allegations had not derailed the Trump presidency, but had effectively ended the careers of Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Leon Weiselter, all these left-wing media figures.
I mean, they must be thanking God for Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly.
If they didn't have Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly to point at, and here is Lauer, here is, this was wonderful.
Our friends over at the newsbusters put this up.
This is O'Reilly recently, the hypocrisy is strong with this one.
Here he is grilling Bill O'Reilly on the allegations against him.
You were probably the last guy in the world that they wanted to fire because you were the guy that the ratings and the revenues were built on.
You carried that network on your shoulders for a lot of years.
So doesn't it seem safe to assume that the people at Fox News were given a piece of information or given some evidence that simply made it impossible for you to stay on at Fox News?
But you don't let your number one guy go unless you have information that you think makes him not true.
Did you ever send a lewd text or email to another employee at Fox News?
No.
Did you ever have any human resources cases brought against you?
Every company in this country, including this one, Comcast, has these lawsuits.
Everyone.
But think about those five women and what they did.
They came forward and filed complaints against the biggest star at the network they worked at.
Think of how intimidating that must have been, how nerve-wracking that must have been.
Doesn't that tell you how strongly they felt about the way they were treated by you?
I mean, that's amazing.
That's an amazing piece of video.
What's amazing about it is if I had the skill to manipulate video, what I would have done was just put Matt Lauer in the chair.
He could have asked himself all those questions.
Because here, you know, there's some people who say that Bill O'Reilly was paid so much that Fox didn't actually mind getting rid of him, that he was costing more than he was bringing in, essentially, or at least detracting so much from his profits that it wasn't really as big a thing as that.
But Matt Lauer was their big guy.
I mean, I thought he was a leftist, biased, crummy reporter.
I always thought he was completely personality-less.
What do I know?
You know, the guy was a big star.
So, Trump tweets, because this is what I want to talk about: that all this stuff is happening, and Trump is tweeting.
There's actual news going on.
Yesterday was a big, big news day, and Trump is tweeting.
So he tweets.
So now that Matt Lauer is gone, when will the fake news practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin?
And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the unsolved mystery that took place in Florida years ago?
Investigate, he says.
This is a reference to an intern.
It's a tragic story, but it's unbelievable.
When Scarborough was a congressman, he had an intern in his office, and she died in his office.
She was found dead in his office.
And there was no evidence of foul play.
The coroner investigated and said that she had fainted essentially and banged her head.
She lost consciousness because of a heart problem and fell and hit her head on a desk.
But a couple months later, Scarborough stepped down saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.
So, you know, that gets tossed around the internet.
And by the time it's finished on the internet, it's like Scarborough's strangling her to death.
But there's no indication of that.
And it's all investigated.
And the other thing with who's the other guy?
Phil Griffin.
He just had a bunch of embarrassing interviews.
I don't really know what he's talking about with that.
But he also has another tweet.
Trump had another tweet.
Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.
But when will the top executives at NBC and Comcast be fired for putting out so much fake news?
Check out Andy Lack's past.
Now, Andy Lack is the head of NBC, and he is under fire because he basically sat on the Ronan Farrow story that exposed Harvey Weinstein.
And he stopped, you know, well, we don't know if he did it, but there was just, it seemed that Saturday Night Live was stopped from making jokes about Weinstein.
And he also is the guy who they sat on the interview with Juanita Broderick.
Was that, have I got that right?
Yes.
He sat on the interview with Juanita Broderick when she accused Bill Clinton of rape.
That was part of Andy Lack's past, too.
So there are all these questions that's coming up.
So that's what Trump is doing, right?
Trump is, and everybody's shocked.
Oh my God, now the story's about Trump.
What a terrible thing.
He tweeted this, he tweeted that.
It's not taking place in reality.
What is taking place in reality is what happened yesterday with the tax reform bill, which is that it passed through a major, major committee place, a committee procedure to go into a vote.
And senators who had said that they were going to oppose it, the guy from Wisconsin and Cork Bob Corker, who Trump had this feud, are saying, nah, you know, we kind of want to get to yes here.
We want to do this thing.
