Ep. 478 dissects Connor Lamb’s PA win as a midterm warning, mocking his "fake Republican" act while praising Trump’s Iran deal exit despite Tillerson’s firing. The host links shrinking GOP margins to Trump’s divisive style, contrasts his cautious Russia stance with Tillerson’s hawkishness, and rejects fat pride as a "shame movement." Mailbag debates multiculturalism vs. identitarianism, warns of conspiracy-theory delusions (like MKUltra fears), and urges conservatives to weaponize cultural leverage—from Joy Behar’s apology to Nikki Haley’s potential 2024 run—as a bulwark against societal decay. [Automatically generated summary]
The special congressional election in Pennsylvania is over and it's so close there's sure to be a recount.
But as of right now, Democrat Connor Lamb is the apparent winner by around 700 votes.
The Democrat triumphed in a district Trump won by 20 points and some Republican commentators are seeing trouble in the midterms.
We're all gonna die!
The New York Times, a former newspaper, ran an op-ed reaction to the election saying, quote, it's always hard to read the tea leaves this far out, but the Pennsylvania election clearly indicates that Republicans will soon be washed away by a great flood and then dragged into the unquenchable fires of hell, while Democrats will likely be lifted bodily into the sky where they will dance around the throne of Barack Obama for all eternity while singing holy, holy, holy, as I'm doing right now, unquote.
Barack Obama, of course, was a former president or something.
It's hard to remember now that his legacy has been crushed to a fine powder and blown away by the indifferent winds of history.
Lamb ran as a make-believe Republican, touting his military service and his mildly pro-gun policies in order to get himself into position to vote on every vote exactly as Nancy Pelosi tells him to.
Pelosi, in fact, was delighted by the election and spoke afterward to House Speaker Paul Ryan about her hopes for the upcoming midterms.
I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.
In the Senate, Democrat Chuck Schumer also told his opposite number, Mitch McConnell, that he was pleased with the results.
I will destroy you.
So things aren't looking good.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshaw, hipsy-topsy, the round of zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
It's mailbag day.
It's here at last.
It is mailbag day.
So all the questions that you asked Ben Shapiro in the conversation yesterday, you can now ask me and get the real answers, right?
Meanwhile, when you're done listening to Ben's podcast and my podcast and maybe Knowles' podcast, if you really want to, there is a new one that Wondery is putting up that really is good.
It's called This Is War.
So many of the stories of our veterans now are not really being heard.
This podcast from the Wondery podcast network called This Is War is sharing the personal stories from the brave men and women who serve in our armed forces.
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In the first episode, these are really beautifully produced, by the way.
In the first episode, you'll meet Ian Mearns.
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Wondery is Wonder and then why.
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So have you ever heard one of those guy-girl arguments where the guy keeps saying, you know, it's obvious I'm right.
These are the facts.
And the girl keeps saying, it doesn't matter if you're right.
It's the way you say it.
You're not saying it right.
I don't like the way you're saying it, right?
It drives guys crazy, I know, but it's almost like the country is in the middle of that argument.
And I'm not saying this is all about guys and girls.
I'm just saying it's that kind of argument, because here we have Donald Trump, who is, look, the country is doing great economically.
There's virtually no unemployment.
Black and white black unemployment is as low as it's been in years.
The black-white unemployment employment participation gap has narrowed to its smallest level in 40 years.
And Trump is losing these elections.
I mean, some of these special elections that they're holding, the Republicans are winning.
But the gap that was there that Trump won by is disappearing.
The one in Pennsylvania, they still haven't worked this out yet.
I mean, Cono Lamb is claiming victory, and he does seem to have a few more votes than the Republican.
But this was a place that Trump won by 20 points.
So here is the guy.
This is MSNBC.
And so you'll say, oh, it's the left wing.
But this is basically the common wisdom that's going around about these elections.
This is from Steve Cornacki at MSNBC.
Yeah, this is not an isolated event that we just saw here in Pennsylvania 18.
Look at it this way.
From the start of Donald Trump's presidency, go back to April 2017.
That's when we had our first congressional special election of the Trump era.
You were then in a district in Kansas that Trump had won by 27 points.
In that special election, the Republican won, but the margin fell down to seven points.
This is a pattern we've seen a few times since.
Went out to Montana a couple months later.
Trump had won the state by 21.
The at-large congressional district also falls down to seven.
Again, you're seeing a double-digit swing.
How about South Carolina, the 5th District?
Trump had won it by 19, went all the way down to three in a special election.
You did have Georgia 6 in here.
That's one where Republicans, Trump won narrowly, Republicans won narrowly.
That one's in there as well.
But then, you know, look, you had Alabama.
Trump won the state of Alabama by 28 points.
