Andrew Clavin dissects Obamagate—from Epstein’s WSJ op-ed defending Trump’s policies despite his vulgarity to Clavin’s counterattack on Obama’s scandals (IRS targeting, Benghazi, FISA abuses)—while warning conservatives against blind loyalty. Callers grapple with divine duty (a grieving caretaker’s codependency) and early marriage, while Clavin dismisses emotional parenting and blames trial lawyers for skyrocketing healthcare costs. He also mocks Joy Behar’s anti-Christian rhetoric, urging conservative advertisers to retaliate, before pivoting to Jackson’s legacy with Kilmead. The episode frames policy vs. character as a moral tightrope for the right. [Automatically generated summary]
We're going to be talking about scandals today, so let's start with a scandal that didn't happen.
I've been very hard on CNN from time to time, so it's worth noting that I got one story about them wrong.
An accusation that CNN scripted some of the questions at its irresponsible, hate-filled, biased, ignorant, lynch-mob-like spewing of anti-gun rhetoric misnamed a town hall was untrue.
CNN did not script the questions at its irresponsible, hate-filled, biased, ignorant, lynch-mob-like spewing of anti-gun rhetoric, misnamed a town hall.
That accusation was made by one of the survivors of the shooting in Broward County, Florida, but the boy's father now says that he, the father, omitted a key phrase in an email exchange with CNN, and that throws the story into doubt.
So, CNN's irresponsible, hate-filled, biased, ignorant, lynch-mob-like spewing of anti-gun rhetoric, misnamed a town hall, was not scripted.
And I regret relaying that false information.
It was an act of journalistic malfeasance that reduced me to the level of CNN, although without their malice and irresponsibility.
So, CNN, I apologize.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Life is to kiddie-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
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All right.
You know, one of the questions I get asked most often is, what the hell is wrong with you people?
Why can't you do anything right?
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This is no wonder 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site in just one day.
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ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire.
And now, now my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free.
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Comey's Testimony: Accountability00:15:22
Today, what I would like to do is read a piece.
Joseph Epstein is a good writer, conservative columnist, writes in all the conservative papers, the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal.
And he wrote a piece yesterday in the op-ed page, on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal that really struck me.
And I'm going to read a fairly substantial portion of it.
It is worth listening to.
And then I want to address some of the stuff he says.
It's called The Only Good Thing About Donald Trump is all his policies.
And he starts out, my son Mark, whose mind is more capacious, objective, and generous than mine, nicely formulated the Donald Trump problem for thoughtful conservatives.
I approve of almost everything he has done, and I disapprove of almost everything he has said.
I second the motion.
I approve of the Neil Gorsuch appointment, the moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the removal of often strangling regulation from much commerce, the opening of the Keystone pipeline, the tax reform law, and more.
I disapprove of the bragging tweets, the touchiness, the crude put-downs of anyone who disagrees with him, Little Marco, Insecure Oprah, Sloppy Steve, and the rest.
The unrestrained vulgarity.
America has had ignorant, corrupt, vain, lazy presidents before, but in Donald Trump, we have the first president who is a genuine bore.
In many realms of life, a bore's rude, unmannerly nature can be forgivable.
A wise stockbroker who makes his clients lots of money might get away with being a bore.
A boorish winning football coach is livable if not likable.
Showbiz has never been without its bores, from George Jessel to Whoopi Goldberg.
Even a boorish friend is possible if he's also loyal, generous, and honorable.
But a boorish president of the United States presents a problem.
The presidency, like the monarchy in England, has a symbolic along with a practical aspect.
The president is meant to represent the nation at its best.
What precisely that means can vary greatly in a country as wide and differentiated as ours.
Dwight David Eisenhower was a different model of our best than was Franklin Roosevelt.
Harry Truman was different again, and yet in his own way, he represented the country.
The obverse of Donald Trump's presidency for me is that of Barack Obama.
To flip my son's formulation, I approved of almost everything Mr. Obama said, and I disapproved of almost everything he did.
He made a wretched nuclear deal with Iran, initiated a hopelessly cumbersome health care law, deserted Israel at the United Nations, and did more to exacerbate than to alleviate race relations.
Yet, no hint of corruption, no sexual scandal of any sort clings to Mr. Obama, a man who seems a loving husband and a good father.
I can easily imagine myself at lunch with Barack Obama talking baseball, basketball, the University of Chicago, the intricacies of Chicago-style machine politics, whereas I cannot think of a single topic I might take up at a similar meal with Donald Trump.
And then he goes on to answer possible objections.
Now, I'm going to get to Trump.
I will talk about Trump and some of the things that he says there I have said.
He is a borish guy.
He's rude.
I don't like him bullying people.
I especially don't like him bullying people who are on his side, like Jeff Sessions, or who might just have a reasonable, honest disagreement with him.
