Ep. 434’s The Great Conservative Mistake dissects how leftist media—backed by George Soros and David Brock’s Media Matters—orchestrated censorship via Pizzagate, suppressing conservative voices while pushing "fake news" narratives to silence dissent, even as Trump’s policies (tax cuts, deregulation) faced skewed coverage. Stephen Wilford’s harrowing chase of the Sutherland Springs shooter contrasts with a civilian’s gunpoint standoff that ended in suicide, both framed through faith and community resilience. The episode then pivots to cultural critiques: dismissing Cat Person as feminist overreach while defending "Baby It’s Cold Outside" as consensual, arguing modern gender politics stifle self-awareness. Ultimately, it exposes conservative media’s fragility—dependent on leftist platforms—and warns of a "new Victorian age" where ideology replaces individual agency. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump made a major foreign policy speech yesterday, and here's the coverage from NBC News.
Now you may ask yourself, how did our news media go from being a stately, well-mannered, reliable broker of slightly liberal distortions to sounding instead like a five-year-old girl's birthday party after a mouse got in the room?
The answer, the left builds information outlets and the right does not.
For instance, here's a story you might not know.
Most of you have heard of Media Matters, the leftist propaganda machine funded by anti-American billionaire George Soros and founded by David Brock.
Brock is an expert at manipulating his friends in the media to protect candidates he likes like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and to attack those he dislikes like anyone dedicated to the Constitution and individual freedom.
Now, I'm sure you remember Pizzagate, the crazy and completely unfounded conspiracy theory that spread during the 2016 presidential campaign, saying that Hillary Clinton, her campaign manager John Podesta and others were running some kind of child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a popular Democrat hangout in Washington, D.C.
The unfounded rumors got so bad that shortly after the 2016 election, some disturbed guy went into Comet with a gun and shot some holes in the place, though fortunately no one was injured.
Now what a lot of people don't really realize is that Comet was run by David Brock's ex-lover, James Aliphantis.
Now even before the Comet event happened back in September, Barack Obama and other perfidious leftists were making noise about fake news, i.e. news from a perspective they disagreed with.
Obama even pulled Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg aside and warned him that he was spreading fake news that might be skewing the election away from serial woman terrorizer and former corrupt and incompetent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump.
But after the December shooting at Comet, David Brock, now running a leftist super PAC called American Bridge, began a major push against so-called fake news.
By late January, Facebook gave in and allowed Brock's Media Matters to be part of a mostly left-wing team policing the news on its site.
Google, which includes YouTube, has also taken steps to censor and demonetize conservative voices with the help of left-wing overseers under the aegis of fighting fake news.
And today, Twitter announced its censorship policy is in effect.
It will ban hate, but let's wait and see if it bans calls for white genocide or only bans the comment that there are only two genders.
Investigative reporter Cheryl Atkinson has written plausibly in her book Smear that the timeline suggests that the Pizzagate story may have been spread not by crazy right-wingers, but by Brock's minions in order to gin up a fake news controversy that would give the left censorship powers over the major distributors of information on the internet.
In other words, while Donald Trump and the right are winning the battle against fake news outlets like CNN and the New York Times, George Soros and his people are working behind the scenes to make sure you only get all the news that fits their narrative.
Texture Com: Curating Your Info00:04:36
Let's talk about it some more.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, hooray, rah.
We've got Stephen Wilford here.
is the gentleman who put a couple of bullets in the shooter in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
You remember, it's about, what is it, like a month ago, a month and a half ago, where there was that terrible shooting.
I wanted to talk to him basically about the aftermath.
His first Christmas as his first Christmas comes in.
Stephen is a very faithful believer in Christ, and I thought it would be really interesting to talk to him in the aftermath because a lot of times people like this get interviewed in the moment, but not later on.
And the final mailbag is tomorrow.
You realize what this means.
This means you're going to make all these New Year's resolutions.
You can make many fewer of them if you simply write into the mailbag and let me solve your problems for you.
You won't have to make those resolutions because the problems will already be solved.
You do it by going on thedailywire.com, pressing the podcast button, pressing the Andrew Clavin podcast button, and then you will see, I think there is an actual mailbag where it says mailbag.
You press that and just write it in.
You have to be a subscriber.
It's a lousy 10 bucks a month to have all your problems solved.
I mean, come on, that is a bargain.
Pay $100.
You can do it for the whole year.
Plus, you get the leftist tears tumbler, which you're going to need if the news continues in its current way.
So that's tomorrow.
Final mailbag of the year.
Get your questions in.
The answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life, possibly for the better.
Also, you might want to think about getting yourself a texture app and getting one for your friends as well.
It is the most addictive thing.
I mean, we sell a lot of addictive things here.
I mean, we sell some really good stuff, but this texture app is seriously, it's like diving into a bottomless pool in which mysteriously you can breathe.