Doug Jones ends up eking that thing out on election night.
And here we go.
This was Trump by 20.
And this is, you know, basically Democrat by, you know, 0.3.
But you're getting double-digit swings now, excuse me, in five of these congressional senatorial special elections, double-digit swings.
That really looks like a trend.
It does look like a trend.
Now, look, I don't read tea leaves and I don't know the elections can change right away.
I suspect there's going to be some big event in North Korea that could change everything, but I won't predict that because who knows what's going to happen.
Just want to make one thing clear.
I am not talking about morality.
I'm not talking about right and wrong.
I'm not talking about any of that.
I'm talking about strategy, right?
Because I know that a lot of people love the Donald.
They love President the Donald, you know, and like every time I say, well, maybe he shouldn't have done that, I hear from him.
You know, I hear like, oh my gosh, you shouldn't say anything wrong.
Donald is fighting our fight for us.
And, you know, he's got the little people and he's got our backs.
Totally talking about strategy.
I mean, let's talk about yesterday, the Tillerson firing, right?
Apparently, the chief of staff called Tillerson.
Tillerson was suffering from some disease in Africa and said, listen, Trump was going to fire you on Twitter on Friday, but I held him off, but you better come home because things are not looking good.
Tillerson comes back.
This is according to the Washington Post.
And he gets fired by tweet.
And three hours later, Trump calls him up.
So Tillerson gave his talk yesterday.
He responded to being fired.
Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, you know, his mother.
Thanks the director of the movie.
Thanks.
It gives the whole Oscar speech.
Doesn't mention the president of the United States, doesn't mention him once.
So clearly, these two guys do not get along.
Now, Trump was right to fire this guy, right?
They were not getting along.
They didn't agree on major things.
They didn't agree on getting out of the Paris Accord.
I'm much more on Trump's side, by the way.
I don't think Tillerson was doing that good a job.
He spent a lot of his political capital reorganizing the State Department, which maybe it needs, but that's kind of a waste of time.
Tillerson is a man you respect.
He's a man you be.
This is the guy who headed up Exxon, very successful, a man of dignity, head of, you know, he was an Eagle Scout.
He believes in the Boy Scouts, support the Boy Scouts.
He is kind of a Boy Scout.
He's a straight arrow guy.
You don't treat the guy like crap.
And this is the thing that it really does bother me when Trump supporters say this.
Trump goes after Jeff Sessions.
You don't treat Jeff Sessions like that.
You know, you can dislike him.
You can argue with him.
You can fire him.
You can do anything like that.
But you treat him with respect.
The guy has earned that respect.
He is acting as he sees fit.
And a lot of people may say, well, he's doing the wrong thing.
He shouldn't have accused himself on Russia.
But you don't go after him on Twitter.
That's not the way people treat each other.
That is not the way people respect each other.
Again, I don't like it.
I can tell you personally, I think it's awful when people treat each other that way.
But just talking about respect, I mean, just talking about strategy, just talking about strategy, women especially, they go nuts when they see Donald Trump.
And when he behaves this way, it just makes them crazy.
And when he's losing 20 points and doing so well, the economy is doing so incredibly well.
Where's ISIS?
Gone.
Where's the war?
Gone.
You know, North Korea wants to talk to us.
Everything is going great.
Everything Trump is doing is going really, really well.
And people hate him.
And people hate him.
And that's bad, bad strategy.
You know, it really is funny because you talk about Tillerson and the disagreements they had.
But there's also the fact that some of the things that Tillerson supported, Trump wound up doing.
Like take North Korea.
Tillerson has been saying we should be negotiating with North Korea.
And now Trump is going over to negotiate with North Korea.
And Trump, yesterday, he took total, so that was my decision.
My decision, my decision.
But Tillerson has been pushing for that.
So when Tillerson made his speech, he made sure to point out, I mean, this is part of the obvious tension between these two guys.
Tillerson made sure to point out that he'd been partly responsible for that.
This is cut number five.
First, working with allies, we exceeded the expectations of almost everyone with the DPRK maximum pressure campaign.
With the announcement on my very first trip as Secretary of State to the region that the era of strategic patience was over, and we commenced the steps to dramatically increase not just the scope, but the effectiveness of the sanctions.
So the big one that they did disagree on is Tillerson apparently supported the Iran deal.
I cannot understand.
The New York Times hammers this thing with the Iran deal, that Trump is abandoning this wonderful Iran deal.
I do not see how anybody supports this thing.
And Trump is absolutely right about this.
Trump gave a speech on the Iran deal, classic Trump.
This is cut number one.
This is where he stands.
So you can see if you disagreed with him on this, you were going to get fired.