But first, we have to talk about Barack Obama.
I mean, Epstein is right.
There is no sexual scandal about Barack Obama.
And as far as I know, good father, good husband.
I have no way of knowing what goes on behind closed doors.
But if it ain't out there in the open, we have to just respect what we see.
And I do respect that.
I do think it.
You know, one of the things about this sex scandal thing is just reading about this, because this is one of the things Mona Charon got booed at at CPAC for saying we've been hypocritical in our treatment of sex scandals when we went after Bill Clinton, but now we don't go after Donald Trump for some of the stuff he did.
Trump wasn't doing it in the Oval Office, which I think is really important.
I never went after Clinton for the sex scandals except to say what it meant about his character, which I will get to.
But one of the things, I was just reading about this.
Do you know that the Greeks and the Romans had no word that means morality as we understand it?
The Greeks had the word ethicos, which is ethics, and it meant pertaining to character.
It was how you tended to behave as a human being.
And Cicero translated that into Latin as moralis.
But it meant what ethicos meant.
It meant pertaining to a person's character.
When we started using moralis in English, it began to be used as the more, as you would say, the moral to a story.
So it was practical wisdom, like the moral to the story is a stitch in time saves nine.
And then they started to say, well, if you had a moral virtue, it would be because you were the kind of person who provided a stitch in time and saved nine.
It was very practical.
But then it started to come into use as the way we use it as morality.
By the 17th century, the 1600s, it meant almost exclusively sexual morality.
And one of the things that always puzzles me is why when we talk about morality, we so quickly go to the way people behave sexually.
And I know that I'm loosey-goosey for a conservative on this.
It's not that I think any form of sex is great.
It's not even that I don't think God disapproves.
It's that I don't think it's my business to disapprove in what people do in their private lives.
I am not the judge of sin.
I know some of you think I am, but I am not the judge of sound, not the old man with the beard living in the clouds.
There is one, but it ain't me.
And so, you know, I'm always puzzled by this.
I really do think when I talk about morality, I'm using it in its classical sense, as the nature of character.
So let's for a minute just examine this claim that Epstein makes that Obama, that no hint of scandal, is that what he said?
No hint of scandal.
Yes, no hint of corruption, no hint of corruption touched the Obama administration.
To my mind, what we have been seeing unfold that many in the press are calling Russia gate has in fact been ObamaGate.
It has been the slow discovery of the scandal that racked the Obama administration from top to bottom that Obama and the press deny.
Obama just the other day was making that super secret speech to the MIT at that sports gathering, and he reiterated this idea that his administration was scandal-free.
So let's take a listen to that.
This is cut three.
You can tell when somebody is putting team first.
You can tell whether they are prioritizing the efforts of the group and are trying to fit their skills into the success of the group.
And I do think that that is a principle that I pay attention to.
So one of the things I'm proud of in my administration was the fact that, and I think these things are connected, we didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us.
There were mistakes, we'd screw up.
But there wasn't anything venal during eight years.
And that's, I know that seems like a low borrow.
So there wasn't anything venal.
We were all for the team.
We may have screwed up from time to time, but there were no scandal.
Now, the reason I say Russia Gate is really ObamaGate is what it has revealed, which is only the final part of this picture of Obama as running a machine-like Democrat government.
And we've seen machines.
We saw it.
I lived in New York at its worst in the 70s.
The Democrat machine turned New York into a crime-ridden, corrupt, unlivable city.
And then sort of lancing the boyle during the Koch administration, every corrupt administrator, there were suicides, there were arrests, every corrupt administrator was cleaned out.
That paved the way for Giuliani to come in and clean it out.
Detroit, same thing, corruption, a machine.
Chicago, we're seeing it now, a corrupt Democrat machine.
That was the way that Obama ran the federal government.
And so it was, and the thing that gets me about it is it was invisible only because the press didn't cover it.
The press, I've played that montage a thousand times.
I'm not going to play it today, but the press just said, oh, it was scandal-free.
The administration was scandal-free.
And that was part of the scandal.
Sometimes when I mention this on Twitter or social media, somebody will come back and say, nobody was indicted under the Obama administration.
That was part of the scandal because the Justice Department was so corrupt that it wasn't indicting anybody.
Now, first of all, let's just say under this Russia thing, what we've now learned that I think is fair to say, because even the Democrats, the Democrats released their memo and it didn't really contradict this.
It said it was contradicting it, but it didn't.
The FBI used this OPO research called the Steele dossier, this unword, unvetted, unproved allegations from Russians to this guy, this former British spy, Steele, that was paid for as OPO research by Hillary Clinton and the DNC used it to get a warrant, a FISA warrant to spy on an American citizen who had been connected to the Trump campaign.
So we know that they were actually spying on the Trump campaign.