That's a really weird, long analogy, but still, you could dive into this thing forever.
What is it?
It is a collection of over 200 premium magazines, and not just any magazines.
These are leading titles.
And the reason magazines are so cool, and we're going to be talking about a magazine later on in the show very specifically, is you really get the information that they have time to get information and put it together.
You can pick magazines that are specifically to your interest.
And once you open this thing, you can save things, you can search things, you can put articles aside.
It really is cool.
So if you're interested in computers, they've got Macworld.
If you like the celebrity stuff, there's people.
Forbes is in there.
Maxim.
The Atlantic.
The Atlantic is still an excellent, excellent magazine.
All kinds of things.
Esquire, GQ, Newsweek, just about anything you want.
So you get the whole spectrum of information, and you're not just on the internet, which is one of the problems with the internet, is it tends to give you stuff that you already agree with.
I always joke about this, but it's absolutely true that some of these apps that curate information start sending me back my own articles so that I'm literally speaking to myself.
With texture, you will get the whole spectrum.
You will be able to, at Christmas dinner, you'll be able to make fun of your liberal friends.
You'll have so much more information than they have.
You'll be able to really take them apart.
If that doesn't work, you can just take your iPad and smack them on the head with it.
So you get your favorite magazines, back issues, anytime, anywhere.
I love this thing.
Start your texture free at texture.com slash Clavin.
How do you spell Clavin, you may wonder?
I know that something, that's a philosophical question people discuss often.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
If you go on texture.com slash Clavin, you'll get a free trial.
And then if you choose to continue, people who listen to this podcast will get texture for just $9.99 a month.
That's over 30% off their listed price, and you're getting over 200 magazines.
So think about that for a minute, what that would cost you if you were actually subscribing.
It's only $9.99 a month if you go to texture.com slash Clavin to start your free trial today.
It's a great, there are some great gift options you'll find for the holiday season.
Please go on and visit our sponsors because they keep us here with these wonderful lights.
You know, we have these wonderful ones.
They keep those lights burning.
United States Courageously Addresses Security00:15:39
So, you know, I talked yesterday about some of the great things I think Trump has accomplished against my expectations.
You know, he's kind of won me over, even though he still kind of goes up my spine sometimes.
But he has won me over with his deeds.
I mean, if you judge a man by his deeds, he has done some great deeds for conservatives and for the Republic and for freedom.
And I think that, you know, you just have to salute that and you have to say, hey, you know, I expected bad things.
You gave me good things.
Good for you.
Bad on me.
There's no problem.
I got no problem with that.
I'd much rather say that than I was right.
I would much, much rather say, you know what, I got it wrong and Trump did a good job than I got it right in Trump's disaster because it's the country, obviously, that comes first.
But here's the funny thing about this: I was worried he'd be kind of a Democrat.
I was worried that his old Democrat instincts would come out.
But I think that the resistance kind of paid to that because they didn't give him any room to move to the left.
And once Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan realized they weren't going to be able to get rid of this guy and he was going to be doing this stuff, they started to do their job a little bit.
And today they're already debating the tax reform on the House floor.
Hopefully, in the next couple of days, it'll get past both the House and the Senate before Christmas, be an amazing, amazing thing.
But the funny thing about it is all this hysteria, all this craziness, all the Russia collusion and everything like this, it has just been basically, he's just a Republican.
He's cutting taxes, he's parrying back government, he's cutting back regulation, he's good for business, he's building up the military.
That used to be, that used to be the typical Republican agenda.
And all we get is craziness.
You know, I was talking to Knowles yesterday, and he reminded me, and I actually remember this, this is in my memory, that National Review, which hates Trump so much, they hated Reagan too.
It was only William F. Buckley who supported Reagan.
And I used to talk to conservatives back then, and they would say, well, yeah, we're a little embarrassed by Reagan, but he'll only run for one term and don't worry about it so much.
Yeah, he's embarrassing.
He's a dumb actor.
Yeah, I get it.
I get it.
So, you know, this is kind of typical.
So, Trump yesterday gives his foreign policy statement.
And this is his, you know, frequently presidents just publish this, but he was proud of it and he wanted to go out and talk about it.
And he talked about what former presidents have done.
Okay, so let me just make sure we have the right.
Yeah, I guess this is cut number one, maybe, when he talks about what former presidents have done.
Yeah.
Our leaders engaged in nation-building abroad while they failed to build up and replenish our nation at home.
They undercut and short-changed our men and women in uniform with inadequate resources, unstable funding, and unclear missions.
They failed to insist that our often very wealthy allies pay their fair share for defense, putting a massive and unfair burden on the U.S. taxpayer and our great U.S. military.
They neglected a nuclear menace in North Korea, made a disastrous weak, and incomprehensibly bad deal with Iran, and allowed terrorists such as ISIS to gain control of vast parts of territory all across the Middle East.
I'm having hysterics.