So while everybody's screaming and yelling about Trump acting in this kind of make-believe world that we're all in right this moment, we're living in this world right this moment where there are good guys and bad guys and moral certainties and all this stuff, that Trump is playing in that world, but he's working in this other world.
He completely trolled.
He's trolling everybody.
He is trolling everybody.
He trolled Chuck and Nancy yesterday.
This really did crack me up.
He invited Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to come and talk to him to negotiate about the deadline that's coming up with the funding the government, right?
The government shuts down, I can't remember, December 8th, I think it is.
It shuts down December 8th unless they fund it.
This usual thing that keeps coming up and keeps coming up.
And he invited them to a meeting and then he tweeted, meeting with Chuck and Nancy today about keeping government open and working.
Problem is, they want illegal immigrants flooding into our country unchecked and they're weak on crime and they want to substantially raise taxes.
I don't see a deal.
So Chuck and Nancy refuse to show up and Trump gives, has the meeting with Republicans and he has chairs on each side of him that are empty.
And just like you do at a debate when the person fails to show up and they had little name plates, you know, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi.
So let's start with Schumer.
Schumer comes out, and he makes this statement about Trump's tweet.
That's crying, Chuck.
Now I'm going to play, I'll play a different Chuck cut and see if you can tell which one is the real Schumer.
With his tweet this morning, President Trump made sure that today's meeting is nothing but a photo op.
These issues are far too serious for these kinds of games.
Mr. President, it's time to stop tweeting and start leading.
Yes, you know, I'm not sure who's winning this because now here's the actual meeting, right?
And the press shows up before the meeting and here is Trump.
This is cut two on the no-shows.
Getting Stamps Right00:02:59
The other thing, they want tax increases and we want major tax decreases.
So they decided not to show up.
They've been all talk and they've been no action.
And now it's even worse.
Now it's not even talk.
So they're not showing up for the meeting.
I will say this, in light of the missile launch, probably they'll be here fairly quickly or at least discussions will start taking place fairly quickly.
So to me, to me, like he just made Chuck and Nancy look utterly ridiculous.
And like I said, meanwhile, in real life, okay, the AP is now reporting the U.S. economy expanded at 3.3% annual pace in the third quarter.
That's the fastest in three years.
Like I said, the Republicans took a significant step toward passing their sweeping tax overhaul on Tuesday.
And if you read the New York Times, a former newspaper, they're going insane over this tax thing.
I'll get back to the tax thing in a minute.
First, let's talk about stamps.
Because I know you were sitting there saying, yes, yes, taxes, taxes, taxes.
But what about stamps?
If you want to get stamps, right, you go to the post office.
The post office does a terrific job.
But to get there, you've got to drive to the post office.
You got to wait online.
You got to hope you go according to their hours instead of according to your hours.
So take the post office and cram it into your computer with stamps.com.
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service right to your fingertips.
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And then your lovable mailman, or in my neighborhood, the mail lady, will come and pick it up.
Stamps.com makes it easy.
They'll send you a digital scale, which automatically calculates exact postage.
And stamps.com will even help you decide the best class of mail every time.
I'm a big fan of the post office, but I use stamps.com because I want it to come to me like everything else does nowadays.
It's just bringing the post office into the modern world.
And right now, if anyone in my audience is clever enough to use our tag that gets you a deal right now, stamps.com will give you a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without long-term commitments.
I know you can do this.
Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Clavin.
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Well, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Go to stamps.com, enter Clavin.
It keeps our show going because they know that you're going to our sponsors.
Plus, you get a great deal and you don't have to go to the post office anymore.
We've got the mailbag coming up, but we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means that you've stuck with your problems unless you come over to thedailywire.com and listen to the rest of the show.
And while you're there, you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for the year.
And you can have questions in next week's mailbag, and your problems too will be solved.
Ted Cruz's Response00:07:08
So, you know, talking a little bit more about this tax thing, talking about the difference between reality and the fantasy of the cometariat world, one of the problems the Republicans always have with taxes is that the reality is the tax cuts tend to make the economy explode.
Because you cut the businesses' taxes and the businesses thrive.
