Andrew Clavin and Michael Duran clash over truth’s erosion, starting with Clavin’s horror film One Missed Call—where actor Johnny Lewis’ push for crude dialogue foreshadowed a "democratization of language" he ties to postmodernism’s rejection of objective truth, citing Derrida and Nazi-collaborating intellectuals. He accuses Google of enforcing leftist bias (shadow-banning conservatives, promoting "furries") while praising Trump’s defiance of relativism, though rejecting alt-right ties. Shifting to Iran, Duran defends fixing—not scrapping—the JCPOA, exposing Obama’s hidden concessions: unfrozen Iranian assets, Syria recognition, and Hezbollah immunity, arguing abandonment risks isolation over containment. The debate frames truth as a battleground between linguistic precision and ideological suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
So yesterday on the mailbag, somebody asked me why I liked old movies better than newer movies.
And I said it was the language that they was, there was more, you know, exposition, more dialogue.
People talked more.
They cared about what they talked.
And I just want to tell an actual true story, something that actually happened to me that kind of illustrates how this has changed.
And I want to begin by saying, just pointing out that I am a person who doesn't get very angry very much.
I was an angry young man.
I kind of got out of that, rose out of that.
And now I very rarely get angry at anybody because I sort of have an understanding of what my life is about.
My life is about making things.
It's about building things that I think are beautiful and convey wisdom and worth and entertainment.
And as long as I'm doing that, I'm happy.
And the only time I ever really get angry at somebody, if it's not outside of kind of personal things, if somebody attacks my friends or something.
But outside of that, the only time I really get angry is when somebody gets in my way of doing what I do, which is very rare because I don't let people get in my way of doing what I do.
But when this happens, we have a joke in my house, my family, that whenever I get angry at anybody, they die a violent death.
And this is not because I go out and kill them.
This is because God sends an angel of the Lord to strike them down on my behalf.
So 10 years ago, and I'm a shock to realize it's been 10 years, I wrote a movie called One Missed Call.
And I always joke about One Missed Call.
It was a remake of a Japanese horror film about a haunted cell phone.
You got a call on your cell phone from a ghost and then you died.
A week later, you died.
It's like the ring.
I called it the ringtone.
I wanted to make, I made a joke in the script about it being the ringtone that they forced me to cut out.
And this is one of the things about the script that the movie has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
And it won that year's award for the worst movie ever made.
I maintain it deserves about a 16%.
But the reason it came out so badly is because everybody made a different movie.
The director was a French artiste and he wanted to make a French artiste movie filled with grotesque violence that said something about society.
And the producers wanted to make a good, you know, kind of scare the teenagers movie that delivered on their investment, which by the way, it did.
The movie was a hit.
It actually was number five that weekend and made a lot of, made its investment back many, many times over.
So they actually succeeded.
I, who don't really like, I took this job because I thought it was a good deal for me, both economically and for fun, which is one of the big reasons I work is for fun.
And I wanted to write a kind of takeoff, a satire, a la scream, on these movies that I call one-by-one movies, movies where somebody, the whole plot is that each person dies one after another.
And so I wrote what I thought was this fairly witty script.
I'm not going to argue that it was Shakespeare.
It was what it was.
It was what it was supposed to be.
But it was witty.
It was young people saying witty things, kind of making fun of the fact that they were in this move, this old-fashioned Japanese horror movie, just as the Japanese horror fad was ending.
So it did include lines like, oh, you know, it's the ringtone.
We're in the ringtone.
And, you know, first you hear the ringtone, then you got all these jokes about the horror, you know, self-referential jokes.
So I knew that the picture was in trouble.
One day, one of the, there were this cast of lovely young people, 20 years old, and most of them, 20-somethings.
And they wanted to make this kind of serious artiste movie like the director.
So they didn't actually see that a lot of the lines in the movies were ironic.
A lot of the lines in the script were ironic.
One of these actors was a guy named Johnny Lewis.
And there's no point in my hiding his name because you could look it up and you'd see who it was.
Johnny Lewis, his big claim to fame was he was in that FX show, Sons of Anarchy.
And one day, Johnny came to me and I was on the set for about a week.
And he said to me, you know, this isn't how young people talk.
And I said, Johnny, I know it's not how young people talk.
And remember now, I'm like 50 or something like this.
So it's like I'm not, you know, I'm not an authority on how young people talk.
I said, Johnny, I know it's not how young people talk.
It's better.
It's people saying witty things that are written for them by a writer.
And so the people go to the movies and they get somebody saying things that they wouldn't know how to say because they're wittier than they are and they enjoy the wit.
And he said, yeah, but this is not what we would say.
It's not what young people would say.
And I said, Johnny, I know it's better than what you would say because young people are kind of inarticulate and they don't speak like this and they don't have this level of wit.
So this will deliver something in terms of entertainment.
Now, obviously, I'm talking from an old-fashioned perspective.
I'm talking about the fact that the movies are supposed to be an entertainment made by people who know how to entertain you, including writers who know how to write witty dialogue.
So of course, he did what any 20-year-old actor would do, is he went to the producers.
And producers in Hollywood are largely 50-year-old men who are absolutely terrified that they're about to become irrelevant because they don't know enough about the youth culture.
And so the producers came to me with stars in their eyes saying, Johnny says that there's a new way, a way of doing this that's much more like the way that 20-year-old people would talk.
