Andrew Clavin dissects Trump’s Twitter wars—mocking Kim Jong-un, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Authority—mirroring Reagan’s Cold War-era psychological tactics while dismissing media hysteria over his "nuclear button" tweet as partisan. He pivots to callers: a Vicodin-addicted firefighter gets blunt rehab advice, a rape survivor learns forgiveness isn’t justice, and a fatherhood query reveals Clavin’s 85% "show-up" parenting rule. Criticizing Disney-Fox’s conservative void and media’s "alien-like" bias against Trump, he ends by teasing John Nolte’s segment, framing truth as the ultimate weapon against institutional decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Skillshare Deals and New Year's Resolutions00:05:39
Well, there's nothing like a little presidential trollery to make the press run in circles, shrieking like hens who've been trained at hen school to run in circles and shriek at a little presidential trollery.
Anyone who's paid attention to this president understands that he uses his belligerent New York sense of humor to tease and annoy anyone he finds to be a puffed up fake or blowhard, whether it's Kim Jong-un, the Iranian Mulahs, or Brian Stelter at CNN.
But the press doesn't seem to get the joke.
For one thing, it's hard for them to see Trump clearly without removing their heads from the bottom 12 inches of their lower intestines.
And for another thing, if they grant that Trump uses humor and insults strategically, they might have to admit that the reason he beat their favored gangster lady of a candidate in the last election, the reason he achieved more that was good for America in his first year in office than the last president ever achieved, and the reason his poll numbers have begun climbing despite their relentless negative coverage is that he's smarter than they are, which is actually pretty funny in and of itself.
On Monday, during his New Year's address, brutal stinkypants fat boy Kim Jong-ung of North Korea told his starving people, quote, the entire mainland of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear weapons, and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office.
They should accurately be aware that this is not a threat, but a reality.
Yesterday, Trump hilariously tweeted back, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un just stated that the nuclear button is on his desk at all times.
Will someone from his depleted and food-starved regime please inform him that I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my button works.
The result was a rain.
A rain of hellfire and death that left two continents leveled to ruins under a rain of radioactive ash.
No, I'm actually joking.
So maybe Jake Tapper and Brian Stelter and Anderson Cooper can come out from under their desks now and take their heads out of their asses as well.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is it-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hurrah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's mailbag day in which all your questions will be answered with 100% accuracy.
I mean, how often does that happen?
How many times has that happened in your life?
This will change your life, and it's possible it will change your life for the better.
You have to experiment.
You have to be brave and experiment and find out.
Meanwhile, it's the new year, so you've probably made some new year's resolutions.
I actually don't make New Year's resolutions.
I make New Year's plans.
I do make a list of things that I hope to accomplish in the new year, but I don't really make resolutions because they're very breakable.
But if you do make resolutions, a lot of people do, and actually people, we always joke about the fact that people make resolutions and they break them, but that's because they make resolutions about things that they're probably not going to be able to do, like diet, which is not good for you anyway.
You know, you should just change your eating habits altogether.
You know, those are the kinds of things you don't follow through on.
But the kind of things you do follow through on, I think, are plans.
And if you have plans and you want to extend, like one of the things I'd like to do in this coming year is I'd like to learn how to play the piano.
You know, I have a keyboard and I want to hook it up and get some lessons.
And the thing that can really help you with this is Skillshare, because Skillshare is a onlearn learn.
It's an online learning.
I still have a little bit of flu here, folks.
Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, businesses, business, technology, and more.
And what they are, they're just a series of classes that you watch the videos, and an expert in the field will explain to you things that you can do to help you develop a new skill or approach a new business or just even learn a hobby that you want to learn.
I've tested them out just so I could do the ads.
I tested them out by asking them about writing, and I found their advice really good, really helpful.
I mean, obviously, it was stuff that I knew because I'd been in the business a long time, but that was really helpful.
And then, when Knowles and I did Another Kingdom, when we put Another Kingdom up, I actually got to the point where I was, we faced so many obstacles and so many things that went wrong.
I actually went to Skillshare and started to ask it about get lessons on doing a podcast.
Now, I know I do this podcast, but a lot of this podcast is taken care of, and this was something we all had to do from scratch.
And it was really helpful, it's really good stuff.
And just in time for the new year and your resolution, Skillshare is offering my listeners a limited-time offer of three months of Skillshare for just 99 cents.
Pretty good deal, 99 cents, which comes out to about a buck.
To sign up, go to skillshare.com/slash Andrew99.
That's how you know they know that you're coming from us and that you're looking at this offer.
And that is very helpful to us as well because it keeps the lights on.
And some of us, some of you guys probably get paid.
Nah, maybe.
I can't imagine why, but some of these people get paid, and it really helps if our sponsors stay with us and they stay with us because you sign up or go to skillshare.com/slash Andrew99 and check out this deal.
Skillshare.com/slash Andrew99, and you get three months of Skillshare for only 99 cents.
Act now for this special New Year's offer and start learning today.
And it's just, you know, it's worth it just to go through the videos and try them out.
