Andrew Clavin dissects Alabama’s 2017 Senate race, where Roy Moore’s loss to Doug Jones exposed Republican infighting—blaming media manipulation, Steve Bannon’s "war" on the GOP, and Trump’s delayed endorsement as key failures. He dismisses Moore as a "clown" but argues his defeat stemmed from broader unpopularity, not policy flaws, while defending Trump’s strategic pragmatism over Bannon’s ideological rigidity. Contrasting moral absolutism with his own libertarian views, Clavin rejects judging politicians by personal conduct, praising Trump for preserving freedoms despite disapproval, and frames Moore’s allegations as unfairly delayed. The episode culminates in a critique of progressive cultural norms, positioning Trump as a necessary disruptor to oppressive "Combine"-like systems. [Automatically generated summary]
Republicans have suffered a major disaster in Alabama, and you know what that means?
That's right.
It's time to blame the people we disagree with, make excuses for the people we agree with, demonize large swaths of the American public and political class, and do everything else we can to keep from learning from our mistakes so that we don't have to take a hard look at ourselves or change our opinions, which would be painful and annoying.
The most important thing to do in a situation like this is protect your illusions and replace any budding self-awareness with an elaborate fantasy that coddles your ego and doesn't require any laborious reworking of your personal philosophy or your sense of self.
Some people will tell you now is the time to reassess in order to grow and change and become better and stronger for the future.
I say, what am I, a girl?
By golly, when a man makes a mistake, he owns up to the fact that it's somebody else's fault, mocks and belittles that person relentlessly, then moves on to become a wiser and more blindly belligerent human being.
Okay, maybe not wiser, but you get the general idea.
The fact is, Roy Moore was a great candidate and an honorable man who obviously would have won if more people had voted for him and if he hadn't been a creepy little hypocrite and a terrible candidate.
But in the smoking ruin of our hopes for a brighter tomorrow, I say it's time to proudly lift our heads and look around for half a dozen unrelated rationalizations for this catastrophe that have nothing to do with our own incompetence.
Then one day, we too may be exactly like Hillary Clinton.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape tipsy topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right.
Don't despair.
Don't despair.
It's mailbag day.
It's mailbag.
See, you came in here, you thought, oh my gosh, you know, we've lost another vote in the Senate.
We now have a razor-thin majority full of clowns who don't know how to even handle the majority.
They have right now.
I'm depressed.
I'm sad.
But, but all you have to do is wait till the mailbag gets here and all your problems will be solved.
Political problems.
We actually have a great question.
One great question we have today is about the difference between the way Ben and I handled the Roy Moore situation.
We addressed the Roy Moore situation.
Excellent, excellent question.
I will answer it at length and try to get to all your other questions.
And the answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
I will say that I'm operating, pardon me, I'm operating under a slight disadvantage, which is that I literally, when I say literally, I mean literally, I literally just got off a plane.
I was giving a speech in Silicon Valley to the conservative form of Silicon Valley, which I thought was going to be like 10 guys in like army helmets like in an underground bunker.
You know, Silicon Valley is almost as left-wing as Hollywood.
But in fact, it was a, you know, a big gathering.
It was like 300 people, very wonderful people, fans of the show and fans of the Daily Wire.
Just terrific people, had a really good time.
They were great.
I should say thank you.
Went back to the hotel, fell asleep for like two hours.
They woke me up at three o'clock in the morning, got back on a plane, flew there, and then with LA traffic, I had to drive right from the airport here.
So I really just want to say now if in the middle of the show, I should doze off.
I also, by the way, want to say thank you to Jay Hay's parents who sent me the tickety boo hot chocolate, which I just love.
They were at a Victorian crafts fair.
And of course, tickety boo is an old British expression.
That's where I got it from.
Everything is tickety boo.
If you ever see that Danny Kaye film, The Mary Andrew, it has that song, Everything is Tickety Boo.
That's where I stole it from.
And this is my tickety boo hot chocolate, which I'll be drinking.
So thank you to the Hayes.
I appreciate it.
And stamps.com.
We have to talk about that before we move forward.
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Enter Clavin.
It's everything.
You get everything but the little post office guy, which maybe they're working on.
Pretty soon, they'll have a 3D printer and you'll actually have the postman in your house.
We have, my neighborhood, we have the nicest post.
She's a post lady, but she is one of the nicest people in our neighborhood.
And you know, it's because it's Hollywood.
Why We Left Google00:14:56
There aren't that many nice people in our neighborhood.
But she is an absolute delight when they can print her and she can actually put the stamps on that.
That will be the perfect thing.
But for now, this is really great service.
All right.
So, you know, this is one of those moments.
Nobody likes failure and disaster and, you know, things going up in smoke.
But it is one of those moments that you learn from.
And if you don't learn from it, as I see a lot of people already are not learning from it, then, you know, you've wasted the pain.
The pain is going to be there anyway.
You might as well use the pain to get to a higher level.
This was a disaster.
To lose Alabama is a disaster.
And I think we have now got to form a mob and go out with torches and find somebody to blame and punish for this disaster because that's what everybody's going to be doing.
