Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 437 satirizes 2018’s leftist absurdities—Chelsea Handler’s Super Bowl mockery of U.S. military actions, CNN retracting a Trump-Moscow conspiracy, and feminists demanding men fund wives while protesting women’s suffrage—before pivoting to Trump’s "trumpifying" cultural shift, from aggressive Christmas greetings to economic optimism. He contrasts Trump’s boldness with Obama’s silence on Islamic terrorism and Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, praising Trump’s support for Iranian protesters while mocking media narratives like CNN’s defense of the regime. The episode frames Trump’s leadership as a defiant break from ideological constraints, dismissing Democratic midterm hopes as reliant on divisive culture-war tactics, and ridicules gender studies’ redefinition of "princess play" as proof of leftist overreach, concluding that progressive "madhouse" culture thrives despite Trump’s counter-moves. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, 2017 is over and it was a terrible year for leftists.
Or in other words, a great year for America.
What's going to happen in 2018?
Here are my top five predictions.
Number one, the Super Bowl will be played between the New England Patriots and some other team.
Approximately 76 people will attend the game, but the audience will be boosted by the hundreds who tune in for its live broadcast on Spike TV.
The halftime show will feature Chelsea Handler singing her new hit song, Screw You America, and Your Stinking Flag 2.
And it'll include a massive dance number representing the United States Army's oppression of Indigenous peoples around the world.
After the game, NFL executives will hold a meeting to discuss the mysterious decline in their ratings.
They'll conclude they need more outreach to transgender people.
Prediction number two, CNN will break an exclusive story detailing how President Trump personally funneled top-secret defense information to the Russian ambassador in exchange for a permit to open a new Trump resort in Moscow.
Several hours later, CNN will issue a clarification stating it was not President Trump, but his personal friend Melvin Hankey, and it was not defense information, but a bottle of wine, and it was not the Russian ambassador, but some girl named Lily Bernstein.
And it was not in exchange for a building permit in Moscow, but in exchange for $20, and that Hanke was not Trump's friend, but works in a liquor store Trump sometimes used to walk past.
A day later, CNN will issue a clarification stating that Trump never walked past the liquor store.
Prediction number three, the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences will hold its annual Academy Awards ceremony at which every presenter will be played by Christopher Plumber.
Mr. Plummer will deliver the best picture honors to the independent production, A Man in Sheep's Clothing, which the New York Times will describe as an important look at society's oppression of African-American lesbians forced to transition to manhood in order to consummate their relationships with farm animals.
After the event, Academy executives will meet to discuss the mysterious decline in the show's ratings.
They'll conclude they need more outreach to out-of-work NFL executives.
Number four, after the exposure of more sexual harassment in the workplace, feminists will demand that men financially support their wives so that women can escape abusive work conditions and concentrate on homemaking and raising children.
Feminists will further protest an American patriarchy that oppresses women by allowing them to vote and thus pressuring them to participate in male structures like politics and government.
Prediction number five, working in a secret lab in the White House basement, Donald Trump will develop a cure for cancer while directing military operations that wipe out radical Islam during the greatest economic boom in American history.
And in reaction, the National Review will run a cover story entitled, Yes, but is he really an intellectual?
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are wingy, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-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, hurrah.
All right, I hope you had a great holiday.
Happy New Year.
I was in New York.
I had a wonderful time.
And then we got off the plane coming home on Friday.
And I turned to my wife and said, you know, I'm feeling a little odd.
And she said, so am I.
And we then, within hours, collapsed into a flu that nearly carried off the both of us.
We've spent three days, the two of us, mostly unconscious.
So this show is not just, this is not just a podcast, folks.
This is an act of courage, kind of like, you know, a feminist march.
You know, it's like an act of courage that doesn't require any courage and isn't actually an act, but here it is.
I'm here, and I still am a little under the weather.
So it is kind of like a feminist march.
We have Michael Knowles is going to come on, and we will have some predictions for the current year, which will be guaranteed 100% correct.
And the mailbag is tomorrow if we can do it.
Free Blue Apron Meals00:02:35
Now, I hope people will come in.
You know, it's a short notice, but if you have questions about your personal life, about politics, about religion, send them in.
And here is how you do it.
Go on the Daily Wire webpage.
You've got to be a subscriber.
You should be.
At this point, come on, you should be a subscriber.
It's a lousy $10 a month, lousy $100, gets you an entire year plus the leftist tears tumbler.
But, but, can you see the leftists here or something?
If you subscribe, go on the website, hit podcasts, hit my podcasts, and then on the podcast page, right, as I always want to get this right, it says mailbag and press that and then send in your question.
We answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Meanwhile, let us give you some free food because that's why we're here.
You know, this is a charitable show, and we are here to give you free food through Blue Apron, our sponsor, which is actually teamed up with Whole30.
If you don't know who Whole30 is, Google them, it's Whole and the number 30.
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And they have teamed up with Blue Apron for eight weeks ending on February 26th.