So much money is offshore, has left the country, not only because of the taxes, but because of the unpredictable regulations of the Obama administration.
He was constantly churning out new regulations, and his agent, the agencies were just constantly sitting on business.
But the minute that you want to cut the taxes, the left starts talking about they're cutting taxes for the rich.
Well, the rich are the people who pay taxes.
And Ted Cruz was debating Sanders the other day, and he had a perfect description of what this means.
This is cut number one.
Democrats have one talking point on taxes: it's a tax cut for the rich.
And they say it over and over and over again in response to everything.
The most important thing for you to know when you're at home is when they say rich, they mean taxpayer.
Every time they say rich, they mean taxpayer.
Why is it?
Because the very rich, there aren't enough of them.
You know, Bernie ran for president.
He rolled out a tax plan.
His tax plan was a massive tax increase.
If you took every single person in America making over a million dollars and you taxed them 100% of their income, you took every penny they earned, you came in in jack boots and confiscated it, it would pay 8% of the cost of Bernie's tax plan.
See, Ted Cruz is a master of reality.
Ted Cruz masters reality.
The reason he's not president is he can't master the fantasy verse that Trump has mastered so well, because Trump realizes that he can get people to scream about some stupid tweet about Chuck Scarborough and get this tax plan past the talking point, the absurd talking point, that it's a tax cut for the rich.
All tax cuts are tax cuts for the rich because, as Cruz points out, what they mean by rich are taxpayers.
Think your money belongs to them and they're going to give you some of it.
We think your money belongs to you and they're taking some of it for necessary stuff.
You know, one of the things that they're, one of the problems they have with Republicans, I guess Bob Corker is one of them, who says this is going to blow a hole in the budget.
And what they want is a trigger that if it does blow a hole in the budget, if the economy doesn't recover, these tax cuts will go away.
They want a trigger built into the tax reform bill.
And that sounds like a good idea, but it's a bad idea because the companies that will be bringing their money back into America are going to say, well, wait, if this is only going to last five or six years, I can't make this big transfer.
They want to be able to depend on these tax cuts.
You know, so I'm praising Trump's mastery of the fantasy verse.
But there are problems too.
Yesterday, something happened that is not a fantasy law.
Kim Jong-un fired off an ICBM missile that is capable of hitting the U.S. just about anywhere.
Here is the Defense Secretary Mattis describing what it was.
President, Senator, Speaker, a little over two and a half hours ago, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile.
It went higher, frankly, than any previous shots they've taken.
It's a research and development effort on their part to continue building ballistic missiles that could threaten everywhere in the world, basically.
And in response, the South Koreans have fired some pinpoint missiles out into the water to make certain North Korea understands that they could be taken under fire by our ally.
But the bottom line is it's a continued effort to build a threat, sir, a ballistic missile threat that endangers world peace, regional peace, and certainly the United States.
And Trump's response very quickly was this.
And some of you have reported a missile was launched a little while ago from North Korea.
I will only tell you that we will take care of it.
We have General Mattis in the room with us, and we've had a long discussion on it.
It is a situation that we will handle.
All right, so here's the question about Trump.
And it's a question all of us have to ask ourselves now because we've been living in this fantasy verse for too long ourselves.
All of us listening to right-wing radio, all of the left listening to all the rest of the media, which is basically living in this left-wing fantasy that the government can solve all your problems.
It can solve the problem of evil.
It can solve the problem of poverty.
It can solve all these problems that it simply cannot solve, and that it can do so without creating other problems like taking your freedom away.
But on the right, we've had these people saying, you know, pounding their palms with their fists and saying, why doesn't the government do this?
Why doesn't the government do that?
When the government is a very, very difficult machine that has to be, you know, run from the inside, sometimes making all kinds of compromises.
And it's easy to sit and scream into a microphone that you can't compromise when you have to compromise.
So Trump is a master of the fantasy verse, but the question remains, will his mastery of the fantasy verse get in the way of his mastery of reality?
And here's how that could happen.
If, in all these tweets, he so offends senators that he can't get anything passed.
That is one way that happened.
I don't think, for instance, John McCain is going to vote for any tax cut anywhere, ever.