But we also have to look at it.
You know, when Donald Trump, when Donald Trump won, everybody else was saying like, oh, you know, this just proves that everything I was saying, even though I got everything wrong, it just proves that everything I was saying is true.
And I say, wait a minute, like I was wrong.
A, I thought he was going to lose.
After a year, I think he's done a really good job.
He's an annoying son of a gun, but I think he's done a really, really good job.
And this part of what my speech was about is like why I think that Donald Trump is a much better president than I gave him credit for or gave him credit for being.
You know, you got to change your mind.
It doesn't kill you.
It really does not kill you to change your mind.
Everybody's so afraid that they'll say, that they'll seem weak because they said, oh, I was wrong.
Now I had to change my mind.
But that's actually where your strength comes from.
You always should be changing your mind as new facts come in.
So first of all, my take on Roy Moore was I hated him.
I had nothing to do with the stuff about the girls.
Like I said, 30 years, I have no way of judging what's credible, what happened.
I wasn't there.
I'll talk about that more in the mailbag of how I feel about sexual scandals and things.
I'll try to be very specific about why I feel the way I feel.
But I feel the guy is a clown and a hypocrite and a posture and a bigot.
He's also a bigot.
I mean, you know, you wave your Bible around and you talk about, oh, people shouldn't be committing sodomy.
The only sodomy I'd like to stop is the sodomy of the federal government on me.
It's like the only thing I want out of my backside, the feds.
I don't care who this guy thinks shouldn't be sleeping with somebody else.
And that made the sexual, that gave the sexual scandal some resonance, right?
Because you looked at it and you thought, oh, you know, you're condemning other people, but then you're chasing these girls around the desk.
You know, it doesn't really go.
But the problem for me is that the people who were out there opposing Roy Moore and trying to bring him down, even with the sexual scandal, trying to gin up the passions against him, were some of the truly worst people.
You want to see how happy Hollywood was last night?
What's her name?
Alyssa Milano?
Is that Alyssa Milano's reaction as she's watching the results come in in Alabama?
We needed this so bad.
This is me in my pajamas watching it come in with a law, my best friend.
You should have been at the party.
Alex Mark, you're there.
A law for best friends.
It's hardy here.
The country needed this.
Thank you, Alabama.
Thank you so much, Alabama.
Oh, my God.
We got to see more.
I want to see more.
I want to see the more people.
They're so sad.
Thank you.
This news just comes in across.
Alabama.
The people of Alabama made this happen.
They said, we do not want this man representing this state.
This bad man, Roy Moore.
We do not want him representing.
And they, the women and the women of color, they got out there and they voted and they made this happen.
It's like, boy, Alabama, Alyssa Milana loves you.
This is a wonderful moment.
You know, what's so hypocritical about this and what's what my whole point about this is she's sitting around with if they stop this bad man, she don't care about this bad man.
You think the people who are out there campaigning against him were trying to protect the females of Washington, D.C. from the evil predations of Roy Moore?
That's not what's happening.
They want the damn vote.
And now, now, you know, it's a question of when Moore will be seated.
It will be sometime later this month or early in the new year.
But now they've got to get that tax bill through.
And the Democrats, I love the Democrats.
You got to love the hilarious hypocrisy of the Democrats.
The Democrats are now making speeches.
It would be wrong of you to pass, go ahead and pass this tax reform, as if we didn't remember Obamacare and Scott Brown coming in at the last minute.
It would be wrong of you to pass this health care bill.
And the only thing that's a little bit spooky is the idea that the Republicans might listen to him.
I don't think they will.
I really don't think they will.
But this is, I mean, it's absurd.
So that's what this is about.
Oh, and also, we got to show you Wolf Blitzer because, I mean, if you think Hollywood was happy, what about the news industry?
This is the news industry, the objective CNN that just calls an apple an apple.
See, here's Wolf Blitzer just rocketing out of his shoes as he announces the victory.
And CNN projects Doug Jones, the Democrat.
He will be the next United States Senator from Alabama.
He beats Roy Moore in this really, really exciting contest.
Doug Jones comes from behind, takes the lead, and now CNN projects he will be the next senator.
First time in 25 years that a Democrat will be elected senator from the state of Alabama, a ruby red state, a very Republican state.
But Doug Jones, Doug Jones is the winner.
CNN projects that he is the winner in this race.
This is a huge moment, a huge win for the Democrats, a huge setback for the president of the United States.
They're getting excited over there at Doug Jones headquarters.
Let's go over to Doug Jones headquarters.
Alex Marcourt, you're there.
They just got the news.
We made the projection.
Doug Jones has been elected the United States Senator from Alabama.
Who was it, Wolf?
I didn't catch the name.
I thought the 17th or 18th time you said it, I started to think it might be Doug Jones.
was it Doug Jones?
I mean, they are so, and this is, this is why, because they played you.
They played the voters of Alabama.
They got them ginned up.
And, you know, it's all on Moore.
I'm not going to say that it's their fault.
This is what they do.
They're Democrats trying to get Democrats elected.
CNN is our Democrats, NBC, Democrats, CBS, ABC.