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Because Blue Apron is treating my listeners to the first three meals, a $30 value with your first order.
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Why Stamps.com Failed00:14:18
So before I start talking about Iran, which is what we really have to talk about, I have to tell you what I saw in New York because it has given me a new theory of Donald Trump, which I haven't heard anybody else say or anybody else notice.
Now, you have to understand, I'm in New York a lot.
I'm in at least three times, two or three times a year.
So it's not like things change vastly when I go from one time to another.
But I'm there for Christmas.
It's freezing cold, absolutely freezing, like 15 degrees on a good day.
And first of all, the city is booming.
I mean, everything is great.
This Christmas is obviously going well.
Everybody's happy.
Everybody's flushed.
But I started to notice that first, people were aggressively, aggressively saying Merry Christmas.
And it's not just me.
People had stopped saying Merry Christmas.
They had started saying happy holidays.
And even I, the most politically incorrect human being on earth, the person who really does, I'm not politically correct because I don't pay enough attention to be politically correct.
I don't care what people say is politically correct.
But even I had stopped saying it, kind of on the idea that I was offending people or something like this.
and I and suddenly people were looking you in the eye.
I'm not the only person who noticed this because I started talking to people about it and they all said, yeah, oh, definitely, it's definitely happening.
People were looking you in the eye and going, Merry Christmas.
And it was kind of like, I thought, okay, I'm already having a Merry Christmas, but thanks for saying it.
But it was aggressive.
The other thing that happened is I frequently, always, if I can, open the door for women or allow women to enter elevators first.
Maybe five or six times, five or six times, a woman turned to me and said, that's so kind of you.
Thank you so much.
But like that, you know, not like, not like intentionally, you know, not like thanks a lot.
Oh, how nice.
Thank you.
It was like turning to me, facing me, looking me in the eye, saying, the culture is changing.
The culture is trumpifying.
The culture is changing.
And it is changing in a dynamic way beneath the surface.
So people, I mean, this is New York, right?
This is the heart of liberal darkness.
This is a place where I heard people make the argument that Kim Jong-un wasn't so bad because if Donald Trump disliked him, he couldn't be so bad.
But the culture changes, as I keep telling, trying to tell conservatives, the culture changes almost unseen, almost against people's will.
It just changes.
And this is something that is happening.
Now, I have two things I want to say about this.
The first is my old theory, the theory I kind of introduced at the end of last year, which is that Donald Trump is Randall Patrick McMurphy.
And for those of you who don't remember One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which now is an old book and an old movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is about an insane asylum that is run by Nurse Ratchet.
And Nurse Ratchet pretends to be the sweet, motherly, all-protecting, all-loving mother figure, but in fact is a castrating horror of a nightmare who keeps these men sort of stuck in their own insanity and grinding their own wheels and really undercuts their manhood at every turn.
Read Hillary Clinton.
Randall Patrick McMurphy is a kind of a jerk.
He's a rowdy, obscene, violent, law-breaking character, but he is the one person who is willing to stand up to Nurse Ratchet because he hasn't gotten any restraints on his personality.
His personality is so out of whack that he is willing to stand up to Nurse Ratchet no matter what it costs, which ultimately, of course, is the question of the story.
My point about Donald Trump was that, yes, he is rude, he is outlandish, he does things that I may not approve of in terms of my life, but he has broken this soft tyranny.
And it is the soft tyranny of insanity.
When I compare America to an insane asylum, I'm not kidding.
When you consider, I mean, think about this for a minute.
Because, you know, it's kind of like dealing with your mother-in-law, you know, not to use a cliché, but dealing with some relative that you don't like.
And you think she's saying hostile things about you.
And you think that every comment she makes is secretly hostile, but you can never convince anybody else because she never says anything that's openly hostile.
So she says, you know, that's a nice dress.
And you know what she means is you look like an idiot, but you can't, you said, well, she said it was a nice dress.
And you think, well, that's okay, you know, but like, no, it's not.
And so, and so stuff happens in America.
Stuff happens that we know is bad and we protest it, but we don't know in our hearts it's bad.
We don't really feel how bad it is.
So consider this for a minute.
Surely, surely, the greatest problem of our time in terms of enemies, in terms of foreign enemies, is radical Islam, is Islam, Islamic terrorism.
Now, the big question about Islamic terrorism is, is it inherent in the Islamic philosophy?
Is terrorism inherent in the Quran and in Islamic belief?
Or is it a cancer that has grown on Islamic belief?
Both those things are possible.
I would like to hear experts debate that at length.
I'm not sure.
I can't really say.
I don't feel like I have a deep enough relationship to the Quran or to Islam to know whether Islamic terrorism is somehow inherent in the faith or if it's a cancer on the faith.
That's open to debate.
For eight years, for eight years, we had a president who would not say the word Islam in conjunction with terrorism.
There's only one kind of terrorism in the world today.
