Donald Trump’s latest immigration stance—calling for bipartisan "border security" while abandoning past hardline rhetoric—sparked backlash from critics like Steve Bannon, who claims Trump now distrusts allies, while Sebastian Gorka warns Sweden’s "no-go zones" reveal failed assimilation. Andrew Clavin argues Trump’s populist shift could realign the GOP but dismisses left-right reconciliation, framing Christian conservatism as inherently clashing with progressive culture. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s decline is blamed on scripted shallowness, and #MeToo’s hypocrisy—exposing elite abuses while silencing dissent—is exposed as a weaponized power grab, setting up debates on ethics and free speech. [Automatically generated summary]
So all this week we've been talking about the difference between reality and the imaginary world that we see on the news and from Hollywood.
Yesterday provided us with some stirring examples of the disparity between the two worlds.
For instance, here is Donald Trump at a televised meeting on immigration yesterday.
I feel having the Democrats in with us is absolutely vital because this should be a bipartisan bill.
This should be a bill of love.
Truly, it should be a bill of love and we can do that.
But it also has to be a bill where we're able to secure our border.
Drugs are pouring into our country at a record pace.
A lot of people are coming in that we can't have.
And here's the news, CNN's Brian Stelter discussing Donald Trump.
President Trump's fitness for office is now the top story in the country.
Reporters and some lawmakers are openly talking about the president's mental stability, his health, his competency.
Let's try that again.
Here's Trump at the meeting.
These are measures that will make our community safer and more prosperous.
These reforms are supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans from every standpoint, from every poll.
And they're being requested by law enforcement officers.
I had the big meeting with ICE last week.
I had a big meeting with the Border Patrol agents last week.
Nobody knows it better than them.
As an example on the wall, they say, sir, we desperately need the wall.
And we don't need a 2,000-mile wall.
We don't need a wall where you have rivers and mountains and everything else protecting.
But we do need a wall for a fairly good portion.
Okay, and now here's author Michael Wolf talking about Donald Trump.
That goes beyond saying, okay, the president's not an intellectual.
What are you arguing there?
You say, for example, he was at Mar-a-Lago and didn't recognize lifelong friends.
I will quote Steve Bannon.
He's lost it.
He's lost it.
Let's do this one more time.
Here's Trump at the meeting.
The animosity and the hatred between Republicans and Democrats.
I mean, I remember when I used to go out in Washington and I see Democrats having dinner with Republicans and they were best friends and everybody got along.
You don't see that too much anymore.
In all due respect, you really don't see that.
When was the last time you took a Republican out there?
Why don't you guys go out to have dinner tonight?
But you don't see it.
So maybe, and very importantly, totally different from this meeting, because we're going to get DACA done.
I hope we're going to get DACA done and we're going to all try very hard.
But maybe you should start bringing back a concept of earmarks.
It's going to bring you together.
You're going to do it honestly.
You're going to get rid of the problems that the other system had, and it did have some problems.
But one thing it did is it brought everyone together.
And this country has to be brought together.
Okay, that's your president.
Now let's listen to the people in Hollywood talking about the president.
He's an idiot, Colin Powell said at best.
He's a national disaster.
He's an embarrassment to this country.
It makes me so angry that this country has gotten to this point, that this fool, this bozo, has wound up where he has.
He talks how he wants to punch people in the face.
Well, I'd like to punch him in the face.
So to be fair here, there really was a time back during the campaign when Donald Trump would talk about some crazy stuff.
Like he would talk about Barack Obama being born in Kenya, which he wasn't.
Or he'd say that Ted Cruz's father had been part of the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, which was absurd.
And all that was fun, right?
But now that Trump is running the country, he seems to move on and to have stopped talking about crazy stuff.
But the media, the news media in Hollywood are still talking about the crazy stuff, which makes me think that one of them was pretending to be crazy and the others are just plain nuts.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Why Trump Supporters Question Reality00:15:16
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All right, it's mailbag day.
We're going to answer all your personal, religious, political questions.
You know, one of the reasons I think that people get politics so wrong and they make it melodramatic when it's actually kind of a, you know, sausage-making, policy-making thing, a lot of debates, a lot of compromises, and they talk about their principles.
I think it's a way of avoiding their personal life.
So on the mailbag, we'll deal with a lot of personal questions.
And on Tuesday, January 16th, that is one week from yesterday, Tuesday, January 16th, we're going to be doing the conversation again.
That's where we, for a full hour, 5 p.m. Eastern, starting at 5 p.m. Eastern or 2 p.m. Pacific, I will sit with Alicia and we will answer Alicia Kraus and answer any question that you send in.