And Democrats released this memo, said no, no, no.
But even in the memo, they did not tell the FISA court what this was.
They used such convoluted language to describe what it was that they didn't just say, hey, this is something that Hillary Clinton paid for to get at Donald Trump, and we have no proof of it.
And there was connections between the Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to get this Russian information, and the State Department and the Justice Department.
There were information going back and forth and Clinton operatives, including Sidney Blumenthal, one of her dirtiest players.
Okay, so a Democrat president is having the top law agency spy on a Republican candidate.
I mean, that is obscene.
It's absurd.
It goes way, way, way beyond Watergate.
The state, the Clinton Secretary of State, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she abused the classified information on her email so badly that it had to be investigated.
But let's for just a minute remember what happened to that investigation because the Democrats keep saying, well, she wasn't indicted.
But remember, Comey came out and made a public statement listing all the indictable things she did.
And why did he do it?
Comey did it.
The head of the FBI did it because he didn't trust the Justice Department.
Let's go back and just look at that clip where Comey is asked why he came out and made this public statement, which is something they never do, and why he made the recommendation that she wasn't going to be indicted.
But just remember, this is Comey's testimony.
Let me go back, if I can, very briefly, to the decision to publicly go out with your results on the email.
Was your decision influenced by the Attorney General's tarmac meeting with the former President Bill Clinton?
Yes, in an ultimately conclusive way, that was the thing that kept it for me that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the FBI and the Justice Department.
Were there other things that contributed to that that you can describe in an open session?
There were other things that contributed to that.
One significant item I can't.
I know the committee's been briefed on.
There's been some public accounts of it, which are nonsense, but I understand the committee's been briefed on the classified facts.
Probably the only other consideration that I guess I can talk about in an open setting is that at one point the Attorney General had directed me not to call it an investigation, but instead to call it a matter, which confused me and concerned me.
But that was one of the bricks in the load that led me to conclude I have to step away from the department if we're to close this case credibly.
That's the head of the FBI testifying that he could not trust the Justice Department, that they had rendered themselves incredible or non-credible.
So he had to come out and do what he did, which was an extraordinary act.
And he listed all the things that were indictable in Hillary Clinton and then said she shouldn't be indicted because she had no intent, which was not part of the law.
And then just remember that Loretta Lynch, oh yeah, that Peter Strzzok, the adulterous FBI agent and his girlfriend were texting back and forth that Loretta Lynch had already decided that there was going to be no indictment when she met with Clinton.
That may have been why she was meeting with Bill Clinton on that tarmac was to tell him that he was going to be cleared.
So whether Comey had told her that, which he testified that he didn't, or whether she just knew it because she wasn't going to do it, according to this text between these two lovebirds, she already knew that Fix was already in.
This is an incredible, incredible depth of corruption.
But I want to talk about Obama himself because we're talking about ethicos, right?
We're talking about the character of a man, the way he tends, the kind of thing he tends to do.
And it's not just when we talk about morality.
It's not just whether you cheat on your wife.
I'm thrilled he didn't cheat on his wife.
Good for him.
I don't care.
It's not my job to take care of Barack Obama's private life or Bill Clinton's or Donald Trump's.
He is the president of the United States.
He is working for me.
I care about his ethicos, his character, and which way he tends to go.
Now, I got to go back and look at this.
I know this is going back over old stuff, but to me, one of the worst scandals, probably the worst presidential scandal of my lifetime, is the IRS silencing conservative voices during Obama's reelection campaign.
And remember that a lot of the scandal happened then.
The cover-up of Benghazi, where the national security agents, the national security advisor, Susan Rice, went on TV five times and lied about the reason our guys were killed in Benghazi, that it was about a video, it wasn't a planned terrorist attack, was to cover up for Barack Obama's claims on the campaign trail that he had decimated al-Qaeda.
And that was why Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, big position in that administration, was lying about it and why Obama himself lied.
So all of this was to get himself re-elected.
Now, the IRS story breaks, and I want to just play what Obama said when it happened.
This is the first one.
This is cut number six.
If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous.
And there's no place for it.
And they have to be held fully accountable.
Okay, they have to be held fully accountable.
It's outrageous.
Now, one of the things about Obama is that he was always reacting to the fact.
He always was reacting to what he thought the press was going to say.
But because the press let him off the hook every single time, he got bolder and bolder and bolder.
So that was Obama.
White House Accountability00:11:23
Remember that clip, all right?
It's outrageous.
They have to be held accountable.
Now, let's just take a look at Douglas Shulman, who was running the IRS at the time that the targeting took place.
They had what was called a bolo list, which means it's from a police phrase, be on the lookout, right?
So they were looking out for organizations with the word conservative, with the word patriot, with the word Tea Party, and they were holding them up and not giving them the tax-exempt status they need that would allow them to speak during Barack Obama's reelection campaign.
