Ep. 451’s host frames an unseen "evil force" as the root of oppression—from slavery to modern "leftism"—while defending Western Christian values against Islamic extremism and progressive censorship, dismissing racial blame for crime in favor of cultural decay. Political analyst Henry Olson argues Trump’s divisive rhetoric and 40% approval ratings will cost Republicans the House unless he adopts a more unifying tone, warning Democrats may push impeachment if they gain control. The episode also praises Judge Akalina’s harsh sentencing of Larry Nasser while critiquing Europe’s cultural decline in The Strange Death of Europe, tying ideological battles to broader societal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
So over the last few years, I've become convinced that there is something or someone in the spiritual world who can be usefully referred to as the devil.
And what I mean by that is I think there is a conscious force in the spiritual realm that underlies physical life, a conscious force that is advocating for evil in the world and evil's handmaiden slavery, as opposed to God who is the source of human freedom and the good.
Now, I don't think that Satan is some red guy with horns and a tail and cloven hooves any more than I think that God is an old man with a long white beard.
These are images we use to focus our minds.
And yes, because of the sight-based prejudice of our evolved bodies, we sometimes let these images override the unseeable spiritual truth, which is harder to imagine.
All the same, I find that if I assume there is a devil, life becomes more predictable and my view of life becomes more realistic.
And that's a kind of evidence.
When a mathematical equation correctly predicts physical events like the path that light will take over a long distance, that's evidence that the equation is true.
And in the same way, when a sane person's spiritual observations allow him to accurately predict and explain human behavior, that's evidence that his spiritual conjectures bear some relation to the actual spiritual truth.
And we know I'm a sane man because I've been insane and I can tell the difference.
So one of the things I've observed about the devil is that he's very good at turning the victims of evil into the servants of evil.
It's one of his favorite tricks.
The victims of child abuse become child abusers.
The victims of racial hatred become hateful racists.
The victims of violence become violent in turn and so on.
Because he's a spiritual creature, Satan doesn't care who does the hating as long as the hating gets done.
Now we've been talking all week about ideas versus this idea of identity and silence versus truth speaking.
Leftism, which is a distorted slave philosophy of racism and sexism and hatred, loves to jump on true ideas and brand them according to leftist categories, to call them racist and sexist or hateful in order to bully truth-tellers into silence.
So for instance, I oppose modern feminism because feminism opposes femininity, which I think is a great human good that helps complement and balance masculinity and helps preserve some of our most important values through the generations.
And so I get accused of looking down on women and not believing they should have equal rights and free choices, which is absolutely untrue.
I think women, generally speaking, are different from men and will choose and live different lives, and I celebrate that, but I also believe they have the same individual rights and a range of individual variations and freedom of choice, the same freedom of choice that men have.
I oppose racism because I know that every person is created in the image of his creator and that we honor our creator by honoring his image and mankind.
So when I say there's high crime in black neighborhoods, which is true, or that Haiti is a hellhole, which is true, I'm not saying that's because of the color of the people there.
It's because of ideas and culture and corruption, a lot of which, by the way, have been sold to the poor and powerless in those places by the rich and powerful of all different colors.
Now, many of these ideas of spirituality, truth, and love have been developed and preserved through the years by white men.
And I'm grateful to white men for doing that.
And I won't waste time honoring bad ideas simply because they come from some minority or women.
But I don't think it's the whiteness of the men that gave them their ideas.
I think history moves in all kinds of mysterious ways.
And in the end, it's only the ideas that matter.
Let me show you what I mean using a little book I like to call the Bible because that's its name.
After the fall of man, God chose to re-enter the world through the Jews.
And God loved the Jews for carrying that burden, which obviously wasn't easy.
But just before Jesus showed up on the scene, John the Baptist, a Jew, came to his fellow Jews and said to them, listen, don't be so proud of being Jews because God can make Jews out of the stones on the ground.
In other words, he was saying it's not your race that makes you great, it's the truth you've been allowed to carry.
Oh, and by the way, here comes Jesus to spread that truth to all the races of the world.
We Americans, or Westerners, if you like, likewise have been granted the privilege of carrying a great truth to the world, the essentially Christian truth that individuals have dignity and equality of rights.
But God can make Westerners out of the stones on the ground.
And happily, over the last 200 or so years, those truths have been spreading to all kinds of people around the world.
Now, as always, it's an open question whether those ideas will keep spreading.
Right now, it's Islamic extremism and hateful leftism that oppose them.
So I'm going to stand on the side of those truths, whether my opponent happens to be a black man or a nasty woman or a white guy who thinks it's his skin color that makes him ever so special.
To my mind, those who speak for hatred and slavery, whether they're white supremacists or Black Lives Matter bigots, those who speak against our rights, whether it's a homosexual thug persecuting a Christian baker or an Islamic thug persecuting a gay man, and all those who try to silence debate, whether they're leftists or other leftists, all these have got the wrong ideas.
The right ideas, individual freedom, equality of rights, and love of each other and love of a loving God who is our creator and the source of every good thing, right ideas must be defended fearlessly so that we can chase the devil back to his safe space, which is hell.