We're also working with allies and partners to block Iran's path to a nuclear weapon and confront its sponsorship of terror and bloodshed all around the world.
Everywhere we go in the Middle East, it's Iran, Iran, Iran behind every problem is Iran.
Well, we're dealing with it in a very serious fashion.
One of the worst deals I've ever seen was the Iran deal.
$150 billion we gave them for what?
For what?
And you know, it's absolutely true.
All this did was delay Iran's nuclear weapons.
And if it delayed them, it may just have delayed them in terms of what we see that people keep saying, yeah, they're following the deal, but they're obviously not following the spirit of the deal.
And they're terrorists.
Who knows what they're doing?
It was a ridiculous deal.
And Obama spent so much of his capital on this thing that he lied.
Vacation Rentals Explained00:03:02
He held up drug investigations.
It's awful.
And I don't know what Tillerson was thinking, but obviously when you have these two guys, some of the things they did were hilarious, like Tillerson calling Trump a moron, which I'm sure actually happened because they asked him about it and he kept saying, Well, I don't want to talk about this silly stuff, you know.
And then the other story, there's actually an entire article in the Wall Street Journal about this, that they're sitting in China at a diplomatic dinner in China and they serve a salad and Tillerson doesn't want the salad and Trump's afraid that they're going to be insulted.
And he says, Eat the salad, Rex.
Apparently, you know, and again, again, you know, here's the thing about Trump.
Somebody said yesterday, one of the hysterics on the mainstream media said that Trump is a sociopath.
He doesn't understand other people's feelings.
That's not true.
I mean, that's absurd.
What he does not seem to understand is that other people have dignity.
He's not the only person who has dignity.
He's not the only person who has a sense of himself.
You know, when people insult him, he says, that's rude.
And then he calls people names.
And I think, like I said, you don't treat a guy like this like that.
It's just not what you do.
And it doesn't come across well if you're just talking pure strategy.
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Putin's Influence Questioned00:07:20
So, you know, again, again, I know people hate it when I when I pick on Trump, Trump's manners.
And I heard yesterday all kinds of conservative commentators trying to excuse him for the way he fired Tillerson.
And I'm not trying to make a tremendous big thing about it, but you could see that Tillerson was really, really ticked off.
And, you know, take a look at this guy, Connor Lamb.
All right.
Now, Connor Lamb, they say he ran as a Republican, but that's not true.
He ran as a fake Republican.
He was an actual Marine, and he did that thing that Democrats always do where they overplay the military thing, like, yes, I accept this mission to run for Congress.
He goes, Yeah, we get it.
You're a Marine.
Thanks for your service.
But what do you believe?
And then he would say things like, well, I'm personally opposed to abortion, which is like great, you know, like as they're ripping the baby to shreds and selling its parts.
Like, thanks.
I'm glad you personally oppose it.
But he wasn't politically opposed to it.
He did say that he was against more gun restrictions.
But you just know all these blue dog Democrats are the same.
Once they get in, they vote.
They're just congressmen, right?
They vote the way the whip tells them to vote.
So they're going to vote with Nancy Felosi on every single important thing.
That's why Trump was calling him Lamb the Sham, because he was just a make-believe Republican.
But listen to the way he speaks.
And he's claiming victory.
The victory is still up in the air because it's so close.
But listen to the way he speaks and compare it to Donald Trump.
People are so tired of the shouting on TV and in our politics.
Come together.
It's amazing what happens when you're in a room with real people who have real aspirations and real troubles.
There's lots of ideas.
There's no angry shouting.
Our job in Congress is to attack the problems, not each other.
People want to be heard.
They want to talk about serious things and honest solutions, not be drowned out by dark money distorting the truth and telling lies to our children.
I'm proud that you helped me refuse corporate PAC money.
You know, it's funny, that dark money thing is always a big issue.
And I remember somebody yelling at me right after the election, Trump won because of dark money.
I mean, Trump spent so much less than Hillary Clinton did.
And the whole dark money issue is really, I feel, an attempt to silence political speech because it sounds great when you say there should be transparency.
But really what that means is if you donate to something and people don't like it, they can boycott your business, which is a terrible thing for you.
You should be able to donate where you want without being exposed all the time.
So the guy is, like, look, this district was redistricted out of existence by a judge.
I don't know if that's going to hold up.
But as of right now, if that holds up, this guy is going to vanish like the district vanishes.
He'll go back to wherever fake Republicans go, you know, and he won't be there anymore.
So this is not a heavyweight result that we all have to worry about in terms of votes.
But I do think there's something to be said for the fact that people are put off by Donald Trump in spite of his incredible successes.
And they are really incredible.
