Ep. 454 dissects Trump’s SOTU as a calculated provocation—highlighting Democrats’ refusal to applaud veterans, God, or tax cuts—to expose their hostility toward American values, with 75% of viewers praising his emotional storytelling over dry Republican policy. The episode frames Trump’s immigration compromise (1.8M citizenship offers) as a tactical move to split moderates from his base while dismissing media claims his economy mirrors Obama’s, citing wage and job growth. It pivots to faith, arguing desires aligned with God reveal purpose, then contrasts Iranian women defying hijab mandates with American feminists over trivial grievances, questioning global solidarity. The segment ends by positioning Trump’s polarizing style as a double-edged sword in upcoming elections. [Automatically generated summary]
So we watched the State of the Union last night, obviously, and there's just no question that Donald Trump has got a genius for politics.
I'm not saying he is a genius, but he has got a genius to politics for politics.
Proof, if we needed any proof, I mean, he beat all those great Republican candidates.
He then beat Hillary Clinton.
You can say, well, she was a terrible candidate, but he chose his moment.
He chose his spot when he was going to run for president, and he picked the time when she was running, and he went after her.
Last night, and the other thing that I keep saying about Trump is that he learns stuff.
You know, he really does.
He acquires, he comes into a place, he comes into a situation, and he learns how to do it.
And he's gotten better at doing what he does.
Yesterday, the State of the Union was like, it was like a mousetrap.
It was a brilliantly constructed piece of work, obviously, by Stephen Miller and his other speechwriters, but also, obviously, by Trump, because he knew what the Democrats were going to do.
He's not fooled.
He's been watching them.
He knew how they were going to react.
And so he was able to give a speech about unity while constructing the speech to guarantee that Democrats would make themselves look like absolute crap.
I mean, they looked awful.
You know, there was an article in the Daily Caller by a lady named Amber Affee.
She wrote a piece, Five Things the Democrats Refused to Clap For.
Let me list them.
The national anthem.
I mean, Trump told a story about a little boy who went around putting flags on the graves of dead soldiers.
And Trump said, and that's why we should stand for the national anthem.
The Dems Sat on Their Hands.
Like good, good thinking Democrats.
Great look for you sitting on your hands for the national anthem.
Second, God.
Trump said our motto isn't God We Trust.
Democrats, nothing.
Better than the Democratic National Convention when they booed God.
That was bad.
But this, it's just embarrassing.
Tax cuts, they don't like tax cuts.
We've heard from Nancy Pelosi and her dentures were almost falling out as she was grumbling and muttering to herself.
She doesn't like people having their own money.
And my personal favorite was when Trump talked about record low black unemployment and the black congressional black caucus sat on their hands because they don't like Trump.
It's like, but you know, never mind if we have the dignity of a job, we don't like you, Mr. Trump.
I mean, that's basically where they're coming from.
And people see it.
People see it and they get it.
And Veterans was another one.
He talked about giving veterans choice in their health care system.
Democrats sitting on their hands again.
I mean, it was perfectly.
He maneuvered them into position.
And I believe that there was a method to his madness.
There was a reason he was doing it.
I have to add to the list in the Daily Caller, my favorite moment, one of my favorite moments, was when Louis Guiderz, the snarling, bitter, anti-American, pro-open borders congressman, heard them chanting USA and rushed out of the room.
Just a quick picture of that.
Run, Luis, run, run for your life.
USA is coming after you.
Run away.
You know, every now and then, with all the drama and hysteria of the press and all the drama of politics, it's good to pause and remember for a moment just how well things are going for conservatives and for America and for the conservative vision of America, which is the founder's vision of America.
It's good to remember just how entertaining Trump is.
And the most important thing of all, it's good to remember how much fun I personally am having during this presidency.
Because isn't that what we're all here for to make me have fun?
Absolutely.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is ticky boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-kunky-keeg.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, it's mailbag day.
We got some great questions in the mailbag, and I will answer them all.
And I will answer as many as I can, but all the answers will be correct because they're guaranteed 100% correct.
It will change your life some days for the better.
Some days, you know, you're on your own.
But I had a lot of fun last night.
That show was really fun.
I mean, it was great to sit around and talk to the guys.
Before the show, I was thinking, I said to Jess, our beloved makeup lady, and if I may call you my friend as well, we were sitting and talking in the chair, and I said, you know, State of the Union, not the most exciting moment in the political year.
I don't know if we're going to have anything to talk about.
And she said, are you kidding me?
You guys, you're like a family.
You're constantly talking, arguing, squabbling about everything.
And you were right.
It was actually, that was exactly the way it was.
I always love talking to the guys.
I love arguing with them.
I love hearing their point of view.
There's never, not Knowles, but you know what I mean.
And he brings the cigars, so we have to let him in.
And I just really had a good time.
And then when Dennis showed up, Prager showed up, it was kind of like, it was almost, you know, I've always been a little starstruck with the great conservatives.