Talk Directly To Us00:04:38
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hurrah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hooray, hurrah, the last show of the week.
These weeks go by so fast.
Henry Olson is here today.
Henry Olson is great.
He writes regularly for American Greatness.
He wrote a book recently called The Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism.
And I'll talk to him about some of the things in the book.
But also, he is just a great observer of electoral politics.
And his predictions have been so accurate and so close to the truth.
And he's been doing it for like he can do it a long way out.
So we're going to talk to him also about the midterm elections.
And he will explain every single thing and tell us every single person who's going to.
Not a lot of pressure, Henry, but just, no, we'll ask him how things look right now for the midterms.
And then after that, we will plunge you into the Clavenless weekend.
And one more time, I'm not going to pitch this thing forever, but please, please, it's time to go and binge listen to Another Kingdom.
Another Kingdom is available wherever you get podcasts.
It's a serial story about a guy who walks through a door and finds himself a murder suspect in a fantasy world.
It is performed by the great and talented Michael Knowles.
You know, I was pitching, I got to pitch this again to a very excellent TV, we'll call it content creator, one of the top content creators in town and people who really do stuff I like.
And he said to me, Michael Knowles, that's familiar name.
Is he a famous actor?
And I was like, are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
No, I didn't say that.
I said, oh, yeah, he's been in everything.
But we'll see.
We'll see how that works out.
But it really helps.
I've sent the book out now, the book of Another Kingdom to my literary agent.
So everything you do really helps push this thing forward.
So if you can go on binge listen, leave a good rating and a good review.
It is really, really helpful.
And then I will be back on Monday for those of you who survived the Clavenless weekend.
And on Tuesday, January 30th, the President of the United States, Donald v. Donald Trump, will speak to the nation in his second State of the Union address.
His first one was one of his best speeches.
And this time, you should be watching it here at the Daily Wire.
Last time we were watching it over my house, I remember.
And this time, we will be watching it here at the Daily Wire, and you can watch it with us.
Starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, we'll just hang out with you for the whole time leading up to, during, and after the dress.
We'll be there for every wild hand gesture, every off-teleprompter remark, and of course, the hilarious rebuttal from the Democrats.
I always feel sorry for the rebuttal guy.
He always, you know, the president stands up there and he's the Senate and the House are there.
And then the other guy comes in and he's in a cafe somewhere trying to sell his stupid ideas.
But you can catch live streams at thedailywire.com, Daily Wire, Facebook, or Daily Wire, YouTube, and spend the evening with Ben and me and Knowles.
And are we letting Knowles in?
Yeah, I guess we have to let Knowles in.
But also, the Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, the God-King of the Daily Wire.
Now, it's not easy to get Jeremy to join us.
You know, we had to sacrifice a virgin, and we're in L.A., so if you think it's easy to find a virgin, you don't know what you're talking about.
But we did sacrifice it, so the God-King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, will also be with us.
We will comment on the address and relentlessly mock all the people we're supposed to respect.
We'll also be joined by special guests.
So you want to stay tuned to find out who will be there.
Again, it's next Tuesday, January 30th at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.
Follow us on Facebook and YouTube, and you'll get notified when we go live so we can spend every unforgettable moment together.
And even the forgettable moments.
We'll spend those with you as well.
So let's wrap up before we bring on Henry Olson.
And we're going to stay on because that's the kind of guys we are.
We want you to be able to see Henry.
So we're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't subscribe.
It's all the more reason to subscribe and subscribe, support us, be part of the gang.
You can join us in all kinds of conversations in the mailbag.
You can talk directly to us when we have the conversation.
You can talk directly to us.
It's a lousy $10 a month, $100 for the year, and you get the leftist tears mug, so you have something to drink.
You know, otherwise you're going to be drinking your leftist tears out of your cupped hands and some of those precious tears will spill.
Mueller's Oath and FBI Emails00:16:11
You know, one of the things I really do believe is we can tell, we can sort of tell who the good guys are by who is spreading information and who is trying to keep information from the public.
And yesterday, I just was watching the way everybody's reacting to this FBI story.
Now, I have not made up my mind about exactly what is happening to the FBI, and I have absolutely no doubt that there are Republicans who are seizing on suspicious stuff at the FBI to try and hamper Bob Mueller, Robert Mueller, in his investigation of the make-believe Russian thing.
I mean, the make-believe Russian thing.
It now seems that Robert Mueller is investigating obstruction of justice without having proved that there's actually a crime to obstruct, which apparently is legal.
Apparently, you can accuse somebody of obstructing justice without there actually being a crime to obstruct.
But it just seems ridiculous to me at this point.
On the other hand, he does seem to be moving forward very quickly.
He's made overtures to the president himself, who I assume will be the last guy that he would do it, but who he would talk to before coming to a conclusion.
But Andy McCarthy over at National Review has been talking about this, and he's just, you know, he's a former federal prosecutor, so he has really good insights in this.
