Andrew Clavin and James O’Keefe expose how Democrats weaponized women’s grievances in the 2018 midterms, leveraging media bias—like The New York Times’ false Trump scandals—to regain House control while ignoring his 2M job gains and ISIS defeat. O’Keefe’s American Pravda traces journalism’s shift from truth-seeking to power-grabbing post-Watergate, with corporate media suppressing dissent (e.g., Project Veritas’ ACORN sting). Clavin links this to "cultural Marxism," where feminism exploits victimhood, contrasting it with conservatives’ acceptance of life’s inherent struggles. The episode ends questioning whether guerrilla journalism sacrifices depth for impact—or if traditional media’s failures demand such tactics. [Automatically generated summary]
So here's something you won't hear anywhere else but here today, okay?
A lot of times you hear these arguments between people who believe in the book of Genesis and people who believe in evolution.
And I believe in both.
And it just really occurred to me yesterday as I was thinking about it that in some bizarre way, almost a supernatural way, they say almost exactly the same thing about the development of human consciousness and self-consciousness and what it means for the divisions between the sexes.
And I want to talk about that and I want to talk about the effect that's going to have on the 2018 midterms.
Where else are you going to hear that?
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes you want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Man, this week shot by.
I cannot believe it is already Thursday.
I think it's because I've been running around so much doing, I had that piece in City Journal that went viral about Trump's crude remark, as it were, about Haiti.
And I've been being interviewed everywhere.
So I just feel like I've been doing nothing but talking all week.
And it's just the day slip I'm supposed to be on Fox and Friends tomorrow morning, if you want to hear that.
But now, now, even the Claveless weekend will not be the Clavenless weekend because the Another Kingdom season finale is going up tomorrow, Friday.
That's right, tomorrow, Friday.
If you haven't listened to this, you can now binge the entire 13 episodes, the entire first season.
Please help us out.
I'm going to be pitching it next week, I think, to another producer.
Falsely Reporting Trump's Legacy00:12:17
So please, you know, every time you go on there and give it good ratings and give it good reviews and just the numbers really help.
So Another Kingdom, anywhere you get a podcast, and the exciting season finale will be there.
We have James O'Keefe of Project Veritas.
He has a new book called American Pravda, My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News.
And he is going to come on and talk to us about that.
And meanwhile, meanwhile, you may notice that if there is one thing I know about, it is shaving.
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So let's begin.
We're going to be talking about the Democrats are relying on women to be fools.
They are relying on women to be stupid and emotional and over-emotional.
And for them to win back the House, especially.
Everything they're doing is about winning back the house.
Every single move they make, that's all it's about.
And they are playing specifically women.
They are depending on them on a sense of grievance, on a sense of victimhood, on a sense of a way in which an emotional atmosphere affects women instead of they are the Democrats are relying on an emotional atmosphere to affect women instead of the facts.
And, you know, Donald Trump yesterday, I was so jealous.
He did this thing where he finally released the fake news awards.
And I was lobbying to be the host.
I wanted to be the host of the fake news.
I was willing to buy a tuxedo from Knowles just to do this show.
I just thought, like, we should really do it.
We'll have the immemorium of Keith Olbermann, you know.
This is all the fake news.
But the funny thing about the fake news is that he put them up on the RNC website, I guess, and it crashed.
And so CBS reported they publish fake news and then the site stops working, which was fake news because it crashed because so many people rushed on to see it.
But what really got me about the fake news awards, and this is important as part of what I'm saying, is that they were actually very substantial.
I mean, there were a few of them that were a little bit, what would you call it, trivial, but a lot of them were really substantial.
So here, I'll just read them off.
Number one, the New York Times Paul Krugman claimed on the day of President Trump's historic landslide victory that the economy would never recover.
He did say that.
Now, I don't think Krugman should get a lot for that because that's kind of typecast for him.
He does that all the time.
Every prediction he's ever made about the economy has turned out to be wrong.
Number two, ABC News's Brian Ross sends markets into a downward spiral when he reported that candidate Trump ordered Michael Flynn to meet with the Russians.
So here, we have a little bit of video of the correction, I think.
Let's play that.
ABC's lead investigative reporter, Brian Ross, appeared to be the one with the scoop.
He is prepared to testify that President Trump, as a candidate, Donald Trump, ordered him, directed him to make contact with the Russians.
That would directly tie the president to the Russia scandal.
Now, that report caused the Dow Jones to take a nosedive, dropping 350 points at one point.
Except Ross misquoted his source, and it took ABC News hours to correct the mistake.
In fact, it was President-elect Trump who asked him to contact the Russians, which of course is pretty much standard operating procedure.
But again, this is Brian Ross being Brian Ross.