I was at a party in New York once and I saw some famous conservative and I said to a pal of mine, wow, there's so-and-so.
And he said, you've met Clint Eastwood.
And I said, yeah, but he's not a conservative intellectual.
When Dennis walked in, I was like, there's Dennis Prager, you know.
So it was really, really fun.
I had a great time.
And I hope we do more of that because I just like to talk to the guys.
It's really fun.
You know, tripping.com is a great service.
And I know it's a great service because they took out ads on my podcast, Another Kingdom.
And so I got very familiar with what they do.
I love to travel.
I travel around.
Sometimes I'll stay at a hotel, but I have learned over the years, especially when you're traveling with your family, that a hotel takes you out of the place you're in because all hotels are cookie-cutter.
They don't always have a lot of room if you're traveling with more than two people.
If you're traveling with more than a couple, you know, you feel like people are on top of each other.
You can rent a place that will get you into the atmosphere of the place you're in.
So if you go to France and you're in the countryside, you can have a cottage there.
You can rent, you know, somebody's rental property will take you right there, a town, a city, what's the word I'm looking for?
A townhouse in a city or a cottage out in the woods or a beach house.
And you can spend less time planning for this and more time relaxing with tripping.com because it's the world's number one site for vacation rentals.
It's trusted by millions of travelers.
It's featured by the New York Times, Travel and Leisure, Forbes, and Another Kingdom.
So you know it's good because it's in another kingdom.
And with Tripping.com, if you're traveling to another kingdom, OneSearch lets you filter, compare, and sort over 10 million available properties on trusted sites like VRBO, TripAdvisor, booking.com, and more.
So don't wonder if you're getting the best deal.
You know, the thing is, with tripping.com, you're guaranteed you'll save an average of 18% per night by booking your vacation with tripping.com.
So don't forget, that's an average.
You'll save an average of 18% per night.
So don't forget, if you want to save time and money while booking the perfect vacation rental for your next trip, head to tripping.com slash clavin right away.
Everybody's Immigration Stories00:15:11
And I know what you're saying.
You know, you're saying, sure, do I want to go to Paris?
Do I want to go to Rome?
Do I want to go to the woods?
And how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So it's tripping.com slash Clavin, tripping.com slash Clavin.
Let them know we sent you.
That helps our show, and it will also help you find a good place to go on vacation.
So one of the reasons I approve of the State of the Union, because Ben and Jeremy, the God King of the Delaware, was saying on the show that they don't like it.
It's too monarchical.
And I understand, and back in the day, maybe when George Washington would just send a letter to Congress, that made sense.
But I think today there is too huge a structure of media between us and the president.
And the state of the union is a time when he gets to come out and put his best foot forward and the people can see him directly.
And you know who knows that?
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump knows that he is going to be, you know, you forget, because we are so involved in politics, we're so wrapped up in it, we forget most people look at the headlines, they glance at CNN when they're in the airport or something like that.
They glance at the paper, maybe they'll look at the op-ed if they're really dedicated very quickly.
And they, you know, if you think that people know about this FISA memo, they don't know about it.
The Times, New York Times, you could comb through that paper forever.
I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but you really could not find it.
They don't know when all the networks are telling them that Donald Trump fired Andrew McCabe.
They don't know he didn't do it.
They don't know that he was probably as much taken by surprise.
He didn't like the guy.
He was tweeting against him, but he didn't fire him.
And, you know, and they don't know.
And this is the time when Donald Trump can stand up there and speak for himself.
And as I said in the opening, this speech was not just a speech.
It was a political weapon because the Democrats are so mired in resistance, they end up hating everything that's good in life.
All Donald Trump has to do is say black, they say white.
He says white, they say black.
He says America, they say no, and he's got them.
They are trapped.
So he just made them look terrible.
And if you don't think so, just listen, let's compare for a minute Donald Trump's, that whole attitude of Trump's speech, which was this optimistic, we're doing great.
I mean, he had it.
Look, everybody, every president brags in the state of the union.
Trump is a braggart to begin with.
He's had a great year on top of that.
So when he was bragging, it had a lot of resonance.
So just listen to the optimism that he was putting forward.
This is cut number one.
This, in fact, is our new American moment.
There has never been a better time to start living the American dream.
So to every citizen watching at home tonight, no matter where you've been or where you've come from, this is your time.
If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything.
You can be anything.
And together, we can achieve absolutely anything.
Okay, so that's Trump.
We can do anything.
We can be anything.
We can achieve anything.
We're having a great American moment.
Here's the Democrats' response.
And this is their vision of the future.
A white privileged male named Kennedy from a family of sexual abusers.
Listen to the tone of his speech.
This is cut number seven.
We see an economy that makes stocks soar, investor portfolios bulge and corporate profits climb, but fails to give workers their fair share of the reward.
A government that struggles to keep itself open.
Russia, knee-deep in our democracy, an all-out war on environmental protection.
A Justice Department rolling back civil rights by the day.
Hatred and supremacy proudly marching in our streets.