I'm hysterical.
I can't stop when I get like this.
I can't stop.
I'm hysterical.
That was the news coverage.
But think about what he said.
Think about what he said.
Not even a conservative.
I mean, I'm much more of a conservative, a libertarian, I'd call myself, I guess, a conservative libertarian, than I am a Republican.
I don't really care about the Republican Party, except as a vehicle for the ideas that make people free when they are such a thing.
But think about some of the stuff he was saying.
He was hitting George W. Bush for nationbuilding.
Well, that has always been a conservative idea that we shouldn't go around nationbuilding, that we're not the world's policemen.
We push our interests as far as we can.
We can't go into every fight.
And George W. Bush reacted, look, 9-11 was a terrible, terrible event.
And he reacted to it by declaring this freedom agenda that he was going to spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
Well, you know, when you do that, first of all, you have to do it quick because free peoples don't have a lot of patience for having their soldiers overseas for years.
I mean, the Afghanistan war, our guys have been over there for longer than they've ever been anywhere.
And this is not something that people want in a free country.
In a free country, we want to be at home.
We want to be doing business.
We want to be having sex scandals and doing all the fun things that you do when you're free.
We don't want our boys getting shot down in foreign lands.
And so he's absolutely right about that.
That's a classic conservative principle.
And then he talked about this Iran deal, letting the military slide, another typical Republican thing, build up the military.
It keeps the world peaceful when America has a strong military.
And then he talked about this Iran deal.
Politico put out a piece.
It is very, very long, but it is truly worth reading.
I'm just going to read you the first paragraph of this political piece about Obama.
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group, Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States.
The campaign dubbed Project Cassandra.
And you'll remember, Cassandra was the prophetess who was cursed.
She could see the future, but no one would ever listen to her.
And the reason they dubbed this Cassandra is because the Obama administration, they kept saying, you know what, Hezbollah has now become an organized crime industry, is pushing cocaine and laundering it by selling used cars in Africa.
It was this whole big chain of things that they were doing.
And they kept telling the Obama administration, the Obama administration kept dampening their investigation, kept scuttling their investigation.
So they called themselves Project Cassandra.
It was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering, and other criminal activities.
And they covered, they suppressed this investigation.
The Obama administration suppressed this investigation.
Now, first, you can say, okay, that's the kind of thing that happens.
Sometimes, for instance, a local cop will bust a mobster and the feds will come in and say, you know what, he's on our payroll.
We need him in place so you can't arrest this guy, even though he's a killer.
Okay, so that's kind of what happened here.
Except why were they doing it?
They were doing it to make this horrible, horrible deal with Iran, which has made Iran a monster in the Middle East.
And the only unintended good consequences has is it has made the rest of the Arab states start to look more kindly on Israel because they need Israel to fight against Iran.
I mean, this is Obama coddling a terrorist state by coddling terrorists.
He was coddling a terrorist organization in order to coddle a terrorist state.
And this is the guy of whom, you know, they kept telling us, this is no scandal, Obama.
This is Obama with no scandals.
They keep covering this up, and they can do it because they have built a structure of communication.
And by the way, you want to hear a montage of the networks covering this?
There it is.
It's over.
And they didn't cover it at all.
They just ditched the political.
Know who covered it?
Evil Fox News.
Evil Fox News covered The political story while the rest of the country didn't.
Well, the rest of the networks didn't.
So, all of this, but let's go back to Trump's speech and talk about how the networks covered this.
We're going to NBC, where Andrea Mitchell, who is a Clinton hack, she's a Clinton hack.
If you see her on MSNBC, I think, okay, it's MSNBC.
They are announced liberal.
This is NBC News, right?
So they are telling us this is the news.
Let's listen to her analysis of Trump's speech and listen carefully to what she says.
It is a beautifully skewed piece, and we're so used to hearing these people lie that we don't even realize how skewed it is.
Listen to this.
There were some contradictions because he spoke of China and Russia as being revisionist countries who are aiming to hurt the United States.
This after two really remarkably chummy conversations with Vladimir Putin in the last four days alone.
He also, in talking about China as trying to compete against the United States, he is widely criticized by many economic and trade experts for having withdrawn from the TPP trade deal, which gave China an open field to compete and best the United States, where we basically left the field open to China and did not join all of our other Asian allies to make these multilateral trade agreements.
The other thing is notable is that he doesn't speak about climate change, which has been declared by the Pentagon and by the Obama administration certainly as part of a national security challenge because of the effect that climate change has on refugee migration movements.
It also was a departure and an open criticism, as Hallie was just saying, sounding more like a campaign speech, like a stump speech, than a real national security strategy.
And it comes only hours after our closest allies, France and Great Britain, lined up 14 to 1 against the United States at the UN Security Council today, rejecting the president's designation of Jerusalem as the legal capital of Israel.
Everybody's always blaming you for everything.