Garker once called him America's wrongest reporter.
He's the guy who said that after the shooting in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater, that the shooter may have had Tea Party ties because he found another guy with the same name, James Holmes, who belonged to the Tea Party.
I mean, he's really bad about stuff like this.
Number three, CNN falsely reported that candidate Donald Trump and his son, Donald J. Trump Jr. had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks.
Do we have this?
I think we have a clip of this.
Now, we've been reporting that this email came on September 4th.
That was before some of these documents were publicly available.
But we have just obtained a copy of this email.
And instead, we now learn that this email was on September 14th.
So that is 10 days later than what we originally reported earlier today.
And this appears to change the understanding of this story.
Yeah, it changed the understanding because the Wikileaks had already been published.
So somebody was sending him a letter and said, have you seen this on WikiLeaks?
But that one, it's just a one, CNN.
Don't feel too bad about it.
Well, let's see what else we got.
Oh, Time falsely reported that President Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.
That was particularly vicious.
And I love the fact.
Well, it's just a mistake.
Just a mistake.
I mean, that was a vicious, vicious mistake.
That's basically the press reporting from its own imagination.
You know, this is Brian Ross reporting from my imagination.
The Washington Post, number five, falsely reported the president's massive sold-out rally in Pensacola, Florida was empty.
They showed pictures of the empty arena hours before the crowd started pouring in.
These are a little trivial.
CNN falsely edited a video to make it appear President Trump defiantly overfed fish during a visit with a Japanese prime minister.
And you know, you say they're trivial, but the point of this is that they're never in favor of Trump.
They never make a trivial mistake in favor of Donald Trump.
And that's the point.
That's how you know they're targeting Donald Trump.
CNN falsely reported about Anthony Scaramouche's meeting with a Russian, but retracted it due to a significant breakdown.
Oh, this is where they fired three journalists.
They suspended three CNN journalists because they said they hadn't followed their usual fact-checking procedures.
So I think they should deserve a special award for playing the role of a network that actually checks its facts.
That would be a real big, big change for CNN.
Newsweek falsely reported that Polish First Lady would not shake President Trump's hand.
That was false.
CNN falsely reported that former FBI Director James Comey would dispute President Trump's claim that he was told he is not under investigation.
That was a big, big, ugly, stupid mistake.
The New York Times falsely claimed on the front page the Trump administration had hidden a climate report, taken it off their page.
And last but not least is the Russia collusion, because now, I mean, it really does seem now, and look, we don't have this solidly, but it seems extremely possible that this entire Russian collusion story is Democrat opo-research used by the FBI to cover up the fact that President Obama had corrupted the top levels of the Justice Department.
Not the rank and file.
Most FBI agents are doing their job catching bad guys.
It's these guys who got political in the Obama administration, the Chicago-style Obama administration.
And this whole Russian collusion thing may be a cover-up for that.
We don't have that solidly, but it's very, very plausible that it's like that.
And that the only reason that Trump hasn't blown the whole thing open by releasing the Pfizer request is they probably have some information in there that would reflect negatively on him too as well.
So he's holding it up.
But that is a very, very plausible version.
And they're just not reporting it.
Only Fox News is reporting that aspect of the story.
So here's the other thing: part of this is while the media spent 90% of the time focused on negative coverage or fake news, the president has been doing things that they're not reporting so much.
And this is still part of the president's release.
The economy has created nearly 2 million jobs and gained over 8 trillion in wealth since the president's inauguration.
African Americans and Hispanics are enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in recorded history.
The president signed historic tax cuts and relief for hardworking Americans.
President Trump's plan to cut regulations has exceeded two out of every one in mandate, issuing 22 deregulatory actions for every one new regulatory action.
That, to me, is one of the biggest stories of the Trump administration.
The president has unleashed an American energy boom.
That is true.
ISIS is in retreat, having been crushed in Iraq and Syria.
And you will remember that Obama said ISIS is a generational threat, meaning there's nothing we can do.
There's nothing we can do.
Trump, bang, they're gone.
I mean, come on.
It's a big, big deal, virtually uncovered.
President Trump followed through on his promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel, something every president has said they would do.
Trump did it.
With President Trump's encouragement, more member nations are paying their fair share at NATO.
He signed, this is a big one too.
He signed the Veterans Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act to allow senior officials in the VA to fire failing employees and establish safeguards to protect whistleblowers.
President Trump kept his promise and appointed Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And that's just the headline because there have been like 60 great judges appointed.
All this stuff, the point of all this stuff, is to create this atmosphere of Trump scandal, Trump outrage, Trump terror, and who does it affect?
Well, here we go.
Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal wrote a really good column today called the Trump Paradox.
