Ep. 481’s Has Freedom Lost Its Way? pits Andrew Clavin against Western decline, branding Putin a "murderous gangster" (77% election fraud) while defending Trump’s fracking policies as anti-Russia. He ties Britain’s grooming gangs (Telford case) to police complicity and far-left violence, then dismisses Trump-Hitler comparisons as leftist hysteria, framing 2016 as "fire vs. crap." Capitalism is hailed over Venezuela’s collapse, but Clavin warns secularism erodes meaning—arguing Christianity alone justifies free will against Pinker’s reason. The episode ends with a moral crusade: freedom’s survival hinges on rejecting both authoritarianism and godless materialism. [Automatically generated summary]
Sometimes in the battle between left and right, we forget to listen to one another.
We conservatives, for instance, we look at our brothers and sisters on the left and think, what a bunch of hateful, small-minded, dishonest, un-American, regressive knuckleheads trying to force their nonsensical, atheistic, self-serving, dishonest, hateful, un-American agenda on people who reject their mindless, stupid, cliched slogans and idiotic, ill-thought-out, small-minded, unrealistic theories.
And instead of opening up meaningful dialogue with these name-calling, sloganeering, poorly dressed, crypto-racist, fat-headed communists, we can do nothing but hurl insults at them for their idiotic, nasty, mean-spirited, unpatriotic, destructive philosophy.
So let's get started.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's Tuesday, and you know what that means.
It means tomorrow is Wednesday, and that means it's mailbag day.
So what you want to do is you want to go on thedailywire.com, hit the podcast space right up at the top, and then hit my podcast and hit the mailbag on my podcast and send in your questions.
You can ask anything you like, personal questions, political questions, religious questions.
Answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
You have to subscribe if you want to ask a question.
So while you're on thedailywire.com, send us 10 bucks.
For 10 bucks, we'll give you a full month subscription.
For a lousy 100 bucks, we'll give you the whole year.
Plus, we'll send you the famous, it's now world famous, leftist tears tumbler, which as I speak, fills up magically with leftist tears, which will cure your skin diseases and other various ailments that people have.
So you want to subscribe.
Also, I forgot yesterday to pay tribute to our own Austin Stevens.
That's his last name, right?
Because who knows who the hell no, we never see him.
Austin works behind the scenes here.
We have no idea what he does, but he goes back there and I guess they pay him.
I don't know why, but there he is.
But he ran the LA Marathon, which I have to say is pretty amazing.
Los Angeles Marathon.
Can you speak?
What was your time?
442.40?
That's a good time.
He actually ran.
You know, I mean, it's funny, the videotape only shows him at the beginning and the end.
In the between, we can't find him, so we're not sure.
He may have taken a car the rest of the way.
And what was the charity you were running for?
Team World Vision, which sends, you know, gives fresh water to kids in Africa.
And excellent.
Good job, Austin.
We knew you did something.
Now we know you run around.
And for those of you who'd like to do something useful with your life, you can use Skillshare.
Skillshare is a platform, an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in all kinds of things.
They've got classes in design, business, technology, and more.
I've used them.
What they are is a series of videos where an expert will teach you about all, you know, just any kind of thing you might want to learn if you want to enhance your own professional skills or if you want to go off and do something as a hobby.
I took a look to test them for you.
I took a look and tested their writing ones because I've made a good living as a writer.
I thought, let's see if this is good advice.
It was excellent advice.
And then I went back to them when we were doing the podcast Another Kingdom to get some advice on that.
That also was excellent.
So what you want to do is you can join, as millions of students have already used this Skillshare, and you can join them with a special offer for my listeners.
You get two months of Skillshare for just 99 cents, which really is virtually nothing, right?
Two months for 99 cents.
Skillshare is offering the Andrew Clavin Show listeners two months of unlimited access to over 18,000 classes for just 99 cents.
Classes in graphic design, social media marketing, illustration, mobile photography, anything you really want to know about.
Sign up.
Go to skillshare.com slash Andrew.
Go to skillshare.com slash Andrew.
Two months for 99 cents.
Skillshare.com slash Andrew.