I don't think he's going to vote for anything.
I think he wants to go to his grave, basically, which is where, obviously, I hate to say it, but that's where he's headed right now.
He's very sick, and he's very old.
He wants to go to his grave just basically.
The last thing he wants you to see above the ground is his fingers sticking at Donald Trump.
And he ain't voting for anything that Trump is going to do.
And Trump has not done anything to make that work.
So in foreign policy, Walter Russell Mead wrote a great piece about this in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
In foreign policy, Donald Trump has done a very, very realistic and important thing.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, America got kind of stoned on its own success and started saying, oh, it's the end of history.
It's just a matter of time before everybody lives like we do and everybody has the same beliefs and we all, it's just a question of time.
We just have to manage this.
Now we can go take care of the environment.
Now we can go establish peace in our time.
Now we can spread democracy through the Middle East.
Not so much.
History never ends.
Human degradation and sin never end.
It's all going to go on.
It's all going to be a problem every day.
There's always going to be risks.
There's always going to be compromises.
There's always going to be gray areas.
So Donald Trump has dialed back our foreign policy in a very, very realistic way.
The question is, do his tweets, does his sense of humor, which is great, which I love, does his constantly trolling everybody, is that going to make people overseas distrust him?
Are they going to catch on that he's a trustworthy guy in the room, but not necessarily on Twitter?
Or are they not going to rely on him and are we going to lose some sense of power in the world?
Reality Checks00:06:52
Don't know yet.
North Korea is going to be his biggest test.
He has been trolling this little psychopath over there, this fat little psychopath, and he has been talking to the Chinese.
He sent out a tweet today saying, I just talked, just spoke to President Xi Jinping of China concerning the provocative actions of North Korea.
Additional major sanctions will be imposed on North Korea today.
This situation will be handled.
But we know North Korea is the most sanctioned country on earth.
We don't know whether he is going to develop a foreign policy that has the reality to go with his rhetoric.
It is an amazing thing what Trump has done.
He is a reality TV star and he has mastered the media.
He really has.
What he is doing is a kind of genius.
I'm not saying I like it all the time, but it is a kind of genius.
The question is, does he know the difference?
Does he know where reality begins?
And we will find out.
Let's do the mailbag.
Woohoo!
Khafifi!
That's a new one.
I hadn't heard that one yet.
All right, from William Glenn.
Hey, man, I just overcame a five-year high school college depression, eerily similar to your past trials, as far as I can see from your memoir, The Great Good Thing.
I want to thank you for being the sole primer in the implementation of my self-help and wellness.
You can now claim the show saves lives, too.
Well, that is actually nice, very nice to hear.
He says, you and Shapiro logically drove me to God and I opened my heart to him.
Three months later, I saw him in my life during a party at my most sadistic level as a millennial.
For a fleeting second, I saw my life through God's eyes and his infinite wisdom.
That night, I threw all my paraphernalia out.
Now I see God all the time.
Is this normal?
Do you think I'm suffering from a little overcorrection in transition to this new existence?
I can vicariously feel people's perspective now.
It's all very new and strange.
Please help.
You know, I'm reading between the lines here.
It sounds like a lot of drugs were involved in this, and I think that may have something to do with it.
I don't know.
I do get visions.
How can I put this?
There's nothing supernatural about them, but I do, in prayer, oftentimes suddenly see the world from other people's points of view, suddenly look around me and understand the inner lives of people, suddenly become less judgmental of that's what's happening to you.
That's not a problem.
If you're having some kind of drug reaction, you should see someone about it.
But if you have given up drugs and if you are really trying to get closer to God, you should not ignore the traditions and standards that people have developed over thousands of years to communicate with God.
You should have a church.
You should be trying to understand the Bible.
You should have a pastor in your life who you trust and who can take you there.
Mysticism, I believe in mystic experiences, I truly do, but they are not enough.
You need reason, and reason comes through, is passed down the line through tradition.
You can't reinvent religion yourself.
And I think that it's a very good idea to get yourself into some organized religion that will help you to understand who this God is, who has come into your life and could very well save you.
And I hope he does.