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Answers are guaranteed, like the mailbag, 100% correct.
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You go on thedailywire.com, subscribe, allows you 10 bucks a month for allows you 100 bucks.
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Log into the website, dailywire.com, watch the live stream, head over to the conversation page, and after that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box, and we will pull the live questions as they come in, and I will answer them.
It will be an amazing feat of intellection and revelation.
That's Tuesday, January 16th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
Come on in and join the conversation.
We're hoping to get Sebastian Gorka.
Let me know, Rob, when he shows up.
He is in Malmo, Sweden.
He is investigating the no-go zones.
I mean, this is this big controversy I'm sure you've heard about where they say that certain Muslim areas basically are places where people who aren't Muslims can't go anymore.
And that's an amazing thing.
If you're talking about Sweden, once one of the most well-regulated, well-run countries in the world, I've been there.
It's a beautiful country.
But apparently we'll find out if some of this is real.
We'll also talk to them about Steve Bannon.
I mean, yesterday, if you think about it, was a kind of shocking day.
When we talk about the difference between reality and perception, yesterday there was a lot of stuff that went on that if you were a Trump supporter, a supporter of Trump-ism, would really cause you to ask a lot of questions.
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I had them make me a shirt and it looks absolutely terrific.
Anyway, the thing that really is amazing, you know, Trump had this meeting on, this was a meeting on DACA on the Dreamers.
Oh, is Gorker here?
Let's start with Sebastian because the other thing that happened is that Steve Bannon lost his job yesterday.
He was kicked out of Breitbart.
His last power, the last pillar of his power pulled away.
He's lost Trump's friendship.
He's lost the Mercer's money.
He has now been fired from Breitbart.
Very important, a very startling fall from grace for a guy who just a few months ago was at the president's side.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is a Hungarian-American military and intelligence analyst, Fox News strategist, and former deputy assistant to President Trump.
He's also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Defeating Jihad.
He is in Malmo, Sweden, where he's looking into these no-go zones.
And we're going to talk to him about that as well.
There he is.
How are you doing?
Hey, great to see you, Drew.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
How's Sweden?
Really fascinating.
The cognitive dissonance is just, you know, it's palpable.
Half of the people we talk to say there's no problem.
If there's increased violence, it's just young guys without jobs.
The fact that hand grenades are being, you know, detonated, the day we arrived, a 23-year-old man was shot in the head in Rincer Beach.
Yeah.
And the other half say, no, this nation is in crisis.
The immigration policies are threatening the future of Stockholm.
So it is a classic case of the political elite not wanting to grasp with the reality.
You know, I want to talk to you about this at length because this is a really important subject, but we have to cover the news first.
I mean, this downfall of Steve Bannon has been pretty shocking.
And it really does look as if Donald Trump kind of sent out the word that you were on his side or on Bannon's side.
Are you as surprised as everybody else?
I mean, did you see this coming?
I'll tell you something, and I haven't told this to anybody else in the media.
When I went to Steve's office one day in the Eisenhower building, so we had to move out of the West Wing when they refurbished the West Wing this summer.
And when I went to Steve's office to talk to him, and Glenn Thrush comes out of his office.
Haha, the New York Times reporter.
Yeah.
I just went, hang on.
Who's he going to be next?
Maggie Haberman coming out of Steve's office.
I have said it, and I'll say it again on the record.
Along with Newt Gingrich, Steve is probably one of the most strategic political minds alive today in America.
But he made some big mistakes.
And his interaction with people like Michael Wolfe.
I was asked by an outside individual who mutually knew us to talk to Mike Wolf for his book.
The second I met him, Drew, I knew this guy's an oily creek who wants to destroy the administration.
I shook his hand, said hi, and I refused to talk to that man ever again.
Steve thought he could talk to this guy and get away with it on or off the record, talk to Glenn Thrush and others.
And his decisions got the better of him, and he's paid the price.
Do you look at what's happening right now?
Yesterday was kind of a shocking day if you just take the news on the surface.
Trump is negotiating to maybe extend the stay of the DACA, the DREAMers.
He's talking about going to Davos now, which was the horrible globalist cabal as Bannon saw it.
Do you think that the Trump agenda is gone?
I mean, is he abandoning the agenda that not at all?
Not at all.
You've said this many times on your podcast, that he's surprised you, right?
This wasn't the guy you wanted.
You didn't have positive expectations.
And he surprised you and he's learned on the job.
And the one, okay, not the one.