And I said, yes, it's true.
There is a way of doing this.
It's much more like the way 20-year-old people would talk, but it's not as witty and as interesting and as fun as what I'm doing.
So, of course, writers have no power on set.
I knew I was going to lose the argument the minute it started, but I thought I'd made my argument.
And of course, they went off and they let Johnny and the other actress who was also in the scene rewrite the scene.
And so it became filled with like stuttering and, you know, dirty words and all this stuff.
And I have to admit, I got angry at Johnny Lewis.
Now, I didn't say anything because there was no point.
I didn't think I could win the fight.
But I said to my wife, you know, this guy really ticked me off because now the script is going to be bad.
Now the movie is going to be bad because they're just going to do this in every scene and there's nothing I can do about it.
I'm not even going to be on set after this week.
So that's just the way it goes.
And they just thought the scene was so much better because it sounded so much more like real kids talking instead of like witty dialogue that was actually communicating with the audience.
Four years later, Johnny Lewis walked into his 81-year-old landlady's room, murdered her, killed her cat, stepped off the roof of the building, and fell to his death.
So the moral of the story is that one, one, that the democratization of language has an effect.
It has some, maybe some positive effects, but it also has, it also tends to cheapen the idea of language as communicating truth.
It communicates reality, but it no longer communicates truth.
And the second moral of the story is, don't piss me off.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Protecting Houses With Blinds00:05:21
Ship shaped, you're welcome to zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
I shouldn't laugh at poor Johnny.
It was a terrible way to go, but that's the way it goes.
Michael Duran is going to come on and talk to us about the Iran deal.
He wrote a really interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, I believe it was, talking about the Iran deal and whether we should get rid of it or fix it.
But I want to talk to him about the Iran deal all through.
I'm going to talk to him about his piece, but I also want to explain what the Iran deal is because we keep talking about it.
And do we know exactly what it is?
I also just have to have a shout out to Montecito.
I lived in Montecito for 15 years.
I used to joke that my house was immune to natural disasters because it was right next to Oprah Winfrey's house.
I was really, I was two houses down from Oprah Winfrey's estate.
Now, I don't want to make myself sound grander than I am.
Her estate is so large that many, many houses were, you know, two steps away.
But mine was right down the street from hers.
Yesterday, there were these horrible mudslides.
I think 15 people are missing right where I lived.
I mean, it was exactly where I lived.
You know, and so many of my friends have had to move or been evacuated.
Here is Oprah.
They had a picture of Oprah just outside her house.
This is cut number five.
This was, I mean, this is yards away from where I lived.
This is how deep the mud is
It's unbelievable.
That was my neighborhood.
And so I used to joke that Oprah was protecting me, but it turns out I was protecting Oprah.
And when I moved away, the veil of protection was lifted.
We moved down here because I was commuting so much.
And one of the things that was really interesting when we came down here is that I love my house in LA.
It's just a lovely house.
But I remember there was one room.
I won't go into this.
I don't want to get too personal, but it was one room that was really bothering me.
And I thought there's something about this room that is just aesthetically not quite right.
And my wife went out and she got blinds for the windows.
And suddenly I thought, oh, that was it.
That was it.
Because it can make your window treatments.
I know it's not like the most exciting thing in the world, but your window treatments can make a tremendous difference in what a room looks like.
And blinds.com takes this from being an incredibly boring exercise in, you know, going to the store and shopping for the right blinds and all this and makes it easy because they do the entire thing online.
Blinds.com, if you're not sure what you want or even where to start, you go to blinds.com and you get a free online design consultation.
You just send them pictures of your house and they send back custom recommendations from a professional for what will work with your color scheme, furniture, and specific rooms.
And they'll even send you free samples to make sure everything looks as good in person as it does online.
And every order comes free with free shipping.
This is the best part.
If you accidentally mismeasure or pick the wrong color, if you mess up, blinds.com will make your blinds for free.
They will fix your mistakes.
For a limited time, you can get up to 20% off everything at blinds.com when you use the promo code Clavin.
And you may say to yourself, hmm, how do you spell that?
Well, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
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There's nothing as easy.
There's no Ease in Clavin.
That's blinds.com, promo code Clavin, for up to 20% off everything.
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Blinds.com, promo code Clavin.
Rules and restrictions do apply, but it's an awfully easy way to fix your house.
It does change, really, it changes everything.
So speaking of Oprah, you know, she made this speech at the Golden Globes.
And we'll play again this thing.
And they made a big fuss about it because they say, oh, she's running for president.
But here was the end of the speech that people kind of reacted to.
Because we all know that the press is under siege these days, but we also know that it is the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice.
To tyrants and victims and secrets and lies.
I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this.
What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.
So a lot of conservatives picked on this because she said speaking your truth.
Speaking Truth Matters00:14:50
And there is no such thing in a way as your truth.
I mean, there is your truth in how you're experiencing life, I suppose.
But there's truth and there's not truth.
And she starts out in kowtowing to the press.
She starts out by saying the press is looking for absolute truth.
Now, let's talk about this for a minute because it's been the thing that I've been trying to get to all week about the fact that I think the press is doing exactly the opposite.
I think the press is creating a fantasy.
It's not just fake news.
It's fantasy news.