So here is Douglas Shulman first goes out and says this never happened.
This is cut seven.
There's absolutely no targeting.
This is the kind of back and forth that happens when people apply.
Now, now it comes out that there was, and he knew about it.
So Trey Gowdy goes out.
This is, I'm only going to play a little bit of this, but this thing goes on forever.
Trey Gowdy ripped him to pieces, right?
You knew about this bolo list.
What did you do about it?
Let's play this little bit of that exchange.
Did you do anything personally to make sure that this insidious discriminatory practice was stopped?
Yes or no?
At the time that I learned about it, I also learned two things.
The first was that it was being stopped, and the second was that the International General.
And what did you do to verify that it was stopped?
The responsible deputy of the Internal Revenue Service told me it was being stopped.
I had no reason to believe otherwise.
Did you investigate why conservative groups were being targeted?
Excuse me.
Did you investigate?
So you can't give me a single name.
You can't answer the who.
Can you tell me the why?
Why were conservative groups?
Why was the culture such under your watch that an employee felt comfortable targeting conservative groups?
Did you investigate that?
You know, from my reading of the report, I can't tell if it was political motivation or if it was tone deaf, somebody trying to expedite away.
You still don't know that this was political.
Excuse me.
You still don't know that this was political?
I'd defer to the Inspector General.
I'll tell you this, Mr. Shulman.
Your predecessor said that he wasn't sure if it was partisan, and that requires the listener to be as stupid as the speaker.
That goes on.
I mean, he just rips this guy who knew he said it didn't happen.
It did happen.
And then it turned out that he knew it happened.
Now, this man, Shulman, visited the White House during the campaign more than anybody else.
He was on record, you know, going back and forth into the White House all the time.
Bill O'Reilly had Obama on, and he went after him and said, why did this happen?
And Obama said, oh, it was just about implementing Obamacare.
That's all it was about.
And here is this now famous exchange between O'Reilly and Obama where he calls him to account.
Remember now, remember Obama, this is outrageous.
Somebody must be held responsible.
We now know that the IRS was lying.
We now know they did it.
And here's Obama.
What some people are saying is that the IRS was used at a local level in Cincinnati, maybe other places, to go wrong.
How do you know that?
Because we still don't know what happened.
Bill, we do.
That's not what happened.
Folks have, again, had multiple hearings on this.
I mean, these kinds of things keep on surfacing, in part because you and your TV station will promote them.
But don't you feel there are unanswered questions?
Bill, when you actually look at the stuff, there have been multiple hearings on it.
What happened here was that you've got a 501 C4 law that people think is confusing.
That the folks did not know how to implement.
Because it basically says there's no corruption there at all.
No.
not what I'm saying.
That's actually...
No, no, but I want to know what you're saying.
You're the leader of the city.
Absolutely.
You're saying no corruption.
No.
None.
No.
There were some boneheaded decisions.
Bonehead decisions.
No law.
Mass corruption.
Not even mass corruption.
Not even a smidgen of corruption.
Okay.
So that's the polite gentlemanly Obama, who I admit is a more graceful speaker than Donald Trump, lying his head off.
I mean, when he said, oh, you know, there was a law that they didn't know how to apply.
That law has been on the books since I was born.
That law was in the books since the 50s.
I was born in 1782.
So, I mean, no, it was on the books for a long, long time.
So that is a complete lie, and he's doing it with a smile.
And it's all Fox News's fault.
It's just because your network promotes these things.
And remember, this was his, you know, talk about ethicos, talk about the nature of his character.
This was the way he behaved.
Jeremiah Wright, I never heard him say those things.
20 years, 2,000 Sundays in that pulpit, never heard him say it.
Bill Ayres, the terrorist.
He was just a guy in the neighborhood.
Bill Ayers helped start his campaign.
And about this politeness, by the way, to his opponents.
When the Supreme Court decided that the founders of this country had meant to permit gay marriage in the Constitution when they wrote the Constitution, because it was just, you couldn't see it, but if you held the Constitution up to the light, the right to gay marriage was in there.
You just had to hold it trust right.
It only appeared on certain days.
But when they decided that, Barack Obama lit the White House up with a rainbow.
Now, I have no problem with him supporting that position, right?
He has the right to support any position he so chooses.
But that was saying to 50% of the country who very much held that to be a principle, held the wrongness of that decision to be a principal.
That was telling them, this White House doesn't belong to you.
This White House is no longer white.
This is a rainbow White House.
It doesn't belong to you.
Now, even if you agree with him, even if you agree with the Supreme Court, that's a rude, nasty, mean, stupid, un-American thing to do.
And that was part of Barack Obama's character, too.
He was a master troll, just like the guy who followed him, just like Donald Trump.