One of the most important things you need to know about this man is he's broken every mold in political category.
The taxonomy of politics changed on November the 8th in America in ways that the elite to this very day has very scant understanding of.
And the idea that he goes to Davos does not make him a globalist.
You know, look at what he did with NATO.
He played NATO like a cheap fiddle.
He said, we don't need you.
You're obsolete.
And then NATO gets all crazy.
And then what does he do?
Well, look, guys, if you want to be taken seriously, you need to, after 30 years, finally pay that 2%.
What happens?
The Secretary General of NATO comes to the East Wing of the White House, gives a press conference and says, 2%?
Sure, no problem.
Do not judge him based upon what you expect other politicians to do if they go to Davos.
And I'm not giving up on DACA.
This man knows why he won the election.
And he knows that when he said build the war as the first pillar of his substantive policy platform, he knows he can't go soft.
There's only one way he loses the base.
There's only one way.
And that's if he's not true to himself.
And I don't expect him to betray himself.
Okay.
Okay.
I have one more question I have to ask you about Bannon because I've never seen anybody miscalculate so terribly where his power lies.
I mean, I was comparing him in an interview the other day with the Wiley Coyote who runs off a cliff and stands in air because he doesn't know he's standing in midair.
Did Bannon think that he was the secret sauce of Trumpism?
Is that the mistake he made?
Did he think that Trump was just a kind of the front piece of the movement, but Bannon was the real intellect behind it?
Is that how he went so wrong?
If you read the accurate biographies, there's a lot of garbage out there.
You know, this is the Darth Vader of the right.
If you read the real stories about where he grew up in Richmond, what his father did, what happened to his father's retirement account in 2008 when the economic crash happened.
No, this isn't a man who pretended I'm the president.
I'm just going to hang my stuff on Donald Trump.
This is a man who had a vision and he saw in Donald Trump the requisite individual who was enough of a rank outsider who could potentially make this economic nationalism a reality.
What you need to know about Steve Banner is he has personally years ago declared war on the Rhino establishment.
And Donald Trump was, you know, the confluence, the constellation came together that he declared war on the Rhino establishment.
And along came a man who, as far as I'm concerned, was only accidentally the GOP candidate.
Donald Trump had nothing to do with the GOP.
He was just accidentally the GOP candidate.
You know, Bernie Saunders has more in common with Donald Trump than the GOP does as rank outsiders.
And this was, you know, perfect for Steve.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay, let us talk.
know, I'm reading this book called The Strange Death of Europe, and one of the points that he talks about is how...
That's Douglas Murray, right?
Yes, Douglas Murray.
And one of the things he talks about is the amazing difference between the opinions of the people, which were up to 70% opposed to the mass immigration that was taking place, and the basic gormless helplessness of the elites and the people in power who simply did not listen.
Is that what you're seeing?
You're in Malmo, Sweden.
You've been looking around at what are called no-go zones.
Is that happening there?
I mean, are the people and the governing class on the same page or not?
I'll give you a couple of quotes from Swedes we met.
One woman who deals as a think tanker on national security issues said, We have a crisis when it comes to immigration and the future of this nation.
But if you say that publicly, you can hand in your resignation letter the same day you make that statement as a professional.
Okay.
I spoke to a Jewish Swedish lady today who said, there is an oppressive cone of silence.
You cannot talk about it.
She says, all the Swedes know we are in crisis because we're having gang rapes occur.
We've had 20 immigrants, 20 immigrants rape one woman.
Five of them are arrested and are eventually acquitted by the Swedish courts.
We have 80%, Drew, 80% of the Swedish police force want to retire early because it's too dangerous to go into the no-go zones.
The chairman of the Ambulance Workers Union is demanding that their ambulance workers and paramedics get issued body armor.
This is Sweden.
It's not Beirut.
But politically, it's the most sensitive issue you can talk about.
So your career is destroyed if you bring this up.
But if you bring it up and then you run for office, will the people turn up?
Will they vote for you or basically?
Well, this is the fascinating thing that this year is election year in Sweden.
And there's a party, it's the Swedish Democrats who originally, and this is where it's going to get really dicey.
The Swedish Democrat Party started as a party affiliated with the Nazis.
So they were a kind of neo-Nazi party historically.
And they've excised that.
They've distanced themselves from those policy pronouncements.
But they're the only party that is prepared to talk about these things.
And we met with the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Swedish Parliament, who's from that party.
And they have doubled, doubled the size of their constituency in parliament in just three years because they're the only party that's going to talk about it.
And Drew, they may be the next government.
That's amazing.