You know, one of the false narratives that's being touted around is that it was really funny because Tillerson worked in Russia for Exxon and Putin gave him some kind of friendship medal and all this, when he was appointed, everybody said, ah, proof at last.
Proof at last that Trump is in collusion with Russia.
He's appointing a Secretary of State who is in the Russian pocket.
He's just, he is Putin's puppet, this guy.
So then, you know, there's this spy thing going on in Britain where this spy, ex-spy was poisoned, obviously, by the Russians.
Teresa May is going out after it.
And Tillerson came out and said, yes, it's the Russians.
Today, yesterday, I mean, Trump also came out and said it did sound like the Russians.
And Trump was actually being kind of reasonable.
Everybody wants him to jump down Putin's throat, including me, for this, because Putin is a murderer, which is a good reason to jump down his throat.
But Trump is waiting to talk to Theresa May in England.
So this is cut seven.
I'm speaking to Teresa May today.
It sounds to me like it would be Russia based on all of the evidence they have.
I don't know if they've come to a conclusion, but she's calling me today.
As you know, now we're going to the wall.
We're going out to the wall.
We're going to be looking at the prototypes, which is very important for our country.
But Teresa May is going to be speaking to me today.
It sounds to me like they believe it was Russia, and I would certainly take that finding as fact.
You believe we should be a responsibility for the United States.
Yeah, as soon as we get the facts straight, and we're going to be speaking with the British today, we're speaking with Teresa May today.
And as soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.
But I have not spoken to her.
I'll speak to her sometime today.
Now, I want to wrap this up so we can get to the mailbag because we have great questions in the mailbag today.
But I just want to finish by Rex Tillerson comes out and he made this statement about Russia, which was much more hard-boiled, much more direct.
I think Trump is right.
He's got to talk to Theresa May before he comes out and says anything exactly.
Putin is hitting back against May and saying he's going to pull out all of British media out of Russia and all this.
But Putin is very good at what he does, which is being a murderous tyrant.
He's really good at it.
He's really good at disassembling whatever hopes the Russians had of freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union.
He has been expert at it.
Barack Obama fell for it.
George W. Bush fell for it.
They've all, you know, remember Hillary Clinton with her reset button.
They all fell for what this guy is doing because they didn't want to start trouble.
They were so happy the Cold War was over.
They were so happy the Cold War was over, they didn't want to start it up again.
But Tillerson has a very, you know, that was one of the things.
The one guy I know who has worked for Tillerson, when he was appointed, I said to him, is he a Russian plant?
He said he knows exactly who these guys are.
And you could hear it in cut number six.
Much work remains to respond to the troubling behavior and actions on the part of the Russian government.
Russia must assess carefully as to how its actions are in the best interest of the Russian people and of the world more broadly.
Continuing on their current trajectory is likely to lead to greater isolation on their part, a situation which is not in anyone's interest.
So the funny thing is, of course, the same exact people who were saying he appointed Trump because he's in Russia's pocket are now saying he fired Trump because he fired he appointed Tillerson because he's in Russia's pocket are now saying he fired Tillerson because he's in Russia's pocket, because Tillerson was too tough on the Russians, so now he's firing him.
So Putin is just like running everything, except you don't know he's doing opposite things.
The one thing I just want to end with this, the one thing about Trump that we really have to think about for a minute is when you think of a bad guy being a politician, a nasty guy being a politician, you think of him being a nasty politician.
In other words, you think of Stalin, you think of Hitler, you think of people who violate the norms of governance, who violate people's freedoms, who violate people's rights.
Trump hasn't been like that at all.
The press keeps calling him authoritarian.
He has actually weakened the executive branch.
He's weakened the government.
He has been less authoritarian than certainly than Barack Obama was with his pen and his phone.
Trump's Uniqueness00:11:09
I have a pen and a phone.
I don't need the lawmakers.
I mean that's authoritarian.
Trump has not been like that at all, but it is possible that he's just a a rude brusque, obstreperous guy who's not violating American norms right, and all I'm saying about that is okay.
So what you know?
So it it lowers the conversation, so it makes the government a little bit chaotic, so it offends the dignity of good men who are serving the country, like Tillerson and like Jeff Sessions.
But also also, we do have to think about this as strategy.
You know, we want to keep winning.
We want to keep the Congress.
We want to for the midterms, if that's possible.
We want to keep the Congress.
We want Trump to get reelected.
I want Mike Pence to be president in the in the election.
After that, you know, you have to wonder about whether, Whether Trump understands.
Look, Trump is obviously some kind of brilliant, instinctive strategist.
You have to wonder if he understands how this comes across to certain people in the country.
All right, let's talk about movement watches.
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All right.
We have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we have the mailbag coming up.
All your questions will be answered.
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Answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
Will change your life for the better.