And the Trump paradox is that Donald Trump may be the most disliked president in the post-war era, even as he presides over one of the most solid first-year policy performances of that era, most notably a strengthening economy.
For most of the first year, Henninger says the Trump paradox didn't matter much beyond the altered psychological state of his audience.
Reacting to Trump became, like uncontrollable weather, a daily routine.
But in year two, the storyline is about to change.
Why?
Everything in 2018 will be identified in terms of its effect on the November midterm elections.
And that is why Dick Durbin is going around telling people what Trump said in the meeting when he made that remark about hell holes.
Now I have a new thing under my desk where I can press and silence myself, mute myself.
So from now I can say it's like I press whole countries.
You know, it worked.
Did it work?
I hope so.
Otherwise, we're off the air.
But that is why Dick Durbin did this.
Henninger says Dick Durbin poisoned the well of the immigration negotiations because he recognized he's a political animal and he recognized that Democrats would gain more politically from public exposure of Mr. Trump's private words than they would from any DACA deal.
So basically, Durbin and the Democrats are throwing DACA, the DACA people, under the bus in order to make people hate Trump, right?
The Democrat resistance, this is Henninger again, the Democratic resistance, which looked pathetic and irresponsible in year one, suddenly makes sense.
In year two, the generic ballot numbers, which show the public preferring a Democratic Congress by an astounding 11-point average, are suddenly relevant.
Suddenly, it matters that Mr. Trump's approval in Georgia, which he carried in 2016 with 51%, is now 38%.
And here's the thing: all right, here's the kicker.
This one-man meltdown is occurring almost entirely among women, driven by a relentlessly smirking, I could care less demeanor.
DACA Under The Bus00:03:25
The beer and shot base loves it.
Women, they just don't like it.
Women came out of the woodwork to vote against Trump in the Virginia gubernatorial election that Ed Gillespie lost.
And the fact is, as we talked about yesterday, Trump has appointed really powerful women to very powerful posts.
Nikki Haley, you know, Kirsten Nielsen at Homeland Security, Sarah Sanders is doing a great job.
He was talking about that.
He gave a speech and he actually was mentioning, as he does when he gives himself praise, his accomplishments in this regard.
Making incredible progress.
The women's unemployment rate hit the lowest level that it's been in 17 years.
Well, at something.
And women in the workforce reached a record high.
More women in the workforce today than ever before.
That's really terrific.
And especially since it's on my watch, I feel very proud of that.
Okay, so the difference between the facts and an atmosphere, an emotional atmosphere of smirkiness, scandal, but part of which Trump is responsible for, part of which Trump does, he's a rude guy.
He's a belligerent guy.
He says what he thinks and he has this bullying attitude that just goes up women's back.
I can see it.
I can see it.
It's hard.
You cannot sit and explain to your wife that her life is better because she's sitting there saying, but he does this and he looks like this and he says this.
It's really tough to do.
Now, I'm going to pause here for just a minute to talk about our, we welcome our new sponsor, which is Da Vinci.
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All right.
So here's the thing.
Myth Of Feminist Power00:15:02
In the New York Times, a former newspaper, today they were saying there was a column that said, maybe the Me Too movement is going to help Donald Trump.
Many think the issue of sexual harassment embodied in the Me Too movement will work to the advantage of Democrats in upcoming elections.
A mid-December NBC News Wall Street Journal survey gave the party a three-to-way one advantage over Republicans on the matter, but it is hardly guaranteed to do so.
The whole idea of this is this whole Me Too thing, this whole rape culture thing.
It's very much, I don't have time today to talk about cultural Marxism, but it's very much a part and product of cultural Marxism.
And it's been part of the feminist movement forever.
The idea that if you are a woman, you are a victim class.
That is basically it.
That is the entire thing.
And it is a political movement to get women to feel hard done by, which women basically, you know, there is an element of that in the female personality.
1972, Joan Didian.
Do you know who Joan Didian?
Joan Didian is a really fine writer.
She wrote a really good novel called Play It As It Lays.
And she wrote all these essays.
If you ever read Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a great book of essays.
So now we're talking 1972, the very beginning of the feminist movement.
She talks about the fact that they've run out of proletariat to help through their socialism.
So they've now turned to women.
They said, just, she says, at the exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, right, the working man who was supposed to unite under socialism, along came the women's movement and the invention of women as a class.
One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration.
This is the Democrat playbook, Find a Victim, Get Him to play them off everybody else and make them feel that they are hard done by.
So she says, the feminist is Joan Didian.
She says, the feminists totted up the pans, scoured the towels picked off the bathroom floor, the loads of laundry done in a lifetime.
Cooking a meal could only be dog work, and to claim any pleasure from it was evidence of craven acquiescence in one's own forced labor.