And he points out the fact that I have said something like this, but he has done it in a much more informed way.
He points out the fact that Obama is the head of the snake here.
The guy who would have been responsible, for instance, for ditching the Hillary Clinton investigation would not have been the FBI and it wouldn't have been Peter Strzok.
It would have ultimately been Obama.
And he says, you know, he's talking about the fact that in the Peter Strzok emails with his mistress, Lisa Page, they were having this adulterous affair, which I noticed everybody, nobody in the mainstream media talks about.
That was why they were sending back these text messages back and forth.
They pointed out that blandly sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch did know, in spite of what Comey had told Congress, that Lynch did know that Comey was going to clear Hillary.
And when she met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in that famous meeting, she knew that, and she was basically passing that on, that you were in the clear.
We don't know that, but that's what it looks like right now.
So all this leads back to Obama.
And here's Andy McCarthy talking about this at National Review.
He says, after the New York Times broke the story that Hillary Clinton had this secret email server, just after the New York Times broke the news about Clinton's email practices of the State Department, John Podesta, obviously a top Obama advisor and Clinton's campaign chairman, emailed Cheryl Mills, Clinton's confidant and top aide in the Obama State Department, to suggest that Clinton's emails to and from the president, Obama, should be held, not disclosed, because of executive privilege, which is really interesting in and of itself.
But at the time, the House committee investigating the Benghazi jihadist attack was pressing for production of Clinton's emails.
And as his counselors grappled with how to address his own involvement in Clinton's misconduct, Obama went on CBS and gave the following interview.
We have this cut.
I learned that Hillary Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. government for official business while she was Secretary of State.
At the same time, everybody else learned it through news reports.
Were you disappointed?
Let me just say that Hillary Clinton is and has been an outstanding public servant.
She was a great Secretary of State for me.
The policy of my administration is to encourage transparency.
And that's why my emails, the Blackberry that I carry around, all those records are available and archived.
And I'm glad that Hillary is instructed that those emails that had to do with official business need to be disclosed.
Well, you say that you have the most transparent administration ever.
You said it again just a couple of weeks ago.
True.
How does this square with that?
Well, I think that the fact that she's going to be putting them forward will allow us to make sure that people have the information they need.
So he didn't hear about this until it came out in the press.
But we know this to be a lie because under a pseudonym, he had sent almost 20 emails to Hillary Clinton on her secret server.
So right after the interview aired, now I'm reading Andrew McCarthy again at National Review, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Sherwin emailed Jennifer Palmieri and other senior campaign staffers stating, Jen, you probably have more on this, but it looks like POTUS just said he found out Hillary Clinton was using her personal email when he saw it on the news.
Sherwin's alert was forwarded to Mills shortly afterwards, and agitated Mills emailed Podesta, we need to clean this up.
Obama has emails from Clinton that do not say state gov. They don't have the government mailing order on it.
So listen, all I'm saying about this, I don't know what happened.
Obama was a master at going on TV and basically giving instructions to his underlings on TV because he went on to say, remember, she had no intent, so she wasn't doing anything criminal.
That was what Obama said on TV.
And then, of course, that was how Peter Strzok, the guy who writes these text messages, that was how he rewrote Comey's statement about Hillary Clinton, that she had no intent and therefore it wasn't criminal, which isn't legally true.
So all of this stuff is just to say, look, I don't know what happened yet.
But it does stink.
It smells bad.
And any reporter, any real news reporter would do what we saw Brett Baer do yesterday.
He goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, just about run this by me again.
What's going on?
Would send people to dig, would send people to ask questions.
Listen to the way the mainstream media, by which I mean the networks, play this.
ABC didn't cover it for three days.
CBS and NBC did cover it, but this is how they covered it.
This is cut number six.
As Mueller's investigation moves along, the campaign to undermine him is also moving full steam ahead.
Republicans are seizing on the revelation that the FBI failed to preserve many text messages during a critical five-month period during the Russia investigation.
Senator Chuck Schumer says the focus on text messages is an attempt to divert attention away from the Mueller investigation.
And as the Russia investigation gets closer to the president, he is escalating his fight with the FBI, specifically over some missing text messages between two former members of the special counsel Robert Mueller's team.
So are the missing text messages from December 2016 to May 2017 really a bombshell?
Democrats call the GOP attacks desperation.
So she said, I love that one where she says, as the investigation gets closer to the president, we don't know that.
You know, we don't know whether it's getting closer to the president in any meaningful way, except that he wants to interview him.
And then, you know, the president ups his feud with the FBI, which is also not true.
The president's been actually kind of quiet about this, though he has pointed out some of this.
And Trey Gowdy has been very fair.
Trey Gowdy has never attacked Robert Mueller, but he says he wants to know what's in this.
And you would think sheer repertorial intellectual curiosity would move these guys to want to know.
And I just want to compare that, which was essentially cover-up.
That was just running interference for the Democrats and the FBI.
That was ABC and CBS doing it.
That was CBS and NBC doing it.
ABC did the same thing after a silence of three days.
I want to compare that to Donald Trump.