What is that from that old Will Smith comedy?
What was that called?
What?
The Fresh Prince, let's write it.
Anyway, so think about it.
I was writing it down as she was speaking.
He criticized Putin.
So he can't win.
He criticizes Putin, and everybody was attacking him for not criticizing Putin.
But he was just very chummy with Putin.
Well, what does that mean?
The guy's a negotiator.
He's out there working deals, trying to get past things.
Of course, he's chummy with Putin.
What is he supposed to do?
Punch him in the face?
Give him a stern look?
I mean, come on.
That is just absurd.
It's an absurd criticism.
TPP, some people have criticized him.
Some people have praised him.
She didn't mention that.
We don't know what that is going to do.
She's welcome to bring it up, but she didn't bring up both sides.
Climate change, he didn't mention climate change as a security threat.
Know why?
It's not a security threat.
The argument there is that climate change causes movements of people.
The movements of people cause refugee crisis.
The refugee crisis was caused by Barack Obama mishandling the Middle East.
That was what the refugee, especially Syria, that's what the refugee crisis was caused by.
Climate change is not a security threat.
And guess what?
There's not that much we can do about climate change.
She says it's like a stump speech.
Who asked her?
How is that even an analysis?
She didn't like the speech.
But then, finally, the big one is our allies tried to squelch Donald Trump's declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel in the United Nations.
Our European allies.
Our European allies are anti-Semitic.
Even Britain is basically overrun with so many Islamic terrorists that it can't afford to support Israel.
Donald Trump should be praised to the skies for standing up to these feckless clowns.
And, you know, she wants to mention that, but she just totally skewed it in the direction, oh, it's like such a terrible thing.
You know, I know we're having this big sex scandal and we always have to talk respectfully about women, but basically you've come to the wrong show.
Watching Nikki Haley in the UN has become a source of porn to me.
It's like spanking porn.
You know, it's like to watch her.
First of all, I find her very cute.
But secondly, to watch her beat these people up, it's like SM porn.
She just slaps them around.
And I'm like, yes, Nikki, yes, yes, yes.
So she goes after them.
We vetoed, this is our first veto in like six years.
They said, oh, no, you're not moving your embassy like the UN should tell us where to move our embassy.
You're not moving your embassy to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is not the capital.
And Nikki just went after it.
I'm telling you, this is, to me, like just filthy stuff.
What is troublesome to some people is that the United States had the courage and honesty to recognize a fundamental reality.
Jerusalem has been the political, cultural, and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people for thousands of years.
They have had no other capital city.
But the United States' recognition of the obvious, that Jerusalem is the capital and seat of the modern Israeli government, is too much for some.
First, some have threatened violence on the street, as if violence would somehow improve the prospects of peace.
Now, today, buried in diplomatic jargon, some presume to tell America where to put our embassy.
The United States has a sovereign right to determine where and whether we establish an embassy.
I suspect very few member states would welcome Security Council pronouncements about their sovereign decisions.
Is it too much to ask her to wear leather when she does that?
Ah, yes, what a terrible thing to say.
Don't laugh.
You know, Rob, don't laugh at that.
You just encourage me.
It's just wrong.
It is just wrong.
My point is this.
They have skewed this information empire of lies that the left has constructed skews everything to the left so that normal, ordinary, average Republican governance seems like a radical agenda.
And we ourselves get swept up into it.
We get swept up.
I saw a woman, a conservative commentator whom I love.
I won't mention her, I won't name her, but I saw her love, apologizing for watching Hallmark movies.
I thought you watch Hallmark movies because you're a girl.
It's a good thing to be a girl.
How did this feminist misogyny get into everybody's head?
Being a girl is a positive thing.
We like girls.
We're glad they're girls.
That's why Hallmark is there.
God love you.
Watch the movies without apologizing for it.
But where is our YouTube?
Where is our Facebook?
We built the Daily Wire.
It now gets, I think, approximately 100 zillion hits every 20 seconds, you know, because people are hungry for this kind of information.
Fox News, the joke about Fox News was that Rupert Murdoch discovered or Roger Ailes discovered a niche audience that happened to be half the country.
But where's the next Fox News?
Where's the Fox Comedy Central?
Where's all the conservative outlets that we should be building?
They are not only building them, they're taking over the ones that already exist in order to censor us.
And we don't do it.
And we keep worrying about, oh, Trump said this, and he used Twitter.
This Trump is fighting a one-man war to change, to keep control of a little piece of the culture.
You know, Knowles and I built Another Kingdom and we put that up.
It's been a big success.
Driver, Get Out!00:11:35
Where's the movie company coming to buy that?
Saying, oh boy, entertainment, the conservatives like.
Where is that movie coming?
Doesn't exist because we don't build it.
We do not build these things.
And we end up having to go to the majors, having to go to the left's construction and beg them to let us speak.