Small children could only be odious mechanisms for the spilling and digesting of food, for robbing women of their freedom.
It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir's grave and awesome recognition of woman's role as the other to the notion that the first step in changing that role was a marriage contract, like the wife strips the bed, but the husband remakes them.
And this was part of cultural Marxism.
You know, there was a movement when the Frankfurt School came over from Germany, escaping the Nazis, and they took over, they started the long march through our universities.
They said, we have got to destroy the family because the family is a place where traditional authority and traditional means of getting along and relating to each other is there.
And so they promoted homosexuality.
They promoted perverse sexuality.
They kind of combined Marx and Freud.
We'll get into that another day.
But let's talk.
I want to talk for a minute about the Bible and evolution and what this has to do with what I'm talking about.
As you know, in the Bible, Adam and Eve are in paradise.
Adam is so thrilled to have a woman with him.
God created man, mankind, in his image, male and female.
Both male and female are created in the image of God.
But they ate the apple, the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they essentially became the human beings that we are with a knowledge of good and evil, a kind of self-consciousness.
And God punished them by saying, here's what he said.
And it's amazing how much of what God's punishment involves the relationship between men and women, that the fall affects the relationship between men and women.
He says, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing.
He says this to Eve.
In pain, you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.
You'll want to do other things, but he shall rule over you.
And then he says to Adam, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat, cursed is the ground because of you.
In pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field.
In other words, he says, by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread.
You're going to have to work to get your bread.
It's not going to be paradise where the food is given to you till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
And now a lot of people say, you know, like, oh, well, this all happened in seven days, and we have to believe every word of this is literal.
And I always say, no, this is conveying something.
This is a myth that conveys something essentially true.
And one of the things it conveys is that the superior brains of human beings cause a lot of the problems, a lot of the separation between men and women.
The fact that human beings became not just sentient, but self-conscious with these enormous heads and walking upright.
The walking upright caused us, we needed narrower hips to walk upright, and we needed bigger brains to become self-conscious people with consciences who could basically live in the image of God through the knowledge of good and evil.
And that, of course, causes tremendous pain in childbirth, right?
That's one of the reasons women suffer so much pain in childbirth.
But it also means that people have to come out of the womb earlier.
So if you ever see a horse being born, right, the horse is born, gets up.
It's a second, it's really a second.
It starts to run around.
Babies are helpless for years, years, because if their brains, if their heads got any bigger, the woman would explode, like in something like in the alien movies.
So that in other words, the child has to be born helpless.
The mother needs to be there for a very long time.
And that means, that means that she is taken out of the power structures of the world and she is dependent on her husband.
It also means that the husband, in order to maintain the family and maintain his own children, has to sweat, has to work to make bread.
It is the knowledge of, it is the knowledge, the superior knowledge, the godlike consciousness of human beings that causes this division of labor to be so intense in human beings.
The story, it's supernatural.
I mean, only inspired writers could have gotten so close to what would be the scientific truth thousands of years later.
I mean, it really is almost an exact representation.
So here's the difference.
I was talking, I was on Dennis Prager's show yesterday, and Dennis and I were talking about the fact that conservatives are happier than leftists.
I mean, it's obvious.
Leftists are always complaining.
They're always miserable.
They're always victims.
And I said to Dennis, one of the things about you and I, Dennis, because Dennis and I have very similar approaches to life, different in very important ways, but very similar in important ways.
I said, we wake up every day with the knowledge that life is tragic and sad, and that makes us happy because you realize every day that goes well is a gift.
Every day of life is a gift.
Even this melancholy that you sometimes feel, the sorrow you feel for the world is a gift.
What the left is selling you is that they can fix your grievances, that they can fix this fallen state of man.
And what the right is selling you and is always harder to sell is no, this is the state of man until Jesus comes again.
This is the state of man in which we are to take our joy.
We are to take our joy from our femininity, from our masculinity, from our different roles, from the way that it, from the life that it creates for us.
And yes, is there unfairness baked into it?
Yep, yes, it is.
It's a fallen world.
It's a sad world.
But because we wake up with that knowledge, we are far, far happier.
The left is depending on women to feel victimized.
It is depending on you to feel victimized by the very state of being women, by the very state.
One of the things that Joan Didian goes on to say is that feminism is basically against adulthood.
It is against the fact that masculine sex drives are rough, that men are rougher than women.
It promotes lesbianism because it's so gentle.
Their love is so gentle.
It's like they're against being grown-ups.
And I think that what the left is depending on is women to be grown-ups, and that's how they plan to win the midterms.
We will see if it succeeds.
You know what?
Listen, can we stay on the air and we'll keep James O'Keefe?