And in fact, the whole idea of fake news has played into this fantasy, has helped, is it was a ploy, a strategy for creating this fantasy and protecting this fantasy.
And part of this grows up, you know, there's a lot of strains of thought that go into this way of looking at language and a way of looking at truth.
But a lot of it starts with the fall of the Soviet Union after and the destruction of Europe after World War II.
A lot of these postmodernists who came along, guys like Paul Demand and Jacques Derrida, and even if you go before them to Heidegger, the philosopher Heidegger, would argue that there was no such thing as truth outside of the context in which the truth was spoken.
Now, this is a novelistic commonplace.
For people like me who write novels, every character speaks, he may speak the truth, but he also is speaking out of his own life.
And that's what all of Shakespeare is about.
Shakespeare, each character says something different, approaches the truth in a different way, and that's how you know his character.
And you get an overall picture of the truth from all the different characters speaking in different ways.
Now, what's really interesting about Heidegger is Heidegger was a Nazi supporter, and people who are followers of the philosopher Heidegger try to explain this away.
It's also interesting that Paul DeMond, one of the founders of the postmodernist movement, a guy who sort of attacked language and with Derrida after him, sort of said that language cannot convey anything but itself, essentially.
That in other words, language doesn't convey an outer truth.
You can't get beyond the text.
The text is always self-referential.
You know, and I don't want to get into the deep weeds about it, but the point is that we're never really talking about the outside world.
The outside world doesn't have a reality that can be conveyed through language.
And one of the things that's interesting about Paul DeMan is after he died, it came out that he was a collaborator with the Nazis, and he wrote anti-Semitic articles that helped the Nazis along.
And a lot of the postmodernists, including Derrida, began making excuses for him.
Now, it was always very hard to tell what Derrida was saying because he wrote in this completely obscure style.
But still, they were making excuses for him.
And I remember saying to a friend of mine who was a Yale PhD and he had studied under DeMan and he would defend DeMan.
And I said, you know, the fact that De Man wrote these anti-Semitic Nazi pieces and then tried to make the argument that language doesn't matter speaks to me of a moral universe.
It means that he knows that he violated the moral, he violated the moral code of God, basically, and he's now trying to prove that it doesn't exist, which is what people do when they sin.
If you sin, you can do one of two things.
You can say, I made a mistake.
I repent.
Let me go forward and do better.
That's one thing you can do.
And then you can do what 97% of people do, which is explain to yourself for the rest of your life why what you did wasn't so bad and the world is really different than everybody says it is.
And if you only understood the world, you would see that your sin doesn't exist.
I mean, that is what most people do.
That's how the devil gets you.
He doesn't get you when you sin because everybody sins.
He gets you when you explain away your sin by saying that the world is different than in fact it is.
And a lot of this played into, I think, the conscience of the postmodernists and the relativists, especially after the Soviet Union fell apart, after communism failed, because they had rested a lot of their hopes in this leftism that was going to save the world and has now been shown to be a failure.
Leftism is a failure.
Socialism is a failure.
Communism is a failure.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't do what it says it's going to do.
It never has.
It never will.
It's not that it hasn't been done right.
That the philosophy itself is wrong.
Embedded in this philosophy and this leftist philosophy is the elevation of the working man over the elites.
And in some ways, this is a good thing and it's tied up with the treatment of black people.
It's elevating black people in the arts and in the way we look at the world.
And it's saying this is an experience too, that the world is not just about what Prince Hamlet says.
It's also about what the little guy that nobody writes about says.
And some of the American, great American tragedies of this post-war era, including The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.
He's an ordinary man.
He's a salesman.
But Arthur Miller is saying this is a tragedy.
Tragedies aren't just about kings.
And the wife in Death of a Salesman says attention must be paid to such a man.
And so it is the democratization of tragedy, the democratization of language, the idea that language should, that the language of ordinary people is important, as well as the language of sophisticates.
The problem with this, now, everything comes with a price, right?
So the good thing about this is it reminds us that everybody's life is not an elevated, sophisticated, elite life, and these lives are just as important as any other.
That's a very good Christian principle.
But everything comes at a price.
And the price is that language becomes devalued.
So that, in other words, if you're an educated person, you're going to speak better, more clearly, more in a more sophisticated, more complex way than if you're not an educated people.
A lot of the comedy in Shakespeare comes from the fact that ill-educated people don't string their sentences together very well.
And so you are devaluing language and you're devaluing language's capability of transmitting the truth.
I always talk about the comedian, oh my gosh, what was his name?
The Seven Things You Can't Say on Radio.
I'll let me look it up.
Who was the famous comedian?
Seven things.
George Carlin.
Thanks, guys.
It was George Carlin.
And everybody loves this routine because he would come out and just repeat these curse words over and over and over again and string them together.
The seven curse words, just the most foul curse words you can imagine.
And he was making fun of the fact that we consider these things obscene.
Why are they obscene?
They're just sounds.
They're just noises.
They're just words.
It's a very funny routine, but it's utterly wrong because language does transmit what we mean.
When I say a tree, we both know what a tree looks like.
We both have the same image of a tree in our minds.
It's an agreed-upon tool that we use to transmit reality.
So when I use a foul word, I actually am communicating something that we both understand.
And saying it doesn't mean that doesn't stop it from meaning that.