Paying Blackmail in FATA00:03:30
I really enjoyed them, and I thought they were very helpful.
So, Trump starts off the second year of his presidency with a tweet storm that shook the world, but also more importantly, it made me laugh.
I mean, the guy obviously knows how to dominate news cycles and he sets the agenda and he gets also getting serious work done.
And the reaction of the media is kind of telling, especially when you look back.
We're going to look back a little bit at some of the stuff that Ronald Reagan did and the way the media reacted to that and just compare and contrast because some of the same thing is going on.
But let's just take a look at some of these tweets.
He puts out, he firstly put out this tweet about how we're spending all this money for giving aid to Pakistan, and Pakistan is not helping us with terrorists.
And this is a big deal.
You know, I keep hearing these commentators.
It's amazing the level of commentary on mainstream news shows that is so ill-informed.
I mean, you know, in Pakistan, the security services are riddled, laced with Islamists.
Okay, so this is a place where Islamism is very, very embedded in the government culture, and there's a lot of problems there.
And so, when we want the help with, you know, they're on the border of Afghanistan.
They're actually on the border of what's called the Fatah, the federally administered tribal areas, which are just basically the badlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And we need their help sometimes to get in there.
And they haven't given up to us.
And they let the terrorists, the Taliban, recede into the Fatah during the winter months so they can come back in the spring and kill people.
And the problem is, of course, Afghanistan has been there for Afghanistan, is a prehistoric country.
I mean, I've been in Afghanistan and you stand in their places where you just expect to see Jurassic Park come.
You do.
You expect to see like a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming over the cliff because it looks like no civilized life has ever gone there.
And so we're there.
And I don't know why we're there.
I got to be honest.
I do not know.
I came back from Afghanistan realizing that it was the stupidest war in the world because there's nothing we can do.
What we do is we go into these villages and we spend money and the money goes to graft and the money disappears and vanishes into the corrupt system.
And then the minute we pull out of the villages, the Taliban comes back out of the fatah and out of the hills and out of the caves.
And the people know if they cooperate with us, they're going to be killed.
And we can't stay there forever and keep them going.
And Afghanistan has been there for a long time.
They call it the graveyard of empires for a reason.
So Trump has been tweeting that Pakistan isn't helping us.
And he says it's not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries and others.
As an example, we pay the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars a year and get no appreciation or respect.
They don't even want to negotiate a long overdue peace treaty with Israel.
We've taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation off the table, but Israel for that would have had to pay more.
But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?
So this is like trollery of the first water serene because the thing is, obviously, aid is a weird thing because we give aid to these horrible people in these horrible countries.
And the only thing we really get out of them sometimes is that they don't take aid from our enemies.
Perry's Payoff Complaint00:14:45
So that's it.
That is essentially what we're doing is we're paying blackmail.
We're paying ransom to keep them on our, not even on our side, but to keep them from playing ball with our enemies.
So that's one tweet.
And then he comes out like almost with the next breath.
I will be announcing the most dishonest and corrupt media awards of the year on Monday at 5 o'clock.
Subjects will cover dishonesty and bad reporting in various categories from the fake news media.
Stay tuned.
Now, I just want to say one thing.
Please let me be a presenter at these awards.
I haven't asked this administration for anything.
All I want is to go to these awards and deliver the prize for the most dishonest and corrupt media awards of the year.
I mean, I would even be, I would like to be the host.
I would like to be the Bob Hope of the most dishonest media.
So of course this, so anyway, going on, then he goes on, crooked Hillary Clinton's top aide, Uma Abidin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols.
She put classified passwords into the hands of foreign agents.
Remember, sailors' pictures on a submarine?
Jail.
Deep State Justice Department must finally act also on Comey and others.
So this just goes on.
I mean, it was just a storm.
Plus this thing with North Korea, you know, where he just basically told this guy, you know, yeah, you're going to blow us up.
We will blow you up so fast it doesn't matter.
So let's just take a look at the measured reaction of our, you know, big minds in the news media.
Let's start with Brian Stelter and Anderson Cooper on CNN.
This is number one.
What's on the president's mind?
We know what's on the president's mind.
16 tweets today to start the new year, some of them deeply disturbing.
Right, I mean, considering how the new year has started, what does this say about the year?
Madness.
And I think we should start to call it that, shouldn't we?
You know, when President Trump was inaugurated last January, some writers, some columnists like Andrew Sullivan started right away to raise concerns about the president's mental health, about his fitness for office.
In the months that followed, we saw Republican senators like Jeff Flake bring these issues up, try to ask about his fitness for office.
Bob Corker, another name that comes to mind.
I think we could apply a test to his 16 tweets today.
The test would be, if this were the leader of Germany or China or Brazil, what would we say?
How would we cover these tweets?
We would say these are the messages from a person who is not well, from a leader who is not fit for office.
So once again, we go back to this old line that the press has been promoting since the election, that Trump is out of his mind, that he's crazy.
It's madness.
It's madness.
It's all madness.
And if this was some other guy that, you know, but it's not.
I mean, that's the thing.
It's Trump talking, being Trump and talking like Trump.