We want to hear from James O'Keefe, so we're going to stay with you.
But please subscribe to thedailywire.com.
It's a lousy 10 bucks a month.
You get to ask your questions in the mailbag for a lousy $100 a month.
You get a year-long subscription and the leftist tears tumbler.
But we won't cut you off from Facebook and YouTube because we want you to see James O'Keefe.
He is an important player right now with all this fake news that is going on.
He has written a new book, which I've dipped into.
I haven't had a chance to actually read it, but I've been dipping into it.
It's really well written, very thoughtful.
It's called American Pravda, My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News.
James O'Keefe, is he there?
Have we got him?
There he is.
Hey, how you doing, James?
Good to see you.
Good to see you.
Great to be with you.
You know, this book is, I don't know who did the writing, if you actually sat down to write it.
It sounds just like you.
It is incredibly eloquent and thoughtful, surprisingly rich.
You know, a lot of books that come out are just self-promotional tools.
This one is not.
It is a real read.
And I'm really, I will finish it, and it's really interesting.
So I want to talk to you about this.
You start out very early on saying that things have gotten worse, that we can expect a disparity between the media and reality.
Of course, anybody who's talking about reality.
But since the computer age, essentially, things have gotten much worse.
Why do you think that is?
Well, Andrew, first of all, thank you for having me on, and thank you for always having our back at Project Veritas.
Well, we love you guys.
And I did write it.
I locked myself in a log cabin for a week and I wrote it.
I did a lot of research.
I read a lot of the progressive muckrakers from the early 20th century, Upton Sinclair, Pam Zekman, a lot of the investigators, Mike Wallace, a lot of the investigative reporters, Gunter Walruf, who actually did this.
And if you think what we do at Project Veritas is hardcore or crosses an ethical line, then you need to study history because this is not like we're doing something new under the sun.
You know, George Orwell wrote in 1984 that the party, the opposition, the establishment, the deep state, if you will, would demand that you don't believe the evidence of your eyes and ears.
That was the most important commandment.
Protagonist Winston Smith said in 1984, the party demanded that I don't trust my own instincts, my own sensory perceptions of the world around me.
So Veritas is just simply using modern technology to disseminate truth to the people.
And the propagandists do not want you to trust your own eyes and ears.
There was a great anecdote after the Michael Wolf thing with the quotes in the White House.
And the Washington Post reported, quote, there's no evidence to suggest that he did not say the things that he said.
I mean, that logic is so twisted.
And it's not, Andrew, it's not necessarily something that the journalism community will say explicitly, we're propagandists, but it's a group think that has fostered inside the New York Times.
So Veritas smashes the status narratives with reality, with cinema verite, and we're hated for it.
So this book talks about that and about the moral courage required to do it.
Why has it gotten so bad?
Leaving Trump aside right now, because Trump has up the ante by fighting back.
But at the same time, they were calling Bush Hitler.
They were calling Mitt Romney one of the nicest people who ever ran for president.
He was a dog killer and he killed some woman.
You know, I mean, they have really been out of control for quite a long time.
Why is it so bad?
That is what this book really dives into.
It goes into some history, some philosophy, and some modern media, a treatise on modern media.
A couple reasons.
First of all, I mean, it started with Ben Bradley with Kennedy.
I mean, they were lapdogs.
They were sharing pieces with JFK before it went to print.
And then Watergate happened, and journalists stopped pursuing truth for fact's sake and started pursuing power.
They wanted to become powerful.
They have a Woodward and Bernstein hero complex.
They're still talking about Richard Nixon.
And something happened in the 80s and 90s with the consolidation of media.
Media became, there's like six companies that control all the information.
Not to sound like Noam Chomsky, but there's some truth in that, that media don't want to challenge the sort of prevailing orthodoxy, the narratives.
And then you have journalists who got so cozy with their sources that they're unable to burn their sources.
So when I investigated, or we investigated Twitter this past week, it was a big story.
I mean, it was a big story.
Twitter is one of the most powerful companies in the United States, along with Google and Facebook.
But that sort of tech crunch, a buzzfeed, these communities were afraid to make a phone call to Twitter to ask because they didn't want to burn their friends.
So you have this sort of system-supported propaganda mechanism that's just getting bigger and bigger.
And whenever anybody actually challenges it, you are systematically destroyed, targeted, called a racist.
I could talk for an hour about this, but when I first got started in my career, I went into Acorn and I exposed that my friend and I posed as a pimp and prostitute.
And Acorn shut down.
Congress defunded Acorn.
Journalists eat your heart out.
That was a result that most people won't achieve in their lifetime.
And the Washington Post did a front page story, and they said, O'Keefe's motivated by this because he doesn't like black people.