It's Islamic terrorism.
That's the only kind there is.
Everything else is an outlier.
Everything else, there are terrorism.
Obviously, there are going to be other kinds of terrorists, but this is so small.
It's such a piddling fraction of the daily murder and mayhem that goes on in the name of Allah that, you know, this is a major issue.
For eight years, for eight years, the president of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, would not say the word Islam in connection with terrorism.
That's not bad or good.
That's nuts.
That's insane.
That's why I'm saying, talking about an insane asylum.
That's why I'm talking about Randall Patrick McMurphy.
The same thing with men and women.
Men and women are the same.
Men and women, there's no difference between men and women.
Anything anybody says there is is sexist.
A man can be a woman.
A man can declare himself a woman.
All this stuff.
Insane.
Insane.
Donald Trump has broken through that insanity.
And here's the second part of my theory.
And this is the new part of my theory.
All right.
This is a theory.
And I'm just going to put it forward and we can think about it all year.
We'll come back to it through the year to see if I'm right.
People like Donald Trump even when they hate him.
Okay?
This is my theory, that people like being free of insanity, even if the guy who did it, who freed them, is Randall, Patrick, and McMurphy, somebody they don't want over their house.
People are happy.
People are happier to be able to say Merry Christmas.
It's insane not to say Merry Christmas.
It's insane to question every American holiday.
Thanksgiving is bad because Indians died and Columbus Day is bad because Indians died and Christmas is bad because Indians died or whatever happens on Christmas.
I don't know what happened on Christmas to the Indians, but I'm sure it was bad.
You know, so all this stuff, all this stuff is insane, and people are happy to be free of insanity.
And I think that this is something that is infecting the culture.
I'm talking about New York now, something that is infecting the culture of America, even as CNN lies and NBC lies and the New York Times lies.
I mean, listen, you know, Donald Trump made his usual radio address and his end of the year address.
Listen to the way he talks, okay?
This is cut number three.
Listen to the way Donald Trump talks.
Obviously, he's praising his own accomplishments.
He's saying we accomplished all these wonderful things, healthcare, tax reform, and jobs and the stock market, blah, blah, blah, blah, and ISIS is destroyed.
He's all touting his own things.
But just listen to the way he talks about the country.
This is cut number three.
Optimism is everywhere.
Enthusiasm is booming.
And the thrilling American adventure has never looked brighter.
We are facing old challenges with new solutions and we are seizing new opportunities with brimming confidence and boundless resolve.
Because of you, your patriotism, your devotion, your love for your family, we will be able to pass on the blessings of American liberty and prosperity to our children and our grandchildren.
Together, we are protecting our magnificent heritage and reaching for glorious destiny.
Glorious destiny.
Optimism is everywhere.
America is great again.
Now, listen to Obama in 2013.
Now, remember, this is his second term, right?
This clown has been in office, you know, mucking things up for now five years.
Listen to Obama talk about America.
The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.
We know that there are airport workers and fast food workers and nurse assistants and retail salespeople who work their tails off and are still living at or barely above poverty.
And that's why it's well past the time to raise a minimum wage that in real terms right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office.
So the American dream is dying, says Obama.
And the only way we can fix it is by raising the minimum wage, which is all the government can ever do is help the minimum, right?
All it can ever do is codify mediocrity.
And that was, you know, who wouldn't like Trump better?
And Trump, Trump's solution, Obama's solution is a minimum wage.
Trump's solution, as he puts it, is jobs, jobs, jobs.
That same speech is jobs, jobs, jobs.
And let me tell you something else.
This was on the Wall Street Journal front page this morning, is for the first time in, you know, who knows how long, wages are starting to rise.
They're starting to rise.
Why?
Because there's so many jobs that they have to pay more to get the best people, right?
When there are a lot of jobs, it becomes a buyer's market.
It's great.
You know, this is a great thing.
The wages are suddenly going up.
It doesn't take the government.
It took the government to get out of the way.
It always takes the government to get out of the way.
Of course, people like Donald Trump.
Of course, they want to hear that things are going well.
Look, you can say, well, Obama was telling the harsh truth and Trump is lying, but I don't think so.
I think Trump is talking something into helping to talk something into existence.
Part of the rise in the stock market has been his simple sound of the simple sound of optimism coming out of the president's mouth, along with the rollback in regulations and the tax cuts and all this.
Part of it has just been the sound of optimism coming out of this guy.
Of course people like him.
And I think people like him who think they hate him.
And I think this is going to show in the midterms.
I think a lot of the polls are off.
I can't say what the midterms are going to be.
You usually lose seats in the midterms and it's still too early to tell.
But all I can say is that something is happening in the culture underneath all the talk and all the debates about this and that is something positive is happening because people are responding to the tone of this president.
And I said to somebody while I was in New York, I think I'm having a Trump conversion experience because suddenly the way he talks is really amusing and entertaining and uplifting to me.
Whereas before, I was always a little doubtful of it.