Dear Mr. Big Pants Clavin, you said on Tuesday that the 2016 election was a binary choice.
As a Californian, did you actually believe that your vote for Trump made any bit of difference?
Or was Ben Shapiro right for not voting in the top of the ticket?
After all, Hillary was going to win your state almost automatically.
Thanks in advance for changing my life, hopefully, for the better.
Well, you know, this is something Shapiro and I disagree on.
Now, I have endless respect for Shapiro.
He's a man of insight, and also I have seen him develop into a man of true integrity, which I really am impressed by.
I know he made his decision out of that place of insight and integrity.
I disagree with him.
And I can only tell you why I disagree.
I'm sure he is absolutely capable of telling you why he disagrees with me.
First, we've been talking about this difference between reality and the commentary verse, the fantasy verse.
In reality, I'm a very big believer in reality.
I'm a very big believer in getting, you know, if you ever check out your daydreams, things you want, and then check out the things that really make you happy in life.
It takes only a very little bit of reality to make you happy, whereas your daydreams, you become king of the world, you have every girl you want, you have all the wealth you want.
It really just takes enough money to get by and not have to worry to make you happy.
So a little bit of reality goes a long way.
I felt that somebody was going to be president.
I feel this way all the time, that if I am required to take an action, I have to look at what is going to happen.
What's going to happen if I take this action?
First, I have to look at whether the action is suitable to my conscience.
Can I take that action?
So for instance, I would not plant something on somebody who I thought was a murderer to get them wrongly convicted because that would go against my conscience.
But voting does not go against my conscience.
So I looked at the two people.
I knew one of them was going to be president.
I wanted the better one to be president.
I did not feel that it was morally supportable to step out of that decision simply to keep my hands clean, simply to keep clear of Donald Trump, because not voting for Donald Trump was, in fact, a vote for Hillary.
In California, in California, the stakes were much, much lower.
We knew Hillary was going to win California, but that didn't mean there were no stakes.
Every vote that was cast was a vote closer to, for instance, giving Trump a popular majority as well.
Every vote that was cast was a message sent to the Democrats who are dominating and destroying California that there is another group of people that they have to deal with.
If all the people who didn't cast their votes because it didn't matter in California had voted, it would have been a lot closer.
So the fact that the outcome of my vote was less did not seem to me to lessen my responsibility to do the right thing.
I do not see how absconding yourself.
Look, if you think that Hillary Clinton would have been a better situation, even if you think she would have been a bad president, but you think, for instance, that Hillary Clinton with a Republican Congress would have been fine, you should have voted for Hillary Clinton.
If you couldn't do that, you should have voted for Donald Trump.
The only way I could see where you wouldn't vote for either one of them is if you thought things were going to be exactly as bad either way.
And I simply don't think that that was at all, at all, a plausible reaction.
Listen, do I think there are going to be bad things that come out of Donald Trump?
Yeah, I think there are going to be bad things that come out of everybody.
And I think this was a particularly bad choice to have to make.
But Trump has really surprised me and been a much better president so far than I thought he was going to be.
Do I think there's going to be bad reactions to his poor manners?
Yep.
Do I think there's going to be bad reactions to his manipulation of what I'm calling the fantasy verse today?
Yep.
I think there are always moral hazards.
A Christmas Carol Reflection00:03:12
I think there's a price.
This is the thing.
There's a price you pay for everything.
And I'll get back to that when I answer another question.
From Evan, dear all-wise and powerful Clavin, being that it's close to Christmas, the two most popular stories of this time are the birth of the Christ child and Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol.
Why is it that so many pay homage to Dickens' classic tale in TV and movies?
Listen, I have talked about this endlessly, and you can find, if you read The Great Good Thing, my memoir, I talk about the Christmas Carol.
It was called when it was written the fifth gospel, and I think there's an absolutely good reason for that.
I think it is one of the great works of wisdom literature.
Wisdom literature includes things like Ecclesiastes in the Bible, the book of Job in the Bible, the Tao De Jing, which I think is a brilliant work.
And I just think that Dickens, who was a genius writer, was hit by another level of genius.
And he produced one of the great works of wisdom literature.