So when kids today, and you listen to them, they talk in these four-letter words and they use them offhandedly, they are devaluing language.
And they say, well, what's the difference?
It's not dirty.
It's nothing wrong.
That's not true.
We both know what it means.
We are both using, we're all using it and understanding it to mean something that is grotesque, that lowers, that elevates, for instance, going to the bathroom or meaningless sex over making love and doing the more sophisticated things that human beings do.
This is why, because language gets devalued and language as a vehicle for truth gets devalued, you can then take the next step that the postmodernists took, the step of deconstruction, and say there is no reality.
There's only the reality that we agree to.
The fact that I say tree and we agree that that means tree is just a contract.
And so that if we can all agree on a different truth, then the world itself will change, right?
That in other words, truth is now given no voice whatsoever.
James Dammore, I talked about this.
This is the guy who put out a manifesto, a Google employee put out a manifesto saying that women may make different choices that keep them from rising to the top of technology.
And he was fired.
And he has sued Google.
And some of the stuff that he has said, that he says Google is doing is utterly nuts.
So for instance, in a section of his lawsuit claiming that Google tries to stifle conservative parenting style, the suit reads, Google furnishes a large number of internal mailing lists catering to employees with alternative lifestyles, including furries, people who dress up as stuffed animals, polygamy, transgenderism, and plurality for the purpose of discussing sexual topics.
The only lifestyle that seems to not be openly discussed on Google's internal forums is traditional heterosexual monogamy.
So they are trying to change the culture by changing what people can say.
And if you go on and you look at Google now has a fact checker.
It has a fact-checking thing.
So if you look something up, it tells you the fact checking.
It only fact-checks us.
It fact-checks the Daily Wire.
It fact-checks other conservative sites.
It does not fact-check left-wing sites.
So the idea that Google is now selling and is selling it very hard is that leftism is truth.
Leftism is truth.
And right-wingery is just a lie.
It's just an entire lie.
You know, I'm reading this book about the immigration crisis in Europe and how it's destroying Europe.
And at one point, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, who started this, who brought all these people, these Syrians, into Europe, she said to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this is in the book, what could be done to stop European citizens from writing criticisms of our migration policy on Facebook?
Are you working on this?
She asked him.
And Zuckerberg said, yes, he was.
In fact, our friend at Project over at Project Veritas, our friends over at Project Veritas, have put out a new video where they've captured people on Twitter saying that they are shadow banning conservative voices.
So the people like me don't know that we've been banned.
We just are still putting stuff out, but nobody's reacting to it because they are banning it without letting us know.
Here's just an excerpt of Project Veritas' catching these people on secret video.
The idea of the shadow ban is that you ban someone, but they don't know they've been banned because they keep posting, but no one sees their content.
So they just think that no one's engaging with their content when in reality no one's seeing it.
I don't know if Twitter does this anymore.
How do you know if it's a lie and not anyone else?
Oh, you use machine learning.
You look for Trump or America and you have like 5,000 keywords to describe a redneck.
And then you look and you parse all the messages, all like the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches like that stuff.
So is it going to like ban, it essentially ban certain mindsets and/or people who could be negative?
It's not going to be a mindset.
It's going to bend like a way of talking.
Do you have access to DMs or Twitter?
Oh, I do.
I do.
It's a lot of bad press if like, you know, people figure out that you're shadow banning them.
It's, like, unethical in some way.
Now, one of the reasons we like Donald Trump and we enjoy him is that Trump is playing the same game they're playing.
Trump is basically saying, oh, okay, if there's no reality, and Trump believes this, I think, if there's no reality, then I'm going to confront your reality with my reality.
And what we enjoy about him is he doesn't care if they call him racist.
He doesn't call if they call him sexist.
He just puts forward his alternative point of view, which in many cases, like a Venn diagram, intersects with what conservatives believe to be the truth.
Now, there are people who have their, they're clutching their pearls saying, oh my God, now we're just one of them.
But this is just politics.
This is why I don't get too excited about this.
However, however, Steven Pinker, in a speech that sounded almost exactly like the speech I gave in Silicon Valley at Christmastime, Steven Pinker at Harvard, he's a Harvard psychologist.
I've read his books.
They're really entertaining.
He put forward this idea that essentially, and I've put forward this idea too.
It's funny, he's a Harvard professor, and I'm just a barefoot teller of tales, and yet we're saying the same thing.
But he put forward this idea that when you keep people from the truth, you open up the path toward hatred, toward fascism.
We were talking about this with Sebastian Gorka yesterday, that when you won't let people say, hey, maybe mass immigration is a bad thing, then the only people who will say it are Nazis, and the Nazis begin to talk sense.
And that's a very dangerous situation.
So here is Steven Pinker on a panel.
It's a really wonderful moment where he simply talks about things that are obviously true that no one is allowed to say.
And then he talks about what happens if you're not allowed to say them.
Now, I'll add that part at the end, but just listen to the basic common sense that comes out of his mouth.
So here is a fact that's going to sound ragingly controversial, but is not.
And that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones.
So if you doubt it, then just ask yourself the question, would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea?
Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany or in the 1960s?
So this is not, I submit that this is actually not a controversial statement, but in university campuses, it is considered flamingly radical.
Here's another one.
Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests.