Vladimir Putin: The Czar of Murder00:09:11
So I got to talk about something serious today because, you know, Putin, Vladimir Putin won his election.
So I think it's his fourth term of six years.
Basically, he's the czar.
And as I've said before, he is a murderous gangster.
There's no two ways about this.
For a while, he was killing so many journalists who exposed his nefarious doings that I think Russia was the third most dangerous country on earth to be a journalist in after like Iran and one other not unsavory place.
There's all kinds of rumors about the way he killed his way to the top, setting off bombs.
I mean, some of this stuff hasn't been proven, but setting off terrorist attacks and then blaming Chechens and showing himself to be a strong man.
And certainly he has messed with our election system and made everybody hysterical here, although I'm not sure whether that's his fault or the people who are hysterical.
But, you know, everybody's talking about Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Russia, Donald Trump, Russia.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead, who now has a column and is an absolutely terrific addition to the Wall Street Journal column family, wrote this piece where he said he was talking about Putin.
And, you know, Putin won this election by 77%.
And they report it, you know, he is popular.
He has improved the economic life of the country, but he is also an authoritarian SOB.
You know, and it's a gangsterocracy where they sold off the state holdings that had been accumulated by communism.
They sold that off to a bunch of oligarchs who now are dependent on Putin.
You know, if you have a business and he decides you've gotten too much business, they come in and arrest you for absolutely nothing, confiscate your business, take it away.
That's what living in Russia is like.
So Walter Russell Mead writes about when they're blaming Trump, he says, you know, President Obama read beautiful speeches about the responsibility to protect the inviability of international borders, the arc of justice, and the evils of chemical weapons.
But while he was making those pretty speeches, Vladimir Putin merrily conquered Crimea, invaded Ukraine's Donbass region, helped Bashar Assad fight one of the ugliest and deadliest campaigns since World War II, regained Russia's position in the Middle East that Leonid Brezhnev had lost for the Soviets in the 1970s, and used the hapless Secretary of State John Kerry as a diplomatic punching bag.
Meanwhile, his agents revived old Cold War networks in Europe, used Russian finance as an instrument of subversive state power, and helped plunge the U.S. into a profound crisis of self-doubt by meddling in our 2016 presidential campaign.
And it isn't just Mr. Putin, he goes on.
The trio of revisionist powers includes Russia, China, and Iran, along with camp followers like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Syria.
Together, they have upended the global balance of power.
And China, of course, is thrilled.
They sent there, you know, while everybody in the West was going, great, you know, Putin won, you know, kind of sending him these muted congratulations.
President Xi Jinping said his country's partnership with Russia was at its best level in history.
And of course, Xi has just become basically the czar of China.
So that's a huge amount of landmass that is now run by basically a tyrant, is run by a king.
It's a lot of spaces.
And then you have, of course, you have all the trouble in the Middle East and all the fat cats, you know, fat rulers in the Middle East sitting on all the wealth there.
But then you have Western Europe, which is in some ways even more troubling because Western Europe, you know, Russia and China have never had histories of freedom.
But Western Europe, of course, was the cradle of modern liberty.
And they are basically allowing their country to be swept away under this onrush of Islamic immigration.
And you can say, you know, it's not as bad as it looks over here.
Now, that's one of the things I've learned about traveling in the world.
When you read about other countries in the paper, it looks like the sky is falling, but when you get over there, life is continuing as normal.
It's just that these troubles are haunting the place.
But when I look at this Telford thing that is now coming out, another city in Britain where Muslims were allowed to groom, as they put it, hundreds and hundreds of young non-Muslim girls for sex slavery.
You know, I'm sorry to lead with this, but it really is important because I want to just show, you know, as tyranny is coming back into play in Russia.
Now, remember, we have this like little 10-year window after the Soviet Union fell where there was a chance for Russia to be free.
That has fallen apart under Putin.
China looked like it was liberalizing.
Their economy was doing so well.
Now that's disappearing under Xi.
And I know that people keep telling me that the economy in China is going to take over the world.
I'm not so sure because I'm not so sure you can run a tyrannical and capitalist economy.
I'm not so sure it's not a paper tiger, a paper dragon underneath it all.
But still, the economy is doing well right now.
And it doesn't really, how can I put this?