These are Democrats trying to get Democrats elected.
And they do it by diverting you from the moral questions of politics and conflating them with personal moral questions so that you can feel it, so that you will get emotional about it and you'll say, I can't do it.
What happened to Doug Jones is people didn't show up.
People showed up for city people and black people showed up for Doug Jones.
They didn't show up for Roy Moore.
And the fact was, it was so close that if all the people who had written in another candidate voted for Moore, Moore would have won, which also indicates, I mean, he didn't lose because of the write-in votes, but it indicates those people writing in were probably people who would have voted for Moore, but couldn't do it because of the scandals and all this.
And by the way, again, again, I don't like Moore.
I just feel people got played because we needed the vote.
I would have said, vote him in, then get rid of him.
You know, vote him in, then hound him out, vote him out this two-year term until the next election because there's a special election to fill the Attorney General's seat, Jeff Session's seat.
So it's a special election.
He won't be there long, but it's long enough to really wrong foot what's left of the Trump agenda, especially if they don't get that tax bill through.
Trump, my opinion, my personal opinion, Trump comes out of the smelling like a rose.
Trump did exactly what I think I would have done.
He tried to stop it.
He said he went after Luther Strange.
He supported Luther Strange, who would have won this thing by a landslide.
I mean, he would have, what is it, like 66, 70% of Alabama's Republican?
They lost Alabama.
You know, I mean, it's insane.
So he did the right thing.
When he realized that he needed that vote, he went out and he supported Roy Moore.
He never said what a great guy he is.
He just said, we need that vote.
He kept saying it again and again.
We need this vote.
Vote for Roy Moore because I need the vote with the Democrats not doing anything.
And now, and if you go back, he said he tweeted, do we have Trump's tweet?
Yeah, the reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange and his numbers went up mightily when I did is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the general election.
I was right.
Roy worked hard, but the deck was stacked against him.
And here he is.
Do we have the cut of Trump making the prediction that this was going to happen?
Luther will definitely win.
No?
You know what I'm saying?
Roy has a very good chance of not winning in the general election.
It's all about the general.
Don't forget, we don't stop here.
So, you know, this does tell us something.
Both parties right now are incredibly unpopular.
The parties are incredibly unpopular.
But I believe they are unpopular for different reasons.
And this is just my belief because I don't think this shows up in the polls.
I believe that Democrats are unpopular because of their policies.
If you watch Obama's numbers, they're still very high.
People like him.
They like him personally.
They like Democrats personally more than they like Republicans.
I think Republicans are unpopular because of the kinds of people they are, because they're loud, like Trump.
They're brash.
They say things that polite people are not supposed to say.
And I think that this just shows that the people will go so far in either direction.
They will go to a certain extent with your policies, even though they don't like them if they like you.
And they'll go a certain extent with not liking you if they like your policies, but they won't go beyond a certain point.
Roy Moore, Roy Moore is, you know, his spokesman was on.
Some of this stuff is so comical.
His spokesman was on Jake Tapper.
And the guy, I don't know what to say about it.
He was like out of a little Abner cartoon, okay?
And I don't mean to make fun of the people of Alabama.
I think, you know, obviously there are plenty of great people in Alabama, but also plenty of simple people who are great in Alabama.
But this is the guy's spokesman.
He is there to speak for the candidate.
So first Tapper asks him whether Roy Moore thinks that homosexuality should be illegal.
And the guy, instead of answering the right answer, which is ask more, don't ask me.
You know, I'm just the spokesman, says probably, you know, and then Tapper goes after him with a journalist instinct.
I'm not blaming Tapper for this.
He goes, journalist instinct goes for the throat, says, what's the punishment supposed to be for homosexuality?
So that we get, you know, we can have this picture in our minds of Roy Moore going around pushing gay people off buildings.
And then there's this exchange, which for those of you who can't see it, I will try and describe it.
In fact, I leave my mic on and I'll just try and describe it.
But for those of you who can watch this.
Judge Moore has also said that he doesn't think a Muslim member of Congress should be allowed to be in Congress.
Why?
Under what provisions should you?
Do you have to swear on the Bible?
When you are before, I had to do it.
I'm an elected official three terms.
I had to swear on a Bible.
You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America.
He alleges that a Muslim cannot do that ethically, swearing on the Bible.
You don't actually have to swear on a Christian Bible.
You can swear on anything, really.
I don't know if you knew that.
You can swear on a Jewish Bible?
Oh, no, I can't swear on the Bible.
I've done it three times.
I'm sure you have.
I'm sure you've picked a Bible, but the law is not that you have to swear on a Christian Bible.
is not the law.
You don't know that?
He just stares at the moment.
Ted Crockett, I don't know.
I know that Donald Trump did it when we made him president because he's Christian and he picked it.
That's what he wanted to, that's what he wanted to swear in on.
Ted Crockett with the Moore campaign.
Good luck tonight.
Thank you so much for being here.
Oh, my Lord.
That look on his face is just, I mean, it's priceless.
It's priceless.
You know, how do you sell a candidate like that?
All right.
Let's get down.
I think Trump comes out of this smelling fine.