Bullets tearing through our classrooms.
Concerts and congregations.
Targeting our safest, sacred places.
And this nagging, sinking feeling, no matter your political beliefs, that this is not right.
This is not who we are.
And he's standing in front of Teddy's car.
You can see the broken car in the background.
It's like, I hope they finally got the body out of there.
But is that your experience in America?
Here's the thing.
They keep saying, oh, well, you know, Trump's economy is no better than Obama's economy.
New York Times was saying this this morning.
Trump said, the wages are not right.
Listen, you can jigger the numbers any way you want, but you can't jigger the dinner table.
You can't jigger the dignity that comes with a job.
You can't jigger the payments on your house.
People know that things are going better now than they were going during Obama's economy.
If you remember, I remember when Trump was running for president and they said, oh, the unemployment is at whatever it was, 7%.
And he looked out and he said, if unemployment were at 7%, this room would not be filled.
I mean, this is not the experience that people are having, and they're not having that depressing experience that that guy was talking about.
So, all right, what's the point of all this?
Trump says jobs for blacks, blacks sit on their hands.
Trump says there's a little boy who puts flags on heroes' graves.
Nothing.
He says, veterans, God.
Here's Mika Brzezinski's reaction to the fact defending the Democrats, not applauding for the things that we hold most dear.
Here she is.
Why can't people give him credit for what has happened?
Why can't they give him credit for a speech that went that people had a chance to see?
If you're a Democrat, there's something there for you.
If you're a Republican, there's something there for you.
That it had specifics.
I think because he's literally screwed everybody in that room over a few times too many.
He's been vulgar.
He's been racist.
He has accused one of the senators in that room of giving sexual favors for money.
He's insulted the wife of a Republican senator in that room in the worst way possible.
What about the speech?
Your job, what you do, Frank, is you read rooms.
You tell me that that room is supposed to respond like this to the great dictator?
Yeah, I don't, that's not what I saw.
I didn't see any great dictator.
I mean, you can tell us that he's an authoritarian.
How is he an authoritarian?
What has he done?
Name one thing that Trump has done that has made the executive branch stronger.
He keeps making it weaker.
He keeps handing over things to Congress.
He keeps dialing back the government.
So there's no great dictator.
You applaud for the flag.
You applaud when things are going well, when people get tax cuts, when people get jobs, you applaud.
And if you don't applaud, so what was the point?
The point is immigration.
He's now got this deal, and he gives them, he puts the deal on the table in front of the camera.
He says, I am going to give 1.8 million illegals a path for citizenship.
This drives his base nuts.
His base doesn't want this.
Ann Coulter is yelling, you know, this is a terrible, terrible thing, okay?
But everybody else who's not on that far side on immigration, everybody else is thinking, wow, that's a pretty good offer.
And Trump then says, yeah, three more things I want.
Border security, because this is what they keep doing.
They keep giving amnesty to people saying, yeah, down the line, we'll do border security.
But they never do it.
So he says, yeah, for this, I want a wall.
I want no catch and release.
I want to end the visa lottery program.
That's number three.
You know, you can't give out random green cards for diversity purposes.
And I want to end chain migration where you can bring in your family because that's absurd.
Once one guy comes in, everybody comes in.
They say, well, he can't all come in that year.
That's not the point.
We all know what this is about.
And so now people are thinking, hey, that was actually a compromise.
He just offered a compromise to people who won't clap for the flag, to people who won't clap for God, to people who won't clap for veterans.
And when they turn this down, and they will, and he knows they will, he just goes to the people and says, hey, you know, what do you want me to do now?
I offered them almost 2 million amnesties.
And my base is screaming at me.
What am I supposed to do?
We've all seen now that they're intransigent.
I mean, Joy Reed at MSNBC said it best.
She sent out a tweet.
She said, church, family, police, military, the national anthem.
Trump is trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s era nationalism.
The goal of the speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for.
So they don't like the church, they don't like family, they don't like police, they don't like military, they don't like the national anthem, and they don't like an immigration compromise.
I mean, it was masterful manipulation.
Speaking of which, give your wife flowers on Valentine's Day.
And don't tell me, oh, you want to give your husband flowers.
Give your wife, give your girlfriend flowers on Valentine's Day.
They like it.
I don't know why.
Who knows what women are thinking?
But if you want to do this, you want to go to 1-800Flowers.
First of all, you can do it at the last minute when you finally remember, oh yeah, it's Valentine's Day.
Or you can set it up in advance.
And at 1-800Flowers.com, right now, when you order early, you can get 12 multicolored roses for only $19.99.
Or you can double it to 24 multicolored roses, which really is nice.
That's a big bouquet, and it's only 10 bucks more.
This is an unbelievable offer from 1-800Flowers at 1-800Flowers.com.
You get 12 multicolored roses for $19.99 or twice that many.
I can't tell how much that is.
I made it in English, but it's only $10 more.
So it's only $29.99 for twice as many.