So we'll see.
We will see.
But I think people like this president more than they will admit and more than they even know.
So let's talk about how that affects Iran.
But first, let's talk about stamps because we wouldn't be here, right, if we didn't have stamps.com.
All of us are here because of stamps.com because otherwise we'd be at the post office.
But the thing is, the post office is great, but like everything in life, we want it in our computer.
And that's how stamps.com comes in.
It puts the post office into your computer.
You can simply use your computer to print official U.S. postage for any letter or package, any class of mail, and let the mailman pick it up.
No leaving the office, no more lugging mail to the post office, no more hassle.
Stamps.com saves you time and money.
Almost everything you can do at the post office, you can do at your desk.
Plus, stamps.com has postage discounts you don't get at the post office.
Not to mention it's a fraction of the cost of those super expensive postage meters.
Stamps.com makes it easy.
It sends you a digital scale that automatically calculates exact postage.
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I use stamps.com, not be, you know, I've loved the post office all my life.
For a writer, they are a lifeline, but to have it in your computer is just such an advantage.
It really makes everything so much easy.
And right now, you can enjoy stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and the digital scale.
Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Klavin, K-L-A-V-A-N, stamps.com, and enter Klavin, and you will have a happier new year sending your mail through your computer.
It is great stuff.
All right, we're going to talk about Iran.
I think we should probably cut off you folks at Facebook and at Facebook and YouTube because you haven't subscribed.
This is the dire punishment you suffer.
But subscribe, and then you can be in the mailbag.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
Go on the website, send your questions in through the mailbag.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can listen.
If you subscribe while you're there, you can just watch the whole thing right on the site.
It's so much easier.
talk to you over there.
All right.
We'll have Michael Knowles coming on to discuss what's going to happen in 2018.
He actually knows.
I don't know how it's amazing, that guy.
They Were Lying About This00:15:23
You know, he doesn't know what's happening now, but he does know what's going to happen in the future.
But this Iran story is a really dramatic story.
And I've been watching the coverage through my flu-induced haze through the weekend.
And it really is, I won't call it dishonest coverage.
I just think it's uninformed coverage.
Now, remember, you know, we've kind of been told that there's broad support for the Iranian government among the Iranian people.
And this, of course, turns out to be completely untrue.
You know, that just, of course not.
These guys are stepping on their throats and have been for decades, okay?
So in 2009, they rose up and Obama did nothing.
There was the green movement.
And this was based in the city.
It was based in Tehran.
You know, the people were rising up and protesting the government and saying they were oppressed.
And Obama said nothing.
Zero Nada.
And his excuse, and this is what I'm talking about when I say the coverage has been uninformed.
His excuse was that if he supported the rebels, that would give the mullahs, the rulers, the chance to say, oh, these guys were American agents.
It was an American-backed uprising.
Now, think about this for a minute, okay?
This was a transparent rationalization, a transparent lie that that's why he did it.
I mean, Netanyahu just the other day came out and supported the guys who are in the street now because he said if he didn't support, if he didn't come out and say it, if he didn't come out and state what he had to say, they were going to say it was an Israeli-backed operation.
So it was the opposite reason.
But the thing is, Obama was already trying to make this stupid deal with Iran, right?
This deal with Iran, that we would remove sanctions, we'd give them all this money that we had frozen if they would say if they would lie and pretend that they weren't going to build nuclear weapons.
That was the deal.
You know, you lie.
And the thing is, they were lying about this.
I mean, people don't remember this.
This is the Ben Rhodes, that Ben Rhodes interview in the New York Times in 2016, where he said, man, we pulled a fast one on you, media guys.
And the media said, wow, we really admire that, that you lied to us.
That was amazing.
This was, they said, they told the press, they told the press that Obama was pulling off this Iran deal because of the election of a moderate, a so-called moderate, which I don't even know what that means in Iran, Hassan Rouhani, to the presidency, right, instead of Ahmed Dinejad.
So that was what allowed Obama to make this wonderful Iran deal.
But that was a lie.
It was a lie.
And when they confessed it was a lie, the press applauded their lying.
It was a lie.
Obama had already been negotiating with Iran and reaching out to Iran while Ahmed Dinejad was the president.
And Ahmad Dinejad was a hardliner.
And it doesn't matter who's the president because the president doesn't run the country.
The country is run by the mullahs, the religious guys led by, what's his name, Ayatollah Khomeini, right?
Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.
So all of this stuff was a lie.
Obama, just like he did with not stopping the drug dealing by the Palestinian terrorists, right, which Politico has now revealed, he pulled the DEA off that case so he could make this deal.
He sacrificed America's interests and he sacrificed the interests of freedom in order to make this stupid deal, which has done absolutely nothing.
And one of the funny things is it's kind of backfiring now because the people saw all this money coming through.
Rouhani's big claim to fame in his own country was, oh, I made this deal with America.
We have all these billions.