He's fine.
They'll obviously go after him for, oh, you endorsed a pedophile and all this stuff.
Trump can take care of himself.
Trump has a certain genius for taking care of himself.
And if I have time, I'll get to that.
But I do think there is some real blame to go around here.
And we'll talk about that in just a minute after we talk about your man crates.
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McConnell's Political Strategy00:15:30
Okay, we're going to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to the dailywire.com.
You can listen to the rest of the show.
If you would only subscribe, or if you subscribe right now for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you too can watch it right on the site and you can ask questions in the mailbag and all your problems will be solved.
So, this thing starts out as a war, basically, between, as Steve Bannon would say, I'm using his language, a war between Steve Bannon, Breitbart.com, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate leader.
Let's go back.
Let's go back and look at the two sides.
Let's look at Bannon basically declaring war on Mitch McConnell, who he sees as the head of the Republican establishment that he despises so much.
We have to prove the theory of the case down in Alabama.
This is a test of wills.
And we're going to determine down there who is more powerful.
The money of the corporatists are the muscle of the people.
You know why all those folks are back there, the world's media.
You know why they're down here taking these photos?
Yeah, this is not about me.
It's not about Seb Gorka.
It's not about Laura Ingram.
It's not about Tony Perkins.
It's not about Mark Meadows.
It's not about our beloved commander-in-chief, Donald J. Trump.
They're here because of you.
They fear you, and they fear you because they understand you've had a belly full of it, and you're taking your country back.
Now, you know, Bannon supported, what was the name of the other candidate, Mo Brooks, I think it was, yeah, which was a good thing.
And then when that didn't work out, when that didn't work out, he could have gone over to the establishment candidate, but he hates McConnell so much.
So let's hear McConnell's side of the story here.
This is the way he sees it.
Let's listen to Mitch McConnell talking a while back at a press conference.
Our goal as the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate is to keep us in the majority.
The way you do that is not complicated.
You have to nominate people who can actually win because winners make policy and losers go home.
Very simple philosophy.
That is the way that politicians think.
You know, there's a lot of people now blaming Mitch McConnell for this.
Oh, if he had only supported Roy Moore.
Oh, if the people had only turned out it's their fault they didn't turn out for Roy Moore.
You know, I said people should turn out for Roy Moore and then we'll get rid of him later because we can keep the vote.
That's the kind of cynical strategic thing to do.
They didn't do that.
Here's, let's just listen to one more Representative Republican Bradley Byrne blaming McConnell.
So you get this line.
I think Mitch McConnell is as much about the outcome of this race as any other single person in America.
Mitch McConnell should have stayed out of this race.
And if he would have, we'd have a Republican U.S. Senator coming up there and not a Democrat.
And this is, I mean, this is kind of the line that Bannon and his crew are selling.
And it's garbage.
It is garbage.
Because people, you cannot expect people to go against their conscience.
My conscience looks at the broader political landscape because I don't care what Roy Moore did 30 years ago and looks at the broader political landscape and says we need the vote.
It's worth getting this kind of creepy guy in Congress, in the Senate for now to get the vote.
That's my conscience.
But other people's conscience look another way.
Plus, Mitch McConnell is making political calculations as a political expert, a man who is one of the hundred people in America who is a senator.
So you know he's playing in the major leagues.
He's making political calculations about what's good for his party, what's good for the body of the Senate that he loves.
Listen, I'm not a part of the Mitch McConnell fan club.
I think he's, you know, I think sometimes he's weak.
Sometimes he tries too hard to be too strategic.
Sometimes he doesn't do what I want him to do.
It's not the question of that.
It speaks entirely to competence.
You've never heard me running down Bannon for his philosophy.
Some parts of his philosophy I like, some parts of it that I don't like.
I've never talked about him personally because he's always been perfectly pleasant to me.
But this speaks to competence.
If you are, you know, when you go around talking about war, and this is a war against the establishment, you got to know what you're doing.
It's not war.
It's not war.
It's politics.
And in politics, your candidate has to convince people to vote for him.
It's not their job.
It is not the voter's job to get out there and vote for Roy Moore, who sends out a clown who thinks that you have to swear on a Christian Bible to serve in this country, which is against the Constitution.
A religious test is against the Constitution.
So he doesn't even know what he's talking about.
It's not up to the people to say, oh, well, he is a kind of a clown and a hypocrite and an idiot, but I'm going to go out and vote for him anyway.
They have consciences too.
They have the right to follow their conscience.
You've got to put up a candidate who can win their vote.
When did somebody not explain that to Steve?
When didn't somebody not explain that to Bennon?
This just speaks directly to competence.
It speaks directly to competence.
And the thing is, the idea that Bannon got Trump elected is wrong.
Trump, this is the thing I disagree.
Here's the thing that I disagree with Ben about, that if Trump had been in this race, Trump would have won.
Trump is a genius of communication.
I don't care what anybody says.
It's not a question of whether he's playing 3D chess, like I said.
It's more a question of whether he's a great running back.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
He knows how he's going to communicate, and he knows how to get people to see him in a certain way.