And listen, Donald Trump has said dumb stuff, you know, stuff about Obama's birth certificate.
Even he says he didn't believe that at the time, but he did say it.
He said all that stuff about Ted Cruz's father.
He says he has said things that have lowered his credibility and made it seem like he doesn't care whether he's speaking the truth or not.
But he has also been incredibly open and transparent.
He will stand in front of the press any time.
And yesterday he walked into a background meeting, surprising the press, and they started peppering him with questions about whether he would talk to Robert Mueller if Robert Mueller wanted to talk to him.
So I just want to play this because it is, it is really, it's only audible.
It's only audio, I think.
But it really is hilarious.
You know, Trumpet is most hilariously trumpy as he talks about this.
Play cut one first.
Are you going to talk to Mueller?
I'm looking forward to it, actually.
Do you have a date set?
There's been no collusion whatsoever.
There's no obstruction whatsoever.
And I'm looking forward to it.
I do worry when I look at all of the things that you people don't report about with what's happening.
If you take a look at, you know, the five months worth of missing texts, that's a lot of missing texts.
And as I said yesterday, that's prime time.
So you do sort of look at that and say, what's going on?
You do look at certain texts where they talk about insurance Insurance policies or insurance where they say the kinds of things they're saying, you've got to be concerned.
But I would love to do that.
I'd like to do it as soon as possible.
So he's ready to talk.
I wouldn't talk to Robert Mueller, by the way, because anything you slip up, anything you mistake, you can be accused of perjury.
You can be accused of lying to the FBI.
You talk to him under oath.
Trump said he talked to him under oath.
If his lawyers would let him, if I was a lawyer, I wouldn't let him, because even if you slip up, you're the president.
If they're out to get you, they can make it look like perjury.
But we're going to go to Henry Olson in just one minute.
I just want to play one other thing because it is Trump, again, at his hilariously trumpiest making fun of the press because they will not, they will not point out that Hillary spoke completely without, you know, nobody took any notes, nobody swore her in, and the press says, I don't know what happened.
I wasn't there.
And Trump just makes fun of him.
This is, I believe, cut two, right?
Did you do it under oath, Mr. President?
You mean like Hillary did it under oath?
Did you do it under oath?
Oh, you said it.
You did say it.
You say a lot.
Did Hillary do it under oath?
I have no idea, but I'm not asking.
I think you have an idea.
Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait.
Do you not have an idea?
You really not have an idea?
I'll give you an idea.
She didn't do it.
But I wouldn't do it under oath.
But I would do it.
And you know she didn't do it under oath.
I would do it under oath.
If you didn't do it, if you didn't know about Hillary, then you're not a surprise.
I think you said you're going to do it under oath.
Oh, I would do it under oath, right?
Absolutely.
I don't know.
Like, I don't know what happened, but he is acting like a man with nothing to hide, and he is running rings around the press who are doing everything, because they are doing everything to hide the fact that the Obama administration, which we do know, we do know this, the Obama administration was a corrupt administration that basically ran the federal government like the Chicago city government.
Henry Olson is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank in Washington, D.C. His pre-election predictions of 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014 were praised for their remarkable accuracy.
His 2016 predictions, which was a black swan, were more actual, accurate than virtually any other major analyst or commentator.
He writes regularly for American greatness, and his latest book is the working-class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism.
Obviously, you can find it on Amazon.com.
He is one of my favorite observers of elections.
Have we got it?
There he is.
You know, I haven't got him on the screen in front of me.
There you go, but at least I can hear you.
How you doing, Henry?
It's good to see you.
Good to see you.
I'm doing great.
How about you?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you.
It's been one of the most interesting political years I can remember.
So it's been so much fun to actually get to comment on it.
So let's start with the book, again, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism.
You say that in the book that Trump has recaptured Reagan's magic, and you're not uncritical of Trump, but let's start with that.
How is that true?
How is it true that Trump has recaptured Reagan's magic?
Well, yeah, what Reagan's magic was, was talking about the average person of America and putting their hopes, their fears, their desires, their lives at the center of his politics.
He wasn't talking about helping them by helping other people, like helping entrepreneurs or job creators.
He spoke directly to them.
And that's what Trump does at his best, is that when Trump was running, he was focusing on the average person who felt that they had gotten a raw deal from both parties over the past two decades.
And he said, I'm going to bring you back.
I'm the person who understands you.
I'm the person who's going to put you at the center of my politics.
And that meant that he was the first person since Reagan to carry areas that are dominated by that sort of person, the five states in the Midwest that everybody but a couple of us were shocked that he ended up carrying because he was able to talk to them in a way that no Republican since Reagan had.
And that is a very different, the kind of Reagan mythology was that he supported the trickle-down idea that he was going to help the corporations and the corporations would help people.
But that was really imposed on him.
That was not the way he talked to people.
And he always supported the kind of safety net that keeps, you know, middle-class people from falling into the underclasses.
He always supported that, right?
Right.
No, he always supported it.
In fact, during his presidency, he expanded it in some ways.