Again, this is not controversial to anyone who is even glanced at the data.
The kind of vocational interest tests of the kind that your high school clients counselor gave you have been given to millions of people.
And men and women give different answers as to what they want to do for a living and how much time they want to allocate to family versus career and so on.
But you kind of can't say it.
I mean, someone, very famous person on this campus, did say it.
And we all know what happened to him.
And he's no longer, well, he is on this campus, but no longer in the same office.
Here's a third fact that is just not controversial, although it sounds controversial, and that is that different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates.
You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, look it up on their website.
The homicide rate among African Americans is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European Americans.
And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist Database, and you find that worldwide, the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups.
So Pinker's point is that if you've been lied to about all these very simple facts, men and women are different.
Islamists create most terrorist acts.
Blacks commit more murders.
If you're not allowed to say these things, when you discover them, you are in danger of becoming part of the alt-right.
Homicide Rates and Terrorism00:02:55
This is what he's saying.
He's against the alt-right, as I am against the alt-right.
And he's saying when you find out that women and men are different, you might suddenly think that women are inferior.
If you find out that blacks and whites are different, you might suddenly think that racism has a point.
And that is not, that is not the truth.
That is not the truth.
You know, somebody yelled at me the other day, a couple of people yelled at me the other day when I said that when women take over an industry, it's because the industry has become obsolete, that men basically move in, they create the industry, and they said, what a sexist thing to say.
And I was joking about it being sexist.
It's not sexist because it's only feminism that accepts that building an industry is more important than building a human being, that building an industry is more important than raising people and nurturing people and teaching people right from wrong, that those two things, that somehow building an industry is a bigger deal.
It's only feminism that accepts that, and of course, masculine sexism that accepts those things.
I do not accept those principles.
And this is what I want to get to.
What I want to get to is this.
It is each one of us are warriors in this fight for the truth.
And each one of us must speak the truth fearlessly, even when people call us racist, even when it threatens our livelihood, even when it threatens, you know, and I've been through all of this, so I'm not just saying this off the top of my head, but even when it threatens our standing in the community, we must speak the truth.
But we mustn't let people, we mustn't mistake the truth, hatred for the truth.
We mustn't mistake hatred for the truth.
It remains true that all of us, men and women, are made in the image of God, and that in loving God, we have to also love one another.
This is basic stuff.
This is basic Christian religious stuff.
We must do this.
And if you are finding the truth, if you are speaking the truth, you have to speak it through this filter of love.
And if you don't, you've ceased to speak the truth at all, really.
You've used the truth in the service of lies.
So this is the danger that we face, the moral hazard that we face.
But each one of us really has a role to play in doing this.
Hey, by the way, we're doing the conversation again.
That's on Tuesday, the, tell me, the 16th, maybe?
The 16th.
All right.
It's Tuesday the 16th.
This is this coming Tuesday.
It's on at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
And how you do it, can you give me that information?
What you got to do, you got to subscribe if you want to.
Anybody can watch it.
You can watch it on our Facebook page.
You can watch it on YouTube.
It's me and Alicia Krauss.
I will answer all your questions live.
But you've got to be a subscriber if you want to send in questions.
So how you do it is this.
We'll be live on Daily Wire Facebook page and the Daily Wire YouTube channel.
And everybody, it's free.
Everybody can watch it.
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Obama's Middle East Strategy00:13:04
On even rarer occasions, will change your life for the better.
All right, let's talk to Michael Duran.
Michael Duran is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
He specializes in Middle East security issues.
His latest book, Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, is out now.
It's about President Eisenhower's handling of the 1956 Suez Crisis, which is a really, really fascinating subject.
Yesterday, Michael Duran wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal that has become really controversial, saying that we shouldn't leave the Iran deal.
It can be fixed.
And we're going to talk about that.
Mike, it's good to see you.
Hi, good to be here.
Let's begin.
I want to cover this.
One of the things that always bothers me about the news is that people keep talking about these things, the Iran deal or something, and they don't explain what it is.
And people sort of kind of feel they know what it is, but they don't really.
So let's begin with at the very beginning.
What exactly is this deal that Obama made with the Iranian regime?
I'll tell you, but I have to caveat that by telling you that I'm telling you my truth.
That's the most important thing Oprah says you can do.
President Obama, one of the strange things about the Iran deal is that President Obama didn't tell the truth about it.
He presented it to the country as an arms control agreement with the Iranians.
And it was certainly that, but it was actually much bigger than that.
It was a reorientation of American policy in the Middle East toward Iran.
Under the Obama administration, the United States aligned with Iran across the board.
And he used the nuclear deal as the device for executing that.
But he never admitted that.
His former officials, the echo chamber, who are still having an oversized role in our national debate about the Middle East, they don't admit that that happened.
They pretend that we were continuing to contain Iran and so on.
So there's my view, and then there's what the Obamaites are saying.
And they're really quite contradictory.
There's no consensus about this yet.
But the content of the deal itself was essentially that Iran could continue to amass nuclear materials as long as they didn't use them.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, but they had to keep their stockpiles.
They could continue to spend centrifuges and to enrich uranium, but they had to keep their stockpiles at a particular level so that they wouldn't have the ability to break out and build a nuclear bomb within about a one-year period.
Different experts differ about the timeframe.