So I want to go back to 1984 to a very famous incident.
Ronald Reagan was about to make his weekly address, and he did a mic check, and he made the following joke, I guess, cut seven.
My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever.
We begin bombing in five minutes.
We've outlawed Russia forever, and we begin bombing.
And this is the height of the Cold War, right?
This is where the Cold War crisis begins.
I was working, I believe, at ABC News at the time this happened, and the press went insane.
It was as if he had launched an actual nuclear strike.
And the New York Times, the New York Times, and you know, Reagan, you have to understand that Reagan is where the press began its journey into dishonesty.
Okay, up until this time, there was kind of a consensus in America that we were kind of a liberal, middle-of-the-road, kind of economically right-wing, but socially, slowly liberalizing country.
Everybody was fighting over the 50-yard line.
But it was always going to be Democrats were going to essentially win and push the ball further.
The ratchet only turned one way.
And when Reagan won, just like with Trump, there was such shock that I really do believe that something clicked in the minds of our journalists and they said, we will never let this happen again.
And it was from that moment that the press really became just an agent of the Democrat Party.
It was just essentially that there was one party of truth and one party of hatred.
The Democrats were the party of truth.
Reagan and the Republicans were the party of hatred.
And they just went to war.
Here is the New York Times, which then was an actual newspaper.
It had not yet become a former newspaper.
The New York Times reacting to what you just heard, that nine-second joke.
President Reagan's gaffe about bombing the Soviet Union has risked tarnishing his recent foreign policy advances and undercutting deliberate efforts by the administration to put him in a better position in this area for the election campaign.
In response to a formal Soviet statement calling the president's remark unprecedentedly hostile toward the Soviet Union, the State Department accused Moscow today of blowing the subject way out of proportion.
But in private, high officials and some Republican strategists acknowledge that they winced over the remark by the president last Saturday.
So the people in the office, and one of the traits of people who work for the president is they very quickly begin to think that they're smarter than the president.
This happens in every presidency.
So they started to say, oh, after working for months to show him in a more conciliatory stance and to put the onus on Moscow for a chill in relations, some officials were concerned that he had unintentionally touched off new uneasiness in Western Europe and had done political damage at home.
This is a nine-second joke, okay?
And one of the associates who unnamed said, I'm sure there's no one who regrets this more and is kicking himself more than Ronald Reagan.
And same today with Trump, Mediaite reporting on Axios, said, as President Donald Trump's testy back and forth with Kim Jong-un reached a climax last night, some White House officials are reportedly concerned that the president will accidentally instigate a war with the North Korean leader due to his reckless Twitter habits, right?
This is what we're really worried about.
You know, does anybody really believe that Kim Jong-un is going to set off a rocket because of this?
You know, SNL, Saturday Night Live, did a very funny skit on Ronald Reagan.
And it was hostile.
It was all about Reagan and Iran-Contra and the scandal and all this.
But the joke was that Reagan looks like an idiot in front of the press because that's what the press saw.
But behind the scenes, he was an evil mastermind.
Just play a little bit of this because it really is hilarious.
Well, hello, little girl.
What's your name?
Lisa Myers.
Well, Lisa, if you're that good a sales lady, maybe I could use you up on Capitol Hill.
Well, it was nice meeting.
Come on, Lisa.
Come on.
Bye bye Afghanistan needs more money.
We've got $65.2 million tucked away in Zurich.
Now, if we hold it there for another 30 days at 7.28% interest, that's roughly $400,000.
$397,200 and $85.
I know.
Don't waste my time.
But if we take out only 20 million, we'll lose roughly, let's see, that's... 121,800.
And 16.
Thank you so much.
Yes.
Mr. President, it's Mr. Karan Hassan Fassan.
Put him on the speaker.
Well, gentlemen, I just concluded a very lucrative deal with the Iraqis.
Mr. President, it just occurred to me.
What if something should happen to you?
You're the only one who knows what's going on.
And that's the way it's going to stay.
The funny thing about it, the thing that made this so funny was there's actually truth to this.
If you take out the fact that he's an evil genius and all this stuff, the actual truth about this was that the joke was intentional.
I'm sure that Reagan knew that Mike was live.
I mean, he was an old-time radio hand.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
He knew that the mic might be live, if nothing else.
He was letting the Soviet Union know, as he continually did, that they had no moral leg to stand on.
He was making fun of them.
He was making fun of the fact that they were, you know, bearish, warlike, and blustering people, and he wasn't going to take them seriously.
And he wasn't afraid of them.
And the same thing is true about Donald Trump and this clown in North Korea.
The one thing this guy depends on is people taking him seriously and acting as if he's a dangerous threat.
And he may, in fact, be a dangerous threat.
But why do you think the one thing that drove him so nuts, that drove the North Koreans so nuts, was when they put out that movie, The Interview?
Remember the movie, The Interview, and they forced, it was Sony, I believe.
They forced them to just release it online because they were afraid of releasing it in theaters?
And why?
Why did they, you know, why, never mind the cowardice of the studio in that case, but why were they, did they take, because it didn't take him seriously.