It is an expertise that he has, and he's had it all his life.
He has been dealing with people and negotiating with people and making himself a star all his life.
If you had put Bannon in this situation, this is not a numbers thing.
If you'd put Trump in this situation, Trump would have taken this.
Roy Moore is no Donald Trump.
It is not the same thing.
You have to know what you are doing when you're taking on the establishment.
And Bannon shows that he didn't.
If Bannon is for real, Bannon now goes home and says, I blew this.
Doesn't say Roy Moore, doesn't say Mitch McConnell, doesn't go on the Hannity show and parade around saying, oh, this is the establishment, this is war, and we'll come back and another.
He goes home, looks in the mirror, and says, you know what?
I don't have the skills to do what I want to do.
How do I get them?
Where do I start?
Who do I talk to?
Who do I converse with?
Donald Trump should be looking at Bannon right now.
Look, again, this is not about affection.
It's not about personality.
It's not about politics.
It's not about philosophy.
It is simply about competence.
It is simply about doing what politicians do to win.
And I think that when you are following the people who supported the guy who lost Alabama for the Republicans, right?
You got to get that through your head.
He lost Alabama.
There are strong questions of competence.
They have to be asked.
They have to be faced.
Bannon's going to have to do it personally.
And if he doesn't do it, Trump's got to do it for him by basically undercutting him at this point.
Trump has got to go his own way and have some kind of sense of confidence in his own political instincts because they're much better.
They are much better.
He would not have lost this race.
And he did.
He was right all along, every step of the way.
All right.
But don't despair.
You know, it's only politics.
All right.
Let's go to the mailbag and we'll answer some of these questions.
All right.
From David, and I wanted to go right to this because it is about Moore.
It says, you prefer electing than removing Moore.
Ben thinks electing him is morally wrong.
What accounts for such a stark difference between you when your values are so similar?
And does it cause friction between you?
Well, let me answer that first.
No, it doesn't cause friction between us.
We argue.
We debate things.
We are both patriotic men of goodwill who understand that the world looks different to different people.
We do share most values, I think.
Our values are very, very similar.
But we also do look at things differently, partly through age, partly through upbringing, partly through the way we think.
We think in different ways.
I'm an artist.
I think in a certain way, and Ben is a commentator and a political, very insightful political observer.
He thinks in different ways than I do.
Here are some things on which we differ that people of goodwill are going to differ about.
One is our attitudes towards sex.
And I say that advisedly because I'm not talking about sex as sex, as an act.
I'm talking about it as an ethical aspect of humankind.
I think that I acknowledge that birth control changed the landscape.
Ben and I live the same lives.
We're faithfully married people who love our wives and are devoted to our children, devoted to our family lives.
We understand that that is the happiness plan.
You know, that's the plan you get if you want to live a great life.
But there's a question about how you react to other people's sex lives and how and what they do.
And Ben sort of feels that this is the way.
I mean, I think today he was talking about feeling homosexuality is a sin, and that's a judgment on other people because he obviously doesn't have that urge, and I don't have that urge, so I have a different way of looking at it.
My feeling about sex is twofold.
One, sex is a strong force in human life.
It is a strong wind that blows through human life, and sometimes people fail to deal with it properly.
Most people, at some point in their life, fail to deal with it as they should, whether in a big way or in a small way.
So I don't look at sex as always being indicative of character.
What the news media is saying to you when they bring up these scandals is that these scandals are indicative of a debased character, a character who should not be making laws.
So when they tell you, oh, Mitt Romney stuck women in binders, Mitt Romney, nonsense, genuine nonsense.
Mitt Romney bullied somebody in high school.
Mitt Romney put a dog on his roof.
They're trying to tell you that this guy's character is bent in some ways, and people are looking at sexual scandals that way because we react so strongly to them.
We have these strong emotions.
I look at it differently.
I feel that they are, since sex is such a strong force, especially for men, they're riding this rocket basically, and it can be very difficult, especially when they're young, and they're not as wise as they are when they're older, and they're not as calm as they are when they're older.
I don't always think it is indicative of character if people make a mistake, if people get drunk and made a pass they shouldn't have made, if people went after a girl who was unhappy with how aggressive they were.
I don't always think that actually is indicative of character, and then it becomes none of my business in the political sphere because I feel that politics is not where I go for moral instruction.
I do not turn to Donald Trump or Barack Obama or any other senator or congressman for moral instruction in my life.
That is not what I look for.
What I look for is freedom.
I look for them to cut the government back and to follow the Constitution and keep it under control.
When they don't do that, like Barack Obama didn't, I don't like them.
I reject them.
When they do do it, as Donald Trump has done it, in spite of all my expectations, he has followed the Constitution and cut back the government.
I support them even if I don't like them.
I don't have to like the people in government.
That is another difference between the two of us is where we put politics in human life.
For me, politics is a small part of human life that is only important because it makes the rest of human life possible, right?
Politics is something that you shouldn't.
Jonah Goldberg said this the other day, and I completely agree with this, that politics should be a small, in a free country, politics should be a small part of human life.
You should have to think about it every couple of years, every election day.
You should read up on what's going on.