And it's a big, big mistake.
You know, Donald Trump has had a great year.
Conservatives have had a great year through Donald Trump, but those great years won't last if the people don't understand what we're talking about.
And they can understand what we're talking about as long as they control the left, controls the means of information.
Let's bring on Stephen Wilford.
I'm sure you all remember November 5th, one of just the worst mass shootings ever, First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
Devin Patrick Kelly went in there and started shooting people and just actually making sure, you know, executing them essentially, going from one to the next to the next, killing babies, killing all in this tiny little town so that everybody knew somebody.
As Kelly left the church, Stephen Wilford, the man we were about to talk to, he's a former NRA fireman and firearms instructor, grabbed his gun and he'll tell the whole story of what happened then.
I wanted to talk to him about what happened afterwards, but he also tells the story of what happened that day.
Let's listen to this interview.
Hey, Stephen, thank you for coming on.
I'm really interested in talking about well, thanks.
I'm really interested in talking about what has happened to you since this event, but I think we should start by taking the audience briefly through this kind of terrible experience again when this insane man opened fire in your church, the church in your town.
How exactly did you find out about this?
Well, I was home, and I was home because I was starting my on-call at the hospital.
I work as a plumber, a maintenance plumber at a hospital, and I started my on-call on the next Monday.
And so I was trying to get some rest and rest up because I could be working lots of overtime.
So I was home resting, and my daughter, Stephanie, my oldest, was washing dishes in the kitchen.
And she came in and said she heard what sounded like gunfire.
And I immediately thought it was just someone tapping on the window.
And I opened the curtains to see, and there was nobody tapping.
And I went to the other part of the house, and it definitely sounded like gunfire.
And I told her it is, someone's shooting.
And I ran to my safe, and she actually ran out the door, got in her car, and ran up to the corner and came back while I was at my safe, loading my gun.
And she came in and said it was indeed someone in black tactical gear shooting up the church.
And I told her to call 911.
She said, I did.
They know about it already, Dad.
And so the next thing I did is I told her, I said, call your mom.
And she did.
And as I was running out the door, I told my wife, I said, there's an active shooter at the Baptist church, and stay where you're at.
She was helping my other daughter build her house on our property five miles down the road.
And, of course, she did whatever a good wife would do.
She said, don't go over there as I hung up on her.
And she had to do her wife duty and try to protect me.
But she told me later, I knew you were going over there.
But as I ran out the door, my oldest daughter followed me out the door.
And I'm going to tell you, the Holy Spirit was on me because I was thinking so clear.
It was amazing.
And I told her, go load me another magazine because I had just grabbed a handful of ammo out of a box and started loading them into a magazine.
And I told her, go load another magazine because I only have a few rounds.
And she ran back into the house, and that's what I wanted.
I didn't think that she could ever have loaded a magazine or even found one and loaded it in time to get it to me.
But I didn't want her following me over there.
I didn't want him to have a target that I cared so deeply about that would be a distraction for me.
And I certainly didn't want her to see me fail if I did.
And because if I would have failed, she would have been right on me and she would have been the next target.
So I had the presence of mind to send her back into the house and give her an impossible task.
As a foreman, I've been a foreman before in construction.
We call it busy work.
If an apprentice is in your hair and you want to get him out of the way, out of my sight, out of mind, you give him busy work and you go tell him to do something and just get him out.
And that's what I did.
And my daughter was kind of mad about that at first, but it was only because I love her so much.
And she needed to not be there.
And I ran across, and as I ran across the street, I yelled.
And I don't know why.
I can't explain why I yelled other than I believe it to be the Holy Spirit was calling out the demon that was within him.
Because I yelled, and he apparently, I was not witness to what was going on in the church, but he stopped shooting the people that he was shooting.
He was finishing people off.
He stopped immediately and came outside.
And the people in the church heard me yell.
And my daughter heard me yell.
And when he came out, he came outside shooting at me.
And it was a dead calm.
And again, I can only attribute that to the Holy Spirit because there was a dead calm as he was shooting at me.
He hit the truck in front of me.
He hit the car behind me and he hit the house behind me.
And it was like God was telling me, don't worry about that.
Just worry about where you're putting the bullets.
And I shot back.
I returned fire.
And I even saw, thought clear enough, I could see that he had body armor on that covered the front and the back, and it velcroed across the sides.
And I could see an opening when he turned to get in his vehicle and I shot him in the side.
He got in his vehicle and I put one more through the, as he put two through the window coming out at me, I put one through the window where I perceived his head to have been, but he had a tactical SWAT-style helmet on with a visor and everything.
And he drove off.
And I ran to the stop sign where a truck was there at the stop sign.
The guy had witnessed the whole thing.
And I didn't know his name or anything else.
I tapped on the window and said, that guy just shot up the Baptist church and we have to stop him.
He unlocked the door, let a maniac with an AR-15 in his truck, as far as he knew, and we gave chase.