Disparity Debate00:12:58
Is the problem here, is the disparity a philosophical one?
Is it the people who are elites believe that this is a good thing, bringing all these people in who don't share Swedish values, don't share the basics of the Swedish worldview, that they believe this is actually a positive thing and the people, they just feel that people are too stupid to see it?
Or is it actual helplessness?
They do not know what to do.
Okay, so Sweden's very interesting.
So let me tell you from the horse's mouth.
We met with the former head of the Jewish National Association of Jewish Swedes.
And she said, Sweden for 60 years has been about consensus.
We define ourselves around consensus.
And you must not rock the boat when it comes to consensus.
So there's this overarching thing to keep things very, very, you know, looking uncontroversial, number one.
But this woman made a fascinating point that I hadn't even thought of before.
She said, I'm a Jew.
My parents survived the Holocaust.
We came from a minority, which meant we automatically wanted to assimilate and accommodate.
The hundreds of thousands of Muslims that have arrived to Sweden from Syria, from Iraq and elsewhere, they come from countries in which they are the majority.
So they can't even think about the requirement to accommodate because they never had to accommodate.
And so they come into Sweden and they want to have their little majority culture define their life inside a nation where they're the minority.
And sooner or later, that's going to cause tension.
That's just going to cause tension.
You know, I'm running out of time.
I want to talk to you about this much more.
I hope you'll come back when you come back to the States and talk to me again.
But just to close this out, is there a connection between what's happening there and what Trump is trying to do in terms of immigration here?
Is there a way to put the brakes on this in America before we wake up one day and we're having this sort of problem here?
Look, you cannot separate Brexit from Trump, from the rise of this party in Sweden, from what's going on in Hungary, from what's going on in Poland.
And wherever you like politically, it comes down to a very simple question.
What does the word Sweden mean?
What does the word America mean?
If these words are to have any meaning, right, they have to have a content.
And if you say it's irrelevant, if you say like Hillary Clinton, when she gave that speech to those bankers, the transcript was leaked, we want to have a borderless Western hemisphere, then suddenly, if there are no borders, America means nothing.
The concept of America, the philosophy, 1776, rugged individualism, free markets, it's nucatory.
It disappears.
And every country in the 21st century has to wrestle with this.
What does it mean to be a Swede?
And can another culture come in and change my culture and Sweden still remain the same?
A lot of people are saying you can't do that and remain Sweden.
Yeah, it's a really, really difficult question because you want the sanity, but you don't want the Nazis coming back, obviously.
Well, this is the dangerous thing.
So the last point, I mean, this Jewish, Swedish person said, I asked her, so what's the best case?
What's the worst case?
And she said, you know, if these former Nazi affiliated party wins the election, then they may have a chance to begin a debate.
And she said, if the former Nazi affiliated party doesn't win the election, there will be no debate.
And you know what's going to happen then?
Sooner or later, the Swedish Swedes who grew up here, whose women are being raped and whose daughters are being told you can't wear a mini skirt in Malmö, they're just going to resort to violence.
Yeah.
No, we don't want that.
It's terrible.
We don't want that.
Yep.
Yep.
Sebastian Gorka, thanks very much for coming on.
When you get back to the States, I'd like to hear a further report.
Really interesting subject.
Let's do it.
All right.
Let's get to see it.
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Okay, I guess before we cut off, I really have to go back.
I mean, it's a really interesting conversation.
And this is what was happening yesterday with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump sits down with the Democrats and the Republicans, and he's basically saying, okay, you know, you want these 800,000 DREAMers to stay in America.
What do I get for it?
Do I get my wall?
Do I get this end-of-chain migration?
And he was doing it in a really interesting way because basically, I mean, first of all, the whole thing was filmed.
Now, part of that, I'm sure, was to fight back on the Wolf book and to make sure that people could see that he was completely in charge and completely sane and all this.
But it also did show you the way he kind of works.
If you take a look at this exchange, Dianne Feinstein, she comes forward with the classic Democrat offer.
The Democrat offer is always the same.
Let the immigrants stay, and then down the line we'll deal with the security, the border security, and the people will not stand it.
And the Wall Street Journal is just as bad about this as anybody else.
We're not talking about immigration.
We're talking about rule of law.
So just watch this exchange between Dianne Feinstein.
And who's he talking to, Kevin?
Kevin McCarthy, yeah.
You need to be clear, though.
I think what Senator Feinstein's asking here, when we talk about just DACA, we don't want to be back here two years later.
You have to have security, as the secretary would tell you.
I think that's what you say.
I think you're saying something.