He increased taxes in a couple of ways in order to support the existing programs, particularly his 1983 Social Security deal, which 36 years, 35 years later, is still the deal that has financed our basic retirement program.
Reagan always talked about workers.
He always talked about the average person.
He always rejected, even in his autobiography in 1989 in American Life, he rejected efforts to paint him as a supply sider.
He said that he never fully understood what it was and exactly agreed all their tenets.
And then he returned to the fact that he had been saying many things the supply siders embraced decades before they ever went to college.
And then we're talking about your book, The Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism available on Amazon.
You then say that some of Trump's policies are actually the opposite of Reagan's.
What do you mean?
Well, you know, that when Trump is talking about eliminating things like NAFTA, you know, Reagan was a free trader but a fair trader.
And Reagan actually came up with the idea that became NAFTA.
When Reagan announced his presidential campaign in 1980, he talked about creating what he called a common market between Canada, America, and Mexico.
Nobody had proposed it before, Ronald Reagan.
So when Trump focuses on tariffs and protectionism, he takes a Reagan-esque insight, which is that the economy has to work for all people, and takes it to an extreme that Reagan would never have taken it to.
Okay, okay.
On the immigration front, let's leave Reagan out of it because things change over time.
But, you know, Trump, Trump seems to be saying, as far as I can make out what Trump is saying at this point, he seems to be saying, you know, he's going to let the DREAMers stay, but he really wants high security, which is represented by this wall, an end to chain migration, an end to lotteries for diversity.
It seems to me that he is standing right where the core of the American public is standing and that basically our elites don't stand there.
Is that a fair action?
I think that's a very, yeah.
I mean, if you were to take the center of American public opinion, it would be don't give the people who stay here citizenship, but let them have legal residence.
Don't deport them, but make sure that this doesn't happen again, which is to say have real border security, have real employment security, and make sure that the people who come here want to contribute and not live off the welfare or the social safety net.
And that's what ending chain migration is about, is that rather than bringing in grandma, grandpa, and your uncle, people who may be 68 and require social support, make sure that the people who are legally allowed to come here are people who can produce for the American economy on the basis of their skills and their work set and not simply have one person's ability to come here create 10 legal rights to come here, whether or not those people do want to or can produce for the American society.
So if Trump has got that right, if he's got the people right on this, obviously you can't speak for them, but what, in your opinion, are guys like Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake and Victor, what are they talking about?
Win House Gain Support00:08:05
Why are they taking this position?
Well, I think it's different for different people.
The ideological libertarian position, which is where Jeff Flake has always been, is basically open borders, is one that says that citizenship doesn't matter.
We shouldn't look at somebody coming from our country any differently than somebody who's already there.
So for Jeff Flake, he's just acting as an ideologue.
For the Democratic Party, you have the political desire to have open borders, which is say they believe it's in their political advantage to continue to have less skilled migration come into the country and to have more and more people who are not necessarily immediately acclimatized to the American point of view.
So you have different reasons that coalesce around a similar policy perspective.
Okay.
Before we talk about the midterms, I just want to get your assessment of Trump's first year.
I mean, I feel there seems to be this division between Trump, the person, and the fact of his accomplishments, which seem to be conservative accomplishments that any normal conservative could appreciate, and there seem to be a lot of them.
How do you feel the first year is gone for now?
I think the first year economically has been pretty much what you would expect from the intersection between a cruz and a Jeb Bush administration.
It's been definitely right of center.
It's been definitely orthodox Republican.
Most of the stuff that scared people was not done on the foreign policy.
Again, despite a style of diplomacy, I doubt that Cruz would have called Kim Jong-il or Kim Jong-un a rocket man.
But effectively, what he's doing is being both tough but willing to negotiate.
And we're still in NATO.
We're still upholding our commitments.
So even on foreign policy, it hasn't been that much different.
It's been strangely conventional.
Now, the only thing that has been unconventional is this form of communication, certainly the Twitter stuff.
Do you think electorally, is that hurting him or helping him?
It's largely been hurting him.
You think so?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think the use of Twitter is a bad thing.
And I don't think going after the media, as long as it's done in the way that he, in the clips that you just shared, is.
But what he's been doing is fighting battles he didn't need to fight and picking on people that are really either beneath the dignity of the president or doing it in a way that's beneath the dignity of the president.
And that's been hurting him.
Now, if he were to go through a year where he didn't comment on Mika Brzezinski's alleged facelift or taking issue with a basketball player's father for not being grateful enough, you might very well see people focus more on the accomplishments and on the personality.
But so far, I think Twitter is the major reason why he's at a 40% approval rating as opposed to a 45 or a 48 percent approval rating.
Wow, wow.
You know, Dan Henninger wrote a column, I think it was last week, at the Wall Street Journal, where he said that the resistance, the strategy of the resistance, now comes clear as the midterms hove into sight, basically.
And the strategy is make him so personally hateful that people will ignore his accomplishments and vote against him for that reason.
In your opinion, looking forward, is that working right now?
It is working right now.