And we chased him 11 miles down the road.
And what the police said, he finally pulled off the road.
And As we came up on him, I reached and I grabbed the door, and I still had the rifle in my hand.
I was going to open the door because I thought he was going to make another stand.
And as we were running down the road to him, I had the presence of mind to drop the magazine and look at what was in it.
And I had one still in the magazine, one in the chamber.
I had two rounds left.
And I chambered it back up, and I told Johnny that had called 911 and was talking to dispatch at that point.
I said, tell them, hurry, hurry.
I have two rounds left.
And so when he pulled over, I thought this might be another gun battle.
And I've got two rounds.
And I'm thinking, man, this has got to count.
And he pulled over, just stopped for just a little bit, and then gunned the engine.
And he hit a road sign and then back up onto the highway and halfways around a curve and then over into the bar ditch.
And he stopped on the opposite side.
And we stopped about 50 yards from him.
And then I told Johnny, get down.
You don't have a gun or anything.
Just get down below the dash.
And I got out and I put the rifle across the hood of the truck and aimed it at the driver's side window and started yelling, get out, get out.
And they estimated it was five to seven minutes before the police got there, which to me seemed like an eternity.
You know, and I was focused on the truck.
And finally, I heard a police officer say, Driver, get out of your vehicle with your hands up.
And I turned and I looked up the road, and he had stopped maybe 50 yards from me.
And it was an officer standing behind his door with a PA mic in one hand and his pistol in the other hand.
And he said it again.
He said, Driver, get out of the vehicle with your hands up.
And immediately I just thought, okay, my job's done.
I put the rifle down on the hood and I started back to the back of the truck with my hands up.
I didn't want anybody to think that I was any threat at all.
And he came over the PA system again and he says, not you.
And so I took that as meaning that I was to go back and pick up my rifle because I had a whole lot better chance because he was about 100 yards from the vehicle.
And so I picked up my rifle and aimed it back over until I saw about six or seven other police cars pull up and they all pulled out AR-15s and stuff.
And I thought, okay, now I am indeed done.
And so I laid my rifle on the back of the toolbox of the truck and started back there.
And they said, no, no, no, stay there, stay there.
We're going to bring a cruiser to you.
And so they brought a car up so I could walk beside the car and go back to the police line.
And so, you know, I had some sort of cover.
By this time, it had been maybe 30 minutes, you know, and we had seen no movement or anything from the vehicle.
Police reports said that when he pulled over, he shot himself in the head.
He finished it.
And I think that was a final gift from God because that he did it himself because then there's, I don't, I wasn't the one that killed him.
He did it himself.
Riding for Toys00:06:46
It's a while now since this happened.
When we talked briefly, right, closer to the time this happened, and you said that you felt that you had been fashioned as a tool for this moment and that the moment had broken the tool.
Do you still feel that way?
In some ways, yes.
But I know God's working on me and he's working hard on me.
He's not going to leave me broken.
And, you know, that brings up kind of what I wanted to talk to.
The people from the church, they've just, you know, surrounded me and just, you know, I can't believe how they've recovered from this.
And the other night, last night, as a matter of fact, we were sitting at home and we had our whole family here.
And the church came by caroling.
And they had an ambulance leading the possession.
And they had a trailer, you know, like a hayride, a truck pulling a trailer with all the people from the church.
And they had one of the fire trucks following.
And they had all the lights going on and everything.
And they stopped in front of my house and started caroling.
Well, it was overwhelming to me.
I walked out of my house and, of course, I cried with everybody and I hugged everybody.
And, you know, some of the wounded that are still recovering were on the trailer.
I hugged them and cried with everybody.
But their spirit, they're out there showing God's glory and praising God and thanking God for Jesus being born at Christmas and just caroling and singing songs of praise and stuff.
And that's character.
This town, this community has so much character and God's working in this town.
And I notice that you actually, since I've seen you, you've grown the Santa Claus beard there.
So you actually are part of this doing God's work in the town, aren't you?
Every December, we have, I ride a motorcycle.
My whole family rides Harleys and we love to ride.
That's something we just do together.
And family that stays together, plays together, stays together, and we ride.
And part of what we do is we ride with the Baptist church every year and we deliver toys.
And I grow the beard.
I start in October and I go through no shave November and tell everybody it's because I'm growing the Santa beard.
And so when they have their annual Santa run and whatever, we load up toys and put Santa in a dune buggy and followed by motorcycles and we make noise.
And as we go down through the neighborhoods, they have low-income families that they have on a list that they deliver toys to.
But any kid that sees what's going on and runs out to the road or runs out in their yard, we stop and we give them toys.
And we don't care whether they're low-income or anything.
If they notice us, we give them toys.
And it's been such a fun experience doing this with them every year.
They're good Christian people that, you know, that's what a community is about.
That's a slice of America.