I'm thinking you're saying DACA without security.
Are you talking about security as well?
Well, I think if we have some meaningful, comprehensive immigration reform, that's really where the security goes.
And if we could get the DACA bill, because March is coming and people are losing their status every day.
Let's be honest with you.
Security was voted on just a few years ago.
And no disrespect, there's people in the room on the other side of the aisle who voted for it.
If I recall, Senator Clinton voted for it.
So I don't think that's comprehensive.
I think that's dealing with DACA at the same time.
So he's got them like really working it.
And of course, you now have these two sides, right?
These guys are now caught.
All of them, all of them, to give them their due, are caught between two sides.
On the one side, you have a memo that was found by the Daily Caller.
It was released by the Daily Caller from the Center for American Progress, right?
Their action funds circulated a memo calling illegal immigrants brought here at a young age, so-called Dreamers, a critical component of the Democrat Party's future electoral success.
So this Center for American Progress is sending out this thing that says the fight to protect dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it's also a critical component of the Democratic Party's future electoral success.
So they're importing voters, essentially, which is the problem that people like Ann Coulter have.
They say if this keeps up, we'll never have another Republican president.
Then on the other side, you have people like Ann Coulter who voted for Trump specifically for this wall.
This is what they want.
Here is a montage.
This is cut number 10.
Congress is full of people from both parties who believe that the point of our immigration policy is to provide cheap labor to their donors and to atone for America's imaginary sins against the world.
They couldn't care less about immigration's effect on you or your family.
Yet these are the same people the president now says he trusts to write the immigration bill, the one he'll sign no matter what it says.
So what was the point of running for president?
This group and others from the Senate, from the House comes back with an agreement.
I'm signing it.
I mean, I will be signing it.
I'm not going to say, oh, gee, I want this or I want that.
I'll be signing it because I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room that they're going to come up with something really good.
That's no art of the deal.
That's complete surrender.
Now, I suspect the president will realize that and try to walk some of that back, but that is very bad.
And he did it in front of the media.
He did it in front of the Democrats.
The whole world heard it.
Just give me something and I'll sign it.
You kidding me?
When Kevin McCarthy is the hardliner on immigration in the room, I think we can call this the lowest day in the Trump presidency.
I mean, he was clearly trying to overcome the bad press of this Michael Wolf book by showing, oh, he's in command.
But in fact, what he did was fulfill every description of him in the Michael Wolf book.
So that's what they're going to be dealing with.
But really, I really do think there is an opening here for a deal because most people, even Trump, most Trump voters, are fine with the DREAMers staying.
What they're not fine is they're bringing their mothers and sisters and nieces and aunts and uncles and just this complete open border.
And so if Trump can get the border security that we've been talking about for all this time, I think a lot of people will be forgiving toward the Dreamers.
I think this is the thing.
You know, everybody's got a stake.
Everybody has got an image they want to put forward of this world.
But we have to talk about reality.
And in reality, they're not going to deport 800,000 people.
I told you this during the election.
I told you no matter what anybody says, they're going to find a way to keep the people who are here here.
The question is, are we going to reestablish the rule of law at the border?
That's the reality question.
And if Trump pulls that off, that'll be quite a feat because this has been stuck for now for generations.
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You can be in the next mailbag, and you can be in the conversation next Tuesday when I answer all your questions.
All right, the mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
New Consensus Coming?00:11:47
From John Andrew, how long will the country continue to be so divided?
You seem like you have lived a lot more life than I have at 22 years old.
I don't just seem like I've lived a lot more life.
I have lived a lot more life than you have at 23 years old.
How has it gotten this?
Has it gotten this bad before and come around for the better?
How long will PC culture and the Democratic left continue to pass judgment on me for being a Christian conservative?
Are we beyond reconciliation?
First, let me point out that really what we're experiencing now is the norm.
What was abnormal is that after World War II, the victory of World War II, the fact that our competing markets were completely destroyed, brought a kind of unity and consensus to America that most countries never achieve.
When Barack Obama said, oh, usually we're fighting, moving the ball around the 50-yard line, he was lying because he knew that those days were gone, but they had been here from about the 50s to about 1968.
1968 was when everything fell apart and the 60s happened and blew away that consensus.
So what you're dealing with now is kind of the norm.
This kind of division, this kind of anger.
You know, we had a civil war in this country.
This is nothing.
And you're just seeing, as I've said this before, what you're seeing is you're seeing that when things fall apart like this, the gravity goes out of the room and the furniture starts floating around the room and everybody gets very nervous about where it's going to land because they think, oh my gosh, you know, the possibilities for disaster are endless.