That if I were going to look at the midterm right now, I would say it's going to be a very good year for the Democrats.
That the only question is the degree of gain.
I'd say it's 50-50 if they win the House.
But even if they don't, it would be such a narrow majority for the Republicans that it would be difficult to pass anything meaningful.
They would lose, Republicans would lose a number of the governorships in blue or purple states that they hold right now.
And the historic opportunity to gain five, six, seven Senate seats, which is what is presented with a highly favorable map, would be frittered away so that maybe they'd gain a seat or two.
But gaining a seat or two when you're fighting on nine Democrat-held states that Donald Trump won would be considered a massive defeat.
Is there still time to change that?
There is.
But I think it mainly has to come from the president, that it's going to be extremely difficult for Republicans in Congress to run apart from the president, in part because the president dominates the agenda.
And secondly, because of our extreme partisanship that a lot of Democrats tried to run away from Obama, but even Democrats who opposed Obamacare got swept up in the 2010 tide because it didn't matter that they had voted no.
It was the party they wanted to punish.
If Donald Trump can focus less on division and more on things that bring people together and he can communicate in a more presidential manner, if he can get his approval rating up into the mid-40s as opposed to 39, 40 percent, well, then I think it could be actually a fairly decent midterm.
You know, single-digit losses in the House, four or five Senate seat gain, holding your own in governorships.
That would be considered a victory because presidents almost always do poorly in their first midterm.
The only question is the degree.
If it's just a historic mild loss, that would be a massive win for the president.
So that's really, you're essentially confirming what some never-Trumpers or whatever you want to call them, some of the conservative anti-Trumpers have said that the president is maybe doing good things now, but long-term he is hurting himself simply by being himself.
Is that fair?
Well, there's elements of himself that help him a lot.
That if the president, you know, the sort of things that you just played, his banter with the press, does not annoy people.
It's the stuff where he's unduly personal, where he's unduly picking on people who don't deserve to be picked on and doing it in ways that are, frankly, crude.
And if the president can talk frankly and honestly like a normal person and show anger when it's appropriate, but not be mean and vindictive, that's a different person.
And that I think would work in his favor.
But that's not what we saw in 2017.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If the Democrats win the House, do you think they'll actually go for impeachment?
Yeah, I do.
Do you think that?
By go for impeachment, I think that articles will be filed and they will begin to have hearings because it will satisfy their base and it's in their narrow political interest to continue to do it.
Whether they will pass those articles out is another matter.
But I do think that they will file articles and Nancy Pelosi will give authorization to have impeachment hearings because it keeps the focus on the personality of the president, which is what they want to do going into 2020.
One of the things that Reagan said, I remember after I can't remember where it was, one of the elections when the Democrats won, he said, don't worry because they can't help but govern from the left and they'll destroy themselves.
Do you think that I know this is a long-term question and I'm only asking you to speculate and I will not hold you to it.
But do you think that a win of the House for the Democrats may actually keep Trump in power for another term?
If he's not going to be able to do that.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Look, the reason Donald Trump is in office is because about 20% of Americans didn't like either he or Hillary Clinton.
And they waited till the end, but they decided that they would rather have Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton.
And the $64,000 question for Democrats is, was that because of Hillary's personality or is that because of Hillary's policies?
That's essentially the question that Republicans have had to face.
Their answer to Mitt Romney was, it was the man, not the message.
And then everyone who ran on the Romney message lost to Donald Trump in the primaries because guess what?
It was the message, not the person.
And I think the same thing, I think the same thing is true with the Democrats, is that if they nominated somebody else who was basically on the Clinton platform, but not Hillary Clinton, that they would find exactly the same thing happen to them as happened to the Republicans after 2012.
Compare Quotes Easily00:02:01
Wow.
I got to say, Henry, every time I talk to you about this, every time I read your stuff at American Greatness or a National Review, it really clarifies the entire field because there's so much emotion going on and not enough observation.
And you really do a great job.
Henry Olson, the author of The Working Class Republic and Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism.
You can find it on Amazon.com.
Henry, thanks for coming.
I hope you come back nearer the day.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for having me on again, Andrew.
All right, I'll see you.
Really interesting.
Just a great, great political observer.
There aren't enough of them.
Yes, we have to talk about policy genius.
We're obviously not dealing with a genius, but I'm talking about policy genius.
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Look at you.
I mean, it's depressing.
But you can still catch up by using policy genius because you've got to have insurance.
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The people who depend on you depend on that.
The people, it may be your kids, it may be your spouse, it may be your parents who are getting older and eventually you're going to need taking care of a life insurance policy, some kind of policy protects them if anything happens to you.
And, you know, this is a good way to be responsible, you know, with money.
I mean, something like 30% of people make this resolution every year that they're going to be more responsible with money, and this is one of the ways to do it.
And Policy Genius is just an easy way to compare and buy life insurance online.
They let you compare quotes right there.
They don't push them on you.
They don't give you any sales talk, but they just let you compare the quotes.
And it takes about five minutes.
I mean, that's kind of amazing.