And I never said that.
And you know what, Andrew?
The Washington Post had to print a retraction.
That was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Carol Lenning, printed a retraction, and nobody knows about that.
So it's just, I think it's just a moral courage that's required to fight this fight.
And I want to talk a little bit about, you know, if I can with you about what that's about, because I think there's a lot of things to talk about there.
Let me ask you this.
We're talking, of course, to James O'Keefe, the guerrilla journalist of Project Veritas.
His book is American Pravda, My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News.
You know, I've always, I believe I've said this to you privately.
You have to be a little bit insane to do what you do.
I mean, it is a kind of mad thing to walk into these places.
And it does, I agree with you.
It does require courage.
Let me ask you this, though.
Is there a drawback that you will be always playing gotcha and never getting in-depth stories?
This is the one thing that concerns me, that our guys are always, you know, you are a guerrilla journalist.
You are doing something that needs to be done because you are up against a monolithic corporate media.
There's just no question about it, and you have made tremendous strides doing that.
But is there a danger that you'll always be in a position of just saying, oh, I got you to say something damning instead of getting rich, deep stories like the New York Times is capable of doing when they try?
Well, unfortunately, it's gotten so bad in our country that if they were doing their jobs, there wouldn't be a need for people like me.
But there's sort of a sacred, I think Matt Drudge said something like that in 1998 when Issakoff spiked the Lewinsky story.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Why We Use Deception00:05:39
And whether or not you can use this sort of undercover technique, you know, and using an alias to draw people out, to get their private thoughts.
Andrew, I would argue that when people tell you things on the record and they know that you're going to report that, it's almost like the reporter is relaying a lie to the public because most politicians are never going to, most politicians, when they know they're on the record, are not going to tell you the honest truths.
So people say, well, Keith, you're deceptive.
Use deception to gain access to people.
I would argue that the people who use deception are reporters who relay information on the record because it's far more important to tell the truth to your audience than it is to tell the truth to your target or your subject.
We deceive our subjects to draw the truth out of them to tell the truth to your audience.
Well, is that ethical?
Well, you can't really evaluate the ethics of the means without evaluating the utility of the ends.
And some of these stories we do are so important.
The story we just did on Twitter, where they're literally rewiring human democracy by not allowing your tweets to show up on your friends' timelines if they don't like you.
I can't imagine a story more vital to the public interest than that.
And the most important thing for a journalist to do is to tell the truth to the people.
And if you look at history, Upton Sinclair and, you know, again, all these people, I've been reading and I'm like, oh, my, it's like I'm reading, you know, they went through hell.
Upton Sinclair was attacked by the media for a year because he was challenging them and they were jealous of him and he was an independent.
So it's just like, oh, a little bit of history repeating, Andrew.
But undercover we're essential.
Tell me some of the things.
I mean, we've talked about this privately.
Tell me some of the things that they have done to you to try and shut you down.
And again, I don't want your audience to think I'm self-aggrandizing here or that I'm pretty amazing.
They've gone to some pretty spectacular lengths.
It's amazing what we, my team, it's not just me, have been through.
We have been, I was on probation for three years.
I went to jail.
I sat inside of a senator's office.
I opened the door.
It was broad daylight.
I didn't break into it.
I just walked in and I sat down and I said, I said, what are you here for, sir?
And I said, well, I'm waiting for someone.
When I wasn't actually waiting for the person I had in mind, they prosecuted me under a misdemeanor.
I spent three years confined to my home in New Jersey and had to do hard labor.
I've been sued 20 times.
I've been indicted.
I've actually been had criminal grand juries.
Subpoenas issued me in New Hampshire twice.
Currently, I'm being sued for a million dollars.
I appear in federal court next week for exposing the Hillary Clinton campaign people.
I have the New York Attorney General threatening my tax exempt status.
The California Attorney General sending me a correspondence audit letter.
And I have every, I got $5 billion.
That's bravo.
Billion negative media impressions in the month of December, for our one of our undercover reporters got burned at the Washington POST.
And you face all this flack and all this hatred.
I mean they, they hate us.
I mean it's, it's visceral and and and and I believe in you know, I tell, I told my I got 50 people on on my team now and I told my team that you know that we're like the Death Star, the more they shoot at us, the bigger that we get.
And as long as you have the courage to continue, what are they gonna do?
Kill me?
Okay, they're not gonna kill me, but what are they gonna do?
Okay, they're gonna put me in jail.
Well then, I didn't do anything illegal, so they're just gonna make me a martyr.
So the most important thing you do is that you keep going and and it's that sort of, that sort of will to win.
And Andrew, let me just say one more thing before you ask the next question.