And that's true, but usually people keep disasters from happening.
What I'm seeing now is I'm seeing Donald Trump reshaping the Republican Party to be more of a populist party and with some solid conservative elements.
And what makes me laugh about the guys, say, at Nashville Review who just feel all our principles are going down the drain, the Republican Party was never a full-flown vehicle for conservatism.
Conservatism was always folded into the Republican Party.
Presidents like George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush drove conservatives insane because they betrayed a lot of the principles of conservatism, but they were the only party in town.
And so now it's going to drive us insane in different ways, in populist ways that weren't there before, but there will still be a conservative element of the Republican Party.
All this will shift out.
I really do believe that Donald Trump, just judging from right now, is going to be a force for good in this because he is going to be, when a lot of his policies work, they're not going to seem so outlandish.
It's not going to seem so strange anymore to cut taxes, to go dial back on regulations, to have constitutional judges.
He could really reshape the party for a long time.
Now, about your Christian conservatism.
If you read your actual Bible, right, Jesus tells you the world is not going to like you.
The world is going to give you tribulation.
It is going to cause you pain.
It is going to reject you as a Christian conservative.
That is the norm.
And when it's not the norm, sometimes it's not so good.
Like in other words, when Christianity becomes acceptable to the mainstream, sometimes the mainstream and Christianity begin to confuse, get confused together.
So for instance, a lot of people think that Christianity is living a life that was suitable to the 50s.
When I read the gospel, that's not what I read.
I do not think the Lord incarnated himself and suffered death on the cross to solidify the 50s.
I mean, the 50s were just a time when they happened to have certain values that were featured in the magazines, but people were living all kinds of different lives, and Christians were living all kinds of different lives.
So your Christian conservatism, your Christianity, forget about your conservatism for a minute.
Your Christianity is supposed to be at odds with the world.
You're supposed to be the guy that everybody says, wait a minute, why is that guy so happy when everybody hates him?
You know, that's basically what Christianity looks like.
So, you know, there is going to be a new consensus.
A new consensus is coming.
I see it about five to ten years down the road.
It will shape itself slowly.
If Trump continues to be a successful president, that will help things along.
I think a new consensus is coming.
It will be a more conservative consensus, I think, than we've had before.
And so I think the news is basically good, but you're going to have to go through this time when we are, like countries, most countries, divided.
I mean, that's what's happening.
What I don't want to see is I don't want to see what happened in Europe happen to us, where the ruling class goes off on this tangent of diversity and lawless immigration, while the people are sitting there saying, no.
And this is the insane thing.
This is why you can't be silenced when people call you racist.
You can't be silenced when people call you sexist.
You can't be silenced when people call you names.
You shouldn't be racist.
It's wrong to be, it's obviously against God to be racist.
You don't want to be sexist, but you don't want to be shut down by people calling you those names.
So people are going to, you know, if you're a Christian, people are going to come after you.
That's always going to be true.
But obviously, you have a higher calling.
All right.
From Travis, leader of men and children alike, master of all.
He purveys, surveys, not purveys, although I may be master of all, I purvey as well.
And some things he doesn't purvey.
He who bathes, nay frolics in leftist whales.
A question, if I may.
My wife and I are in our 30s, and we think Hollywood put out its best stuff during the 80s and 90s.
Whenever you mention movies you love, you tend to cite the black and white classics.
In your opinion, what did they have that later movies don't?
Words.
They had words.
And that is what made them a little bit more adult.
A culture that depends on language will be a thoughtful culture.
A culture that depends on imagery will be a stupid culture.
In the Middle Ages, you had church paintings that were what they called the gospel of the illiterate.
That is conducive to, you know, not to deep thought.
It's language that takes us into deep thought.
In the 30s and 40s, a movie script was 250 pages long, and a movie was 90 minutes to two hours.
Now a movie is 90 minutes to two hours and the script is 110 pages long.
That's because there's no dialogue in it.
Hitchcock was the man who really realized what he did.
And look, art has to follow, will follow its own logic.
What Hitchcock realized was that the movies were a visual art form, that sound had not in fact added that much to the way movies affect people.
And so if you watch Vertigo, for instance, it's a sound movie with a half an hour of silence in it.
There's a half an hour where nobody says a word in it.
And that really transformed movies.
So listen, the 80s and 90s, there were some great movies.
Goodfellows was made then.
Certainly, I guess The Godfather was in the 70s.
That to me is the last actually great American film that is actually great.
But still, there were some wonderful movies made in the 80s and 90s.