And that's where I grew up.
I'm almost out of time, but I really would like to know if you had to say, has this experience changed you and how has it changed you?
What would the answer be?
Oh, how it's changed me.
Boy, that's a complicated one right now.
I think revisiting that question next year might be easier, Whole lot easier to answer.
People keep saying, My new normal, well, I love my old normal, and I don't know exactly what my new normal looks like right now.
I'm asking for prayers for peace for me and my community and my family.
And I'm asking for prayers for humility because a lot of people are trying to make me more than what I am.
And I have to give the glory to God for everything that's happened.
So answering that question next year might be a whole lot easier than answering it now.
I go through issues and stuff with, you know, one of the men that were wounded in the church is married to a girl that went to our homeschool group and grew up with my daughters and was friends with my daughters.
And they did sleepovers at my house and stuff.
And now her husband was shot in the back.
He's paralyzed from the waist down.
And he sees this as he has this testimony for God now.
And he just blows me away.
He's enriched my life.
And so, how has it changed me?
I guess it's brought me closer to God.
Somebody said something the other day about, you know, someone in politics knowing my name.
And I said, you know what?
That's great that he knows my name.
I said, but my God knows my name.
And he called me that day.
And that's awesome.
And that is awesome.
It's an awesome.
Yeah.
I know God knows all our names, but that particular day, he called me.
And I know he did.
Yep.
Yep.
It's an awesome story, Stephen.
Thank you for sharing it.
I hope you have a wonderful Christmas.
And I hope when we talk again next year, I hope you feel that God has begun to make you whole.
I know he will.
All right.
Really, I find that interview very moving, really moving guy.
Sexual Nuance In Songs00:09:41
When you live in LA and you hear about a community like that, this kind of wistfulness comes over your heart.
We did not break because I forgot to break from Facebook and YouTube.
So you guys got a free interview, you bums.
You should subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
Also, tomorrow, last mailbag day of the year, last mailbag day of the year.
Well, your last chance to fix.
I mean, go look in the mirror, right?
Is that the way you want to go into the new year?
No.
Go on the mailbag, hit the Daily Wire, hit the podcast, hit my podcast, hit the mailbag, and leave your questions.
Answers guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life once or twice for the better.
Let's do sexual follies.
Get myself in my dresses with a...
Hey, hey, you know, that's how I identify.
There is a...
There is a short story that has gone viral from The New Yorker, which for a fiction writer like myself is actually kind of encouraging.
I hate New Yorker stories.
I always find them small and pinchy and all this.
And this is a very talented, a story by a very talented writer named Kristen Rupinian.
It's called Cat Person.
And what struck me about it is it's not that New Yorker stories have become any larger.
It is that some people's lives have become so small that they now fit into a New Yorker story.
All this story is, cat person, is the story of a sexual encounter between a young woman and a slightly older man, a woman in her 20s, a woman who's 20, and a man who's in his 30s.
And they flirt for a while on text, and then they, you know, it's not giving it, there's no plot, so it's not giving anything away.
Then they have sex, and it goes really badly.
The sex goes very badly, and then they break up.
And here's just an actual, here's the author reading just a little bit while they are getting into what becomes a disastrous sexual encounter.
Disastrous for her in the sense that she's not enjoying it.
The guy has watched too much porn and he's throwing her into all these different positions because that's what he thinks sex is supposed to be like.
And she starts to have this imagination that is all the way she kind of justifies the whole thing.
She has this fantasy that turns her on that he is admiring her helplessly.
Here's just a little bit of audio from the story.
As they kissed, she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it.
Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking.
She's so perfect.
Her body is perfect.
Everything about her is perfect.
She's only 20 years old.
Her skin is flawless.
I want her so badly.
I want her more than I've ever wanted anyone else.
I want her so bad I might die.
So it's this really sad picture of this girl who doesn't know who she is, what she's for, what it means to be a woman, any of these things, and just is kind of drawn randomly into this encounter because he sometimes seems nice.
He presents a good text personality.
And there are moments when he is protective of and caring for her.
And she kind of slips into this.
And of course, it goes badly.
So here this thing is going around.
And of course, all the feminists are rolling their eyes and saying, oh, yes, yes.
So now in the New York Times, a former newspaper on Knucklehead Row, Jessica Bennett writes her reaction to this when saying yes is easier than saying no.
For years, my female friends and I have spoken with knowing nods about a sexual interaction we call the place of no return.
It is a kind of sexual nuance that most women instinctively understand.
The situation you thought you wanted or maybe you actually never wanted, but somehow here you are and it's happening and you desperately want out, but you know that at this point exiting the situation would be more difficult than simply lying there and waiting for it to be over.
In other words, saying yes when we really mean no.
Sometimes yes means no simply because it is easier to go through it through with it than explain our way out of the situation.
Sometimes no means yes because this is like why guys go crazy talking to women.