Now, I'm going to end by, I went a little long on this because it's so, I just, it bears remembering.
I know he's not president anymore, but remember the press said this thing was scandal-free.
Joseph Epstein is in the Wall Street Journal saying it's scandal-free.
Obama in that speech is not only saying it's scandal-free, he's telling Google and Facebook to change their algorithm so you can't find all those nasty Fox News reports about just how scandalous it was.
So he wants the silence to continue.
He wants to write it into history as much as possible and obliterate the facts as much as possible.
Trump is a boar.
Epstein's right.
He is a boar.
And more than that, on the issue of ethicos, the nature of his character, I don't think it's all that good.
I mean, the way he has treated his wives, his many wives, and his mistresses, some of his business practices, that bullying treatment, which really is real, you know, the way he treated the candidates he was up against, he was mean, it was low.
This does speak to character.
It's more than just boarishness, I think.
Now, on the other side of that, the Heritage Foundation, a rock-solid conservative organization, has released a report saying that with unprecedented speed, the Trump administration has already implemented nearly two-thirds of the 334 agenda items called for by the Heritage Foundation, a pace faster than former President Reagan, who embraced the conservative think tank's mandate for leadership blueprint.
They're just absolutely delighted with the way that Trump has acted.
And remember, Trump hasn't done anything.
His talk is extreme, but everything he's done has been just typical Republican governance and that the Republicans don't do.
Typical conservative Republican governance.
So it's entirely possible, it's entirely possible that a man whose character is questionable or has been questionable in the past is doing good things for the country.
And that is disturbing.
I mean, that does carry with it a moral hazard.
It means that we have to follow Donald Trump in what he is doing just as far as we can, because I'm not a pearl clutcher.
I don't care if he cheated on his wives.
I really don't.
I think it's a rotten, low thing to do.
I think it does speak to your character to treat your wives like that, but it's none of my business.
It's not something he did in the White House, first of all.
And second of all, it's not what I hired him to do.
If you're a heart surgeon and you're cheating on your wife, I don't care.
Just fix my damn heart, you know.
But it does mean, it does mean that if we follow the man, if we follow the man and not the principle, if we follow the man and not the politics, if we follow the man and not the policy, we could follow him right off a cliff.
And recently, I've been a little worried about Donald Trump when he starts talking about gun control.
And yeah, don't worry, we'll stand up to the NRA who supported him so powerfully during his election when he starts passing a budget that plunges us into trillions of dollars of debt, into a trillion dollars of debt.
I worry that he's going to go back to his Democrat roots.
I think you and I have to keep our heads and keep our hearts.
We have to keep hold of our hearts and not just follow the guy off the cliff if that's the way he goes.
For right now, I'm not clutching my pearls.
I don't care what he is, but don't forget it is Epstein is right at least about this, that a guy whose character is questionable doing great things does present a problem.
I'm not going to surrender the present victories for a possible wrong turn in the future.
That would be nuts, but I am going to keep hold of my heart and not necessarily follow him wherever he goes.
All right, the mailbag is coming up, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to the dailywire.com.
You can hear the rest of the show while you're there.
You know what would be a good idea?
Subscribe to the website.
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It was empty when I started, and now, mmm, leftist tears.
Right.
All right, the mailbag.
E. What was that?
Woohoo!
You guys are asleep back there.
From Christopher.
Hey, Andrew, just started watching your show.
Love it so far.
My question is: do you think that if we start banning assault rifles, it will only lead to more bans until the Second Amendment is repealed completely?
Yes.
That's exactly what I think.
That is their intent.
Listen, no one, not one person who's over the age of 18, over the age, in the age of reason, not one person thinks banning those weapons would keep an evil shooter from getting the weapon that he wanted.
Nobody thinks that.
When you sit down and think about it for a minute, you know that if a bad guy wants a gun, he's going to get a gun.
The only thing it does is it keeps the good guys from having the guns with which they fight back.
That's all it does.
They don't want you to have guns because they don't like you.
It's the kind of people.
What they don't like is the kind of people who carry guns and the things that those guns represent, because they represent freedom of the individual, the ordinary guy, and they hate that.
They believe in governance by experts, governance by bureaucrats, governance by essentially them, the elite.
That is the point.
And so, yes, if you read between the lines, the New York Times yesterday had an article saying, oh, you know, you may be supporting somebody who actually invests in guns.
So in other words, it's going to be this kind of thing where we boycott anybody who ever came near a gun.
Somebody on MSNBC said, oh, if we could just get rid of these guns, everything would be great.
Yes, I wouldn't give them an inch.
Codependency Costs00:07:10
As far as I'm concerned, you should be allowed to carry a bazooka as long as you are not, as long as you have a background check and you're not nuts.