It didn't take him seriously.
And that is Trump's strategy, and he's doing it on purpose.
And if Trump is not good at gauging his opponents and defeating them through knowing who they are, then he explained to me where the other 16 Republican candidates are who tried to beat him for the presidency.
And by the way, one Democrat who also didn't beat him for the day.
If he didn't know, you know, people keep saying, oh, he got lucky and stumbled into the presidency.
He saw his moment.
He saw his moment.
He knew who he could beat and he knew how.
And he's doing the same exact thing here.
Just play a moment from this thing.
This is what dictators are afraid of.
This is what they're afraid of more than anything else is jokes.
And here's just a scene from the interview where James Franco and the dictator in North Korea bond over Katy Perry.
Look, you have a sound system in here?
Oh, no, no, no.
Don't touch.
Katy Perry?
Oh, you know, my wife must have a put that in there because I've never heard this before in my life.
I love Katy Perry.
Baby, you're a fight.
Come and show what you were.
I love that.
I mean, I have this on.
I listen to this all the time.
Really?
I love her.
You know why I really like her?
Because she has such a strong message for young women and girls across the planet.
She's a, it's so empowering.
You know, Dave, sometimes I feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start the game.
Oh.
As you shoot across the sky.
Sky.
Sky.
Oh, good times.
Dave, do you think that Margaritas are gay because they are so sweet?
Did someone tell you that?
That margaritas are gay?
No, it's just a question I have.
Liking Katy Perry and drinking margaritas is gay?
Who wants to be straight?
Not me.
Boring!
Margaritas are great!
And whoever planted that in your head is crazy.
That's what dictators are afraid of, and no kidding.
And Trump knows it, and that's what he's doing.
Hey, you know, if you want to be more informed about history in a entertaining way, there's a new podcast coming out from Wondery called American History Tellers.
It starts today, and you can go to subscribe to American History Tellers on Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to podcasts, where you're listening to, as I know, Another Kingdom.
You know, you want to go and download American History Tellers.
It is this fellow named Lindsey Graham.
And no, it's not that Lindsey Graham.
He is a guy who's fascinated with history, and he teams up with PhD historians to bring you a new take on history telling.
He takes the first person's perspective, and it has sound design.
It really gets you kind of into the history.
I've listened to the first episode, and it really is entertaining in an entertaining way.
And the first six episodes for the new series cover the Cold War.
And so this is something like you just shouldn't forget this stuff because this is something that really, a lot of the patterns that developed during the Cold War are repeating themselves today, and you really will learn a lot.
The show starts today, January 3rd.
You can start listening to the first episode right now.
Check out American History Tellers on Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe.
American History Tellers, subscribe today.
Really entertaining way to learn stuff.
And it's just, it's just, it's nice to have an easy way where you suddenly know this stuff and you're not like walking blind because remember, the opponents, our opponents, let us call them that, our opponents depend on our ignorance.
They depend on us not knowing what happened in the past.
So this is a really good way to find out.
We got a break from YouTube and from Facebook.
The mailbag is coming up.
How can you just sit there?
How can you just sit there when all your problems could be solved?
Come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe.
You can watch the whole show if you're a subscriber for allows you 10 bucks a month.
can watch the whole show right on the website and you won't be cast out into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Hey, we've got to deal with a breaking story.
You know, on Drudge today, there was a preview from the Guardian of this new book that's coming out by Michael Wolf, and it has Steve Bannon going off on Trump and saying that this meeting that Trump Jr. was going to take with a Russian was treason and all this stuff.
And Trump has really been kind of going up.
Trump, Bannon has been really going off the reservation on Trump.
And Trump has been uncharacteristically restrained in responding, you know, because Bannon, I remember, we said before when Bannon supported a guy against Trump who then lost Alabama, very, very strong questions about his competence.
You know, everybody with Bannon always focuses on his ideology and his ideas.
But as I said then, that very, very powerful questions about his competence came up.
Bannon's Alabama Bet00:03:02
You cannot lose Alabama to the Democrats.
It's almost impossible to do it, and yet Bannon helped do it.
Well, Donald Trump has just run out of patience, apparently, and he just released a statement saying, Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency.
When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.
Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating 17 candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.
All of this is true, by the way, you know, just saying.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look.
This guy really, you know, is not a guy you want to be on his wrong side, I guess.
Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country.
Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than 30 years by Republicans.
Steve doesn't represent my base.
He's only in it for himself.
Boy, this is brutal.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.
It is the only thing he does well.
Steve has rarely in a one-on-one meeting, was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue whom he helped write phony books.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great agenda, again, agenda.
Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.
Well, you know, the Trump, you know, I'm not really surprised.
I'm a little surprised that Trump waited so long to unleash that.
But, you know, Trump is also looking ahead to the 2018 elections that he doesn't want Bannon going around.
You know, Mona Charon had a hilarious tweet yesterday.
Mona Charon from National Review.
She said something like Mitt Romney may run for the open seat and Oren Hatch is retiring.
And so Mitt Romney may run for that open Senate seat.