But so they were given this enrichment, they were blessed with an enrichment capability by the international community as long as they restricted their activities for about a decade.
And then after a decade, the agreement sunsets and they can go do whatever they want.
That's one of the major criticisms of the conservatives of the deal: the fact that it has sunsets.
And what was all this about the money that we were sending them, the pallets of money dropped in the dead of night from helicopters?
I mean, what was that?
Well, we incentivized them to sign the deal by releasing assets that had been frozen by international law.
And in addition, we incentivized them with regard to the money by settling some disputes between the two of us, some bilateral U.S.-Iranian disputes, settling them, in my view, very much in the Iranians' favor.
There were all kinds of hidden concessions to the Iranians, as far as I understand the thing.
We basically recognized Syria as an Iranian sphere of influence and did nothing to counter the Iranians or, for that matter, the Russians when they moved to prop up Assad.
We stopped prosecuting cases, narcotics cases against Hezbollah operatives in this country in order not to not to anger Hezbollah, which is basically Hezbollah is basically a wing of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.
So there were an enormous number of hidden costs to this thing as well.
So this is something I've never gotten a reasonable answer to.
What was Obama thinking?
I mean, Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.
They hate us.
They talk about death to America all the time.
Their leaders despise us.
What brilliant vision did he have?
I mean, I'm assuming, you know, whenever I ask people of this, people about this, I start to hear from the crazies who say, well, Obama's a secret Muslim.
He was working to build the caliphate.
But surely there must be something that was on his mind.
No, I'm the perfect guy to explain this to you because I understand Obama's thinking about all of this.
He's not a Kenyan communist in this regard, and he's not a closet Muslim.
He's just an Ivy League professor in terms of his understanding of the world.
I spent enough time in the Ivy League to be able to parrot how their lines about the world.
He had basically three motivations.
One was he wanted to go down in history as the guy who ended wars in the Middle East, who ended George W. Bush's wars.
Number two, so that meant we had to pull back from Iraq.
And the minute you say, the minute you say, I'm going to pull American troops out of Iraq, we have this problem and that there's Iran right next door, which has an outsized influence in Iraq.
So if you're going to pull your troops out, Iran is going to start having a major, it's going to start putting Iraq under its thumb.
What is the United States going to do?
Is it going to play its usual role of containing Iran or is it going to give Iran a pass?
So in order for Obama to achieve his goal of pulling the troops out of Iraq, he had to give Iran a pass right there in Iraq.
But then he also had to give them a pass or at least come to an agreement on the nuclear question.
Basically what he did on the nuclear question is he just put it aside for 10 years, which was long enough for him to get out, to pull back from the Middle East, to get the peace that he wanted in Iraq, and so on.
So that's factor one.
Factor number two is that Obama seems to have decided, and I think a lot of foreign policy experts would agree with him on this, that now the real game in the world is in East Asia.
It's the challenge of China, and we're kind of just throwing, you know, wasting blood and treasure in the Middle East for no good purpose.
And then the third thing is what I think you and I would both laugh at, which is that I really do believe that Obama felt that he had some kind of special insight into world affairs, some kind of factor X, you know, that he was going to, unlike the Republicans who have this really nasty worldview, which in Obama's mind, your worldview, Drew, mine, it is self-defeating.
We create the beasts that we say we want to slay.
And if we just reach out our hand to these guys like the Iranians, then they'll stop fighting with us because we can find a kind of natural equilibrium because we are the problem.
Every Ivy League professor believes that.
Barack Obama believes that, and he believed that he was the anointed one to come fix it all.
Okay.
So we're talking to Michael Duran of the Hudson Institute, the author of Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, which is about the Suez Crisis, one of the genuinely fascinating historical subjects.
So you wrote this piece that I think you're getting a lot of flack for this, I think.
All my friends are very angry with me.
A two, Mike.
To explain, every now and again, the President of the United States has to re-ratify Obama's Iran deal, right?
He has to say, yes, the Iranians are, in fact, holding up their end of the bargain.
And I think it's today he has to do it again, right?
Am I right about that?
Basically, it's actually tomorrow and perhaps the next day.
I'm a little bit confused because what we're looking at here is the confluence right now of two legislatively mandated timelines, the Anara timeline and the, these are, it's inside baseball.
But every 90 days and every 180 days, according to two different pieces of legislation, he has to certify whether Iran is in compliance and whether we should waive or not waive the sanctions on them.
The gist is this.
The sanctions that we put on Iran before the nuclear deal are still in place legally, the American sanctions.
And so when he waives them, when he waives the sanctions, it means we're not applying them.
But he can decide to reapply them at a moment's notice.
That's the question.
And your contention is that he should not ditch the deal, which a lot of people feel he should, but he should fix the deal.
How can this deal be fixed?
Well, bear in mind that I think the deal is an abomination.
Okay.
If Trump decides tomorrow to tank it, I'm not going to lose any sleep on that at all.
For me, it's just a question of tactics.
The question for me is, how do we contain Iran?
And what's the smartest way to go about it?
And if he decides tomorrow to reimpose the sanctions, that means what will happen is in effect he's pulling the United States out of the deal.
So we're going into a major confrontation with Iran.
And at the same time, a major confrontation with our European allies, because when we reapply the sanctions, it means that we say to European companies, they can't do business with Iran.