Roses from 1-800 Flowers are picked at their peak and shipped overnight to ensure their freshman, freshness, and her delight.
Call to order a dozen multicolored roses for $19.99 or upgrade to 24 multicolored roses for only $10 more.
Go to 1-800Flowers.com, click the radio icon, and enter the code.
It's Clavin.
You know, why don't they give a simple code that you know how to spell?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease.
There's no ease in Clavin, let me tell you.
When I was a boy, I walked naked to school in the ice storms.
It's 1-800 flowers until I was arrested.
I don't know what that was about.
1-800Flowers.com, code Clavin, a good deal for Valentine's Day, not just for you, but for the lady in your life.
So he's caught out the Democrats.
And of course, when you catch out the Democrats, you catch out our friends in the media because they're the same people, right?
That's just the communications branch of the party, the networks and all the rest and CNN.
The speech got a 75% positive response from actual human beings.
75% looked at Donald Trump, who everybody's supposed to hate.
He always ratings are so low.
They loved the speech.
75%.
Here is a montage that we at the Daily Wire, for your delight, put together that is a sampling of press reaction.
He was selling sweet-tasting candy with poison in it.
His words will float up like smoke from a fire and dissipate.
In 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours from now, we'll see the typical recklessness, the looseness, the tweet out of left field that will extinguish this moment.
This guy doesn't look happy, doesn't he?
It's him reading off a teleprompter.
There are some things he says that sound like them.
Totally.
You know, and I'll throw in a beautiful and an extra totally.
But you can tell he's reading it.
He doesn't own it.
I thought it revealed Donald Trump's deep and almost sort of sad obsession with being light.
Blue blood moon, I think, is what's rising.
The last time it was visible in the United States was in the 1860s.
And I think we are as divided now as we were then.
No mention of Russia, given what's going on the last couple of days in the streets.
No mention of Turkey, no mention of the Philippines.
This selective principle doesn't wash.
No mention of Europe, no mention of climate change.
Here we have a president in 2018 advertising the coal industry and not talking about the future.
I mean, how that is appealing to anybody.
More than anything, it was a speech delivered almost from an alternate reality, a fifth dimension.
I think his rhetoric last night set things back, did not advance the ball forward.
Because while on immigration, while the tone was an attempt at bipartisanship, the way he sold immigration really offended a lot of Democrats.
So 75% of the people think the speech was great and you feel that way.
Should you hire some people who maybe reflect the people that you're talking to?
The reason they don't do that is because they don't feel that they're reporting the news.
They feel that they are telling you how to think.
They're explaining to you from their high perch of wisdom that how, what is the right and proper thing to think.
And the problem they have now is that Trump is a communicator.
He is one of them, essentially, and he knows how to do this stuff.
You know, the stories that he told were amazing.
I mean, some of the stories, some of the stories, I mean, Dennis Prager was saying that he actually choked up.
And of course, the one that got everybody was, I don't know how to pronounce it, Ji-Seung-ho, who, I mean, this story, if I had written it, if I had written it, people would say, you know, dial that back a little bit, right?
He's a North Korean guy.
He's trying to steal coal from a railroad car to barter for food because he's in North Korea and he passes out on the train tracks, exhausted from hunger, and a train takes his leg off, right?
And he has multiple amputations without any morphine.
He's going through this hell.
And his brother and sisters are giving him food and they're eating dirt.
I mean, it's this incredible story.
He's tortured.
He's tortured by the North Korean authorities because he went to China and they tortured him because they wanted to know if he had met any Christians.
And a great line, probably from Stephen Miller, Trump says he had met Christians and he resolved to be free.
I mean, that is a beautiful, beautiful line.
He traveled thousands of miles.
I've heard these stories of guys who do this on his crutches, and now he has new legs and he stands up.
And do we have, is this just a picture we have?
Yeah, it's just a photo of him holding up his crutches in defiance and victory.
I mean, this is the way Democrats talk.
This is not the way Republicans talk.
Paul Ryan, God love him, he is the way Republicans talk with a pointer and a graph, and he sits there and explains the facts.
You know, Ben, again, he says, facts don't care about your feelings, and he's right.
But in a democracy, feelings are facts because they guide, they motivate people to do things.
And Trump gets it.
He's not pointing at things.
He's saying, you want to know what North Korea looks like?
Looks like that guy.
Because guess what?
Nobody, nobody ever crawled to get to North Korea from South Korea.
Nobody's ever tried to escape from South Korea to North Korea and gone through this stuff.
And it tells you who Kim Jong-un is.
You know, George Soros is telling us that Trump and Kim Jong-un are the same.
Nobody's crawling out of America, not even Lena Dunham, not even like Hollywood people.
You don't see, you know, they're showing up in Hollywood in their black dresses, but they ain't trying to get out of America.
They're trying to stay because things are going well.
I mean, this is the thing.
You know, when I lived in England, I remember I've told Rob the story, but I don't think I've said it on the air.