And Mona Charon said, but Steve Bannon is canvassing prisons and madhouses for candidates.
So, you know, Donald Trump is looking forward and thinking like, I do not want this guy losing any more of my majority than I have to lose in these 2018 elections.
So this, now we've got, you know, Bannon was always signing his letters, hashtag war.
Well, now he's got himself a war, and I don't think this is a war that Bannon can win.
I think if he goes up against Donald Trump, you know, the only thing that Bannon has really going for him, he has the Breitbart site, and he has the money from the Mercers.
And if the money from the Mercers goes away, if they start to think that they've backed the wrong horse, Bannon's just going to have a website like everybody else.
Everybody has a website, and it's not going to really do him much good.
It was Trump who really made that website explode the way it did.
So this is going to be really, this is interesting, good, interesting political stuff.
Father's Guilt and Forgiveness00:13:11
I mean, this is the kind of stuff I love.
Let's go to the mailbag.
All right.
I was not ready for that.
Here's one with a name withheld.
Dear Clavin, I met a boy in college and quickly we became intimate.
He was my first time, but I never told him that.
And soon after, he only talked to me with month-long gaps when he wanted to have sex.
It's fairly obvious that he doesn't truly care much about me, but I feel as if he consumes most of my thoughts.
I guess I'm trying to reconcile with my cognitive dissonance because I really believe that intimacy should be between people who love one another, but I'm having a hard time with it all.
So this is my long way of asking you, how do you let go of someone who is more fantasy than reality, but simultaneously a big part of your reality?
Look, you're a big girl.
You let go by letting go.
That's the way it's done.
You know, I feel like I should say this.
You know, women, the thing that makes women women and the thing that makes women womanly is a capacity for giving of themselves that men simply don't have.
There's a reason that when, as a guy who's played a lot of sports and who's been in a lot of male locker rooms, men make locker room jokes.
It's true, and they use language in locker rooms they don't use elsewhere.
It's true.
But you don't hear men saying things about their wives disrespectfully in locker rooms.
It's really interesting.
You actually, even in locker rooms, men speak of their wives with great respect because they know that women give them things that they would not give, that they have not the capacity for selflessness that some women have.
It's the other reason why people go to their graves thinking about their moms.
You know, if they had good moms, you know, people, they say that the word that most men, the last word that most men say when dying on a battlefield is mom.
And there's a reason for this because women have this capacity to give.
But if you have that capacity to give, and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing, like all sweet things, it attracts rodents, and you got one.
You got a guy who's just using you.
He's, you know, he got some sex and he knows he can come back and get some sex.
And he knows that you want to give yourself to something of worth.
And he is using that, you know, to get what he wants without any respect for you.
So you got to dump him.
You got to dump him and move on.
You made a mistake.
That's a sad thing.
We all do it.
We all make romantic mistakes.
And you've made one and now you've got to get out.
This is part of being, you know, growing up and being a woman.
You know, if you have that much to give, there's somebody who will honor you for it and treat you as you deserve to be treated, but this is not that guy.
Okay.
From Stephen, Mr. Clavin, I know you usually get a better title, but I'm having a hard time.
After getting injured, fighting a fire about two years ago and getting prescribed Vicodin, I have been on and off Vicodin because it helps with my depression, but it's harder and harder to come by.
A relatively small dose in the morning and then again in the afternoon helps me get moving and calms my anxiety, but I know I can't be on this medication forever.
As a father, I want to do the best I can for my children and wife, but I have a hard time accepting that something which helps me feel better and be more productive is a bad thing.
Everyone tells me it is bad and it feels wrong and I don't want to ruin any relationships.
I just don't know what to do.
So here's, look, you're a firefighter.
I'm not going to like mince words with you.
You're a drug addict.
You're addicted to Vicodin.
It's very, very possible that your depression is a symptom of your addiction, that the Vicodin is not actually solving the problem.
It's causing the problem.
That is a very possible thing.
You've got to beat it.
You're obviously a brave guy if you're fighting fires.
So now you need to put that courage to work, especially for your children.
You've got to put that courage to work on a full court press on dumping this poison and getting it out of your system.
It's very, very possible that you could use some help with this, either a rehab thing that'll get you off it and teach you new ways to live, and maybe even NA, Narcotics, Anonymous, that will teach you how to be sober, you know, because once you're on this stuff, you've got to really live a clean life to get away from it.
As for the depression, you'll find out once you break the habit, once you break the habit, you'll find out if the depression is an independent thing.
One of the reasons this addiction is so satanic is that it, just like Satan, it pretends that it's going to help you with things that it's actually causing.
And so if you get away from this stuff, you may find that your depression clears up and cures itself, or you may find that you're also depressed for some other reason and you've got to address that.
But first, get off the drug.
The drug is everything.
The addiction is everything.
You're not dealing with anything else but addiction.
That's what you're dealing with.
You're dealing with an addiction to a drug.
Get off it.
You know, and get help and do all the things that people who are addicted have to do.
But you're a tough guy, you're a brave guy, you're a firefighter.