From William, dear Mr. Clavin, I was married and lost my wife nearly six years ago due to mental health issues.
I've recently turned 34 and feel as though time is running out for me to eventually have a family.
My situation is more complex than just go out and find someone as I take care of my best friend who is a quadriplegic veteran who needs full-time assistance.
I fully believe God has placed me as his caretaker and that it's been assigned as a duty to me with no foreseeable end.
How do I build patience for a day that may never come in regards to having a family and companionship and be at peace with the word God has set for me?
All right.
I'm sorry, this is signed Liam.
Anyway, first of all, it could be that your situation is tragic.
You know, the whole thing about tragic situations is that they're tragic.
And it may just be that you are in a position where you can't find all the things that you think you should have.
and you may feel that taking care of your friend simply is a full-time job.
It's possible, and I don't know you, I don't know if this is true, I'm just reading this letter, that's all the information I have.
It is possible that you are making some taking some misguided steps.
You had a wife who had mental health issues.
Now you have a best friend that you feel you have to take care of full-time.
It may be that this is part of your character to feel that you need people who are broken, depending on you.
It's called being codependent.
That's what the shrinks call it.
And that may be a personality trait that you want to keep.
It may be a personality trait that you want to solve because it's possible.
I know sometimes when people are taking care of someone who is disabled, that the state pays them to do that.
So it's possible you're collecting money for that.
And it's possible that money could go to somebody else who could fill in for you some of the time and that you don't have to be a full-time caretaker and could then start to build your family while still being a friend to your friend.
So it's possible that there's more wiggle room that your letter indicates.
If there's not, and this is what you have to do full-time and it doesn't give you a chance to have a family, that's something that's a tragic situation that you're going to have to come to accept.
But it is possible if you look at your character that maybe some of these obligations are self-imposed and could be handled in a different way that allows you to still have a life.
Because I don't know, I can't speak for God and I can't speak for you, but I don't know if what God wants is for you to throw all of your life into the care for this guy.
That may not be true.
All right.
This is not signed.
All right, it's not signed.
For our most revered scholar and protector of the cosmos, Lord Clavin, that is, in fact, one of my titles.
I'm glad you got that one right.
This may be a strange male, but I hope it isn't too strange for a man as intellectual and wise as yourself.
I am a senior in high school and have been dating a girl for a year and a half.
She's a freshman in college.
It probably sounds really ridiculous, but I really have felt that God has been calling me to marry her for some time now.
I'm fairly certain that it's not just a crazy fantasy of mine because even my own father has told me about visions he's had of me marrying my now girlfriend.
And I've prayed to God extensively for months about this.
My girlfriend and I have discussed it for months now too, and she and even her own father are all for it.
So what's the, I would like to know what your thoughts are on young love, getting engaged early and waiting a few years to get married.
I have nothing against it.
If you feel God is telling you to marry her and she feels God is telling you to marry her and all the people around, maybe God is telling you to marry her.
Marry her.
I mean, I don't even understand what the problem is.
I guess what I'm hearing is that the problem is people say don't marry young.
And that may be good advice in general.
It might be a good thing to be careful about.
It might be a good thing to think about.
But it doesn't mean in your particular case that's true.
I mean, I know this.
I've had my marriage is the making of me and the central joy and consolation of my life.
And I did everything wrong.
I did every single thing wrong.
If you look at what I did on paper, my wife and I did on paper.
We frequently think about this.
Somehow God took care of it.
If you really do feel this and you feel convinced that God is telling you to do this and she feels convinced and you love her, my blessings upon you.
All right.
From Seth, Mr. Claven, what are some examples of regulations that currently keep the costs of medical care high?
Is it realistic to think that a community can cover others' medical and long-term care needs without federal involvement?
If so, what does this community structure look like and how would the community operate to help others' medical needs?
Well, first of all, if a community can't cover it, why should the federal government be able to cover it?
Health care is bottomless.
The expenses of healthcare are bottomless because you can keep a guy alive forever.
Does his Viagra get covered?
Does his anti-bald medicine get covered?
What gets covered and what doesn't get covered?
Once you start it, it is a bottomless pit.
And if a rich guy can afford it and a poor man can't, does the federal government make up the difference?
And why, why is the money that you earned, why is it being spent on my health?
That doesn't really make sense to me.
I don't understand why your earnings that you went out and worked for, that you sacrificed for, why that money belongs to me.
But if you want to talk about some laws or regulations that I think unnecessarily raise the cost of healthcare, the most important one is the fact that you can sue doctors at the drop of a hat and you can sue them for such catastrophic amounts because of suffering, whatever they call it, suffering and whatever.
You can sue somebody for your emotional suffering.
And the way I feel that that should be, and the reason Democrats won't do this is because they're run by the trial lawyers.