What they didn't have was they didn't have the depth of thought and emotion and human interchange that movies had when the scripts were longer and when they were kind of the writers were coming out of the theater.
They were bringing theater to the movies.
So I find those films a lot more adult and a lot more thoughtful.
They're corny.
They're old-fashioned now.
They may not speak into the life we live today.
I understand that.
They may have just become dated.
But still, I thought that there was something there that has been lost.
That said, I do believe there are great movies that were made in the 80s and 90s.
Certainly a couple of great movies that were made in the 70s.
And so it's just the language I miss.
I just think art with language in it is smarter.
All right.
Dear Supreme Overlord and Master of the Malbag, this is from Michael.
Over the last year, I have turned away from atheism, and thanks to mostly you and a few others like you, I am now a firm believer in God.
Good.
My wife and I have made it a point to go to church this year, and after going, I still seem to be missing the connection between God and Jesus.
We've been going to a Christian church, and it seems they use the terms God and Jesus interchangeably, but I have trouble thinking of the two in the same way.
I know what the Bible says mostly, and I started reading your book, The Great Good Thing, but I was hoping you could help me understand the connection in the way that you see it.
First, if you finish The Great Good Thing, which is my memoir of my conversion, it does talk a lot about this and why ultimately I came to feel that Jesus was the God that I was worshiping.
I mean, this is one of the things I never really try to convince people to become Christians, because I think if you convince people to believe in God, the logic of God, they'll suddenly realize that the logic of God and the logic of Jesus are the same, and that's kind of a coincidence, you know, a kind of strange coincidence that tends to lead you to become a Christian.
But let's say this, let's put it this way.
Everything has a purpose.
My leftist tier tumblers is here to collect and preserve my leftist tears.
I use it for that purpose.
My computer has a purpose.
I use it for that purpose.
When we relate to God, we are looking for our purpose.
We're looking for what is the point of us, because we are made in the image of God.
But no one has seen God.
No one has ever seen God the Father, the Lord in heaven.
What we have seen is we have seen God as he is as a man.
We have seen this in Jesus Christ.
And in seeing this, we start to realize what we are for.
Now, each of us is for something different in some ways, but we're also for God.
So we're all for the same thing, but each of us is for the same thing in a different way.
And in our relationship to Jesus, what you do is you find out that that starts to come true.
If you don't have that, you just have this amorphous maker up there in the sky, then God begins to look very much like you.
Jesus keeps that from happening.
Jesus, because he's such a strong personality, because he said certain things, because there's no getting away from the things that he said, he shows you that there are certain parts, that God, just like everything else that exists, has a nature, right?
People who say, oh, all religions lead to God are speaking nonsense, right?
Because everything that exists has a nature.
A microphone is a microphone and not a leftist tears tumbler.
Everything has a nature, and God is God, and he is not God, okay?
And so when you see God as a human being, as you would relate to him, you see Jesus Christ.
And one of the really fascinating things, and this has been the way I've been reading the Bible for the last two or three years, is as a way of getting to know Jesus, because he's not the person that people tell you he is.
He's not always the person that the church tells you he is.
He's not always the person that your pastor tells you he is.
But in the Gospels, you do see him, and he is an unmistakable personality saying unmistakable things.
It makes a big difference whether you are reading the words of Jesus Christ as the words of a human being, of a person, or whether you're reading them as a set of rules.
Christianity is the one religion that is not a set of rules.
It is not a set of rules.
It is simply good news.
It is something that happened that is good.
And when Jesus, I mean, Jesus says some weird things.
You know, he says stuff like, turn the other cheek.
If somebody slaps you, turn the other cheek.
Well, is that, do you always do that?
If somebody slaps your wife, do you turn the other cheek?
What does that mean?
But if you are relating to Jesus and reading him in context and reading him in his life and context, you start to realize that he was presenting an entire philosophy, an entire way of being that God has when he does the human thing.
And since you are doing the human thing and he is doing the human thing, it is a good way to guide yourself.
What you find when you follow Jesus is yourself.
That's what you find.
And I don't think that happens if you just have this amorphous idea of God as being a nice guy.
Then you just start imposing your values on him as opposed to the other way around where you let his values shape you.
And I think that that is the important part about Jesus, as for the logic of Jesus and why it makes sense to me.
I think the great good thing is a good thing to read because it does explain a lot of that.
All right, I'll do one more and then I will stop.
Hey, Andrew, my dad turns 60 this month, and I'd like to buy him one of your books.
Besides your great good thing, what of your works would you recommend?