Beautiful Days in America00:03:15
I was standing on a street corner and it was a beautiful day.
And you don't get a lot of beautiful days in England.
I mean, it really rained something like 60, 70% of the time.
And it was just gorgeous.
And I turned to the guy next to me, who was just a, he was kind of an old-fashioned Englishman with the umbrella and the suit and everything.
And I said, lovely day.
And he said, it won't last.
And I said, it's the weather.
It's not supposed to last.
The weather doesn't last.
Well, the same thing is true in politics.
This is tremendous fun.
This is Trump at his trumpiest.
This is conservatism winning.
This is the economy taking off.
This is people becoming more free.
Don't forget to have it.
It doesn't last.
Politics is like the weather.
Things change.
Things will get worse.
Things will get better.
This is a good day.
This is a good time.
Don't forget while you're screaming at the Democrats, scream at the Democrats because they deserve it.
But don't forget while you're screaming at the liberals, have a good time.
Remember to enjoy it.
This is really a period of victory for us, and it's great.
And you may say, yes, but why do you look so terrific?
And it's because I work out constantly.
I work out all the time because when you're my age, if you don't work out, it's like the last scene in a Dracula movie.
You just crumble to dust.
There's just not that much standing between you and the end.
So you've got to work out possibly constantly.
And a great way to do it is using Beach Body on Demand.
It's an online fitness streaming service that gives you unlimited access to a wide variety of highly effective, world-class workouts personalized to meet your needs.
It also includes extensive nutritional content, all proven to help people achieve their health and fitness goals.
Beach Body on Demand is a total package, which will help you become the total package as well with familiar exercise brands.
I don't know how to pronounce this one, P-O, P-I-Y-O, but I do know P90X.
It's insane.
Insanity, also insane.
That's why they call it insanity.
21-day fix.
And this is something, you know, like you can put it on your phone.
I like it because I can put it on the phone.
You can just take it to a hotel if you're traveling.
You can do your workout.
And, you know, you can use it if you just want to get in shape for something.
Or like me, you just don't want to die.
You want to continue to be able to stand upright and move.
And workouts range from cardio to weight training, yoga, low impact, and even dance.
And there are over 600 different ones.
You can sort them by type of workout or favorite trainer.
Right now, my listeners can get a free trial membership.
So that's pretty cheap.
As free is about as cheap as you can get.
You can text Andrew, text on your phone, Andrew, to 303030.
Text Andrew to 303030, and you'll get full access to the entire platform for free.
All the workouts and nutrition information free.
Just text Andrew to 303030.
Andrew does have an E. There is E's in Andrew.
That's an E in it.
The mailbag is coming up, but we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means you can listen to it, but you won't be able to watch the beauty of it unfold in front of you.
You would if you would only subscribe to thedailywire.com for allows you 10 bucks a month.
And not only does that, if you do it for $100, you get the whole year plus Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Nobody uses this for an ashtray, my friend.
Salients of Personality00:14:36
They use the Crowder mug for an ashtray, as you saw last night.
This they just use to drink the leftist tears, and the ashes don't taste good, so we put them in the Crowder mug.
But with your subscription, you also get to be in the mailbag.
All your problems will be solved.
Your life will be so much better, or not better, but different.
You know, it'll change.
So come on over and listen to the mailbag.
coming right up.
All right.
Mailbag.
I always try, I always try to catch them off guard, see how long it takes them to get Lindsay screaming there.
All right, from Matt.
Hi, Andrew.
At what point do Democrats go too far and hurt their chances for winning midterms?
Really good question.
The Democrats have bet the farm, basically.
They bet everything on personal hatred for Donald Trump.
And Trump, it's possible, is his worst enemy there.
He's got a gruff style.
He can be bullying.
He can tweet things that are sometimes not so helpful.
By the way, I like his tweeting.
I think his tweeting, you know, the New York Times has something like 0.5% of the reach of his tweets.
So this is a way that he gets stuff out to the people who like him.
But he can also be bullying.
He can also go off down the wrong track sometimes.
So the Democrats are depending on that.
The thing is, as I always say, reality gets a vote.
And if you tell people that they're not going to get taxes or that $1,000, as Nancy Pelosi said, is just crumbs.
And if you continue to tell people, oh, things are just as good as they were under Obama, or, you know, the New York Times said today, Donald Trump didn't do anything to ISIS.
He just continued Obama's policies.
That is nonsense.
That is nonsense.
Read any of the books, any of the books by the soldiers fighting under Obama, and almost all of them will talk about how he hamstrung them with rules of engagement that made it almost impossible for them to do their jobs.
Obama himself said that the ISIS was going to be a generational problem.
It may be a generational problem, but not from territory.
And that was their big sell because Trump and Mattis took that territory away.
So reality has a vote.
So here's what I think.
I think that if Trump can just control himself just a little bit, and it's an open question, and the economy holds good and he continues to put forward things that the Democrats say are awful.
I think as this tax cut kicks in, it's going to really jumpstart this economy.