You should be able to make your decision, vote, and forget all about it.
The problem is the growth of the federal government, its reach into every aspect of our lives, whether a man bakes a cake that he doesn't want to bake, whether somebody lets somebody into the bathroom in their school, the president in Washington is telling somebody in Alabama or Arkansas who should go into the bathroom in their school.
Because the federal government has gotten so large, it has become much more difficult for us to give politics the level of attention it deserves, which is about this much, a little bit, so that now we have to pay more attention because it affects so much of our lives.
We shouldn't get confused with thinking that this is the moral sphere, that this is where the great moral questions are played out.
Really, really, only one great moral question should be played out in the government sphere, and that is how free are you?
How small can we keep this government?
How can we solve problems?
You know, here in LA, we just have had these massive fires.
Up where I lived just three years ago up in Santa Barbara, these fires, all my friends have been evacuated.
These fires are going out of control.
The fire in LA was started, they say now, by a homeless man, a group of homeless people, having a cooking fire that caught fire in the woods.
And L.A., nobody talks about this very much, but LA has become a homeless city, a city full of homeless camps.
There are tents.
You go downtown around City Hall, and there are tents, whole tent cities out there.
I call them Obamavilles.
You know, there are these encampments of homeless people.
Now, that's a question.
What I say as I look at that is how can we solve this problem?
Because people shouldn't be homeless in this country, and most people who are homeless in this country are mentally ill, and mentally ill people should not be wandering around free, in my opinion.
How do we solve this and keep people free and not lessen freedom?
That's the problem.
The Democrats don't ask that.
They always say, how can government solve this?
I always say, how can we solve this and keep people free?
Those are the questions I want answered from government, and I really don't care.
I really don't care whether they divorce their wives or cheat on their wives.
I don't even care if Al Franken grabs a girl by the backside now and again.
She ought to turn around and smack him as hard as she can, which would end his career right there anyway.
So that is a difference in the way I look at politics and the way I look at government.
And finally, and this is probably the most important thing, and the one thing that Ben and I have discussed a number of times, and part of this is just age.
It is just a difference in age.
I look at time differently.
I'm not an idealist.
I am not an idealist.
Younger people tend to be idealists.
They think that there is some way that the world is going to become a better place.
The world becomes a better place mostly through technology.
You know, technology makes the world easier and better.
But in terms of the big questions, the world stays right about the same in terms of how much good and evil there is in it.
I'm not an idealist.
I'm a pragmatist.
And I realize that time is finite.
For someone at my age, time is really finite, man.
You know, time's winged chariot is right over my shoulder.
So I realize that every day, this is what this is the words I, if you go back and look at the video of me and Ben on election day, these are the words I spoke to him on the day.
I said, every day is a day.
What I mean by that is every day that's a good day is a good day.
And every time, and if you string enough good days together, eventually it's not your problem anymore because you are then dealing with the eternal questions you should have been dealing with all along.
Every Day Counts00:05:50
So I look at politics and I just think one day America, one day America is going to be gone.
One day freedom's going to be gone.
Freedom always collapses.
There's no time in history when freedom has lasted.
This is what makes me not an idealist.
I know that I am just trying to save today.
As a political operative, I'm just trying to stay free today and tomorrow and the day after that until I'm gone, then it's your problem.
And that is the way I look at it.
So when I look at this, Roy Moore, I think, yeah, you know, I don't know what he did 30 years ago.
I really don't.
I don't think he's going to rape anybody in Washington, D.C.
I don't even think he's going to chase anybody around.
I think he's a creep.
Let him come in.
Let's pass the bills that he can pass and then throw him out.
That's just because every day is a day, right?
Every day is another day that we can move forward.
I don't see the moral issue to me is freedom when it comes to Roy Moore.
Obviously, if he's a depraved personality who is doing things right now, this is why for me there's a difference between someone who has done something and someone who does something.
Harvey Weinstein was doing things.
It was something he was depraved, seems to be allegedly, I'll say he was an allegedly depraved person who was doing things all the time.
That's got to be stopped.
If it's a crime, he should be arrested.
If it violates the ethics of the body he's a part of, he should be ejected.
And if he does something to a woman that's untoward, she ought to knock him out.
She ought to slap him in the face.
I mean, those are the only remedies society is ever going to come up with.
And it's not right to stay silent for 30 years and then come out and make an unfounded allegation and that should cost the guy a job.
That's not right.
That is not due process.
That is not, there's nothing, you know, I said this yesterday.
They use that word credible.
You have no way of judging what's credible in that situation.
So those are things, those are attitudes that, you know, ways of looking at life, worldviews, I guess you'd call them, that Ben and I are different, you know, have different.
What we have in common are our love of this country, our belief in virtue, our belief in God.
We both share these things, and these are the things that that's why there's really not, at least on my side, I should say there's no friction on my side, maybe.
For all I know, Ben is outside the door going, the minute he's out of there, I've got a crowbar from the man crate.
I'm going to beat that guy.
But no, that's not.
I really, I think Ben is the greatest, and I think that we disagree on certain parts of our worldviews.
All right.