So we go into a major conflict with our European allies and with the Russians and the Chinese as well, and into a conflict with the Iranians.
Now, who in the U.S. government right now is in favor of this conflict?
Well, perhaps Donald Trump if he decides to do that.
But then none of his advisors, not Mattis, not Tillerson, maybe Mike Pompeo.
I don't know where Pompeo is.
But Tillerson and Mattis are not there.
The Europeans are not there.
You just saw very wisely, they went and they met with Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, to thumb their nose at Trump.
I wish they hadn't done that.
It was very unwise, but they did it.
And then the American press and the Democrats, right?
So he's going to go into a major conflict with nobody on his side.
And I just think that's a mistake.
It's not like we apply these sanctions and we topple Iran tomorrow.
We're going to be in an extremely significant conflict, which could turn very ugly.
And I was in the White House during the Iraq War.
Just think about the way I look at this is that this legislation that they're trying to work on with Corker and Cardin and Cotton and so forth, the legislation to fix the deal just says basically, as a matter of American law, these sunsets in the nuclear deal are unacceptable.
The intercontinental ballistic missiles of the Iranians are unacceptable.
That the levels of uranium enrichment must stay where they are now fixed.
And if the Iranians move beyond them, then we're going to reimpose sanctions across the board.
It's sort of a unilateral statement by the United States that if the Iranians ever move beyond the terms of the deal as we currently understand it, then we're going to reimpose sanctions.
So you're basically getting rid of the sunset clause.
Getting rid of it, according to American law.
And I look at this as a kind of laying a very rational, very reasonable basis when you look at this regime, a reasonable basis for American policy that can get a lot of support on the left, and it can get a lot of support in Europe as well.
And that is the better position to take when going into a conflict with Iran than to just go and throw the whole thing to the wind and then be blamed.
I mean, you can already imagine how everyone is going to team up to blame Trump on this.
So I'm thinking about the day after and the day after that, when things get nasty and we have to call on people to help us.
Perfectly reasonable.
Michael Durand, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, author of Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East.
Thanks a lot.
Macbeth's Echoes00:10:15
I appreciate it.
That was really interesting.
Thank you.
Take care.
Talk to you.
You know, we should talk about Skillshare before we go, because Skillshare is a really, it's a really fascinating website that will help you to improve your skills at work or develop new skills or just develop a hobby.
I've used it a couple of times.
I went on it to look at some of their writing programs.
What it is, it's like online classes by experts in the field, people who are actual practitioners in the field, and they'd do a series of video classes.
And you can take these classes and learn a new skill or hone your old skills.
I used them.
I went and looked at their writing classes to see if the advice was good because I thought that was something I knew about.
And it was.
It was really good advice, marketing skills, something I don't have a lot of.
I learned some from them.
And even when Knowles and I did Another Kingdom, our podcast, I went on and said, how do you do a podcast?
You know, how do you do a podcast without this whole support of the Daily Wire around you?
And they were really, really helpful.
They have over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more.
So whether you're trying to deepen your professional skill set or start a side line or just explore something new, Skillshare will keep you learning in 2018 and beyond.
And just in time for the new year and all those resolutions I know you're making and breaking, Skillshare is offering the Andrew Clavin Show listeners a limited time offer of three months of Skillshare for just 99 cents, a lousy buck.
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And you'll find that there's a lot of stuff that you can learn that you might really be interested in.
All right, you know, we've got to go.
Gosh, but we ought to do stuff I like before we go.
We'll do a quick stuff I like.
Since we're talking about the use of language, you know, many years ago, just back in the 90s, I got a call from my agent saying they're going to remake All About Eve with Jane Fonda.
And they were interested in getting my take on the script.
And I said, no.
And my agent got very upset.
And I said, why not?
I said, one, they're not going to do it because it's a perfect movie and you can't remake it.
And the other is, I'm not going to rewrite a perfect script.
It's Joseph L. Mankowitz.
It is one of the greatest scripts ever written.
And it is a brilliant, brilliant story.
So we talked about, we were talking about why I liked old movies, and it's the use of language.
And here's a story about an aging Broadway star played by Betty Davis and a young woman, Ann Baxter, who infiltrates her world, basically, in order to replace her.
And it is about this kind of conniving young woman who moves into an older woman's space.
And they're all highly literate people.
And here's a very famous scene with one of the most famous lines in all of movies.
I started joking when they called me up about this.
I started making jokes about how do you rewrite?
This is one of the greatest lines ever written.
How do you rewrite this line for the modern world?
But if you'll notice, it's just the playwright is teasing the actress played by Betty Davis.
And then Betty Davis meets the critic played by George Sanders.
And he comes in with his latest chick on his arm, his latest babe, and it's Marilyn Monroe in one of her very first film roles.
So just listen to the language and listen to the reparte as they talk.
The kid, Junior, that is, will be down in a minute unless you'd like to take her drink up to her.
I can get a fresh one.
You're a Gibson girl.
The general atmosphere is very Macbeth-ish.
What has or is about to happen?
What is he talking about?
Macbeth.
We know you.
We've seen you like this before.
Is it over or is it just beginning?
Fasten your seatbelts.
It's going to be a bumpy night.
Please.
Where are you?
Mademoiselle, je vous remercie infiniment pour l'invitation.
M'enchanté to you, too.