It's really going to help people.
People's wages are rising.
It's another thing the Times said.
They're not rising any faster than they're with Obama.
You can jigger those numbers, but like I said, you cannot jigger the dinner table.
People know when they're eating well and getting a vacation.
They know when that's going on and it's obviously going on.
You can smell it everywhere.
You can see it on people's faces.
So if this is all they've got, there is a chance they could genuinely blow the midterms.
In ways that we don't even imagine.
Usually the president loses.
Some guys are in the midterms.
They've been talking about a blue wave.
Right this minute, I'm not thinking so.
There's still a lot of time left, still a lot of ways to go.
So the thing is, it's not whether they go too far.
It's whether they only have one trick.
And when you're sitting for the flag and you're not clapping for God and you're not clapping for little boys and you're not clapping for people who escaped from North Korea, your only trick is the resistance.
Your only trick is depending on people to hate Trump.
And I don't think that's going to hold up all that long.
From Samuel, Dear King Clavin, I think that's concise.
That contains all the other titles.
Do you believe in individual vocation?
In the words of Benedict XVI, we all have a universal call to holiness, but does God have any more specific demands of us excluding the more general things like prayer, charity, faith, et cetera?
If so, what are they?
And why do you think they are these things as opposed to some other thing?
I definitely think we have individual vocations, but I can't tell you what they are because they're individual.
I mean, obviously, the things like charity and faith and prayer, those are things that all of us should partake in.
And I think they will connect us to God and to each other.
But your individual vocation is your individual vocation.
I thought about this a lot because sometimes I wonder, you know, I spent so much time working and my work is putting forward what I think is what I hope is God's vision, you know, something that will connect people to God.
And so I think that is my vocation.
I think God has honed me for this and has created an instrument that is capable of doing this, even in the way it took me so long to find God.
So I know a lot of the dead ends that people go down.
I think he has actually created me as a weapon.
Here's the way I think about it.
Jesus said, unless you become like a little child, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven.
And did that mean you should become like, you know, stupid or not walk or something?
No.
It meant you should become the person you were meant to be, the person that you were when you were born.
As they say in Zen, they say, what is your original face before you were born?
That's what Jesus wants.
He wants you to refine that person.
That person is defined by his desires.
A person's desires are like salients of his personality.
A salient is a jutting out place.
It shows you the shape of who you are.
The things you want, the things you want, tell you who you are.
Now, I'm not talking about the things your body wants.
Your body wants food and sex and all the things that a body wants.
I'm talking about the things you want as a person.
And the mistake that people make is that they let those desires become connected to the things that they desire instead of keeping them connected to God.
Because God gave you those desires to show you where to go.
They're like a guide inside you.
They will carry you to God and they will carry you to the things God wants you to do.
And it doesn't have to be your job.
With me, my work and my life are so intertwined, it's hard to tell the difference.
But it might be family, it might be other things that you do, it might be charitable work that you do in your spare time.
It might be a million different things, but you know it by following your desires, but connecting those desires to God.
I'll tell you a funny story when I was a kid.
I think I have told this story before, but I was watching with my family.
My father was in show business.
He was a radio DJ, and I was watching a guy do an ad for toilet paper, and he was dressed up as toilet paper, you know.
And my mother turned to my father, my mother's a little snooty, and she said to my father, would you do that?
And he said, It's a job, you know, it's a job.
But I thought to myself, that guy probably studied to play Hamlet.
He probably studied to act.
He probably went to acting school to act in the great parts, and now he's playing toilet paper.
And the reason is that he has connected his desires to the desire to act rather than what he was acting for.
What he was acting to bring a kind of truth, a kind of portrayal to people that would deepen their lives and enrich their lives.
And now he's selling toilet paper.
It's an honest job.
It's an honest job.
I'm not running it down.
I'm just saying that maybe his desires have gotten disconnected.
So you want to follow your desires, but you want to follow them in such a way that they connect you to the person, God, who gave you those desires.
Your desires define your vocation.
They define who you are.
Just don't separate them from their source, because that's the supply line of truth that takes you where you want to go.
Each person comes with a pathway to God built into him, and it is defined somewhat by your desires.
That tells you where to go.
So I believe, yes, you have a vocation.
This is a short answer.
I just should have said that, right?
I just should have said yes.
From Joshua, dear dark lord of the light, clavin with an E, or is it clavin with an A?
That's a stupid question.
Are you not listening to me?
I am an atheist.
However, I recognize that the West is built on the confluence of Judeo-Christian and ancient Greek thought, so I'd like the foundations to be solid.
A thing in the religious worldview that I fail to understand is why Western religions require God's omnipotence, because omnipotence really does seem to me to result in the system falling afoul of the problem evil.
With omnipotence in the sense that I outlined, the answer that the world couldn't be any other way and preserve things like free will or human ability to know the good are unsatisfactory.
So my question is, am I badly misunderstanding the Western religious view of God?