They're sending us tens of billions of dollars, including platforms full of cash that they're sending into the country.
And the people were kind of looking around and saying, hey, you know, we're still starving here.
You know, we're still just getting by.
And they started to protest this time, not in the cities, not in the cities, but in the surrounding areas in the countryside.
And it started to ignite.
So it started out.
It seems to have started out.
And it's hard.
Some of this, you know, you don't really know how accurate the news is, but it seems to have started out as an economic protest, but now it's spreading.
They don't want to be oppressed anymore.
They don't want to be in this theocratic government.
Women who are leading a lot of this, women are taking off their, you know, those horrible cows they're forced to wear and throwing them in the street.
I mean, this is why while Mattel is making Barbie, hijab Barbie, these brave, courageous women are taking their hijabs off, which could cost them their lives.
They could die.
And by the way, it's really wonderful to see Linda Sarser and all the other pink hat feminists rushing to support.
Oh, no, that's not happening.
I'm making that up.
That's not happening at all.
Feminists are doing nothing.
They're silent.
And so Donald Trump is doing the only right thing to do, which is put the support of America behind people who love freedom.
Wherever people rise up for freedom, America should say yes.
You know, we can't always give them, we can't always give them arms.
We can't always give them money.
We can't always give them, you know, military support, but at least we can give them moral support.
So Trump started tweeting.
He said the people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime.
All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their pockets.
The people have little food, big inflation, and no human rights.
The U.S. is watching.
This is the right thing to do.
It's the only right thing to do.
And let me just put down this marker.
The odds of this revolution succeeding, I can't say.
They always seem slim when these things start.
You never know if it's going to carry things away.
But it is entirely possible that this may be the beginning of the end of the mainstream support of Islamic terrorism.
It may well be.
These guys, Iran is the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world, state supporter of terrorism in the world, and it has served their people ill.
And in the best case scenario, and I realize this is an optimistic best case scenario, in the best case scenario, we are seeing the people of the Muslim world saying, you know what?
We don't benefit from this at all.
We don't benefit from bombing the West.
We don't benefit from killing Israelis.
We don't benefit.
Israel could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, and the Middle East would have all the same problems, all the same problems.
You know, they do not get anything out of this except a kind of firework show that makes them feel good about themselves because they have nothing else.
They have all this energy.
There's no reason they can't have a working economy, but their socialism and their theocracy is destroying them.
And if people start to find out, it would be a beautiful thing.
And I just want to say, before we go to Knowles, I just want to say that it is despicable the way the mainstream media is supporting this regime, supporting this regime in order to support Obama, in order to hide the fact that Obama did the cowardly, dishonest thing to support in not supporting the Green Revolution of 2009.
They're attacking Trump.
The New York Times runs an op-ed from one of Obama's old State Department hands saying, you know what he should do?
He should keep quiet.
He should keep quiet and do nothing.
That's the way we handled this.
And we already know it failed.
We know that that failed because the Green Revolution was crushed.
So we know Obama's ideas and practices failed.
So we know it's right to do something different.
It's ridiculous.
And on TV, some of the stuff that has been said is just, it makes you gag.
I mean, let's just listen, before we go to Knowles, let's just listen to CNN International.
This is Arwa Damon.
And CNN International is an anti-American propaganda unit.
It has nothing to do with the news.
It is just a relentlessly anti-American, socialistic piece of garbage.
And listen to what she says about America versus Iran.
This coming out from the country's foreign ministry, not only talking about the fact that they view the government of President Trump as the greatest bearer of ill will towards Iran, but going on to say that the people of Iran give no value or credibility to such opportunistic expressions by the government or the person, Mr. Trump.
American officials, through their conduct, have not earned a place from which they can express massed sentiments as sympathies for the aware and engaged people of Iran.
Now, this is not just necessarily a rebuke of what the U.S. president tweeted, but also perhaps a reflection of just how frustrated not just Iran, but other countries, frankly, are with the United States.
A lot of nations and their populations, no matter how they feel about their governments in particular, do perceive the United States as not really having a moral leg to stand on.
Unbelievable.
That is unbelievable.
She is supporting the Iranian foreign ministry's rebuke of President Trump because we don't have a moral leg to stand on.
The only reason we don't have a moral leg to stand on is because Obama dealt with these people out of some weird connection of Israel hatred and bizarre visionary nonsense that made him blind to the fact that this is an evil regime.
That is unbelievable.
Anyway, this is insanity.
What you just heard was insanity.
And Donald Trump, all his personal flaws included, has broken through that insanity.
And I am telling you, we're going to test this theory out as the year goes on.
I think people like this more than they admit, more than they know.
Speaking of things we like more than we admit and more than we know and more than we should admit, let's bring on Michael Knowles.
Hey, that's the nicest thing that was ever said about me.
In this place, it sure is.
I have to say it's good to see you, though.
I saw you just moments ago in New York.
That's true.
I saw you in New York, although you look much less blurry now.
