Andrew Clavin exposes mainstream media as a "three-card Monty" scam, citing CNN’s fabricated Flynn/Trump Jr. narratives and Al Franken/Roy Moore sex scandals as distractions from real governance failures. He argues moral hypocrisy—like excusing theft for anti-terrorism—mirrors how elites weaponize outrage over personal flaws while ignoring systemic corruption. Contrasting Christianity’s divine simplicity with Eastern mysticism, he mocks revisionist history (e.g., Eisenhower’s infidelity as a WWII surrender cause) and urges listeners to reject fearmongering over freedoms. The episode ends with a call to action: prioritize substance over spectacle before democracy’s erosion. [Automatically generated summary]
So a long time ago when I was still a teenager, I did something incredibly stupid, as many of us do when we're teenagers.
And of course, instead of costing me a fortune, it cost a friend of mine a fortune, I was traveling in Europe with a pal and we were in London and we were walking through a kind of connecting alley and we came upon a three-card Monty game.
Now, most of you know what that is, but that's where the guy takes three cards and he shuffles them around.
You have to find the queen and you bet money on whether he can hide the queen from you or whether you can pick it out of the deck.
And out of those three cards, and there was a huge crowd gathered around it, maybe 20, 25 people, and they're all shouting and there's a lot of excitement and people are winning and people are losing.
And I'm watching this thing and I've never seen this up close before.
You know, I'm only a kid.
I'm maybe 18, 19 years old.
I've never really seen a three-card Monty game before.
And I start to think like, gee, you know, some of these people are picking it out and some of them aren't, but I'm picking it out every time.
I'm getting it every time.
Some of them are winning, some of them are losing, but I'm getting it every time.
And I started to reach into my pocket and took out some money.
And I said to my friend, you know, I think I've got this.
I think I have got this.
I think I've got this figured out.
And he starts looking at it and he starts to think, because I said so, he starts to think that he can figure it out too.
And I lifted up my hand to lay down the money.
And suddenly it occurred to me that everybody in the alley was part of the con, this entire huge crowd.
I mean, it was 20, 25 people.
They were all part of the con.
And I reached out to my friend and said, stop.
And it was too late.
And he dropped 40 pounds, which at that point was almost $80 on this game.
And he lost the money because of me, because of what I said.
It took me all that time to realize, I mean, it was such an atmosphere, such a complete scene, that it took me all this time to realize that it was everybody, that everybody in the scene except for us was part of the con.
And we walked away, of course, stunned and shocked.
A lot of money for us to lose at that point in time, obviously.
And we went back, and of course, the alley was empty, and they were all gone.
Power Player Reveal00:05:16
And it occurred to me this weekend as I was watching TV and kind of thinking about some of these sex scandals and the Russian thing, that that's exactly the situation that we are all in right now with the communication that is coming out of our TV sets as news,
it's coming over the radio, that even is in the commentary like this, and even to some degree that I'm participating in, that is all part of a con to keep us from studying and looking at and discussing the truly great moral question of our time.
Let's talk about it.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, roll around the zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, are we back?
Yes, we've got Michael Knowles with us today.
He's going to come in after the break, so you've got to be a subscriber.
If you want to see Knowles right away, if you come on over to the Daily Wire and subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, a lousy 100 bucks for the entire year, you could just watch the whole thing right there and see Knowles.
Knowles, of course, you know, is America's sweetheart after his starring role in Another Kingdom, which is now, I think, is close to 1,400 five stars.
I mean, it just keeps going up and up.
And people are really, really loving it.
We have nine, I think there are about four more episodes left of the first season.
And we hope now it's been so popular, we hope we'll have a second season that our sponsor is happy with what's going on and everything like that.
And of course, if you subscribe, you also get to be part of the conversation, which is coming up tomorrow, December 12th, at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
And who will be on it but Ben Shapiro, who I saw yesterday on the Wallace show on Fox.
I was stunned.
I was watching.
He was the power player of the week.
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Join the conversation.
He must be impossible.
I haven't seen him today, but he must be impossible to deal with.
It was a great, great piece.
But it wasn't as great as our Christmas party, right?
I mean, true, yes.
We have a great Christmas party.
It's kind of a scam.
We invite everybody over, and they think they're going to get free booze and food, but really we put them to work decorating our tree.
And some of the people here at the Daily Wire played an amazing stunt on us.
It was really one of the great pranks ever is that Knowles and Jay.
I don't even know what Jay, does Jay still have a job here?
Does he just kind of walk around?
Jay actually runs the entire place.
And then Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire, they got together and they secretly flew my son in from England.
And they kind of were giving a toast by the tree.