Do not let this stand in the way of the life you're supposed to have and that God wants you to have.
Get off it.
You know, and I got to say also, doctors are really bad with this stuff.
You know, doctors who now give you a hard time if you want some antibiotics for an infection, which is nonsense.
It's not going to help anything.
It's not going to keep any of the germs from becoming more drug resistant.
That's ridiculous because you can walk into it.
First of all, you can walk into any urgent care center and get all the drugs you want and their drugs are peppering your meat and all that stuff.
But they will prescribe this pain stuff for anything and opiates and just really addictive stuff.
And they really should check themselves.
It's really bad idea.
From Joel, dear Supreme Lord Clavin, now we're getting down to it.
I mean, come on.
It's just Claven.
Dear Supreme Lord Clavin, creator of nymphs and rightful heir to the throne of Galeana, which is the kingdom in another kingdom, I've really been enjoying the work of your children, Spencer and Faith, which I really appreciate.
They are doing incredibly good work.
Faith's pieces, which are over at PJ Media, are really insightful and heartfelt.
And Spencer recently made an appearance on the Michael Knoll show, which elevated it to the level of watchable, which I have to say says something for my son because that is almost impossible.
From where I stand, it seems you have managed to raise some amazing children.
Well, my wife raised some amazing children, but I was there.
I was participating.
I am a young, struggling father of twin boys and two little girls, all under five years old.
I pray every night that they would grow to be followers of Jesus, but I often find my own example undermines all I try to teach them.
I struggle with anger and impatience in a way that I never did before having kids.
I had a terrible relationship with my own father, and as a result, feel woefully underequipped to be a good father to my own children.
So how did you do it?
Is there anything you wish you had done differently as a dad?
What advice would you give young fathers?
Well, first of all, thank you very much.
My children are incredible people.
They are incredible people.
And I think that if I take any credit, it's for not getting in the way of them growing into the incredible people that God made them to be and not trying to impose.
You know, I certainly tried to teach them values, but I didn't try to impose my vision of life on them and let them find their way as much as I possibly could without their hurting themselves.
You know, that was a good thing to do.
But just to take the side question first, is there anything you would wish you'd done differently as a dad?
Of course there is.
Of course there is.
Being a father requires you to be God, and none of us is.
And so you make mistakes and there are things you regret.
And of course there are things you want differently.
That's not the point.
The point is, did you show up for the kid?
Were you there for the kid?
It's 85% showing up.
And were you on their side?
I mean, this was a big deal.
My father was not on my side.
And I remember when I first brought my daughter home from the hospital, I thought I had thought like, oh, please don't let me be a better father than my father.
And I brought my daughter home and I thought, oh, that's too low a bar because I know that I'm on my daughter's side and I know I'm going to be in favor of her to succeed and be happy and do all those things.
So here's what I know.
If you picture yourself like a piano keyboard, your children are going to hit every single key.
By the time they're finished, they will play every single key, good and bad.
So I rapidly understood, because I understood this even before my daughter was born, that I had to make sure that the piano was in working order and was in tune.
You have a problem with your dad that is probably playing into your sense of anger.
You have a lot of kids, you don't have a lot of time to think.
You should get that fixed.
It might require therapy.
It might just require some thought.
You do not want, you're absolutely right that you can preach Jesus all you want, but if what you're living is anger and resentment and hostility, that's what they're going to learn.
They're going to learn your anger and resentment and hostility.
They do not learn as much from what you say as from what you do and how you treat them, and especially how you treat your wife.
You know, I really believe that the first and most important thing you can do as a father is treat your wife with respect because, you know, you're the planet your kids live on.
You're the planet your kids live on.
Whenever I hear people get divorced and they say the kids are all right, I think, yeah, the kids are fine as long as you accept you just blew up their planet.
You just blew up their planet.
They're not all right.
They're not fine.
You just ruined their lives.
You know, don't kid yourself.
Don't let yourself off the hook.
So the same thing is true here.
You know, treat your wife with respect and kindness and decency, and that's going to have a big effect.
But you also got to treat your kids with patience and pay attention to what they need and what their needs are and put yourself aside a little bit, which is always hard for men to do.
But if you need help getting this thing about your father out of your mind, go get some help.
You owe it to your children.
You will, I can tell you this.
I can tell you this as an older guy.
I can tell you when you get to the point where you're looking at your adult children, you will be so happy you took the time to work on yourself now when they need you because now they're being formed.
This is when the little tree gets, this is where they get their shape from, and this will be with them forever.
Stuff you do later, there's room to maneuver.
If I make a mistake today, my son and my daughter can come to me and say, hey, you're making a mistake, and I have to listen to them, but then they have no power, and you're shaping them, and they're early, they're clay.
They're like clay in your hands.
So you've really got to take care of yourself.
So get yourself some help because you shouldn't be angry at your children all the time.
Obviously, there are times when you want to beat them into the ground with your fists, but you still should not be, it shouldn't be an out-of-control anger inside you.
That's coming from some other place.
Okay.
Let me see what else I got.
Have I got time?
Yes.
All right.
I'm taking the tough ones today.