It is a book, you know, I was talking, I guess it was last week, I was talking about the difference between living in time and living in reality, and that Christ tried to bring, I am living in eternity, and that Christ tried to bring the vision of eternity into time.
And that is what a Christmas Carol is about.
It is about a man who explores the past, the present, and the future, and realizes that he has to live in all three because that is where eternity lives.
And he changes his life.
What's so brilliant about it is that it brings all that Christliness into an ordinary story, a ghost story about what it is to live.
You know, I was quoting T.S. Eliot before about humankind cannot bear very much reality.
In the very next line, he says, Go, go, go, said the bird, humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been, point to one end, which is always present.
And this is T.S. Eliot's Christian vision.
The Christmas Carol is a brilliant, brilliant evocation of that.
I'll talk more about that as we come to Christmas.
If you watch the only other good Christmas story besides the one in the Gospels is the Jimmy Stewart movie, It's a Wonderful Life.
If you look at it, it's the exact mirror image of a Christmas Carol.
In a Christmas Carol, a greedy man is visited by spirits who teach him the damage that he has done in the world.
In a Christmas Carol, a good and generous man is visited by a spirit who shows him what the world would be like without him.
It is the exact opposite story.
And as every storyteller knows, the opposite story is the same story.
There's only one great Christmas story, and it is that.
It is the entry of eternity into time, which is the story of the nativity.
And it's just the Dickens Classic is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant book.
So, from Liam, dear Grand Inquisitor Clavin, I'm an overseas observer of American politics, and I fall into the camp of having, like yourself, fall into the camp of having reservations over President Trump's conduct and manner, but overwhelmingly positive feelings about his administration.
So far, one of the oft-repeated hopes going into this administration is that President Trump would grow into the office a la Ronald Reagan.
However, in terms of his character, he is still the same blunt instrument, always in search of a nail to hit.
My question centers on this: When we judge President Trump or any man or woman, what matters more?
Rules vs. Individualism00:07:03
Is it their character or their deeds?
As a conservative, is it preferable for a man of the utmost integrity to carry out acts that we don't agree with politically?
Or would we rather take our chances with somebody like Trump who is unquestionably boorish and unpalatable but continues to pursue an effective conservative agenda?
That's the question, right?
That is the question.
Here's the answer: there's a price you pay for everything.
Every single action you take has a price.
The trick that, see, we've been talking about rules, rules-based morality versus individual morality, and I obviously feel that there has to be a little bit of both because rules taken to the extent taken to the furthest extent become tyranny, where individualism taken to the further extent becomes anarchy.
There's a price you pay for everything, and the way you find the best way forward in a complex world is calculating the price.
It's not based on rules.
It's calculating the price.
What the rules help you to do is they help you to go to keep from going off the rails, from saying what they call consequentialism, of judging everything by the outcome, right?
You can't judge everything by the outcome.
I used the example before of setting up a man for murder because you know he committed murder.
That is destroying something bigger than letting the guy for the price of that is destroying the justice system.
If you do that with a criminal, you destroy the justice system and thereby destroy justice.
The price is just too high.
And the rules are established to keep you from knowing that.
But if you live in a world, we live in a world where certain things happen behind the scenes.
Does it bother me?
Every time a cop is caught abusing somebody, you have to punish them.
But does it bother me that occasionally a cop knocks a guy down a flight of stairs because he needs to get some information out of him?
It doesn't really.
It doesn't really.
I don't want to know about it, but it doesn't bother me.
You know, John McCain, here is one thing that John McCain said that I really liked.
He said, we should never ever torture somebody.
And they said, well, what would you do if you knew a terrorist act was about to take place and you could only get the information by torture?
And McCain said, I'd do what I had to do.
You know, that's the answer.
Every day in this country, people are killed in hospitals through euthanasia.
And they don't tell you that.
What they say is, you know, we're going to increase the dose of morphine.
We're going to, you know, if you've ever been through a death, you've seen this happen.
They come in and say, you know, we're going to increase the dose of morphine a little bit every hour.
And they're telling you, they're going to kill him painlessly because it's over.
It is over.
And these are things we don't always want to know about.
We calculate the price.