And then my son walked in, who was supposed to be thousands and thousands of miles away, and they all sang Christmas carols.
And it was quite, it actually did knock me over.
And it made me realize, you know, deep in my heart that these three guys don't have enough to do.
These are three irresponsible, completely out of control people.
And you wonder, like, how can a place like the Daily Wire, which is so successful, how can it run with these people around here?
Well, the reason is we neglected to use ziprecruiter.com when we were hiring the people who run this place.
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My listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free.
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Go to ziprecruiter.com slash daily wire.
Sex Scandals and Credibility00:15:05
Don't let what happens at this sad organization happen to you.
You can do so much, so much better.
You know, so let's talk about the news because I've been thinking about these sex scandals and all the news.
Do you know this?
Here's a quiz.
On Saturday, Iraqi government forces recaptured the final remaining pieces of their territory out of the western desert along the Syrian border that were still under ISIS control.
Three years ago, ISIS held one-third of Iraqi territory.
Did you know, now, let me ask you, we all read the news.
Did you hear that news?
Honestly, no.
Yeah, no, nobody did.
Of course not.
I mean, I stumbled on it, basically, and I'm really, why?
You know, what were we paying attention to?
Well, part of what we were paying attention to was utterly fake news.
I mean, it's now CNN, and the rest of the news media is not blameless, obviously, has covered itself in shame and has basically become what Donald Trump has been accusing them doing.
One weekend, one weekend, they have blown three huge stories.
Okay, first there was the Flynn's testimony.
I guess this was maybe over a week, let's say a week.
There was Flynn's testimony, remember when he pled guilty to lying to the FBI.
They said that Flynn had been told by then candidate Donald Trump to get in touch with the Russians.
But of course, it was already in December and he had been elected.
So he was president-elect Donald Trump.
So Trump was doing exactly what he's supposed to do.
He was telling his security guy to get in touch with the Russians.
This is something that Obama did, that everybody, every president does.
And the State Department said they had no problem with it at the time.
So it was just a completely false story.
Then there was the Deutsche Bank subpoena.
Remember that Mueller was subpoenaing Deutsche Bank for business funds, business transactions that Trump had made?
That turned out to be untrue.
And then there was this incredible, here's this breathless CNN lead up to their big story about an email received by Donald Trump Jr.
This is cut number one.
Lay out your new reporting today on this effort to give Trump access to WikiLeaks documents.
Well, Kate, this email on September 4th, 2016 was sent to Donald Trump, then candidate Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and others in the Trump organization, including Donald Trump Jr.'s personal secretary.
And in this personal assistant, I should say, and in this email, it actually has a decryption code and a link to a web address where purportedly they could have received the hacked Wikileaks documents.
Included in this, it says that they could also receive the hacked Clinton, Colin Powell emails, the former Secretary of State, whose own emails were hacked and were released 10 days later by a Russian front group.
Now, the timeline is important here because on September 4th, that was after, a month after the DNC was hacked and after their own emails became leaked.
And it was a month before Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails were leaked by Wikileaks.
Okay, so this is this big, big thing.
And you've got the little chart.
If you can't see it, it's September 4th.
And here's July 22nd, September 21st.
And the only problem is, is they left out one little thing, the number one, because it was, in fact, September 14th when the Wikileaks release was free to everybody.
So it was basically like one of you guys listening to the show and writing to me and saying, you know what, you should take a look at?
You should take a look at this.
It was like a complete non-story, total, total fabrication.
And they said, they said, well, we're not firing anybody because we went through our usual procedures.
And you think, like, wait, isn't one of your procedures to look at the stupid date on the document?
But they've got these sources trying to get at Trump, probably inside the administration, probably inside the bureaucracy somewhere.
The deep state guys, and they're phoning up CNN and they're giving him these things.
And they never have to name the sources.
So nobody knows, nobody can vet them.
And they just didn't look at the date.
So here's the big oops.
I just have to play cut number two when he comes back on and it's like, sorry.
Now, we've been reporting that this email came on September 4th.
That was before some of these documents were publicly available.
But we have just obtained a copy of this email.
And instead, we now learn that this email was on September 14th.
So that is 10 days later than what we originally reported earlier today.
And this appears to change the understanding of this story.
And by the way, by the way, when you listen to the news, you always have to listen for the passive voice.
It changes the understanding.
It changes the entire story.
It's not the understanding.
It went from being on a date when it might have had some kind of resonance to a date when it has zero resonance at all.
So it's not a story at all.
So who's, and here's the beautiful part about this, because now it's, and this is just, CNN is maybe the most open offender because there's so many stupid people working for them.
But it's not any worse than anybody.