I distinctly remember Addison crossing you off my guest list.
What are you doing here?
Dear Margot, you were an unforgettable Peter Pan.
You must pray together.
You remember Miss Caswell, don't you?
I do not.
How do you do?
We've never met.
Maybe that's why.
Ms. Caspell is an actress, a graduate of the Copacabanha School of Dramatic Art.
Ah, Eve.
Good evening, Mr. DeWitt.
I had no idea you two knew each other.
This must be at long last formal introduction.
Until now, we've only met in passing.
That's how you met me.
In passing.
Parliament Monroe is the dumb blonde.
So he was making a pass at her.
And that's how you met me in passing.
The line, of course, fasten your seatbelts is going to be a bumpy night, is one of the most famous lines in all of film.
A brilliant, brilliant piece of writing.
But just note for a minute the assumed cultural references that it was assumed that you would get.
The references to Macbeth, the references to the Copa Cabana.
She's from the Copa Cabana School of Acting.
In other words, she's a club girl.
She's a dancer at this crappy Copa Cabana club.
And he's making fun of this because Betty Davis was playing this great stage actress.
You were wonderful in Peter Pan.
I mean, that's just saying you're old, basically.
But the assumption that you could understand this, that it was not above you, that you could aspire to this as opposed to the other way around, that you would aspire down to be like Eminem and to talk the language of the streets, to talk the language of rap.
And this began with the Beatles.
And you hear sometimes you hear Ben Shapiro go off and the Beatles and everybody gets very upset because the Beatles were very talented and that's what they get upset about.
But the Beatles changed the order.
So in other words, in the old days, Frank Sinatra would come on and he would sing a classic Cole Porter song like I Get No Kick from Champagne.
And it was assumed that he was elevating you into this cultural world of champagne.
I get no kick from champagne.
Some of them may go for cocaine.
You know, this was a very elegant world.
He says, when I'm out on a quiet spree, fighting vainly the old ennui, and you're supposed to live up into that cultural world.
With the Beatles, they brought you down.
The language was now, she loves you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's been a hard day's night, and I've been working like a dog.
But when I get home to you, you know, I work all day to get money to buy you things.
It was very, very basic.
It was working class, what the English called the kitchen sink school of the arts.
Now, listen, that's democratization.
That is democracy playing out its logic that the world is for everybody, that we have to respect everybody.
But, but it means that language loses its importance and its ability to transmit truth.
Because what is happening in All About Eve is people are using language to communicate in a way that is subtle, that's intricate, that assumes a sort of cultural reference point that we all have.
Now, how many people know what's in Macbeth?
Could you make a movie where you reference Macbeth and anybody knew what you were talking about?
I don't think you actually could make a popular movie that did that.
And when we have lost those cultural reference points, we lose the ability to say things in a very rapid way.
When we mention Macbeth, a whole world of meaning opens up that is now you're now cut off from that.
And if you go to school and you study English literature, you may not read Macbeth.
So that whole world of meaning that has been with us for thousands of years is being taken away from you.
You're being deprived of it.
So the democratization of language and of thought actually comes at a tremendous, tremendous price that I'm not actually convinced is worth paying.
And I think that it will change.
It will turn back around.
But I think right now, you're being actually cut off from your heritage of meaning.
All right.
It's the end.
The Clavenless weekend is here.
That means that you've got to go on and listen to Another Kingdom tomorrow.
The penultimate episode, the second to last episode, comes out tomorrow, episode 12.
There are 13 episodes in all.
It is an exciting fantasy suspense thing.
Please go on and listen to it.
We need the listeners.
We need the five-star ratings.
We need the good reviews.
They are helping us all to move it to another level.
I've got another pitch to do in Hollywood.
You know I'm fighting the tide.
So you guys are actually my weapons.
Please go on and listen to it and share it with your friends and tell your friends about it.
I think you'll really like it.
I think you'll really enjoy it and everybody seems to.
It's now got, I think, 1,500, 1,600 five-star reviews.
So I think like five-star ratings.
So I think that you really will enjoy it.
We will end this my son said.
My son was on a plane and he listened to, you know how they have all that lousy music on a plane.
He listened to my son Spencer.
He was listening to the new talent from the UK and he stumbled on a genuine discovery, a woman named Rose Betts, who has a piece out now called The Stars Look Down.
And it's a perfect example of some of what we're talking about because as she puts it out, she herself made this kind of video.
It's nostalgic for this life, this higher life of high culture.
But what's interesting about this is The Stars Look Down is a phrase, a title of a famous novel that was excoriating society for its treatment of coal miners.
So it actually has a kind of irony built in.
Whether Rose Betts knew this or not, I don't know.
She is in the Adele school.
You'll hear her.
She sounds a lot like Adele, but she really is talented.
And the song itself is very beautiful.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Listen to Another Kingdom, please, on iTunes, and I will see you here on Monday if you survive the Clavenless weekend.
Tonight we dine on caviar and dance on marble floors.
Our clicking heels under collar wheels.
We kiss behind the doors.
A drink to easy victory, a drink before we fall.
No, I can't stay.
I know one day we'll dance again once more.
We'll dance again once more.
And all along the stars look down.
And All Along You Were Reaching00:00:53
And all along you were reaching out.
And I wasn't sure I was caught.
I was lost in the sound.
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