I was seeing two of you over copious martinis in the middle of the night in midtown.
I have to tell you that if you never do anything else for anybody else ever again, you may have made your life worthwhile by introducing me to the Yale cocktail, something I had never known before.
I guess we can tell the secret.
There's this place in Manhattan, which is the Yale Club, and they serve a very famous martini.
And there's nothing really different about the martini.
Just a regular martini, except that there are two of them.
So you order it in there, too.
And then what's nice is in the big room there, they have portraits of all the presidents who graduated from some school at Yale.
So Clinton, Ford, Taft, and both Bushes.
There is always a seat available because nobody will sit in front of George W. Bush.
That was great.
That was a fun night.
It was a really, really fun night.
It really was.
And we should mention Another Kingdom comes back on Friday for the final three episodes.
I'm used to getting hate mail.
Obviously, we get a lot of this.
Yes.
I got a lot of very angry mail that we didn't post the episode.
And he said, who wants to listen to this interview with you guys?
Bring back the next chapter.
So that will come back on Friday.
All right.
All right.
So let's talk about what's coming up.
You know, Donald Trump is really, in my opinion, he's in a brilliant political position because he's accomplished so much in the first year that really he now can kind of pick and choose where he wants to go.
Everybody is shocked.
I think this is why.
I was trying to think of some predictions that we could make for 2018.
And I think, well, Trump will finally become tyrannical, right?
That's going to, well, maybe he'll become tyrannical.
Maybe he'll get tax reform.
Oh, he already did that.
Oh, maybe he'll defeat ISIS militarily.
Oh, he already did that.
On and on and on and on.
The only thing, obviously, they're going to hang their hat on is that Trump will be impeached.
Mike Pence will resign.
The House will elect Hillary Clinton Speaker, and then she'll finally become the president.
All will be well.
That prediction is as likely to come true as all of the other ones for 2017.
And I think there are a couple actual predictions we can make now.
I try not to forecast the future with Donald Trump because it is impossible.
Yeah, and he's very, that's true.
He does the unexpected.
But I do think we can finally see campaign themes emerging.
You saw this, Donald Trump finally signaled this.
So we know that the Democrats are going to run on sex.
Why are they going to run on sex?
Because their heads are in the gutter.
Why else?
Because Donald Trump has had an extremely successful first year.
So they can't run on the economy being in the doldrums.
The economy is currently at levels that Obama's economists said were impossible to reach again.
Foreign policy has been handled very ably.
Not only have we not started a nuclear war or Armageddon, but things seem to be going pretty well.
He pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord.
We were told that that would destroy the world.
It hasn't.
He pulled us, he repealed net neutrality.
We were told it would destroy the world.
It hasn't.
All of their hysteria hasn't come through.
So what can they do?
The only thing they can do is appeal to sex and call every man in America a rapist and try to make that stick to him.
He has just signaled just within the last day or two his response to this campaign theme, which is he tweeted out and said, quote, Democrats are doing nothing for DACA, just interested in politics.
DACA activists and Hispanics will go hard against Dems.
We'll start falling in love with Republicans and their president.
We are about results.
And this is a continuation of his campaign theme, one of his campaign themes from 2016, which is that he is about action.
Politicians are all talk and no action.
And I think he's going to contrast that.
He's going to shine a light and say, look, the Democrats have to run on this tabloid trash because they have no accomplishments whatsoever and everything they predicted hasn't come true.
I think this is a great appeal.
This is a direct appeal.
He's able to do this very well because he feigns ignorance about ideological conflict.
So he did this with Chuck and Nancy.
He said, I want to make a deal with Chuck and Nancy, but the trouble is they want to raise our taxes and ruin the country.
So I don't see a deal.
And so I think that that is going to play really, really well.
And think about this, too, though.
He's in a position now where if he puts, there's things that he wants to do that Democrats should be on board with, right?
By any logic, infrastructure, right?
Infrastructure, I'm always dubious because infrastructure funding usually turns out to be graft funding.
Absolutely.
As it did with Obama.
You know, that was Obama just threw away $700 billion, right?
That was all going to be for shovel-ready projects.
Oh, yeah, they weren't so shovel-ready.
Ha ha ha.
That stuff usually.
But we do need infrastructure.
We definitely need revamped infrastructure.
It's always going to take some government funding to get that done.
So depending on how it's funded, it could be a positive thing.
But the point is, it's something that Democrats should be on board with.
If he now goes and says, give me infrastructure, and they do their resistance thing, if Chuck Schumer puts on his pink hat and says, oh, no, I resist, I resist, they're going to look like idiots.
Conservative Trump, Entitlement Expansion00:06:11
Everybody is going to say, well, wait a minute, don't you guys do anything for a living?
The same with DACA.
If he says, yeah, I'll give you a DACA, but you got to give me the wall, and they say no, it seems to me he can just go to the people and say, you know, I tried to compromise.
What am I going to do?