You know, the Washington Post, who's to blame for the story?
Here's the Washington Post.
Trump Jr., who like his father is vocally partisan and highly critical of the mainstream media on Twitter, claimed without evidence that CNN reporters Manu Riju and Jeremy Hurt got played by their puppet master.
He claimed this without evidence because he doesn't know who the sources are.
How can he have any evidence?
He doesn't know.
And now CNN, Brian Stelter, who is now basically his full-time job, is patching up the disaster that is CNN, the daily disaster that is CNN.
Brian Stelter brings on Carl Bernstein, who used to have some kind of credibility from Watergate.
And what's his name?
David Frum, the guy from the Atlantic, who's now with the Atlantic, used to be a Bush guy.
He brings them on, and they explain to you that the reason we should trust them is because they lie, because they get things wrong.
That's why we should trust them.
Listen to this.
The mainstream media makes far fewer errors than most institutions in our culture because we indeed are in the business of trying not to make errors.
And we have all kinds of procedures in place to keep us from making those errors.
Compare us to Wall Street.
Compare us to banking.
Compare us to the Congress of the United States.
Compare us to almost any institution, and we make fewer errors.
David Fromm goes on and says, well, we're like scientists.
You know, scientists make errors, but then they correct themselves.
But, you know, you're supposed to correct yourself before you go on the air.
And the way you do that is bringing your sources out into the open so that people can vet them.
And they will not be so quick to lie if their face is attached to the lie.
And the thing is, the argument makes no sense because all the errors are on one side.
Remember, they got Comey's testimony was he was going to testify that Donald Trump was wrong and that he hadn't told, that Comey hadn't told Trump that he was under investigation.
That absolutely was the opposite of the truth.
CNN, what else do they do?
They wrote an article, Anthony Scaramucci, remember, was the subject of a Senate investigation for his ties to Russian bankers.
That was untrue.
Republicans funded the steel dossier.
That was untrue.
Even Trump, like little stuff, Trump dumping fish food in the koi pond with the Shinzo Abe.
David Wiegel, who is still on the Washington Post, in spite of the fact that he was exposed as a journalist partisan hack, right?
Dave Wiegel, Trump made a speech, a great, really stirring speech in Pensacola, Florida.
And he puts up, and Trump said it's packed to the rafters.
And Wiegel tweets, oh yeah, to the rafters and shows this picture of the empty stadium.
And here's the real picture of the stadium after it filled up.
It's packed to the rafters.
Because people love Trump.
And Trump is now tweeting.
And Trump is hammering them.
He's tweeting.
Very little discussion of all the purposely false and defamatory stories put out this week by the fake news and media.
They are out of control.
Correct reporting means nothing to them.
Major lies written then forced to be withdrawn after they exposed a stain on America.
Okay.
So let me get to why I'm talking about this and why I think this stains not just the stories they get wrong, but also the stories that may or may not be true.
And I will talk about that in just a minute.
But first, I will talk about stamps.com.
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So I was thinking about this in terms of the sex scandals.
And I am basically done with the sex handles.
And I will tell you why.
I mean, sex is always a very emotional subject.
It's always a subject that gets people going because we all have experience with it.
We all have experience with doing things we regret.
We all have experience with people in our lives who have been abused and all this stuff.
So Franken, Senator Franken, yes, sort of quit.
Now, he did this as I was coming in, so I didn't actually see the speech until afterwards.
But it turned out that he intended to quit.
He says, I intend to resign at a time later on.
This was reported as his resigning, but in fact, it's kind of just a ploy at this point.
The Roy Moore vote is tomorrow in Alabama.
And if Moore loses, will Franken not resign?
And then suddenly the press will say, oh, well, that was a little ridiculous anyway.
Now, Franken is a dishonest guy.
He stole that election.
That first election for the Senate, it was like separated by 300 votes, something along those lines.
And they found over 1,000 felons who had voted illegally.
I mean, it was that is a really serious thing.
Did he grab some girls by the butt?
Maybe so.
Maybe so, but I don't know.
I have no way of knowing.
So, and then there's Roy Moore, and I've said this a million times.
Now, I don't like Roy Moore.
I don't like the way he uses the Bible to condemn people.
I don't like the way he stirs up anger and divisiveness and uses the Bible to bash gay people and all this stuff.
It's just not my thing.
I think he's, you know, what has he got to do with whether people commit sodomy or not?
That's none of his damn business, basically.
And he's not something he's going to be dealing with the Senate.
So he's just stirring up your emotion.
But at the same time, do I know what he did 30 years ago?
Do I know?
I don't.
I have no idea.