Who knows?
Let's find out.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com and listen to the rest of the show or subscribe and watch the whole thing.
All right, the mailbag.
Yeah.
All right, from Jesse.
Hello, speaker of truth in dark places and lord of the east coast who went west.
Big fan of your podcast and books.
How do you reconcile your uncomfortableness with Lauren Southern's identity beliefs and your belief that European nations are not creedal, which I believe you explained as France is France because of the French?
And if non-French replaced the French, it would no longer be France.
I hope my question makes sense.
It does make sense, but let me clarify it for anybody who didn't quite get it because that was a long way around.
Basically, I have said that you could make an argument in European countries that some of their culture is race-based.
English is English because they were Angles.
The French are the French because they were the Franks.
The Germans are the Germans, and so on.
And you could argue that these things grew up naturally out of culture and whatever, whatever, more out of culture than of race.
But you could argue that only the people who came from that culture could support that culture.
Whereas in America, we have written down our creed so anybody can join the fund as long as they subscribe, ascribe to the creed.
And so we have no argument.
We have no identitarian argument, as they now call it, which is just bigotry, another fancy word for bigotry.
But all the same, we have no identitarian argument because we've written the creed down.
Anybody can ascribe to it.
Here's the thing.
It's historical, right?
Because after the fall of the Roman Empire, which is where some of their culture came from, and the German tribes did have a tradition of freedom and voting.
And I think they used to vote twice, once drunk and once sober, to make sure they got the same results.
I actually do think that's true.
But the cultures grew up a little bit more like Topsy.
It grew up naturally out of the earth, out of blood and soil, as they say.
And so America was essentially a distillation of those cultures, especially British culture, put into words.
They realized that a new age was beginning, a new country.
How often in the world do civilized men get to form a new country and say, this is what this country is going to be like?
That hadn't really, I can't think of another instance where that happened.
It happened in America.
It was really as if like history had had a new birth, and they took what they had learned from England and Europe generally and they put it into a creed.
That changed the world, right?
So that washed backwards, not only over Europe, but over the whole world.
As I've said before, even the Russians, when they enslaved people, had to pretend they were a republic.
They said we're the union of Soviet socialist republics, even though it was just a gigantic slave state.
They had to pretend they were a federation like America because America had been so successful.
And so it washed back into Europe, where now you will hear Europeans say, well, we're a multicultural country.
I lived in England and they were always saying, the prime minister was always saying, this is a multicultural country.
And I'd look around and think, really?
You know, it looks like a British country to me.
It looks like a bunch of Englishmen running around to me.
But it did wash back and they said, yes, this American idea works so well.
It is the leading idea in the world.
We are the kind of empire of the world at this point.
It has washed backwards.
So they have to decide.
It's not for us to decide.
The European countries have to decide how they feel about this.
Are they ready to establish that what they are now are creedal countries like us, or are they not?
But it's something that they have to decide.
So you can, all I was pointing out was they can make the old argument that we are French, we are France because we're French, where we can't make that argument.
So if they took my advice, they would establish their creed.
The British used to laugh at me.
When I lived in England, they would laugh at me.
Why do you have to have a written constitution?
That's why.
That's why, because we're a bunch of mutts.
We come from all over the place.
We like that we come from all over the place.
We enjoy it.
We enjoy our multicultural life together most of the time when we're not killing each other and when people aren't using it for identity politics, when we're left alone, we do have a successful melting pot.
That's a good model.
They could take up that model, but they have to take it up.
You can't just sit around talking about who we are.
That's not who we are.
You have to know what you believe.
We do.
Do they?
That's the question.
So, you know, yeah, Lauren Southern can go over there and sell, you know, identitarian politics, or her friends can, but they have to decide for themselves if that's what they believe in.
All right.
John Lindell, clairvoyant Clavin, sayer of sooth.
Do you see a President Haley in our future?
I feel that she could revitalize conservatism and attract tons of new voters.
I'm actually not clairvoyant.
I could really see her becoming the first female president.
She's doing such a good job at the UN.
So I could see that happening.
All right, from Colin, dear Zionist over Lord Clavin, that's sarcastic.
All right, this is very long, and I'm going to try and edit it as I read it.
I honestly think the fat pride movement has a bit of a point on some things, which of course their suggestion that severe obesity is a healthy lifestyle is absurd, and their demands that everyone find them attractive, childish.
I think I honestly agree with them on their view of beauty standards in the West.
It seems to me that the idea of trying to attract a mate is a false and animalistic view of what love is.
And in my experience, choosing to love someone makes all their qualities and physical attributes perfect to you because you love each other.
It also makes me think that the political rights common response to the fat pride movement of you're ugly, go lose some weight, is counterproductive and destroys a woman's self-confidence.