Democrats, trial lawyers and unions basically run the Democrat Party.
Republicans might think about doing this is that, look, it's an emotional thing.
When a doctor makes a mistake, terrible things happen, and you go in before a jury and the jury says, oh yeah, we'll award you a billion dollars.
That means the doctor's health insurance goes skyrocketing.
That means your costs skyrocket.
The way I feel about this is that it's not malpractice unless you can show that the guy is actually practicing badly.
If a guy makes a mistake and it costs you, I'm not sure you should be able to sue him.
The other thing that raises prices is insurance that covers everything.
Insurance, as far as I'm concerned, should only be for catastrophic illnesses because take your car in, take your car to the mechanic, and he'll say to you, are you insured?
And you say no.
And he'll say, well, that'll be 50 bucks.
And he'll say, well, wait, I am insured.
Oh, it'll be 400 bucks because nobody cares about taking the money from the insurance companies.
And that's what happens with doctors too.
So there's a lot of things we could do to bring down medical costs.
There are a lot of things we could do to bring down the cost of insurance too by allowing competition across state lines.
There's absolutely no excuse for the federal government to take this over, even though I can see why it's tempting to do it.
But I just don't see why we should live in a socialist society when we know what happens to socialist societies.
Everybody keeps pointing to England.
Their healthcare thing is broke.
You have to wait forever.
Canada, come down here to get good care.
I think that it's going to be unfair.
The rich, they will live and the poor, they will die.
Stuttering and Social Isolation00:05:54
That is the old song.
And it's going to be true that rich people are going to get better health care no matter what.
All right.
From David, Professor Ming the Merciless Claven.
I am a father.
It's the mustache that gave me away.
I am a father of three and have a great relationship with my kids.
They can talk to me about anything.
And my oldest is a daughter, senior in high school, and is likely moving out next year.
She's much more affectionate than I am and seemingly needs warm closeness from her father.
I am quite cold emotionally.
I don't call just to say hi.
I don't hug too much, etc.
She is very worried that if, when she moves out, our relationship will quickly deteriorate into apathy.
What advice can you give me to try and change my coldness to warmness in order to give my daughter the confidence that I will always love her and be there for her?
You know, the old song, love is not something that you feel, it's something that you do.
I don't care whether you change your coldness to warmness.
I care that you get in touch with your daughter on a regular basis and that she knows you will.
I would make a deal with her and tell her that you are going to Skype her at least once a week and maybe text her three times a week.
I don't care if you don't like doing that.
You know, the hell with that.
Do you love your daughter?
Do it.
You know, that's the thing.
You don't have to feel good about it.
It may be hard to schedule.
Do it.
Don't let her go away and don't let her fears be realized and tell her, make a deal with her that her fears will not be realized.
You know, that's what dads do.
Dads show up, right?
You show up.
If your daughter needs you to call her once a week, call her once a week.
That's what dads do.
That answers that question, right?
All right.
Let's see, before I run out of time.
Hello, Andrew.
From Chris, do you think social media is eroding our private lives?
It seems like any good time I have is always undermined by one participant broadcasting it in some way for outside viewership.
There's practically no escaping it.
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I just wanted your input.
No, you're not being paranoid.
Social media, first of all, it's not the media.
It's us.
It's the people.
The media just sits there unless we do stuff with it.
So I always hate it when they say social media is doing this, video games are doing that.
It ain't the media.
It's us.
And like, you know, they always talk about, well, do video games make you violent?
It's like, if you're playing them 12 hours a day, sure, they'll make you anything.
You know, play it a half hour every now and again.
It's not going to hurt you at all.
Same thing with social media.
It is really addictive.
It sets off whatever.
You know what it's like?
It's make-believe fame.
It's make-believe fame.
When people recognize, you know, I mean, one of the things I loved about being a writer is you never got recognized, but now I'm on the camera, so I get recognized.
And you get this little burst of like, oh my goodness, I matter in some way.
I didn't, you know, it's all nonsense, right?
You don't matter anymore than you did the day before.
It's absolutely nonsense.
Twitter does the same thing and all these social media platforms do the same thing.
And they're addictive and people overuse them.
I've talked, mostly it's been girls.
I don't know why, but most of it's been girls where you talk to them and while you talk to them, they're going through their Snapchat thing and they're pressing like, And of course, I think there's a reason it is mostly girls, but I think that, yeah, I think that that is damaging.
I think it's damaging when you go on vacation and every minute has to be broadcast to the world.
I think it's damaging to think that your life matters so much that everybody has to like it.
I think it's damaging not to make your own judgments about things.
I'll tell you how old-fashioned I am.
I think it's damaging to take pictures of things when you can experience them.
I remember I was at a bullfight once and took pictures and I just stopped and I said, I'm never going to go back to this because it's a sadistic mess, but I do want to see it while I'm here.