I knew that was going to be a long answer, but from Daniel, Andrew, I read your book, The Great Good Thing, and loved it.
However, I do have one lingering question.
What did your wife say to the nurse who hit on you while she was giving birth to your first child?
As I said in the book, I can't tell you that because it's unprintable.
All right.
From let's see.
From Joshua.
Here's a tough one.
Yeah, I'll take this one.
To the brightest star on the entire internet.
Thank you for your highly informative and entertaining show.
I debated whether to ask you this question, but I decided to seek your wisdom.
My stepdaughter was molested by her biological father.
After we found out, we quickly got her into counseling.
Good move.
I can't imagine what she's going through.
She's an 11-year-old girl.
It's hard enough without being betrayed by her father.
She's been distant from me, and I assume it's because her father ruined her trust in men.
It breaks my heart to see her this way.
I try to let her know that I care and worry about her and that I love her so much, but I don't feel that I should force her to spend time with me.
I miss being able to be a whole family, and I'll never forgive her father for ruining her life.
What do you feel is the best way to have a relationship with my stepdaughter and show her that she can trust me?
I know the saying goes, time heals all wounds, but I'd like to do more to help her in this rough time and her life.
First of all, you're doing great.
You're doing great.
The outcome on these things differs tremendously according to the early reactions to them.
If a child is molested, first of all, you shouldn't say that he ruined her life.
She can get past this.
This is a bad thing.
I'm not going to underplay it.
I'm not going to minimize it, but it won't ruin her life because it won't ruin her life because of the way you're reacting.
Okay, you're doing a great job.
It changes the outcome of these disasters whether the people in her life who are close to her believe her, trust her, react to her, and help her.
And you're doing all those things.
Sent her into counseling.
You haven't said that it didn't happen.
You haven't told her to ignore it.
Hopefully you're not sending her back into any situation where her father can get at her again.
You're right about the guy.
He is as low as you think he is.
He's done a terrible, terrible thing.
He will answer before the judge of all things.
But right now, your job is with this little girl, and you're doing great.
You have given her the cushion of trust she's going to need.
It is going to be tough for you because it's going to take patience.
Partly, you're right.
He probably did make it hard for her to trust men.
He probably made it hard for her.
I talked about this last time.
We were talking about this.
It's hard for children to reject their parents, you know?
And now maybe she, I don't know this to be the case, but maybe she feels that by turning to you for some of the comfort she needs, she'll be turning away from him and rejecting him.
The thing is, you're going to have to wait it out.
Show her, do what you're doing.
Show her you love her.
Show her you're there for her.
Show her you support her.
Maybe if she doesn't want to be alone with you, be there with your wife and be a presence there with your wife.
Show her by the way you treat.
This is one of the most important things for kids too, especially little girls.
Show her by the way you treat your wife, how you respect her and how you love her and how you do not abuse your power over her.
She will, I believe, come around because of the way you're being, because you got her counseling.
It just takes patience.
I mean, look, being a dad is one of, I won't call it thankless because it's incredibly rewarding.
It is incredibly rewarding, but there are times being a dad, you are on your own.
There are times when everybody, including your wife, looks at you and thinks, what are you doing?
Because you have to take the helm and make decisions that people don't like that you know are going to are for the best.
This is one of those moments when as a dad, and that's what you are, you're her dad.
Culture's Madness in Movies00:08:04
You're the only father she's going to have, it turns out, as a dad, you are going to have to take the hit and live with her distance and live with her discomfort and live with her distrust until by your actions and by your decency and by your kindness, you slowly win her back again.
You will.
You're doing a great job.
What you're doing is great.
Let me do one more.
Oh, here is from Stephen, Lord Clavin the Wise.
I have been listening to Another Kingdom with Michael Knowles, God Help Us.
And thus far, I have enjoyed it immensely.
I am an avid reader of fantasy, and my question is, what fantasy writers inspired your writings?
Which ones do you enjoy reading?
That's a really interesting question because, first of all, I don't really like fantasy writing that much.
I thought The Hobbit was great.
I finally did get through Lord of the Rings, but I just found it excruciating.
I don't really like C.S. Lewis.
I love C.S. Lewis's nonfiction, but I don't like his fiction all that much.
But I do love fairy tales, and I have been experimenting for the last several books.
If you go back and look at a book I wrote called A Killer in the Wind, you'll see that it's a hard-boiled American noir mystery story.
But if you read it carefully, you'll see the way fairy tales weave in and out of it.
And I love fairy tales, and I love Arthurian mythology.
I love Arthurian myths.
I love Mallory.
I love Chrétien de Trois.
I love all the old, the Tristan and Ishol poem, and I'm steeped in that stuff.
I know it really well.
So what I was doing in Another Kingdom is I was melding my extensive background in hard-boiled detective fiction and in Alfred Hitchcock suspense fiction with my love of medieval fantasy as it was written in the Middle Ages, more than the ones that have imitated it in the present.
I would like to hear if anybody wants to write in and recommend some really good fantasy.
I have read a lot more fantasy than I think I have because I've kind of read everything, but if there's something that I've missed that I would really like, let me know and I'll react.