So here is the reason that people that the press talks about sex, because I think about the fact that when Mitt Romney was running, we had stories about him putting a dog on the roof of the car.
We had stories about him bullying somebody in high school as if you're still the same person that you were in high school.
Everything, everything is geared toward getting your emotions inflamed so you're not talking about what?
The issues.
You're not talking about what these people are doing.
Now, why?
First, as I said, sex is emotional.
We all do it.
We all struggle with it.
And it makes us say stupid stuff.
I mean, here's Gretchen Carlson who says she was harassed at Fox News.
She is a former beauty queen, and she's very, I've met her.
She's very beautiful, very, but also very smart.
Just listen for a minute to what she says here when she's talking about the partisanship that goes into judging sexual harassment cases.
What I've said from the beginning since my story broke 17 months ago is that sexual harassment is apolitical and that it's completely disingenuous to believe some groups of women and not believe others.
And that's what we're seeing play out right now.
I believe America is in this amazing political divide, unfortunately.
And I would just implore all Americans to try and put their politics aside and put human dignity before all of that.
Okay.
Listen to what she said.
It's completely disingenuous to believe some women and not others.
That doesn't even make any sense.
I mean, this is a smart woman.
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Of course, you believe some people and you don't believe others.
Some people lie.
Some people tell the truth.
But the question, again, is: does it matter?
And the way they get you to think that it matters is they try to implicate you.
They basically tell you that if you vote for this guy who has done something sexually wrong, who has done something perverse, that you become him.
You now are the supporter of pedophiles.
Here's David Brooks from Knucklehead Row at the New York Times, a former newspaper.
David Brooks trying to pitch this idea that the Republican Party, and this is the idea that they're trying to stir up a moral panic in you about what Roy Moore did 30 years ago.
Now, let me stop.
Before I go to Brooks, let me just point this out.
You don't know.
The word that has become abused is credible.
Credible.
These are credible reports.
This woman is credible.
You have no idea.
Neither do I. When a woman says something happened 30 years ago, you have no idea whether she's telling the truth or not.
She may be a good actress.
She may be a good liar.
She may be telling the dead truth.
You don't know.
It is a he said, she said situation.
You can't judge.
And do you judge somebody for what happened 30 years ago?
Is it your job to judge somebody?
They try to implicate you.
And here's David Brooks pulling that trick.
A victory by Roy Moore for the Republican Party is, I guess, the ultimate and empiric victory in it.
Right.
You think there's a long-term?
Is it a temporary vote for the Supreme Court justice for a tax cut?
But for a generation, you're repulsive.
You're repulsive to younger people.
28% of millennials think the Republican Party cares about them.
That's just a generational problem.
You're repulsive to people of color forever.
And so you end up not only making yourself unpopular, but sort of corrupting a piece of yourself too.
Yeah, see, there it is.
There's that argument.
But is that true?
I mean, for instance, if you hire an illegal alien to mow your lawn, are you participating in the problems at the border?
Or is that somebody else's job?
Is it somebody else's job to make sure our border is secure and your job to get your lawn mown?
I mean, you know, obviously, you don't want to be a hypocrite.
Two Parallel Events00:15:43
You try to abuse.
I always try to use people who are, you know, legal, but I know they hire people who are illegal, so you're implicated because once the rule of law breaks down, you haven't got the power to do this.
Is it your job to police what Roy Moore did 30 years ago?
Are you participating in his?
I'm not sure that that is true, okay?
In fact, I'm sure it's not true.
I'm sure you are not participating in that.
What it means when they attack somebody for sexual ethics is they're saying to you, this person is too corrupt, too perverse to serve in the government.
I'm sorry, but for that to be true, the guy has to be doing stuff right now for you to understand this.
That something happened 30 years ago that he shouldn't have done.
You know, is it telling?
Does it say something to you?
Yeah, okay, take it into account.
But who is responsible for this?
There are three ways.
There are three ways that these things are handled.
One, if you have committed a crime and they can prove it, you should go to prison.
If you have raped somebody or assaulted somebody or molested somebody and they can prove it, you should go to prison.
Two, if you violate the ethics and the stated rules of your organization, you should be kicked out.
So, Matt Lauer is fired because of stuff he was doing right now and the fact that he was caught at it and it came out because they all knew he was doing it, but he's fired for that.
And the third is women are responsible for themselves.
This idea that you can keep silent for 40 years and then come out with unproved allegations and destroy a man's career and that makes you a hero and you're the person of the year on Time magazine.
I don't think so.
You have a responsibility to slap a man in the kisser if he puts his hands on you.
You have that responsibility to shout him down in the moment.
And I'm not talking about obviously, I'm not talking about assault, I'm not talking about rape, I'm not talking about anything, any kind of crime.