Sometimes no means yes because you actually do want to do it, but you know you're not supposed to lest you be labeled a slut.
And if you're a man, that no often means just try harder because you know persuasion is part of the game.
And now she starts to go into this leftist nonsense.
The reality is that no matter how many sexual harassment training programs we enroll in or how much activists extol the virtues of consent, we are missing something deeper.
Our idea of what we want, we're supposed to want with what society tells us we should want.
It's all society.
It's society.
It's society that tells us.
Humankind has been having sex as long as there's been humankind.
It has had these problems as long as there's been humankind, but now it's society that is gathering together in a conspiracy in the halls of Mount Sexism and is writing these rules that are confusing women.
Women have been taught by every cultural force imaginable that we must be nice and quiet and polite.
You should be nice and quiet and polite.
When I see a woman saying, oh, bragging that she's a nasty woman, I think, how would it be like brag that was a nasty man?
Don't be nasty.
You should be nice and quiet and polite.
But, but if you know who you are, you start to know what you want.
Okay.
Now, I'm doing this as a lead, and I've been ending the show with Christmas songs, and there is a song that has become a Christmas song because it's about winter, a lovely song called Baby It's Cold Outside.
And now this song is being attacked for being rapey because it's about a seduction dance between these two people.
It was written by one of the great American songwriters, Frank Lesser.
And it was written in 1944, and Lesser and his wife would go about performing it.
But it was first put out to the general public in a movie, a now forgotten movie, called Neptune's Daughter in 1949.
And this was by Esther Williams.
If you don't know who Esther Williams was, she was the classic swimmer who did those swimming ballets and they would do the swimming dances and all this.
So the thing about this is the song is in it twice and nobody remembers the second time.
So I'm going to play both, first one, then the other.
And you get the picture of this and of this, it's like supposed to be a conversation between a man trying to keep a woman there and seduce her and her playing along but also teasing him with her reluctance.
And it's a dance between men and women, which has been going on since the Garden of Eden.
Here is the first version of the song in Neptune's Daughter.
Really can't stay.
Baby, it's cold outside.
I've got to go away.
Baby, it's cold outside.
This evening has been very nice.
I'll hold your hands.
They're just like ice.
My mother will start to work.
Beautiful, what's your hair?
My father will be pacing the floor.
Listen to the fireplace right now.
So really, I'd better skirt.
Beautiful, please don't hurt.
Well, maybe just to have some records on while I fold.
But baby, it's bad out there.
Say what's in this drink.
I wish I knew how to break this spell.
I'll take your hat.
Your hair looks swell.
I ought to say no, no, no, sir.
Mind if I move in closer.
At least I'm going to say that I try.
What's the sense of hurting my pride?
Oh, baby, don't hold out, baby, it's cold outside.
Now, people always protest when she says, hey, what's in this drink?
Of course, in the Bill Cosby version, that's the last line of the song.
It just goes black after that.
But what people forget is that the song is sung again by one of the great comic actors of his age, Red Skelton, and also Betty Garrett, who is wonderful.
You'll probably recognize her if you're watching this.
You'll probably recognize her.
And they sing the song with the man taking the part that the woman had before.
I really can't.
Baby, it's cold outside.
I've got to go away.
Baby, it's cold outside.
This evening has been awful.
But I'm hoping that you drop me.
I'll hold your hands.
They're just like.
My mother will start to worry.
Beautiful, what's your hair?
My father will be pacing the floor.
Beautiful, please don't hurry.
Put some records on while I pull.
But baby, it's bad out there.
Say what's in this dress.
No cabs to be had out there.
I wish I knew how.
Your eyes are like stars outside.
I'll take your hat.
Your hair looks swell.
I ought to say no, no, sir.
At least I'm going to say that I drive.
The sense of hurting my pride.
Oh, baby, don't hold out, baby.
But it's cold outside.
You know, seduction and sex are so difficult because we all want it, but we all have to know what it is we want.
And it might help sometimes if women stopped listening to feminists who tell them they're supposed to be like men and started listening to their own hearts and maybe some of the wise people through the ages and knew what they wanted before they get into the room with the guy.
If you know what you want before you get there, then you don't find yourself saying no when you mean yes and yes when you mean no.
I mean it's a very important thing to know yourself.
And the feminists have taught women not to know themselves at all by telling them what feminists think they should be instead of what they in fact are.
And, you know, if you want to know where this is going, it's going to end up with the feminists saying, men should take care of us.
Men should take care.
You know, this is, it's going to end up with the new Victorian age in which basically the feminists are arguing for the old-fashioned values.
Remember Norman Mailer00:00:50
By the way, people predicted this back in the 70s.
I remember Norman Mailer talking about he was worried about this new Puritanism that was coming through feminism.
It is coming.
It is almost here.
Tomorrow, the mailbag, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Be there.
will see you then.
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.
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