It's possible that I'm not thinking of some books that I do like.
All right, we're almost out of time, but let's do a quick tickety-boo news.
So I made this speech in Silicon Valley, and it was really interesting because it was a different speech than I usually make.
I usually go and I talk about the culture in terms of big culture, in terms of novels, in terms of movies, TV, and comedy, and the news, and all the things, the ways the left basically infiltrates our world and eats the moral ground out from under our feet.
But this time, I just talked about something else.
I talked about personal culture, the way the culture affects you in your life by moving what's called the Overton window, which is the window of acceptable discourse, of things you're willing to talk about.
And one joke I make in almost every speech is I talk about the fact that there is no film in which a valiant, brave businessman brings wealth and jobs to a community in spite of the evil EPA environmentalist who tries to stop him with the full force of government.
And every time I make that joke, people laugh because the idea of such a movie is outlandish.
And I point out it is the plot of Ghostbusters, essentially, the original Ghostbusters, but they would never make that movie today.
And people laugh thinking, yes, that's silly.
They would never make that movie.
But then I point out, why not?
Why would they not make that movie?
That is actually what happens.
Businessmen do bring jobs and do bring wealth in spite of the fools and bureaucrats at the EPA who try to shut them down over little, tiny little things.
And the thing is, the left has used the culture to move the Overton window so that we believe all these crazy things.
And I listed, I listed six because in Through the Looking Glass, the Queen says to Alice, I practice believing in impossible things, and sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
And so I listed six impossible things that the left expects you to believe that make no sense.
Things like that there's no inherent difference between men and women.
Things like we shouldn't be racist because all races are essentially the same, but we should support diversity because all races are essentially different.
Things that make no internal sense and don't describe the world as it is.
Islam is the religion of peace, which I always love because the only people who ever say that Islam is the religion of peace are people who are being shot at by Muslims.
They say, yes, but they're not doing it because they're not doing it because it's their belief system.
They're doing it because of something I did.
They're not grown-up adults with their own philosophy and motives.
So I talked about this and I started to compare it.
And I did this a little bit.
I brought this up when I was talking to Jonah yesterday.
I started to compare it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
And I don't know if you guys remember One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
It's about a madhouse.
The novel by Ken Kesey is wonderful.
The movie, I think, won the Academy Award, certainly one of Jack Nicholson's great performances, but I didn't like the movie as much as I like the book.
The book is brilliant.
And it's about a madhouse where these men are in this madhouse.
Some of them are committed, but some of them can leave.
But they stay there hiding from the world and their world, life is dominated by Nurse Ratchet.
And Nurse Ratchet is the agent of what one of the characters calls the Combine, which is the culture.
The Combine is the culture.
And they all look at her as if she is a loving mother.
They call her the big nurse.
They think of her as a kindly, wonderful female maternal presence who takes care of them.
But in fact, she is surrounding them with this cloud of rules and self-doubt and self-hatred that castrates them, basically.
It takes away their manhood.
It takes away their freedom.
And her rule is finally destroyed by Randall Patrick McMurphy, who is a complete lout.
He is a brawling, obscene, vulgar, violent, thoroughly objectionable guy who comes in and breaks the soft tyranny of Nurse Ratchet.
And I said, that is Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is Randall Patrick McMurphy.
The guy, the guy who reminds me of, and I hate to compare it, but I have to, is Steve Everett in my novel True Crime, who is such a bad guy, such an obscene, poorly behaved, rude, loudmouth, that he can see through the political correctness to the truth of solving a crime.
And these are the characters that I've been thinking about, and obviously people have been thinking about, writers and artists have been thinking about for a long time.
And Donald Trump is that guy.
And it is a morally complex thing to deal with such a man because Randall Patrick McMurphy in the real world would be a guy you'd want in prison.
He's a guy who beats people up.
He is, you know, a lout and a drunk and all these things that you might not like if you met him, but he is the right man for a job in a madhouse.
The left's culture has turned America to a certain extent into a madhouse.
When you can pick up newspapers and read that if you don't date a woman who has a penis, you are a bigot.
You know you're dealing with insanity.
When you can go to a college and the liberals have created dormitories for blacks only, segregated dormitories, you know you are in a madhouse.
And it's, and I think that the people who cannot stand Donald Trump, who still can't accept him, who still won't get used to his off-beatness and his craziness, are not understanding how insane, how insane the culture has become.
And they have bought in to a certain extent to that culture.
And I just think, you know, I'm starting to feel that for however long Donald Trump is with us, he may have done a very, very good thing.
He may have freed us a little bit from this Nurse Ratchet culture that was smothering us.
Understanding Insanity00:00:58
And if anybody ever looked like Nurse Ratchet, it was Hillary Clinton.
All right.
Who we got tomorrow?
Tomorrow is the end.
Oh my gosh, the end of the week.
And we've got Christian Toto's coming on to talk about the movies and the Golden Globe Awards.
And we will talk about that and many other things.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Now, I was in a plane.
Did we get a Christmas song?
Oh, we didn't.
I will say chestnuts roasting on it.
Ah, never mind.
see you tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.