So basically, the question is, what do you think of this?
And what's your opinion in general on the fat pride movement?
First of all, I completely agree with you.
I completely agree that standards of beauty have become absurdly limited.
and anybody, there are plenty of women who would be considered overweight who I find incredibly attractive.
And yes, you are right when you fall in love with women, they become attractive.
And I think that, you know, that it is absurd to think that every woman can only be produced either by surgery to look the way she looks or like a million hours of exercise.
Not every woman has to look like that.
Women in the old days didn't look like that, and I don't think they have to now.
So I think you're absolutely right about that.
The problem with, you know, obviously obesity, which is a huge problem in this country, and people never talk about it because it doesn't affect the coasts.
That's why you don't hear enough about it.
In New York and LA, people are super thin.
You go out to the rest of the country, there's a lot of obesity, and obesity isn't good for you.
The fat pride movement, like all pride movements, is garbage, okay?
This is the thing.
So this has nothing to do with people, you know, or you may be a little overweight.
You may be whatever.
People should leave you alone.
Other people's weight is none of your business anyway.
All pride movements are shame movements.
Black pride, gay pride, fat pride, they are all movements of people who are ashamed of something, who are trying to get rid of their shame by forcing you to like them.
The shame is internal, but they have taught themselves or been taught that it's coming from outside.
That is a recipe for misery.
If you need the approval of people around you before you can be happy with yourself, that is a recipe for misery because there are always going to be people who dislike you and they may dislike you for good reason.
You have to look within and ask yourself what you are actually ashamed of.
You don't have to tell fat people that they should lose weight.
They know that already.
They're having a problem.
You know, if they're really obese, they're having a problem with food.
And it's really hard to break the food addiction because you can't, it's like I broke an addiction to smoking because you don't have to smoke, but you have to eat.
So once, you know, once you start eating, it's hard to stop.
So the thing is, the pride movement is ridiculous.
You have to look within yourself.
What are you ashamed of?
How can I change it?
Obviously, I feel that it's orienting yourself to the North Star, which is God and Christ.
And when you do that, you stop feeling ashamed.
You feel better and better and better.
You cannot get rid of your shame by forcing other people to pretend they like you.
It never works because the shame is within you.
So fat pride has nothing to do with the issue.
Obviously, we should definitely expand our ideas of what's attractive and stop picking on people.
From Janine, hey, Andrew, I am hooked on the Shotgun Alley series.
Joy's Apology Approach00:13:51
Oh, these are my, I have a trilogy of books called the Weiss Bishop books.
They're Dynamite Road, Shotgun Alley, and Damnation Street.
And I'm very proud of them, I have to say.
So as it says, I'm hooked on the Shotgun Alley series.
Can't quit listening.
When you talk about the investigator inserting himself into the story, the author, there's an author character.
The story is it's a detective agency and a lover of detective stories comes to work at the detective agency as a glorified secretary and he starts writing the novels.
So the books that you're reading are his creation of what he's actually seen.
He's asking me if that narrator is based on me.
No.
I am extremely good at writing characters that people think are me.
It's just a talent I have.
Somebody is always reading a character, especially the nasty characters.
I don't know why, especially the real bastards, you know, I mean, the real guys who like people, I'll have guys who are like, you know, sexual murderers and they'll say, is that you?
Yes, that's me.
That's what I do, you know.
It's like for some reason, people read my characters and they think they're me.
I take that as a compliment.
But no, I mean, obviously they're a relation.
He goes to the same college I went to.
He loves mystery stories.
So there's always some kind of parallel, but he is not really like me.
All right.
Good series, though.
I actually am quite proud of that.
Josh, wise Master Clavin.
This is also very long and I will try and keep it ash cut cut it down.
Recently, my sister has told me about some of her extensive beliefs in topics such as MKUltra, Project Monarch, and governmental connection to extraterrestrials.
Monarch and MKUltra are conspiracy theories that the CIA controlled people's minds, okay?
She says, I was, I'm sorry, this is from Josh.
He says, I was raised as a Christian, and over the last few years, I've become more and more convinced of the truth of my faith in part because of you, so thank you.
As my sister told me about some of these beliefs of hers, I could not help but feel she has lost complete touch with reality.
She says some of her beliefs are so outlandish, and there seems to be no firm base for her to hold up these beliefs, such as reason and logic, because even your thoughts and memories, she believes, even your loved ones, could be manipulated by the mysterious they according to her beliefs.
She has seemingly become more intense with her desire to warn me.
She believes there are implants in her body and probably in mine and almost everyone else's.
She doesn't want me to see the doctors, have my kids vaccinated, and even caution me about having my mom watch my kids alone as she believes she may play a part in implanting these mind-controlling devices.