I'm talking about guys like Al Franken who get handsy with you.
You got to slap the guy, you know?
I mean, if you've lost the fine art of slapping a man in the face, you basically nothing society can do for you being silent.
All right.
So let's talk about predictions.
And you know what?
I have to break from Facebook and YouTube.
So come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe, and you can just watch the whole show right there.
All these predictions of what's going to happen to the party and whether millennials are going to be alienated and all these things, people, you cannot tell.
You can tell the long-term future.
That is, I can tell you you're going to die.
I can tell you America will one day fall and be gone because all things that are built by human beings fall and are gone.
I can tell you kind of what's going to happen with the economy tomorrow, maybe, maybe for the next couple weeks.
Maybe I've got some predictive ability.
It's that middle line where people start to tell you what's going to happen over the next couple of years.
And it's always the same people who on election night were telling you that Donald Trump was going to lose by a landslide.
The same people are now telling you what's going to happen two years.
You cannot do that.
You cannot know what the ramifications are going to be.
If anything, the election of Donald Trump, a guy who obviously has been handsy with women himself, has actually brought this matter out into the open and is kind of purifying some of these organizations.
What is the thing that they are all just this?
It's the Russian collusion thing.
It's climate change.
What is the moral question of our time?
Because what they're saying to you is, you are not moral if you vote for Roy Moore.
And I would argue, by the way, Donald Trump, this is cut number 11, he made this speech in Pensacola and he said this, and this to me sounds completely rational.
We cannot afford this country, the future of this country, cannot afford to lose a seat in the very, very close United States Senate.
We can't afford it, folks.
We can't.
We can't afford to have a liberal Democrat who is completely controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
I can't tell you, I can't tell you.
His name is Jones and he's their total puppet and everybody knows it.
He will never ever vote for us.
We need somebody in that Senate seat who will vote for our make America great again agenda.
Okay, so that seems perfectly rational to me.
That's a political consideration, and that's what we're playing here: politics.
It's not my life, it's politics, right?
This is a part of my life where I judge who is going to govern the country.
So, fair question to ask: Is the guy running so morally corrupt that he can't govern?
Fair question.
If that is not true, if I can't, or if I can't decide whether it's true or not, I can't see what it's true.
Why are you telling me that Mitt Romney tied his dog to a car?
Why are you telling me that maybe 30, 40 years ago, in a way, in a manner I cannot judge?
I cannot judge, maybe 30, 40 years ago, Roy Moore put his hand on the bra of an underage girl.
I mean, that's a terrible thing to do.
It's an awful thing.
But how the hell do I know?
How am I supposed to judge that?
And why am I complicit if you tell me when you're wrong about so much, if you then tell me this is true?
What is the issue that I feel that all of this is getting away from?
And it is the moral issue of our time.
It is the issue of whether people should be free, whether you and I should be free.
Who makes the decisions in our country?
Who decides how the dollar you just made by your hard work is going to be spent?
Who makes that decision?
Who decides how your business is going to be run?
How you're going to worship?
How you're going to exercise your conscience in the world.
Who makes that decision?
Is it Barack Obama in the White House or Donald Trump in the White House?
Or is it you?
Is it you in consultation with your priests and your moral counselors?
Is it you?
You know, everybody who struggles with the issue of God eventually struggles with the question of evil.
And they ask themselves, why does God permit evil?
And the answer always comes back because the first thing before morality that God values is freedom.
He didn't say to Adam and Eve, you will not, you will not touch the forbidden fruit.
He said, you do not touch it.
He gave them a command and let them free to obey or not to obey.
If freedom did not come first, it's implied in every page of the Bible.
If freedom did not come first, there would be no evil.
If freedom did not come first, God would simply move us around like pawns on a chessboard.
Freedom comes first, and freedom is under threat by a government and a country.
In a country that is this large, the government is going to get large.
But it still has to be restrained.
And every day, every time a guy runs for office, the first question, the first and most important moral question is, is he going to make me more free or less free?
So far, Donald Trump has made me more free.
He has cut down on regulations.
And I'm not that constrained by regulations because so far the First Amendment protects me in what I do, but it matters to my neighbor.
He is defending a cake maker's right to exercise his religious rights, even if it gives a gay guy the feels and he feels bad about it.
You know, I support the gay guy's right to live the life he lives, but are these people going to make me more free is a bigger, more important question.
And what they're using is they're using emotion.
The only, let me give you an analogy.
It is as if you were sitting in the middle of a nuclear terrorist attack, right?
Terrorists were converging on your building, about to set off nuclear bombs, and they found the guy who stole a teddy bear from a child.