It doesn't really matter if your economy is doing well if you're not free.
But here in England, the cradle of our freedom, I mean, just the place where modern freedom and the modern idea of freedom was born, they had this horrible thing where they let these girls get groomed for sex slavery, young girls up to as young as 11, and didn't do anything about it because the police did not want to be seen, the authorities did not want to be seen as racist.
They're so hamstrung by this idea that they could be racist that they let this happen.
I just want you to listen to this.
This is tough to listen to.
It's about a minute plus long.
This is a girl on the BBC telling what it was like when these clowns did this to her.
It is worth hearing.
But it quickly moved on to being sold onto men every single day.
So I'd be being sold maybe two or three times a night, taken into the only thing I can describe as a rape house, which was set up for the purpose of young girls being sold to men.
The reason why I kept going back was they were threatening me with burning my house down, which was a real threat in Talfin because that had actually happened previously.
And they would say to me they would rape my mum and rape my sisters.
And they knew all about my family.
Yeah, there was just no escape at all.
I was gang raped just after I turned 16.
And that was probably the worst, the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Sorry.
You don't need to apologise.
No way.
And after that, I tried to commit suicide.
And people would say to me, was that a cry for help?
And I would say, no, I genuinely wanted to die because I thought that was the only way, the way out.
I was in cars that were stopped and searched by the police with older men and never questioned why I was in there or who I was.
My name was never asked.
And I just think if they'd been more proactive at points like that, Things could have changed earlier.
But they wouldn't move.
They wouldn't act.
I mean, in this, if a society's first obligation isn't to protect its young women, its young people, you know, I don't know what it is.
So you're talking about a kind of failure of nerve in the West as the rest of the world is going under, is falling under this authoritarian, these authoritarian regimes.
I just want to read one other survivor.
This is not graphic, but she talks about the fact, she says, they made it clear that because I was non-Muslim and not a virgin, and because I didn't dress modestly, that they believed I deserved to be punished.
They said I had to obey or be beaten.
It's another sex slave, essentially.
And she says, Islamophobic online hate and personal attacks occur every day.
And in response, anti-fascist groups in the far left carry out their own violent attacks on groups they perceive to comprise white supremacists or Nazis.
As someone who has experienced life inside a grooming gang, I can tell you with certainty that none of this is likely to make any difference to the behaviors of the groomers.
Like terrorists, they firmly believe that the crimes they carry out are justified by their religious beliefs.
If anything, rising anti-Muslim hate will probably make groomers stronger in their convictions and drive ordinary young Muslim men towards fundamentalism, grooming gangs, and terrorism.
The camaraderie, protection, money, and kudos that these groups offer makes them a strong pull for anyone.
Worryingly, several young men I have spoken to joke that being a gangster and going to jail are their life goals.
You know, what it is, is like that, it's like that Yeats poem: the best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.
So while you have these Muslims doing these horrible things, you have Muslim hate groups, people who hate Muslims, fighting with leftists who hate everybody, and they're fighting it out, and that doesn't help anything.
Blue Apron Delivery00:02:18
That's why you see a lot of women now.
There's an article someone sent me yesterday: a lot of women escaping from Sweden to Hungary.
Okay, think about that for a minute.
They're escaping the rapes, the Muslim rapes in Sweden to go to Hungary because Hungary won't allow, you know, the Eastern Europe is not allowing the same level of Muslim immigration.
But of course, in Hungary, too, there's rising anti-Semitism.
So the same people who are saying, no, Islamists, welcome, are also saying we don't like Jews.
I mean, it's kind of a complex.
It's part of the same mindset.
We're going to get back to this in a minute, but first, let's talk about something more cheerful.
Because here, we're still doing great, and you can get good food delivered to your door through Blue Apron.
Blue Apron is the leading meal kit delivery service in the U.S.
And while many people know what they do, many people don't know about the types of meals you eat.
I have ordered a lot of them, and what happens is they come to your door, they're delivered to your door as ingredients with a card that tells you how to make them.
You then sit and drink a glass of wine while your wife makes them.
Or you may do things differently in your house.
But in my house, I watch my wife make them.
And when she is finished, it is a fancy restaurant-level meal.