He's a John Grisham fan, I think, but has enjoyed your hilarious monologues.
French Take on Sex00:04:39
Thanks a lot.
Love the show and never miss an episode.
That's from Benjamin Benjamin.
I think what I do is I work my way back.
Werewolf cop is, despite the title, which I'm still annoyed by, Werewolf Cop is really one of my best books, and you can read way back from that.
The Identity Man, I think, is really good.
I think Empire of Lies is an exceptional one, especially for conservatives.
They like that a lot.
And then you get back to True Crime and Don't Say a Word, which are both, I think, still books that hold up.
You know, obviously they take place in a different time, but I think they're books that really do hold up very well.
So I would say Werewolf Cop, Identity Man, Empire of Lies, True Crime, and Don't Say a Word.
I got to stop, unfortunately.
It's a lot of questions today.
I wish I had more time, but I don't.
Let's do tickety-boo news.
Here is news from the cheese-eating surrender monkeys in France.
We always love to hear from the French.
There is one thing the French know about, and that's sex.
If you go to France, those people are the best-looking people that you have ever seen.
And when you go and watch French movies, I always say, you know, it's not like American actresses aren't beautiful, but the French actresses have a way of being insanely gorgeous, but looking like human beings, like looking like someone you might meet on the street, and yet at the same time, they are gorgeous beyond belief.
And one of the most gorgeous of them all was Catherine Deneuve, one of the most beautiful women who has ever walked onto the screen.
So, just one day after Hollywood offered a show of support for the Me Too movement on the Golden Globe's red carpet and stage, a famous actress on the other side of the Atlantic lent her name to a public letter denouncing the movement, that the Me Too movement, as well as the French counterpart, which is called the Balance Tent Porque, or expose your pig.
Catherine Deneuve joined more than 100 other French women in entertainment, publishing, and academic fields Tuesday in the pages of the newspaper Le Monde and on its website in arguing that the two movements in which women and men have used social media as a forum to describe sexual misconduct have gone too far by publicly prosecuting private experiences and have created a totalitarian climate.
This is the letter.
Rape is a crime, but insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry, a chauvinist aggression.
As a result of the Weinstein affair, there has been a legitimate realization of the sexual violence women experience, particularly in the workplace where some men abuse their power.
It was necessary, but now this liberation of speech has been turned on its head.
You know, one of the things that is so funny about this Me Too movement, what most leftist movements are, is they're not actually an attempt to make things better.
They're an attempt to seize power for a certain number of people.
So for instance, when people call you racist, it doesn't mean that you did anything racist.
It means that the left is seizing the right to denounce you.
It doesn't mean you did anything racist.
They say, well, you said this, and that's racist because it could mean this.
You think like, well, wait, if I'm a racist, I would say people of one race are less than people of another race.
I don't believe that.
I don't believe that.
I actually believe that that is a sin.
To approach people like that is a sin.
That's why I won't do it on either side.
So I'm not a racist.
So, you're calling me a racist is just essentially a power grab to say that you have the ability to define me in that way.
And it's a way of shutting people up.
If they say, you know what, maybe we should be careful who comes into our country and you say you're a racist, that's just a way of saying shut up.
You know, it's a way of scaring you into silence.
But the problem with this is when you start talking about sex, most people have sex and most people do sex, and most people have done things in their sexual lives, things that they regret and things that they don't regret.
And they have very strong opinions about what right and wrong is.
And the reason this thing is blowing up in the left's face, so that the Hollywood actresses at the Golden Globe parading their black dresses and all this stuff are the same people who hid Harvey Weinstein's crimes for 20 years.
They're the same exact people and it's blowing up in their face.
The reason is that when you start to think about what really is sexual abuse, you have to look at your own life and your own thoughts and your own way of behaving.
And that's different than just letting somebody seize the power to call you names.
That's what Hollywood is doing.
They're playing by that old playbook.
We're the ones.
We are the left.
We are the elite.
We are the beautiful people.
We decide who's racist.
We decide who's sexist.
It's not going to work.
It's not going to work because with sex, that's part of everybody's life.
And we all have very definite opinions.
We're going to bring some people, get some guests on, to talk more about sexual ethics because I think it's a really complicated, really interesting subject.
And I think we need to hear a little bit more about it so we can think more clearly about it.
Sexual Ethics Discussion00:00:48
That will be coming up tomorrow.
Who do we have tomorrow?
We're not sure.
Oh, yeah.
Henry Olson isn't feeling well, but hopefully we'll get Mike Durren and we'll talk about a Ren.
He wrote a really interesting piece.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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