Please help.
I do not know what to do in this situation.
I don't blame you.
All right.
First, I'm not a doctor.
I mean, very important that I say this, and I don't know this person, so I'm going only off what is in your letters.
If this were me and somebody I loved were telling me this, I would be deeply concerned about this person's mental health.
I don't know how old your sister is.
If she is a younger person, this is when diseases like schizophrenia and paranoid schizophrenia appear, and they can cause you to have these belief systems that are impervious to logic because they take away all the things that logic is composed of, like induction, like free thought, all those things that make for a reasonable argument.
It outstrips those arguments, so you can never argue with them.
If I were you, I have to say, in this situation, if it's as bad as it sounds here, I would contact, you know, when I worked on a suicide hotline, essentially, they had references.
You could go to, one of them was called the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
And they have lots and lots of things that can help you deal with this and possibly help her.
It may not be possible to get her to see somebody.
It may not, but you have to deal with it because what she's talking about is seriously bad stuff.
This is not something like, oh, if I can just find the right argument, she'll go like, oh, of course.
You know, this is something that is obviously hooked into her head and very hard to get rid of.
And it could be trouble.
I don't blame you for being worried about it.
I would contact the experts NAMI.
It's called N-A-M-I, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
From Aaron, hello, great sage of the written word.
While listening, how do these guys get my business cards?
I don't know.
While listening to your Monday podcast, you talked early on in the stream.
You made a point of defending Trump.
A thought seized me, and I would like your thoughts on that.
The thought is, Trump, is Trump our Clinton?
That is to say, is President Trump curving the grading of what Republicans will accept as public officials?
Well, yeah, this is what I'm worried about.
This is what I'm talking about all the time.
This is why I feel that even though we should support Trump and I don't pick on him every time he says something or, you know, and I get the whole thing where he attacks the press, I find hilarious.
The whole thing where he violates norms of political correctness, I think is actually a positive thing, even though I wouldn't do it.
I think it actually is a positive thing.
But this is why you do have to stop and think, well, wait, wait, are there certain things we're not ready to give up, like our principles, like our good manners, like our sense of respecting other people?
Because then, then down the road, what happens to us is what happened to Clinton, what happened to Hillary Clinton.
When you go back to Hillary Clinton, she says, I'm a feminist icon.
You say, yeah, well, where were you?
When were you a feminist icon when you were hounding the women who were accusing your husband of rape and molestation?
How are you a feminist icon?
You sacrifice too much.
The feminists during the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky thing, they lost all their moral sway, all their moral power, if they had any to begin with, because they threw away their principles.
And I don't want to sacrifice present victories for possible future disasters, right?
I want the present victories.
I don't want to sacrifice them for things that might happen.
But I do want to hold on to myself.
I do want to hold on to my own virtues.
I do want to hold on to my own principles so that later on I can say, yes, I didn't sacrifice my principles.
I understood that Trump did bad things, but he also did good things.
And this is where I stood.
And, you know, obviously, obviously the left is going to say whatever they're going to say, but at least I want to feel that I did the right thing all along the way and was saying the things that I truly believe.
From Benjamin.
Andrew, I'm 23 and getting married in November.
One of the things I'm anxious about is having children in a few years in this horrible culture.
How do I raise my future children to have good values and appreciate good and virtuous art without being completely socially alienated?
First of all, never be afraid to have children.
Or put it another way, be afraid to have children because they're a tremendous responsibility.
Then have them.
We need more children.
Children are like guns.
We need a lot of them to stay free.
We need people like you to be having children.
When you create a family, you are also creating a culture.
And if that culture is a joyful culture, obviously it's not always going to be happy because sad things will happen.
But if it's a joyful culture, if you are with your wife because you enjoy being married and she takes joy in you with all your flaws and you take joy in her with all her flaws and you take joy in your children, then you're going to have this joyful household and the culture that you create in this household is going to have tremendous appeal.
It's going to be a powerful thing because people are going to, you know, your kids are going to say, hey, you know, that is very cool.
If you're saying like, if all you're saying is no, no, no, don't do that, that's evil, that's evil, that's evil, then, you know, you're not going to be giving them a world of joy of positive influences that is going to battle the culture outside.
It's perfectly okay to make your point about the culture outside and even to forbid things, especially to younger children that you don't want them to see.
Even homeschooling them is, as far as I'm concerned, it can be a really wise move.
But the most important thing you're going to do is pour the love and joy and show them that your way of life is a joyful way of life.
And when they look around and see their friends taking drugs and looking like idiots, and when they see them, you know, going off and becoming radicalized and being miserable, it's not going to have all that appeal to them.
You will have a lot more strength.