Blue Apron is the number one fresh ingredient and recipe delivery service in the country.
Blue Apron's mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone.
And they offer three plans.
They have the two-person meal plan, the family meal plan, and the wine plan, six bottles of wine from renowned winemakers delivered monthly.
That sounds good.
I haven't done that one yet, but that sounds terrific.
And the upcoming meals, you know, the meals change all the time, and you can give them feedback and they'll listen.
It's got a lot of variety, a lot of flexibility.
Let me just read you some of the stuff they have.
Quick bucatini, pan-fry, chicken breast, parmesan, crusted steaks with mashed potatoes and broccoli.
Like I said, these are restaurant-level meals that you can cook at home.
Blue Apron is treating my listeners to $30 off your first order.
It's like free food.
What do we have to do to get people to try this out?
Tell them, go to blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
Tell them I sent you so they will remain our sponsors and you will be happy with what you get.
BlueApron.com slash Andrew.
Check out this week's menu.
Get $30 off at blueapron.com slash Andrew.
It is a better way to cook.
Why We Left Wondery00:15:21
So Brett Stevens, the formerly conservative columnist from the Wall Street Journal, who has now gone over to the New York Times and has breathed in, the Kool-Aid, you don't have to drink the Kool-Aid there, you just breathe it in.
And Stevens hates Trump so much that he's become kind of a weird columnist at some time.
And he wrote this column about the rise of what he calls Euro-Putinism.
And I didn't really like the column that much.
It reminded me of Zeth Rogan and This is the End.
Remember the Apocalypse.
I love that comedy, this apocalyptic comedy.
And Zeth Rogan says, I'm gluten-free.
And the other guy says to him, You don't even know what gluten is.
And Rogan says, Gluten is everything bad.
So as with gluten, so with Putin.
Brett Stevens, kind of any movement that he dislikes, he sees as helping Putin.
But he ends this column with some great paragraphs, which I will read.
He says, Europe's larger problem in the face of Putin's serial aggressions isn't a dismaying and potentially compromised U.S. president.
It isn't the methods the Kremlin has used to subvert Western democracies, the troll farms, propaganda channels, email hacks, rental protests, or loans to extremist parties.
And it isn't a matter of ideology either.
The Kremlin is as happy to ally itself with fascists as with communists, techno-anarchists, or radical environmentalists.
The deeper reason Putin seduces is that he believes in the principle of power.
He acts.
The uses of his power are mainly wicked, but wickedness at least is a quality, particularly when it is wedded to political efficacy, personal forcefulness, and the appearance of great cunning.
And here's the graph that really grabbed me.
He said, compare that to the last decade or so of European leaders.
David Cameron, Matteo Renzi, Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean-Claude Junker, even Angela Merkel.
What did any of them stand for?
What did any of them stand for?
What in their personalities was anything other than feckless and pallid?
Who among them would pull a trigger for their country's preservation or even for their own?
How many of them will be remembered in 20 years' time?
Vladimir Putin is a criminal president who poses a clear and present danger to democratic society, but nobody can accuse him of being feckless or pallid or unwilling to pull a trigger.
I mean, this is what we're talking about when we're talking about the Islamist invasion of Western Europe, that people will literally sit there and let their little girls get raped in order not to show themselves to be bigoted.
And there is bigotry in the opposition to Islam.
There is, you know, I mean, it's not people that I protest against.
It is the beliefs of certain Islamists, the belief of certain strand of Islam that allows them to do this.
And if you allow a lot of Islamists in your country without vetting them very, very carefully, you are going to get a lot of this coming in.
And you have a right to protect your creed.
You have a right to protect your nation.
You have a right to protect the ideas that have made the West so great.
And that is what brings us back here to America and to Trump.
And the question is: how does Trump fit in?
I know Brett Stevens thinks, oh, he's just another authoritarian.
You know, he's another strong man, another guy willing to step.
Well, what does he stand for?
You know, that's what Stevens thinks.
You know, so far, I don't see it.
So far, I don't see it.
And I have been absolutely gobsmacked by the way Trump has inspired a level of hatred on the left and foul, nasty rhetoric.
I mean, it is just from the very beginning.