I think the conservative movement and I think the Republicans I i'm i'm really concerned about the people that you and I would think are our allies, because I think they are afraid of the flack they will get if they stand up for their own principles, because when you do this, and you do it well, you will be viciously and savagely assaulted and you will be maligned by people on your own side.
So really, it's not.
The question is not so.
So why is that?
Yeah, because because the question is not, do you, do you know how to be effective?
The question is, do you have the will?
Why is it?
Um, because they, because they control the means of disseminating information.
And then and CN will run their Chiron the Washington POST will say, we'll dig into your tax returns, they will pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it, and they will.
They will assault your reputation and people on your side Andrew, and this is like goes back to Solzonitsin's Gulag archipelago the people on your side will sell you out for a penny.
But that's what I want to know why.
Why is the right against you?
Because you do.
You don't get a lot of respect from the right.
They, they actually, they actually do come down on you, obviously not as hard as the left, but they do.
They do give you a hard time.
Why is that?
Why are you ostracized there?
Well, after this twitter thing, all the people who had negatively attacked me were singing our praises, but I don't have to mention any names.
But but I think it's because Andrew and I, and I don't I don't like to speculate motives, all I can do is talk about, you know psychology, as I see it, getting praised by the NEW YORK Times yeah, feels so good, it feels so good.
So, when that political reporter, that NEW YORK Times reporter, and says well, O'keefe uh, you know, looks like he's in trouble, what say you?
Well, I think that he's wrong and the ends don't justify the means they they, it.
It's that that that they praise you.
And the problem is is that like, we're creating a nation of moral immoral, feckless cowards, because all you have to do is is is sell out on on, on your your, your friend when the going gets tough.
And Andrew, most people live in fear.
I, even the people that love us, and we have millions and millions of people who have our back.
Those people live in fear.
They don't want their kids, their names, to be printed.
They don't want.
They want their kids to go to law school.
Bernthal's Punisher Performance00:09:55
And what's happening?
Is it taken to its extreme, you have a nation of cowards who will sell each other out so that they're not targeted by the mainstream media and it's all just a little bit of history repeating.
Yeah, so the book is American Provd, i'm out of time, but the book is American.
Pravdo by James O'keefe, my fight for truth in the era of fake news.
Can you tell me what Project Veritas has coming up?
Give it, give us a preview.
Well, we just broke one of the biggest stories ever inside Twitter.
I think big, I think big tech is a is a big theme and I think you'll see more from us on those companies in the future.
James, thanks a lot for coming on.
Good luck I with the book and uh, good luck with what you're doing.
Come back again, thank you.
Thank you um really, and I have to say the book is a surprisingly deep and rich uh read and uh, it's it's.
I'm looking forward to getting back into it.
Uh, let's do stuff.
I like You know, one of the things I love is I am a, they always call me a tough guy writer whenever they write about my fiction, and I am.
And I love tough guy actors.
Obviously, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Alan Ladd.
One of the forgotten tough guy actors is John Garfield.
He was kind of like a second string guy, although he did have a couple of really big hits.
He was in the Postman Always Rings twice, one of the great, great tough guy movies ever.
And he was in They Made Me a Criminal, Body and Soul, where he played a boxer.
In fact, we have a quick clip from Body and Soul.
He played a boxer.
And here is a great scene.
It's in almost every boxing movie ever made where the gangsters come in and they want him to throw a fight and Garfield is the honest boxer.
Leave the door open, you don't.
Are you crazy coming in here in front of everybody?
It's a gym.
People come and go here.
Besides, I'm an admirer of yours.
I like to watch you train.
You're all set for the Marlow match.
Yeah, well set.
That's great.
The odds are two to one for you to win.
It's a lot of dough if you bet on Marlowe.
I ain't handing no title over to any kid.
I can beat him.
Betting on yourself to win, Charlie?
I didn't think you were punch drunk yet.
Well, I think I can beat him.
You're not thinking, Charlie.
You're dreaming.
It's only natural after all these years of living good.
Fight now and then, the dough rolling in and the dough rolling out.
You begin to dream this can go on forever.
When I lose the championship, they'll have to carry me out.
This gym is full of guys who were carried out.
Mr. Roberts is right, Charlotte.
You'd like to see me take a dive, wouldn't you?
No, I should have.
Even money in a bank, Tommy, but facts are facts, Charlie.
Yeah?
How much of my money you got in the bank, Quinn?
Or what you got, Charlie?
Just as a side note, if you're actually watching, the guy in the background with the mustache is William Conrad, one of the great radio talents of all time.
If you've ever heard of the old Western gun smoke, he invented the character Matt Dillon on the radio.
He was the announcer for Rocky and Bullwinkle.