You know, you can get life insurance, figure out which kind of life insurance to get in five minutes online without people jumping down your throat and trying to sell you stuff.
It really is a good deal.
And they don't just ensure life, they ensure everything in it.
You can compare health insurance, disability insurance, pet insurance, renter's insurance.
Is that the pets insuring you?
Fury Over Molesting Judges00:04:25
I mean, it seems to somebody that would be more wise.
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I have to speak briefly before we get to stuff I like.
I have to speak briefly about this Larry Nasser trial.
A really interesting moment yesterday.
This guy, Larry Nasser, was the doctor for the, a former doctor for the American gymnastics team.
And he, over years, I mean, it's such an awful story that I even hate to talk about it, but he was one of these guys who was expert in winning people's trust.
And he had this trust as a doctor.
He's treating these, what, guy at my age, these are essentially little girls.
These are teenagers, teenage girls who have worked so hard to get to the Olympics.
They're dedicated athletes.
They're representing America.
Their girls, like I said, like 13 years old, who have worked so hard.
And he is the athletic doctor for the U.S. Olympic team.
And under the guise of helping them, he is molesting them.
And he's doing this for years and years.
And there's hundreds of them.
And, you know, it is basically, you know, it's monstrous.
It's monstrous.
You don't even want to go for all the words because they're meaningless against the level of evil.
So he basically cut a deal where he pled guilty and all the women stood up.
Now they're women.
They stood up and told their stories so they had a chance to voice what had happened to them and tell what had happened to them.
And at the end of this, Judge Rosemarie Akalina, I believe it's pronounced.
Do you know Rob?
Is that the right pronounced?
Akalina.
She sentenced him to 40, 40 to 175 years in prison.
And this clown, Nasser, gives her a document, and she made a big show of it.
That's what I'm getting at.
She made a big show of it.
Nasser gave her a document where basically he kind of whined and said, well, I pled guilty because I had to.
And, you know, there's, what was it, Hell Hath No Fury?
That's what women as a woman scorned.
I mean, this is what he's talking about, these little girls that he molested.
Hell Hath No Fury.
And so the judge took this document and threw it away and then read this guy, the Riot Act.
And it's caused a controversy.
Here is a kind of a little series of clips where she basically says, well, let her say it.
I am a judge who believes in life and rehabilitation when rehabilitation is possible.
I have many defendants come back here and show me the great things they've done in their lives after probation, after parole.
I don't find that's possible with you.
Your decision to assault was precise, calculated, manipulative, devious, despicable.
I don't have ad words because your survivors have said all of that.
I don't want to repeat it.
Sir, I'm giving you 175 years, which is 2,100 months.
I just signed your death warrant.
I need everyone to be quiet.
I self-contempt powers.
I told you I'm not nice.
So, you know, you couldn't, it's kind of hard to hear.
It's not the greatest audio, but she was basically saying, I'm signing your death warrant.
You're irredeemable.
You cannot be redeemed.
And, you know, almost making, she took the paper that he sent her and just threw it away.
And so the left, of course, went into paroxysms of delight at this, about the female judge standing up for the females.
And it was kind of like part of this Me Too stuff.
It was just like too much of a, it was too good to resist.
And so the right, in kind of reactionary mode, came out and said that she had, even though, of course, they agreed with the fact that the guy should be put away for life, he is evil, saying that, but she had disgraced herself by basically playing to the cameras and saying he was irredeemable, no one's irredeemable, and gleefully saying, I have signed your death sentence.
And the right was attacking.
Art And Ideas Collapsed00:08:49
And I have to say that on this one, I've got to go with the left more than that.
There is a long, long tradition of judges, after the trial is done, after everything has been handled in the proper way, ripping into evildoers and letting them know what they think and letting them know why they're being sent away.
And I think she was right in the mainstream of that judicial tradition.
She had every right.
You might have thought you went too far.
Maybe she was playing to the cameras, very possible.
But with all the things we have to think about, the idea that this monster got slapped by a judge, it's like, I'm not even going to lose a minute's sleep over that.
And I think the right maybe overreacted to the left's glee.
I'm not saying she's a movie star.
I'm not saying, oh, it's the greatest judge ever.
I'm just saying, judges rip these guys because they're evil.
They're evil.
And they're speaking for our society.
And they're letting the society know that, no, we do not accept this.
Goodbye.
So long.
Nice to know you're out of here.
And I was totally on her side in this one.
Stuff I like.
Usually with stuff I like, I like to talk about cultural things, books, novels, TV shows, movies, and the like, and music.
But I read this book that I finished.
My son-in-law gave me this for Christmas, and I read it.
I finished it over the weekend.
It's called The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam, by Douglas Murray.
Now, I think, Rob, will we have a Douglas on?
Is he coming on?
He's got a going to.
We're not sure.
We haven't scheduled him yet.
Okay, he's going to come on next month probably.
And so we'll get to talk to him about it.
But I highly, highly recommend this book.
It is a brave book.
Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator, a British conservative journal.
He writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Sunday Times and the Wall Street Journal.