I got to say, these are tough questions.
Hi, Andrew.
I've been having trouble with this situation for a while, and I want to hear what you think.
A couple of months ago, I was sexually assaulted by a close friend of mine.
Well, no, you weren't.
I mean, you were sexually assaulted by someone you thought was a close friend, but okay.
At the time, I didn't report him because I blamed myself and felt bad about reporting my friend.
I wanted to just forgive him and move on, but with all the sexual assault stories that have come out, I began doubting my decision.
Is it wrong if I try to forgive him?
Do I have a responsibility to report him?
Well, first of all, you don't say what the sexual assault is, and it does make a difference if he, you know, if he raped you.
It's a terrible thing to have to report somebody for rape because you are going to be put through the ringer.
And I'm not minimizing that at all.
You are going to be treated like a suspect.
You are going to have to prove your case.
You are going to be attacked in ways that you cannot believe when you're the victim.
But if he actually raped you, you do have a responsibility if you can handle it.
If you can handle it, you have a responsibility to report him because he's going to do it to somebody else.
I mean, he really is.
Now, look, if he pinched you, if that's what you're talking about or did something, then you just, you don't need to report that to anybody, but you might want to tell him off.
So it really depends on what the assault was.
But if you think he did something genuinely assaultive, genuinely dangerous and criminal, yeah, I would report him.
This has nothing to do with whether you forgive him or not.
Okay, people make that mistake.
You can forgive somebody and still report him to the police.
You can let it go in your own heart, which I recommend you pray for and you try to do.
You don't have to harbor your anger against him as not achieving anything.
You can forgive him and let him go and still make sure that other people are protected from him because he's doing something destructive and criminal.
Obviously, I hope you do understand.
I wasn't just joking before, he's not your friend.
This is not your friend, as somebody who did that to you.
I don't know what it was, but if it was, you know, it's so hard when you use these terms.
I know they get used so loosely, but assuming it was something violent and terrible, he's not your friend, and he wasn't just stepping over the line.
Rupert Murdoch's Media Grip00:10:16
Let's see.
All right, here's something a little, here's a little, something a little lighter from Zachary to he whose voice can soothe a raging bull.
With the recent UFO videos being released, I can't help but have some questions.
If we find out aliens do exist, what does that do to Christianity?
Mainly, that since we are made in the image of God, then naturally the alien race would also be made in that image.
Well, you know, I've never really understood the concern about this.
You know, I mean, I actually believe that there are probably alien life forms and other planets.
And I think when we meet them, it will expand our idea of God.
I think that they too will have an idea of God, and it may be somewhat different.
They may be so different from us that it has to be different.
And that, you know, we'll just have to learn at the time.
But what we know is what we know of God here on Earth.
We know, you know, of God as man, and God was incarnate and made man.
You know, maybe he was also incarnate and made Zorf.
You know, I don't know.
But it's going to be interesting to find out.
I just think it's going to be a fascinating new piece of information that we get.
So I kind of look forward to it.
That's the one thing.
It's the one thing I'm kind of hoping I live to see is life from other planets contacting us.
I mean, that would be so cool and it would change everything.
One last question.
Hey, Emperor Clavin, what is your take on the Disney Fox deal?
Will this make Disney a monopoly?
Should the government intervene?
No, it won't make Disney a monopoly and the government shouldn't intervene.
But it is important because it shows that Rupert Murdoch is beginning to divest.
And that makes me think that maybe he, you know, he's in his 80s.
Nobody lives forever.
One of the things that has really, really bothered me is, you know, Rupert Murdoch has made tremendous strides in conservative communication, and nobody, zero people, have stepped up to imitate him.
You know, as I keep saying, where is the Fox Comedy Channel?
Where's the conservative comedy channel?
Where's the conservative movie makers?
Where are all these people who are not, you know, they don't have to be conservative in every way.
They just, where are the people who are standing up for America and making patriotic films and patriotic TV shows that aren't sappy, but just have very firm American values.
I think that would be an important thing to add.
So, I mean, it's just a reminder that even Rupert Murdoch will not live forever.
He may not know that, but we do.
And that really conservatives need to be thinking really hard about what the future of the culture is before we let it get away from us yet again.
All right, tickety-boo news.
So Woodward and Bernstein, right, the guys who broke Watergate, made some really interesting comments about the press the other day.
So, I just want to play, I guess it's cut five we have.
Yeah.
Let's play Cut Five and listen to what they say.
The press is in the United States, as our leaders have recognized going back to the days of the early republic, the last bastion of truth that makes democracy function.
Yes, we make mistakes and we need to admit our mistakes.
We oughtn't to be too provocative, which we sometimes are with a president who's putting a lot of bait out there.
And sometimes we take debate and get a little petty.
I'd like to see a lot less of criticizing on our air the president for playing golf.
Let him play all the golf that he wants.
I don't think that's our job.
So that was Bernstein, who was a virulent left-winger and not always, in my opinion, very honest in his criticism.
Woodward, who is a much more balanced guy and a much more talented journalist, in my opinion, he also said that the press had become smug.