And they said, look, look, this guy who's going to stop these terrorists has stolen a teddy bear from a child.
What's wrong with you?
Do you believe in stealing teddy bears from a child?
Are you going to participate and be complicit with a guy who steals teddy bears from a child?
And you're going, wait a second, this is the guy who's going to stop the terrorist attacks.
If these people are going to keep me free, then you better show me they are perverse to their core, corrupt to their core, before I send another guy who's going to take away that two-vote margin that Trump has to pass tax reform, to cut government back, to make us more free, and roll back the slow, steady growth of government that has been taking over this country for way, way too long.
You are being scammed.
It is just like that incident in the alley.
It is all of them, including us sometimes, because I can't help but report on the sex scandal.
It's interesting.
I know it draws you in.
I know I want you to listen, and I know it makes you talk.
All of us are complicit.
You have got to keep your mind on the moral question of the time, which is your freedom.
Speaking of freedom or something, let's bring it on Michael Knowles, who expresses his First Amendment freedom by wearing that absurd sweater.
This is one of the only times of the year that I'm allowed to wear.
I try wearing it during the summer.
This is one of the few times it's really appreciated.
It is true.
It is a great, great sweater.
Cynthia made that with her own hands, right?
That's true.
And it's still doused in tobacco smoke and booze from the party on Saturday.
So I figured might as well bring it in.
It's not just me, right?
That is a wonderful party, isn't it?
Oh, it is the best.
It is truly one of the great highlights of the season.
And your prank bringing in Spencer in was spectacular.
It was actually one of the best surprises I've ever had.
Well, we realized who the prank is on because it was just a nice gesture to you.
You saw your son at this great party, truly one of the real highlights of Christmastime.
We had a good time.
He's my pal from college.
We always love hanging out with Spencer.
The real joke is on Spencer, who had to fly 25 hours in a 36-hour period.
It's true.
He was here for 12 hours.
And he's coming back in a week.
He was here for 12 hours and he slept on the couch and then we took him all back.
Classic Clavin, just insisting on going across the globe to read more books and then coming back a week later.
That was funny.
He said to me, I have to go back to do my work.
I knew that you would understand.
I said, I have no argument.
What can I tell you?
And congratulations, another week of another kingdom.
Although we did get burned, the TV lady turned us down, I should say that.
And she turned us down.
I'm sure it's about me.
I really am.
Because she didn't give, she's a lovely person, very smart, but she didn't give her reasons, were a little bit shady, and I just vaguely.
They said, oh, yeah, I really love the project.
I really love the characters and the plot.
There's just one thing that I don't like about this.
Yeah, I wonder what that.
I don't know what it could be.
Maybe it's me, who knows?
But the thing is, I do have more pitches.
They may not happen until next year, but I do have more pitches, so I hope people keep coming in and leaving good reports because we still need that.
That's the only way we're going to overcome the prejudice.
By the way, it is how you know that this town is really against right-wingers because the listeners, Daily Wire listeners, your listeners have really come through.
I mean, there are like 1,300 or 1,400 five-star reviews on here.
And for some reason, TV is still reluctant to buy it.
It does have to.
All right, but let us talk Christmas.
Last time we talked about the genealogies, but this is a more inherently interesting thing.
We're going to talk about the Annunciation.
Somebody asked me when I said you're going to talk about the Annunciation what that is.
It is the announcement of Mary that she is, in fact, miraculously pregnant.
That's right.
And there are two parallel events.
There's the announcement that Elizabeth will become pregnant with John the Baptist, and the announcement that Mary will become pregnant of the Holy Spirit with Jesus.
And those events have important parallels.
So, for instance, Zechariah, John the Baptist's father, is told of his son.
They didn't think it would happen.
They're very old.
He's told in the temple while he's doing the liturgy.
He's a prominent man in a prominent place, performing an important act to God, and he's told in the temple.
On the other hand, Mary is an unknown woman, an unknown virgin in an unknown town, in an unknown private dwelling, to whom the angel Gabriel comes and says, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
You found favor with God, and you'll have a son named Jesus.
And that parallelism shows you all sides of Christianity.
There is this great, important, magnificent, majestic aspect.
And then, of course, Christ himself, the logos of the universe, comes into the universe in the most humble, hidden way that one could.
And Zechariah, the religious guy, doesn't believe in it, right?
He doesn't believe it right away.
So they're very old.
And he says both Zechariah and Mary become scared when an angel comes down and talks to them.
Unsurprising, I think.
If an angel came down to me, I'd probably get goosebumps.
But Zechariah remains troubled.
And they ask when the angel says that they'll have a child.