Well, I don't think you're thinking this through quite clearly, if you'll pardon me saying so.
First, if God is not omnipotent, then something controls him.
And that's paganism.
The pagans and the Norse myths have gods who are controlled by fate.
Fate is above the gods, and there's some fate they can't avoid.
We don't believe that.
It doesn't really make sense.
For God to be God and not just the God of the trees and the God of lightning and the God of this and that, for God to be God, he really does have to be omnipotent.
He has to be outside the world, outside everything that's cause and effect.
Now, you go on to say that he falls afoul of the problem of evil.
With omnipotence, he could do anything he wants.
Now, C.S. Lewis points out that talking nonsense and then putting the word God in it doesn't stop it from being nonsense.
So when people used to say things like, can God create a stone too heavy for himself to lift?
And you go, that's just language without meaning.
And then you put God in it and people say, wow, that's profound.
It's not.
God can, in fact, make a world of free will.
But if he makes a world of free will, it has to be free.
He can't make a world of free will that's not free.
So it doesn't make sense for you to say that he can make a world of free will, but people can't do evil in it.
That just simply does not make any sense.
Once you create freedom, you create the possibility of evil.
Once you create the possibility of evil, there are going to be people who choose that.
The world is a broken place.
We know this.
It is separated from God.
And so it is in and of itself.
Even nature is torn and broken and not the world that God wanted us to have and wants us to have still.
So because of our free will, because our free will, you know, people sort of say that Adam sinned and therefore we all sin.
I don't actually believe that's the way it works.
I believe that once you start on that path of sin, we all are born into it, basically.
We're born living on land that was stolen from somebody else by bloodshed.
We're born with desires that have been acted out in bad ways and we don't know how to recount, you know, how to teach our children how to do, live right and what the rules are and what the rules aren't and how can we be free but still have rules.
But God's omnipotence is hugely important for us to understand who he is, but it doesn't mean, it means that in order to understand evil, you have to understand freedom and how high a value God puts on freedom.
And I think he puts that high a value on freedom because he puts an even higher value on love, and you cannot love without freedom.
Freedom is a basic component of love.
You know, nobody loves at the point of a sword.
Nobody loves because he has to love.
If God made creatures who loved him by force, it wouldn't be love.
And so he is giving us this wonderful, wonderful chance to find our purpose, to find our dignity in freedom.
And by the way, by the way, when you say you're an atheist but you like Western society, that argument is not going to hold water.
The faith is important.
Okay.
From Patrick.
Hello, Andrew.
There are no E's in Claven Claven.
I've listened with rapt attention to your recent talks on why the old classic movies, which relied more on witty and engaging dialogue, are much more entertaining than today's fairs, which require nothing by way of clever dialogue.
I would put forward that, ironically speaking, it was the production code, the Hayes Code, they call it, instituted in the early 30s, which may be largely responsible for the quality of the dialogue in movies until the code died out in the late 50s.
By making it hard to explicitly express sexual content, movie makers were forced to convey indirectly and nonverbally on-screen sizzle, and in doing so, their approaches were quite clever.
Being forced to tone it down actually brought out more creative ways to convey more sensuous content, making it even more sensuous because it wasn't explicit.
This is one of the great paradoxes of art.
All artists long to be free.
All art yearns to be free.
And when you put restrictions on it, it does get better because people get cleverer.
Once poetry lost the need for scanning and rhyme and rhythm, poetry disappeared.
I mean, nobody reads poetry.
Literally nobody.
There are 10 people who read modern poetry.
I read old poetry because I love it, but nobody reads the poetry in the New Yorker except the guy who wrote it because they've taken away the limits.
And yet, and yet, I would not, there is something old-fashioned.
When somebody writes a sonnet, it doesn't quite work anymore.
It doesn't quite describe the world as we live in it.
So yes, the Hayes office, which was a foolish and stupid thing to do, made the movies better.
There's simply no question about it.
If you brought it back today, it would make the movies irrelevant.
I mean, they're already irrelevant, but you couldn't depict life as we live it and as we know it to be with the Hayes office in place.
So it's just entirely possible that nobody forced poetry into sonnet form.
It just was the way it was.
It's entirely possible that simply the mores of the time would have toned down the sexual content of movies and made them better.
But it always is true that when you put limits on art, art becomes better because people just have to be more clever to do it.
And yet, and yet, I don't believe you should put limits on art.
I believe only the artist should put limits on art.
It's one of the reasons I always worked in genre fiction, because genre fiction, you can't escape the needs of the fiction, and it always made a lot more sense to me.
Do I have time for one more?
Not really.
Some good questions, but we'll have to move on, I think.
Yeah.
All right, let's do tickety-boo news.
All right.
Hey, we'll just sit here, you know.
There's the tickety-boo news guy.
We can't do the tickety boo news without the tickety boo news guy.
I want to talk about some, I want to say something about women you've probably never heard me say.
You know, I joked last night on the State of the Union show.
We were talking about movies and Ben was joking about Wonder Woman.