I believe that we do a lot to separate ourselves from the actual experience of life and social media is part of it.
But again, it's not the media.
It's you.
It's what you're doing.
And you can always turn to your friends, as I do frequently, and say, put that damn thing away.
I'm very annoying about it.
All right.
I'll take one.
Ah, boy, I'm out of time, but I'll take one more quick one.
It's hi, Andrew.
I'm a 20-year-old male college student who has lived with a lifelong stutter.
And it's a very long letter about how painful and difficult a stutter is.
He says, I'm practicing Catholic and I'm currently reading your memoir, The Great Good Thing.
As someone who has had a unique and special road to self-discovery and fulfillment, would you offer any advice into what I may be able to do to improve my situation?
The stutter has basically isolated him.
You know, I had a good friend with a stutter, and it really is painful.
And I don't blame you for, you know, for it's a real situation.
You really do have to have courage to overcome it and to overcome your shyness.
And courage is really the only thing that I can suggest, except for one other thing.
You know, John Glenn, the great astronaut and one of the greatest flyers in the history of aviation, married his childhood sweetheart.
I think her name was Annie.
And she had a terrible stutter and she never wanted to leave.
And he once famously told the vice president of the United States that he couldn't see her because she didn't want to be on television because she had this terrible stutter.
She found a place called the Hollands Communications Research Institute, which didn't get eradicate her stutter, but it really helped her with it.
And it might be worth checking out what they do and whether you can find it in your locality because there are treatments for stuttering that do work.
And it may be that the people you've seen so far haven't been the right ones.
I mean, look, it's painful.
I don't know what to tell you except have courage and do what you can do.
Do as much as you can do to not be isolated and not be alone because of what is essentially an affliction.
But also look into that.
Look at what Annie Glenn did because she had this all her life.
And I think she was in her 50s when she went to this place.
And it's a very touching story that she called home.
She called John Glenn and he burst into tears because suddenly she wasn't stuttering.
She had this really painful stutter.
So there is hope and I hope you'll look it up.
And if you find something that works, I hope you'll write back and let me know.
All right, I'm out of time.
Tickety-boo news.
All right, I have to play this because it is just too good.
Show Us Power00:02:51
The View was making fun of Mike Pence the other day, and Joy Behar said this about his religious life.
One thing to talk to Jesus.
It's another thing when Jesus talks to you.
Exactly.
Okay, well, that's different.
I think that's different.
That's called mental illness, if I'm not correct.
That's called mental illness.
Oprah Winfrey has been asked if she wants to run for president, and this is what she said.
I thought, well, gee, I've never in my life, ever, ever imagined that I would be in politics.
And I've always said, no, Am I supposed to at least look at that question?
Because I had enough people, billionaires, calling me up saying, I can get you a billion dollars.
I can run your campaign.
And I actually went into prayer about it.
Like, God, if you think I'm supposed to run, you got to tell me.
And it has to be so clear that not even I could miss it.
So Joey Blejar has accused Oprah Winfrey basically of being mentally ill.
And I think Joy owes Oprah an apology.
But the reason I bring this up is because the Media Research Center has announced a campaign to hold ABC's advertisers accountable for the anti-Christian bigotry on The View.
Okay, and the View sponsors say they want, you can go on the Media Research Center and they have a link that will go to call the View sponsors and let them know how upset you are about a show that smears Christians as dangerous and mentally ill.
And the reason I bring this up is because all week long we've been listening to people saying they're not going to give NRA people discounts anymore.
And that's pressure coming from the left.
And the interesting thing is FedEx, which has refused to disconnect from the NRA while saying they disagree with them, which is their right, but while refused to disconnect and their business is going up.
We all remember Chick-fil-A when the left tried to pillory them because the owner of Chick-fil-A doesn't approve of gay marriage.
He held his ground.
Now Chick-fil-A is one of the biggest fast food vendors in the country.
The thing is, the thing is the left has more power with these people because the media gives them an echo chamber.
They have more power than they actually deserve.
And I don't think conservatives are always saying, I don't believe in boycotts.
Why not?
Let's show them who has the power because I think we're the ones with the real power.
And I think Joy Behar owes all of us an apology, but I don't see anything wrong in us fighting back if this is the way it's going to go.
You know, I support the NRA and I think that these businesses are just running scared of the press, not of the people.
The people will support their businesses.
They supported FedEx as they supported Chick-fil-A, but they are running scared of the press.
We need to show them who has the real economic clout.
I think it's us.
Andrew Jackson's New Book00:00:47
All right.
Tomorrow, who do we have?
Brian Kilmead from Fox and Friends.
He's going to talk about his new book about Andrew Jackson, which is a really interesting book, by the way.
So be here for that.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show, and I will see you then.
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.