He's an experienced debater and has spoken at the British and European parliaments and at the White House.
This book is about, obviously, immigration identity in Islam.
It's about a lot of the things I've been talking about this week, some of them were just informed by the ideas in this book and the way he talks.
He talks without hatred, and yet he talks with blunt, brutal honesty about this policy since World War II of allowing Muslims to come sweeping into Europe even though the public didn't want it, even though the public consistently said it didn't want it to happen.
And he talks, the first half of the book, I would say, roughly, it's not easy reading, it's factual, it's just telling the history, and I think it's worth reading that part to get through it.
The second part, where he starts to talk about the sense in Europe that maybe the European idea, the Western idea is over, is so moving and so intense and so well observed and honestly talked about.
He talks a little bit, I think on one of our stuff I like, I talked about Michelle Huilebeck and his submission, which is a wonderful, wonderful novel, which I highly recommend, which talks about a lot of the same things and dramatizes a lot of the same things.
But there's one passage in here I want to talk about where he talks about the fact, he talks, as a lot of intellectuals are talking about, and you've heard me talk about this from a slightly different perspective, a lot of intellectuals are talking about the death of Christianity, the loss of Christianity has weakened the West, and yet, and yet intellectuals still can't believe.
And he talks about how he says it was in the 19th century.
It actually was, well, I guess it was at the very beginning of the 19th century when the Romantics started to believe that, yes, God might not be there anymore, but art can replace prophecy.
And they called it the transition from the mirror to the lamp.
Shakespeare said that art should hold the mirror up to nature, but now the new Romantic artist said, we have a lamp inside us, and we're kind of talking to you and prophesying to you.
And that goes back to Plato, really, who said that artists are kind of dumb.
You know, we shouldn't listen to artists when they give their Oscar speech.
But when they're informed by the muse, they do create a truth through their art.
And that was what Plato said about artists.
He didn't like artists very much because he said, because they say truthful things when informed by their muse, we tend to trust them to say other things.
But when they're talking without their muse, when they're giving their Oscar speech, they're idiots.
And I think that that was part of it.
But he did believe that they were informed by a muse.
The Romantics kind of came back to that idea that they weren't holding a mirror up to nature.
They were shining a lamp on it and giving us new truths.
And that was going to replace the truths of religious revelation and the Bible.
And it didn't work.
It collapsed, especially, I think, we could say it collapsed with the Holocaust and with the Nazis, who had come from one of the great cultures that believed in this and led the way.
Germany had led the way in a lot of Romantic thought, and Wagner believed in this, and it all came crashing down.
And he says, perhaps, I'm reading now from Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe.
He says, perhaps it was the realization that art had failed in this way that persuaded so many contemporary artists to stop aiming to connect to any enduring truths and to abandon any attempt to pursue beauty or truth and instead to simply say to the public, I am down in the mud with you.
Certainly there was a point in 20th century Europe when, I folded this over second time, when the aim of the artist and the expectation of the public changed.
It was evident in the way in which the public approach to art moved from admiration to disdain.
Technical ambition significantly diminished and often disappeared altogether.
And he tells this one story that just moved me so much.
He was in an art museum.
Let me see if I can find this.
Once he says, while wandering somewhat aimlessly and underwhelmed through an art gallery, I heard the strains of Spem in Allium, which is by the famous medieval composer Thomas Talis.
He was a tutor-eric composer.
He heard the strains of Spem in Allium and made my way towards the sound.
Suddenly, I realized another reason why the earlier galleries had been so depopulated.
All the other modern art galleries are depopulated.
Everyone had migrated toward this sound installation by Janet Cardiff.
It consisted of 40 speakers arranged in an oval, and each speaker relayed the voice of a singer in the choir.
And in the center, people stood and they were mesmerized.
The couples held hands, and one pair sat embraced.
It was deeply moving, though also striking, that people thought the achievement was Janet Cardiff's, the woman who had set up the speakers, rather than Thomas Talis's.
And he mentions, I mean, it's such a touching idea that this medieval composer spoke to these people, but what they thought was important was the arrangement of the speakers.
And Thomas Talis also, of course, shows up as Douglas Murray talks about this.
He shows up in 50 Shades of Gray.
He's mentioned in these books, which are all about, you know, whipping each other and basically sadomasochism.
And it's this degradation of this thing.
The art that contained these ideas, just like the people who contained these ideas, was not great because of the artist.
It was great because of the ideas, the thoughts, the vision that it contained and the experience of that vision that has been what made Western art so brilliant, so incredibly brilliant from 1500 to 1914 about.
And that really was, it really was a high point of human artistic creation.
It was just unbelievable.
So we are going to end with Thomas Talis with his Magnificat, and you can hear a little bit of that.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
The Clavenless Weekend begins.
Stave it off by binge listening to Another Kingdom, performed by Michael Knowles.
And then if you survive the rest of it, we'll be here on Monday.
Here is Thomas Tallis and the Magnificat.
Andrew Klavan
Productions Behind The Scenes00:00:26
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 their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.