And I said, you know, it really got me.
And this is absolutely true, that there were several female journalists, feminist journalists, who said they wept when they saw Wonder Woman because finally, finally, a woman had been a strong woman and won World War I.
And I thought, but no, that didn't happen.
That actually didn't happen.
Female Fight Clubs00:05:13
And one of the things that so bothers me about the feminist movement is that it takes place here, where women are free, where they can do whatever they want, where really women do not have a problem that government can solve anymore.
The same way blacks don't have problems that government can solve anymore.
And it creates, it makes people stupid if they don't turn, if they don't use their privilege to help other people or to move forward in their own lives.
When they're still banding together and complaining and whining about what's going on, once they've won the fight and the fight needed to be won, they just make fools of themselves.
My daughter, I know I promote my daughter possibly too much, but she's become such a fine writer over at PJ Media, and she wrote a hilarious piece that I have to read you just the first part.
Feminist fight club members beat the crap out of each other because resist or something.
This is the first paragraph.
A group of feminists is so angry about something or other that they're beating each other up, literally.
They call themselves femme feral, a queer femme fighting force, whatever that means, and they want to destroy the conservative government and bring down the patriarchy by beating the living daylights out of one another.
Because apparently the best way to protest things you disagree with is to put on really ugly underwear, paint your face to look like a three-year-old who did, like a three-year-old did your makeup, and throw your friends on the floor.
So they have this female fight club.
I mean, that is the sign, that is the sign of people who have nothing to protest, who have no problems.
And I just want to read you this from Britain's Independent Paper.
At least six women in Iran have been pictured protesting the obligatory Islamic headscarf by publicly taking off their hijabs and waving them on sticks.
There's one, the 31-year-old protester who we've all seen, the pictures of her taking off her hijab.
She's known as the girl of Engelhab Street.
She was later identified as Vita Movahed, took off her head scarf on a street in the capital, Tehran, and she was detained for several weeks before being released from custody.
And you can bet being in an Iranian prison is not a walk in the park.
One of the women taking part in the protest was arrested after staging a protest on the same busy street in apparent solidarity.
Narjus Hosseini was arrested within 10 minutes of removing her hijab, along with two people filming her, Iran's foremost human rights lawyer told The Guardian.
Ms. Hosseini was pictured wearing a green wristpan, an apparent reference to the Iranian green movement, which rose in protest after the 2009 presidential election.
The thing I wanted to say is that because we're here in America where women have it great, here in America where women have it great, that we start to look at women through the lens of feminism as being talking about this useless stuff all the time, whining, complaining, angry when they have nothing to be angry about.
And it makes, it kind of lessens your respect for women as women.
But you have to remember that that's not women.
It is just feminists.
These women, what they are doing in Iran, is so courageous.
I do not know if I would have the guts to do what they're doing.
And they are doing it so they can be free because they're not free people.
And they're trying to have the freedom and dignity that people have all over the world.
You know, that people have in better places than Iran.
And they're so brave and they're so courageous that it reminds you, that reminds you of what women really are and what women really can be.
And we pick on American feminists so much because they are whiny, complaining people with nothing to complain about except their own life choices.
They complain about their, you know, not being able to kill the child inside them as if that child just got there by accident.
You know, they complain about things that they are responsible for.
And here are women showing us, reminding us that there are real wonder women in the world.
There are real wonder women who are not muscular and can't throw a spear, you know, and don't win World War I, but simply by taking off the scarf on their head, you know, perform an act of heroism that a lot of guys could not perform.
I mean, look, there are heroic guys too, but this is something we have to remember.
And it also reminds us of something else, that when we put ideas ahead of identity, there are a lot of friends to be made in the world.
You know, these are women who believe in some of the things we believe, which means we can reach out to them even though that they're in the Muslim world.
We can reach out to them if it's not about their identity as having whatever color skin they have or even whatever religion they have.
It's about what ideas they are expressing in that religion and what ideas they believe in.
If they believe in ideas, we can somehow get close to, we can get close to them.
Anyway, it's just a reminder of how brave actual women can be because these are not soldiers.
These are not, you know, tough girls.
These are just people with courage doing what it takes to be free.
And I just think the feminists in America, by not supporting them and by instead talking about some girl who said yes when she meant no and now she regrets it 20 years later, when they're talking about that, they're talking about crap.
And like, I just think by avoiding this, they avoid winning the respect for women as a gender that they could be winning by standing for things that actually matter.
Tomorrow's Guest: Andy Weir00:01:09
Tomorrow, we have Andy Weir, who is the writer of the wonderful novel, The Martian Navy.
As I get to the end of the show, I start to lose my memory.
Do you remember what his new book is called?
Artemis.
Artemis, thank you.
Artemis is his new book, really entertaining book about a moon colony.
And we had a great conversation about how he kind of got around the publishing world after he had given up on a writing career.
So be there for that and be there for just all the entertainment that we deliver because we are having fun now.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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 their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.