So the Democrats are going to be playing to their base, but he's going to be playing to the broader public, I think.
And we know that the Democrats do this already.
Chuck Schumer was the lone Democrat voice against the Iran deal.
And then the minute that Trump calls to rescind the Iran deal and rip it up, he says, no, no, no, we can't do that.
Why is that?
Because he's just a hack and he's oppositional.
That's fine.
I sometimes wonder if Donald Trump has trolled the Democrats into trolling Donald Trump to be more conservative.
By that I mean he's a deal maker.
He easily could make deals with people.
He has some shared goals with Democrats, infrastructure, for example.
And yet, because they oppose him tooth and nail, it's backed him into this conservative corner, which is great for us.
I'm pretty pleased with it.
And I hope he keeps offering them little olive branches, and I hope that they keep smacking it down.
It will only advance our agenda.
I think that's absolutely right.
You know, Ben and I had the conversation, I don't know, when we were in Texas, it must be a year ago now.
Is it that far from the bottom?
About six months, I think.
We're still down there.
Yeah, six months.
And Ben said, you know, what do you see as the good path forward?
And I said, well, let's say he gets tax reform and the economy then takes off.
I said, then he's going to do stuff that's going to drive you, Shapiro, crazy, like infrastructure and stuff like that.
And you're not going to like it.
But at the same time, it puts him in this position of power because the Democrats have to play along or die.
And so if that happens and if the economy takes off, you're looking not only at a re-elected Trump if he lives, if he gets, you know, loses some weight, stays alive, but you're also looking at a President Pence.
I mean, we'll have a Republican president for years if the economy becomes as strong as I personally think it's going to become.
And if we have to pass some lefty bills or even infrastructure with a lot of graft in it or whatever, first of all, all Republicans do this.
I once talked to a well-known conservative writer and thinker that I won't name, and he said, well, Bush had to pass Medicare Part D.
He wouldn't have gotten elected otherwise.
He had to expand certain entitlements.
He wouldn't have gotten elected otherwise.
If we need to pass an infrastructure bill to get a more good conservative governance, I suppose I can live with that because I don't predict that this will happen in 2018, but I do see it coming down the pike, which is something I thought was impossible with Donald Trump, and that is entitlement reform.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
He signaled this a couple months ago in a speech in Missouri.
And coincidentally, at the same time, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan also signaled a turn toward this.
Paul Ryan has been salivating and chomping at the bid for entitlement reform as he came out of the womb and he just started reform Medicare.
And so that is the number one driver of our debt and deficit.
The long-term fiscal problems that we face are driven by those programs.
Donald Trump campaigned and said, I won't touch Social Security.
But then in the speech in Missouri, he reframed it and he said, Well, we need welfare reform.
We need welfare reform.
Now, these programs, I suppose they are welfare programs.
They're handouts from the federal government, albeit ones that we pay into.
If Donald Trump can pivot on this, can touch that third rail, he hasn't been afraid of touching other third rails in politics.
If any politician would be willing to do it, willing to do what other politicians think is suicide, it would be this guy.
If he could do that, it would be the greatest conservative governance probably since Coolidge.
It really would be amazing.
And the thing about Trump, as I've said from the beginning, is he obviously learns stuff.
You know, he comes, he's such so weird that he just will step into a situation that he knows nothing about with complete confidence.
But he does pay attention.
And in this time, it would not surprise me if he had learned that Ryan is right about this, you know, that this entitlement has to be reformed in order to be saved.
I mean, I'd probably get rid of it myself.
I'm such a cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge-like individual.
I just want to throw Granny off a cliff.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But I mean, even this fact, this simple fact that Social Security was framed when people died at 63.
You know, that was the average, the lifespan was 63, and it kicked in at 65.
So they just weren't paying the same thing as now when people live to be into their 70s and 80s and can work.
You know, if you have to work another three years before you get it, is that going to kill people?
You know, that's not the worst thing in the world when life is much longer than it used to be.
I think it's possible.
I don't think it's possible in a midterm election year.
Certainly not.
I don't think he'll touch it before 2018, before the elections in 2018.
But you are right, he does learn things.
And the evidence of his learning things is to compare President Trump to candidate Trump, to compare the things that President Trump says and does to the frequently insane things that candidate Trump said and did.
He had no idea what they were talking about.
Right.
Yeah, and now he does.
All right.
One last thing.
I think we have to pin it.
What do you think?
Give us a guess on the 2018 midterms.
I'm withholding much judgment.
The one thing I know is that we have to distrust the consensus.
So the consensus view is that we're going to get blown out.
We're going to lose the House by a lot.
We might lose the Senate.
I just don't buy that.
I don't even really buy much public opinion polling in the age of Trump because it is so taboo.
It is so unfashionable to say that you support this guy, even as a Republican, even as a conservative, that I think that silent majority that has cropped up during Richard Nixon's time, during Ronald Reagan's time, I think we could see that again.