Listen, as you go along the way, kids are going to believe all kinds of things, but joy is a powerful weapon.
So when you have those kids, and I'm telling you, have kids.
When you have children, the world becomes three-dimensional.
When you have children, you suddenly say, oh, I thought I was living in a three-dimensional world, but it was actually an illusion.
Now I see the meaning of life.
And it will teach you as much as it teaches them.
But again, that is the way you combat the culture.
You combat the culture by creating an internal family culture of love and joy.
Gee, I'm running out of time.
All right, I'm going to stop.
All right.
Let's go to tickety-boo news.
So, I'm sorry, I just ran out.
I was having such a good time doing the mailbag.
I could do the mailbag all the whole show, could be the mailbag, but I just lost track of time.
So here is something that is actually, I think, a really positive development.
Joy Behar on The View, who to me is just, she's a dope.
I mean, I just find her to be a dope.
But she said something about Mike Pence and his Christianity that was genuinely offensive.
And let's play the original, what she originally said.
Do we have that?
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 mental illness, if I'm not correct.
If I'm not mistaken, she meant to say, but she was mistaken.
And real credit to the Media Research Center.
It's one of our favorite sites here.
We use their videos all the time.
I don't always give them credit because it just slows things down.
But the Media Research Center does wonderful work keeping track of the mainstream media and their biases.
And they just mounted a campaign to get her to apologize to Pence and to all Christians because it's a stupid, insulting thing to say.
Pence got into the act.
And first, the, what is it, ABC, the head of ABC said, well, she apologized to me.
And that was like, yeah, that's not exactly it.
So then Pence got into the act and says, yeah, said, yes, she does an apology.
And Joy Behar called, we like to call him, we shorten his name to Mensch because he is basically my favorite guy in the administration.
So Mensch goes on TV and says, yes, he did get a private call of apology.
You know, I give Joy Behar a lot of credit.
She picked up the phone.
She called me.
She was very sincere and she apologized.
And one of the things my faith teaches me is grace.
Forgive as you've been forgiven.
So does mine, but I'm not as good at it as you.
Look, but I said to Joy, of course I forgive you.
That's part of my faith experience.
But I did encourage her, and I'm still encouraging her, to use the forum of that program or some other public forum to apologize to tens of millions of Americans who were equally offended by what she makes me question the sincerity of it.
So on the view, they played what I just played, and now Joy Behar delivered this incredibly heartfelt, lengthy, and extensive apology.
So I think Vice President Pence is right.
I was raised to respect everyone's religious faith, and I fell short of that.
I sincerely apologize for what I said.
Okay.
She should have added, and screw you, because that's obviously what she was thinking.
So it was a graceless apology, but it wasn't an apology.
The point that I want to make here, by the way, is led by the Media Research Center, conservatives used some of their social might to get her to do that.
She obviously didn't want to do it.
She resisted it for a long time.
She should have done it the day after.
Anybody can say a dopey thing.
And, you know, I really don't believe in outrage, constant outrage, and all this.
And I don't believe in constantly making everything into a cause celeb.
But conservatives have got to understand that we are now the revolution.
We are the revolution.
We are in the minority.
We are fighting for American traditions that were good, that worked.
The reason these traditions were tossed aside is because the left made the argument, the stupid argument, that people had been excluded from our traditions.
That was true.
So the answer is to include them in the tradition.
That's true.
But the left's argument has become, you excluded them, therefore the tradition is wrong.
So we have to get rid of the tradition itself.
We are fighting for our lives, for our country.
We have to pick up the phone.
We have to use our economic might.
You saw what happened with the NRA, a little bit of pressure, a little bit of pressure, and all these companies started to cave.
But when you stand up to them, you thrive financially.
When people stand up to the anti-gun people, they thrive.
When Chick-fil-A stood up to the pro-gay marriage people and said, no, we have the right to our opinion, they thrive.
So we have to make people understand that you thrive when you are just the NFL.
That's what I liked about Trump attacking the NFL when the players refused to stand for the national anthem.
He's right about this.
Trump is right about this.
These things matter.
Our culture matters.
Getting people to respect our culture matters.
Getting people to respect the way our culture was built, which is through Christianity, matters.
This was a good thing.
And even Joy Behar's graceless and obviously reluctant apology is a victory.
And I think good for the Media Research Center and good for Mike Pence for standing up for the things that people believe.
All right, who's going to be on tomorrow?
Do we know?
It's up in the air.
It's up in the air.
We're juggling.
We got a couple of different choices, but both of them, I know who they are, and both of them are really good.
So there will be a great guest tomorrow.
I will be my own guest, and that will be fantastic.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
will see you tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Tomorrow's Guest00:00:19
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.