And I just, these guys, you know, I was a newspaper reporter right after Watergate.
And we thought we were heroes.
They had given us, Woodward and Bernstein had given us this very heroic idea of the press.
But I want to remind you of what that idea looked like, because when I was a newspaper reporter, I worked with at least one guy who went on to become one of the most famous New York Times reporters, a tremendous liberal.
And anytime I made any liberal assumption, he would call me out on it.
He would yell at me, really go after me.
You know, I was a neophyte reporter.
I was just trying to learn how to do it.
And he would call me out, you know, and he would say, I don't believe he, that same guy, would do that today.
But let's just look back at all the president's men, which is a basic hagiography of Woodward and Bernstein, the movie made from their telling of how they exposed Watergate, at this famous scene where Ben Bradley, the editor of the paper, calls them out on not having sources who can be named.
He's looking at a story that they think is a big story, and he says, no, you have not got this story.
They haven't got it.
Librarian and Secretary say Hunt looked at a book.
That's not good, man.
White House aide told me that Hunt was investigating Kennedy.
Who was it?
Who was it?
You want the name you mean?
No, no, how senior, how high up?
I don't know titles.
Showing special interests, you know, we said the White House was investigating Kennedy.
Show a special interest.
Jesus, the story is stronger than that.
We got a White House librarian who said, Hunt checked out a whole lot of books.
We got a Secretary in Colson's office in Huntington's.
All right, that's five.
Ben, that's a page one story.
Take it inside someplace.
This is an important story.
Get some harder information next time.
Get some harder information next time.
So, you know, the press, one of the things I always say about leftists, I don't know if you remember that scene in Men in Black where the alien comes down and eats the farmer.
He kills the farmer and then puts on his flesh as a suit and the alien wears the farmer as a suit.
That is what leftism does to institutions, whether it's Yale or the New York Times.
It goes in and eats out the core of them and then wears the New York Times or Yale as a suit and walks around pretending to be the old Yale or the old New York Times.
And that is what has happened to journalism, mainstream journalism in this country.
It really has.
Leftism has eaten it out from within.
So when they report, oh, that Mike Flynn has implicated candidate Donald Trump in collusion with Russia or that the Russians passed the Trump campaign, a secret key to WikiLeaks file.
What the New York Times did shamefully, in my opinion, Over the holiday, they ran this front-page story of essentially FBI propaganda because FBI is being caught out using this steel dossier, this ridiculous steel dossier dossier.
They may have used it to get a FISA warrant.
It may have inspired their Russia collusion story.
And the entire Russian collusion story may, in fact, be, this is not proved yet, but it's certainly a worthwhile suspicion at this point.
It may in fact be the FBI's way of attacking Trump and hiding the way, the partisan way they behaved in the run-up to the election, that they were spying on Trump for the Obama administration.
And so the New York Times ran this story saying, oh, now we know it wasn't the steel dossier.
It was George Papadopoulos, you know, in Russia drinking or in Australia, whatever it was, he was drinking.
Where now the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said today that George Papadopoulos was not a name on my radar scope when I left.
So it really, it really is like the New York Times is now using unnamed sources, sources that nobody can check, sources that nobody knows how reliable they are.
The FBI has a point to make, and the New York Times is allowing them to make it.
They're not following the rules that made journalism heroic and made it great.
That was what made, you know, the press hated Nixon.
They hated Nixon.
But even as much as they hated him, they went after him with respect.
They had to get the facts.
They had to get people who had come on record.
They had to use their off-the-record sources to get people to come on record and confirm the stories.
I mean, it just made them crazy if they had two off-the-record, if they had two off-the-record guys.
Let me just end with a montage from Sean Hannity.
Have we got that?
Yeah, it's cut number 12.
This is why their pleas, their idea that Trump's attacks on the media are somehow attacks on the First Amendment simply won't wash.
Here is a montage that Hannity put together of the way the media looks at Trump.
This was a whitelash.
This was a white lash against a changing country.
It was a white lash against a black president in part.
There's a sign out there that's been hung up in the White House or outside the White House saying, if you're not white, you're not especially welcome.
This is a man who is not well.
He alternated between being a whiny six-year-old who's had his Nintendo taken away and between being the cranky old man who's out there condemning everyone who doesn't worship him adequately.
Donald Trump, short of only meeting Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson, is being himself more than any other previous president with disgraceful racial views.
He said today, America first.
It was not just the racial, I mean, the, I should say, racial, the Hitlerian background to it.
Is Donald Trump competent to be president?
President Trump said America first.
Tonight, President Trump put himself first.
A little whiff of fascism tonight, I think it's fair to say.
Absolutely.
Leftism eats out the principles and core of organizations and leaves them empty and then demands the respect that those organizations earned before leftism killed them.
And so that's what has happened to the press, and the press needs to start on the long road back to becoming what it should be and what it used to be.
A Whiff of Fascism00:00:42
Tomorrow, I think John Nolte, the Noltenator, is coming on.
We love this guy.
It's great to talk to him, see him, and find out what he thinks of the new year.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
be there then.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.