And so my only prediction is that if Democrats make gains, they will be much more modest than is being predicted right now by the mainstream media.
But if we get 4% economic growth in 2018, I just don't see us really losing, despite all of the historical record that shows the incumbent party losing seats in the midterms.
Girls Will Be Girls00:05:31
It could be a brand new day.
I hate to say it, but I'm on exactly the same page.
I'm not willing to predict it yet, but I kind of suspect it's going to be much different than people say it is.
All right, Knowles, what's on the show today?
So today, obviously, we're singing about the ninth day of Christmas when the Shah 2018 Make Iran Great Again campaign was launched on the ninth day of Christmas.
The Iranians gave to me the death of Ayatollah Khomeini.
All right, sounds good.
The Michael Moll show is up next.
Thanks a lot, Knowles.
All right, let's end with sexual follies.
So this may be, this is a story that came up, it came up again in the new year, but it had come up before in the old year.
It may be the in a way, the silliest story I've ever heard.
A metadata study published in the journal Infant and Child Development by John A. Berry of University College London's Institute of Women's Health, as well as colleagues from other universities, has found that young children tend to prefer toys typed to their gender.
According to the abstract, after examining the studies which were conducted in multiple countries across 36 years, with a significant sample size of 1,600 children almost evenly divided between boys and girls, the researchers found that boys played with male-type toys more than girls did, and girls played with female-type toys more than boys did.
So boys like boy stuff and girls like girl stuff.
And you know, what is so interesting about this is how hard you have to work to keep this information from the public.
My daughter, Faith Moore, who writes over at PJ Media, the lifestyle page, has a piece called Feminists, Princess Play Important for Girls, but Only If Princesses are Sword-Wielding Warriors.
And this is what's really interesting about this, as Faith points out, there's an article in the New York Post saying that girls like princesses, but includes as princesses Wonder Woman and Princess Leia and She-Ra, you know, the people, but that's, and they quote this study from an old Psychology Today article from 2015 that says that princess play is good for girls and acts like princess says that princess play is good for girls, that girls like princess play and it's good for them.
And then it says, yes, well, look, it's She-Ra and Wonder Woman, but that's not what the Psychology Today article talks about.
It's talking about little pink princesses who have tea, their friends over for tea.
That is the type of princess play that girls like.
They actually don't necessarily prefer being Wonder Woman or She-Ra or whatever.
They prefer being Cinderella and nothing that the feminists has done over all this time.
You know, feminists are terrible.
It's just an awful thing.
So what I wanted to point out about this is that if you listen to the way that people react to, that the left reacts, especially feminists react to people who disagree with them, it's always by attacking the messenger.
So for instance, if you're male, you can't speak, because why would a male get to say anything about women if you're white or something or privileged, whatever, or you're old.
And this is one of the biggest ones is when an old guy, because old guys are tough, right?
Because we don't have anything to lose.
So we'll say anything because we've already got ours as far as women are concerned.
It's like we don't have anything.
They'll say, well, you're old.
Have you heard this?
They do it all the time.
Andy Rooney said he didn't like seeing the old commentator on 60 Minutes, who's now passed away, but Andy Rooney said he didn't like seeing women do football commentary.
I don't really like watching women do football commentary either.
I never quite believe that they know what they're talking about.
But he was just absolutely flagellated for being old.
He's 80.
What's wrong with you?
You're 80.
You can't, you know, and I just thought, what?
So the only thing I want to say about this is just think about how that emphasizes the state of mind of white men.
In other words, if I said to women, it would be, you would be happier if you were a homemaker and a rearer of children.
If I said that, I'm not necessarily saying that.
I think each person is different.
But if I said that and you said, well, you're being a paternalistic white male old guy, you know, what does that have to do with whether my statement is true or not?
It simply has to do with the state of white men.
And I think that everything the left does is really about white people.
Everything the left does is really about privileging white people.
Like if a white guy says, you know, blacks would be happier not having children out of wedlock, and everybody says, you're white, you can't say, how does that help black people?
It doesn't.
It basically just emphasizes what white men should be like.
It privileges white men.
So all I want to say about this is that girls will be girls and boys will be boys.
And if we are afraid to talk about this stuff, and I think so many of us are, I hear so many people moaning and complaining about feminism behind the scenes who will not go and say what I say, which is I am opposed to feminism itself.
I'm not opposed to individuals making their own choices.
I'm very much in favor of that, but I'm opposed to the philosophy of feminism.
If we don't say that stuff, we live in the madhouse.
That's the thing.
We're trying to get out of the madhouse.
For eight years under the Obama administration, the madhouse surrounded us.
Personally, I think it has surrounded us for 50 years.
I don't think it matters who's in the White House if the culture around us just supports this insanity.
It's going to continue to do that until we say no, until we stop watching and agreeing with and being afraid to say what we have to say.
Breaking Out of the Madhouse00:00:44
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I'm Andrew Clavin.
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