In the case of John the Baptist, they ask, that can't be possible.
How is that possible?
No way.
They don't believe it right away.
Mary differently does believe it.
She also asks, How is that possible?
Which is a difficult problem.
Obviously, the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox and many varieties of Christian denomination believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Some Protestants don't believe in the perpetual virginity.
Either way, you fall on it.
There's this very strange question.
So the angel Gabriel says to Mary, you will conceive a child in your womb.
She's betrothed.
She, for most purposes of the law, already has a husband, though she's not yet living with him.
And she says, how is this possible?
I know no man.
I do not have a husband.
Or I have not known my husband.
And she isn't stupid.
One assumes she knows where babies come from.
But she says, how is it possible that I will conceive?
And even Pope Benedict says this must remain a mystery.
Explanations on both sides don't really hold up to scrutiny.
In other words, she might have taken it to mean I'll get married and have a baby.
Yeah, one assumes that if an angel came to me now and said, sweet little Elisa will conceive, I'd say, okay, I've kind of figure out how that's going to work.
I don't want to tell any tales out of school, but I could see how that might happen, right?
Mary doesn't seem to understand it.
But it isn't a disbelief.
It isn't this won't happen.
She asks simply how it will happen.
And in that call, that Hail Mary, the word in Greek is to rejoice.
And in the Greek, we see the universality of Christ.
We see the opening up of the promise made to the Israelites, made to the Jews, to the entire world.
And there are obviously so many parallels throughout the Old Testament into this moment.
But Zephaniah says the Lord is in your womb.
Exodus says that God dwells in the Ark of the Covenant as dwelling in Israel's womb.
And now we have the new ark.
We have the ark of the new covenant, which is literally Mary's womb.
And the word literally is so important because that is what Christ does.
Christ unites the heaven and the earth, the physical and the metaphysical, the symbol and the symbolized, in this person of Christ.
So then there is this moment when it has been said by some theologians, the heavens are waiting.
Because unlike other world religions or heresies or sometimes the distinction is blurry, this is a God who recognizes human dignity and free will.
So there's total grace.
There is the angel coming down the mountain, the messenger of the Lord, coming down the mountain onto Mary, telling her what's going to happen.
But then they wait until she says, thy will be done.
I am a servant of the Lord.
Let it be to me according to your word.
So there is still the human element of free will, of human dignity.
God can come down the mountain, but humans have the right and the ability to turn toward God or to turn away from God.
God's Will and Human Choice00:02:19
That's very beautiful.
That's not my own thought.
I lived a lot of these things from Pope Benedict and obviously all of theologians for two millennia.
His book on the nativity is brilliant.
But you know, as you're talking about this, I was thinking about Sam Harris, the famous atheist, who wrote a book and he said he quoted something from Eastern literature, Eastern religion, because he likes to meditate and he thinks this is really important.
They all think that's really cool.
They all think that's really cool.
And there is, you know, I studied Zen for a long time.
There's a lot of very complex talk that sounds very scientific and sounds very modern when you're looking at Eastern religions.
And Sam Harris says in one of his books, The End of Toleration, I think, he says, is there anything in the Christian religion that is anywhere near as complex as this?
And I immediately thought, you know, yes and no.
I mean, no, in the sense that Christianity is made so that the simplest person can understand what's happened because it does not judge you.
It does not have Sam Harris's pride and his intelligence.
It just comes for everybody.
But at the same time, once you start to think about it as an intellectual, as a person who thinks, it is completely full of riches that just come pouring out of it once you start to parse it like that.
And it's endlessly illuminating.
I suppose that word is important.
It's endlessly enlightening in a way that I think modern secularists or former secularists flirt with Buddhism and Eastern religion because it's so simple.
Edwin Bevan, C.S. Lewis's pal, says that it's the natural reaction of human nature: pantheism or seeing God in everything, God in nothing, trying to make him an idea.
But in the Annunciation and in the Incarnation, we see that God is not an idea.
God is a person.
He is a person with a will and with intelligence, an infinite will and infinite intelligence, as Dante describes heaven, where dove si puote choque sivuole, where the will and the ability are one.
That's amazing.
I always thought that quote meant pay up or I'll break your legs.
That's when you translate it into Sicilian in New York.
There's a little bit that's lost in the translation.
So, what are you talking about on your show?
Kids Stand Up00:05:33
Today we are talking about all fake news.
Obviously, this was a great weekend for fake news.
But then we have VDH.
We have Dr. Victor Davis Hansen.
And he has this great book on the Second World Wars.
And on this day in history, Germany declared war on the United States, one of the great blunders of the war.