And with Trump, I think the calculation was easy, but it was unpleasant.
And I think that that's why I disagree with people who didn't vote.
That's why I disagree, because I think what they did was they took the easy way out.
It's not easy for me to say, yep, I voted for Donald Trump.
I know what he does.
And sometimes I really dislike it.
I suspect that things that women have said about him are true.
I don't like it.
I wish the president was Abraham Lincoln.
It's not.
But having calculated the price, it was an easy, easy decision to make.
And it turned out to be a much better decision than I feared it would be because I thought the price might be a lot higher than it's been so far.
So there is no simple answer, whether you choose a man of character or you choose someone who does the right thing.
If those are the choices you are offered, and sometimes life does offer you those choices, it is really difficult.
And you have to sit down knowing yourself and you have to make that decision every time, every single time.
There is no way except to know that you cannot, there is a line you cannot cross.
If I had thought, for instance, and this was my biggest fear, if I had thought, for instance, that Trump really was a Nazi or an authoritarian, somebody who would damage the government, then I wouldn't have voted for him.
You know, I would have voted for Hillary Clinton.
I actually, you know, when Trump was first nominated, I thought, oh my God, I may have to vote for Hillary Clinton.
But it became obvious to me that Trump was probably, very, very probably not that guy.
And that Hillary Clinton was that guy in a very quiet way.
Like Obama, she was going to reduce our constitutional government, reduce our freedom.
And that was the decision I made, and I am really happy I made it, and I'm really satisfied with the results.
But there's a price.
There is a price, and we will pay it as we go along.
And we pay all prices every day.
All right.
I have to do one more, and then I'll stop.
What should I do here?
If Hillary Clinton from Daniel, if Hillary Clinton was the president now, do you think that the media would still be so focused on all of these sexual assault allegations happening these days?
Or would they be a bit more silent about it to protect Hillary from Bill's past deeds?
Yeah, I think they would have been silent.
I don't think, I do not believe that Harvey Weinstein would have gone down like this if he was still a bundler for Hillary Clinton.
I do not believe it.
I do not believe that the New York Times, which is now a leftist propaganda outfit, I do not believe that they would have undermined the first woman president by essentially exposing Bill to the kind of opprobrium he would be exposed to if this kind of scandal had taken place.
I mean, Hillary is still giving interviews saying every woman should be believed.
She's making a total fool of herself.
I do not think they would have put her in this position.
I might be wrong, but I simply don't think so.
I think that it is Bill Clinton's malfeasance that allowed these guys to operate for so long.
Why?
Why, if everybody knew what Matt Lauer was doing, why was he allowed to operate for so long?
Why, if everybody, as Koki Roberts said, knew you couldn't get into an elevator with John Conyers, this Democrat icon, why was that allowed to go on?
Why didn't they say it?
Part of the reason, the only reason it's coming out now is because you can't keep secrets anymore because of the non-mainstream media.
The only reason I think this stuff is coming out is because you can't keep the secret.
It's going to come out.
And because Bill Clinton isn't president and people feel, you know, people feel shame and remorse for having covered up for this long and having made a feminist icon out of this woman who basically helped him cover up rape and allegations of rape and allegations of abuse.
I think that this is a coming to Jesus moment.
There is a reason why all these people who are being busted, so many of these people are left-wingers.
I mean, there's Roy Moore and there's O'Reilly who is accused, and there is Roger Ailes, but all the rest of them are left-wingers.
There's a reason for that is because if a right-winger had done it, he'd have been caught.
It's not because right-wingers are better people.
They're not.
Their philosophy is better, but they would have been caught, so they didn't do it.
These guys knew they could get away with it because they lived in the left-wing communication world.
You know, that's why they knew it.
All right.
Do I have time to do a quick, you know, we had this technical glitch, so I went a little long.
You know what?
Let's just pass on.
We'll come back tomorrow.
Who have we got tomorrow?
We've got...
Kinster.
What is it?
Ken Stern.
Ken Stern.
Oh, yeah.
He's written this really, really interesting book called Republican Like Me.
And he has traveled around as a liberal talking to conservatives and had a kind of a revelation.