He was just a terrific voice guy and also one of the great tough guy actors.
He was in a wonderful, wonderful movie version of Ernest Hemingway's story, The Killers, and he went on to play Cannon on TV, The Fat Detective, because he was overweight.
But anyway, so I love tough guy actors, and of course they're in short supply because so much of the movies are getting taken over by kind of wimpy stories.
But recently, well, back in 2000, I went and saw Pitch Black, and that was one of Vin Diesel's first films.
And I remember literally walking, I walked out of the movie, picked up my cell phone as I'm walking out of the theater door, and called my agent.
And I said, if you have never seen this guy, Vin Diesel, you want to see him because he is a great tough guy actor.
Now, Diesel's career has not been as satisfying as I wanted it to be all the time.
Obviously, he's in the Fast and Furious franchises.
He's set for life.
But I always felt in his independent films, the films that weren't part of series, he tries to send a kind of moral love me message, which takes away from his tough guy persona, which is a shame.
But in Pitch Black, he is absolutely riveting.
That's the first Riddick picture.
Here's just a quick clip.
All you people are so scared of me.
But it ain't me you gotta worry about now.
Show me your eyes, Riddek.
Kicket.
Did I kill a few people?
Sure.
You got the wrong color.
Look deeper.
I mean, it just shows it takes a great writer to make a great tough guy actor, but it's still, he still is terrific.
But the guy that I have recently discovered is John Bernthal.
And Bernthal is a real actor.
Like he actually can play different kinds of parts, but he has recently become the Punisher on Netflix.
And The Punisher, you know, it's really entertaining, exceptionally violent.
I mean, it's comic book violence, but it's very violent.
And it's got some stuff in it, some left-wing garbage.
It's all written by women, oddly enough.
All the writers are women, but it's got some left-wing garbage, like all the terrorists are white veterans and all the bad guys.
The only Muslim in it is the good girl.
And it's just got all this kind of left-wing talking points, although it does have some pro-gun messaging in it.
However, Bernthal delivers one of the genuinely riveting tough guy performances.
He just plays a Marine recon guy.
You know the Punisher from the Marvel stories.
I don't like comic book stories, but this kind of goes beyond that because it's really just a Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer character amped up to a comic book level.
And Bernthal delivers this character.
He absolutely gets him just dead right.
It is a great, I mean, a genuinely great tough guy performance.
Here's just a little bit as he's trying to talk one of our many white Christian terrorists as he's trying to talk him down, stop him from killing a girl he likes.
Maybe you were right.
Maybe you and me, we are the same.
Maybe this is the way it's supposed to end, right?
Just you and me, though, right?
Just you and me.
And Obama.
Come on, kid, let's do it, okay?
Let's do it.
When we were with Curtis, you told me to pull that white wire.
You did the right thing, kid.
You could do it again.
Let her go.
You did.
Stay back!
Mickey.
Did your father teach you not to hurt a woman?
Let the girl go.
I won't go to a movie unless it has the line, let the girl go in it.
I think that's what movies are all about.
John Bernthal, a really, really promising tough guy actor.
I hope he gets more parts like this because he just understands this part down to the ground.
And he's a really good actor, too.
All right, that's it.
The Clavenless Weekend is not here because Another Kingdom will conclude its first season tomorrow.
Please go on.
Please, now you can binge the whole thing.
13 episodes, hours of entertainment is really entertaining.
Some guy named Michael Knowles plays the part.
He performs it.
He does a spectacular, spectacular job.
We will go out with music as we always do.
Shamika Copeland singing and Gary Clark Jr. playing guitar.
I love the song.
I have to admit, this is why I'm not richer than I am because all my heroes have been.
This is her singing about her father.
It's called, what is it called?
The dirty old guitar, I think the song is.
And it's got lines in it.
He never makes much money when they pass around the jar, but he sure can play those blues on the dirty old guitar.
And every time I hear this song, I think, why are these guys my hero?
Why isn't my hero like, you know, some billionaire?
But it's always been the guy who can do the job, who cares more about what he creates than the money that he gets.
These have always been the guys who have moved me, inspired me, and that I want to be like.
It's a great song that she wrote in tribute to her father.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin show.
Listen to Another Kingdom Tomorrow and survivors of the Clavenless Weekend gather here on Monday.
In a bar down in Texas.
In a bar part of town.
Santa man playing the blues.
Play them dirty and low down.
Just trying to make a living.
But you know we can't go far.
Playing them old blues, playing them all blues, playing them all blues on a beat up, a beat-up old guitar.
The body was all scratched up, the neck a beat-up thing.
But when that man started picking, he could make the guitar sing.
Though I never made him famous, he never was a star, but he could really play the ball.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.