But now that we know that Eisenhower cheated on his wife, we have to surrender.
We have to surrender.
Otherwise, we will be corrupted by Eisenhower.
Exactly, exactly.
How can I look myself in the mirror?
And also, Jefferson was fooling around with his slaves, so we have to set fire to the Declaration of War.
Please don't compare me to Thomas Jefferson.
I'm so offended.
How outrageous.
Well, I guess, you know, by these standards, by the way, and the left has been very successful at this: of saying, if you support Roy Moore, you'll destroy yourself and you'll have no credibility.
By the way, Bob Menendez is still sitting in the United States Senate.
But if we can only identify and support perfect people, we got one coming in just a couple weeks, baby.
Announced today.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Michael Knowles, America's sweetheart.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Stay tuned for the Michael Knowles Show after this.
All right.
Let's go to our crappy culture.
All right.
I don't know if you've seen this, but this is a very, very moving video.
A lady, Kimberly Jones, in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Her son, a very intelligent boy, has been getting beaten up and bullied in school.
And he got in the car.
He was sent home early again.
And so she videoed what is happening to him and played it.
It is just a heart-wrenching video that has now been seen by over 20 million people.
Let's just play the video.
Just out of curiosity, why do the boys?
What's the point of it?
Why do you find joy in taking innocent people and finding a way to be me too?
It's not okay.
What do they say to you?
They make fun of my nose.
They call me ugly.
They say I have no friends.
What'd they do to you at lunch?
Pour milk on me and put a hand up my clothes.
They're red at me.
Is it just you?
Yep.
Or is it other kids, too, that feel that way?
Say it to other kids, too.
How's that make you feel?
Why did they do it to me?
And I'm the shooter.
Why did they do it to other people?
Because it's not okay.
People that are different don't need to be criticized about it because it's not their fault.
But if you are bedside up, just don't let it bother you.
Just stay strong, I guess.
It's hard.
It'll probably get better one day.
Just heart, it really chokes you up.
So many people have turned up to help him.
You know, Sean Hannity offering thousands of dollars, Donald Trump Jr. offering to take him into his home.
And he'll be fine, I'm sure, with people turning up.
But of course, I've worked on many helplines, I've worked on suicide lines, and I know this goes on all the time.
And we all know it.
We've all been in high school.
High school is a jungle.
Elementary school is a jungle.
Kids are animals.
They haven't learned things yet.
And there's this kind of rough justice out there.
And when I was a kid, I got in a lot of fist fights.
And once or twice in my life, I actually bullied people, laid hands on people when I shouldn't have, and I live with it to this day.
I'm ashamed of it to this day.
But in my defense, most of the time, not only was I not fighting because I was being bullied, I was fighting because somebody else was being bullied.
And several times, and I didn't always win these fights.
You don't get a nose like this by always winning fights.
I won my share, but I also lost my share.
But I did step in when kids were being tormented.
And I have to say that no matter what the administration does, no matter what parents do, justice and the events are going to take place in the field.
And there's some justice that has to be done on the field.
And people always say to kids like this, they say, well, stand up for yourself, punch back, and that's good advice.
But sometimes, you know, the guy who's going to go on and become a tech giant may not be as big as the guy who's a football player.
Here's what I want to say.
See, I was a big guy.
I was a big guy.
And if you're a big guy, if you're a kid and you're a big guy, and maybe you're a popular guy, maybe you're the football star, if you bully this kid, your clique is going to like you.
They're going to slap you on the back.
If you stand up for this kid, you will have your choice of any girl in the school.
Let me tell you this: you will be a hero.
And when you get to be an older person and you start to have a moral sense, you won't look back ashamed.
You will look back and be proud of yourself.
I am proud of the times, even when I got my head handed to me.
I am proud of the times I stood up because some kid had been thrown in a garbage can or somebody was being teased because he was maybe a little effeminate or whatever.
Those are things that stick with me to this day and that I hold to my heart.
And if you do that, there'll be a lot less of this.
If the kids who are strong, if the kids who are popular, stand up, kids like this won't have as big a problem as they obviously do.
All right, tomorrow, who we got on tomorrow?
Jonah Goldberg has come, one of the great writers, great political writers in the country, will be talking to me for some reason.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
Pride In Standing Up00:01:58
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Be there then, and we will end with my favorites.
You know, I only now found out that they've disbanded Pentatonics.
I know, I know, they've disbanded.
I'm so sorry.
But here they are with their great Mary, did you know?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on daughters?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you lose this child that you deliver will soon deliver you?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy gave sight to a blind man?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy will come the storm with his hand?
Did you know that your baby boy has watched where angels drawn When you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of all hooray, hooray.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.