This is from the very beginning.
You know, I looked at the election in a certain way.
I didn't like Trump.
I was very much opposed to him during the primaries.
Once he became the candidate and I compared him to Hillary Clinton, I took a long, long time to think it over before I decided, you know, I have to vote for Donald Trump.
And so far, I've been really happy that I did.
So far, Trump has been obstreperous, chaotic.
He does a lot of crazy things, but his policies have been great.
And I don't even, half the time, I don't even like to talk about persons.
I like to talk about policies because that's what really matters.
But I looked at the election like a maze.
Think of it this way.
You're in a maze and you can only go forward, right?
It's like a fantasy maze.
The maze disappears in back of you.
You can only go forward.
And of course, as you go through a maze, you've taken some wrong turns and you don't know where you are and you're lost.
And you come to a wall and you can only go left or right.
And to the left is a pit of fire.
And to the right is a corridor filled with crap.
Okay.
And so the intellectuals are saying, you know, oh, I can't step in crap.
You know, this, you know, metaphysically, when you think about it, it's not a binary decision.
You think like, well, wait, I'm standing at a wall.
I can only turn left to right.
I can't go back.
It's a binary decision.
And, you know, the intellectuals say, well, if we walk into the pit of fire, we'll always be able to put the ashes back together again.
You go, you know, and then you've got the moralists who say, well, once you step in crap, once you step in crap, there's no going back.
It's crap all the rest of the way.
And then, you know, I'm saying like, well, it's a maze, right?
Once we go, maybe we can still make decisions.
As long as we haven't been burned up, we can make decisions turned left and right.
And of course, the mob, there's a lot of people going like, hooray, crap.
And so it's a very complex thing.
It's a complex thing.
What I said is, no, I'll take the right turn.
I'll take the right turn.
I'll wade through the crap.
And then we'll make decisions as we go and hopefully find our way back to our principles and back to our freedoms.
But the left immediately, as they always did, always do, they reacted to Trump.
What's their mantra?
What's their mantra of any right-wing president?
Bush is Hitler.
They're all Hitler.
John McCain may be the only guy they didn't say was Hitler, but Trump is Hitler.
I'll get back to that for a minute.
But I want to talk for another second about Wondery.
We were talking about their new This Is War podcast.
Wondery is a great place to go for podcasts, I know, because they ran my podcast, Another Kingdom, at Wondery, which was really, really helpful.
Now they have a new one that is about work.
And this is something, I mean, obviously we all have to work and we all deal with work.
Here at the Daily Wire, we have, you know, problems like Michael Knowles.
You know, I was like, what to do?
Do we kill him or just maim him?
You know, I mean, we have these questions we have to ask.
Like when we're sexually harassing women, do you chase them around the desk clockwise or counterclockwise?
These are the things that the Daily Wire we deal with.
Probably at your office, you have other problems.
But the thing is, what do you do?
Who do you ask for advice, right?
So the new podcast from Wondery is called Safe for Work, and it's hosted by a former CMO of Nike and a former lawyer.
They take your questions and calls and give you advice to help you find happiness in the workplace.
No matter how big or small your questions might be, Safe for Work is there for you.
So go and subscribe and listen to Safe for Work on Apple Podcasts, wherever you're listening to this right now, wherever you get your podcast.
Or head to wondery.fm slash clavin.
That's wondery, wonder with a Y at the end.
Wondery.fm spelled FM slash Clavin.
And you say, yes, yes, I know how to spell FM, but how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-M.
Wondery.com slash Clavin.
Safe for Work, a really interesting new program that will answer your questions.
Not the ones we're asking here, because you probably work at a much more savory place.
I should probably say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, should I not?
I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube and cast you out into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But if you come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe, you can be in tomorrow's mailbag.
Go on over there, subscribe, lousy 10 bucks for a month.
Plus, all your problems will be solved.
All you got to do is hit the podcast button, the Andrew Clavin podcast, and the mailbag.
Type in your questions.
I will answer them.
Answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
Will change your life sometimes for the better.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So let me show you some pictures, just some stuff about the left.
I mean, we know that the left is represented not just by Democrats, but also by the media and by the entertainment and the entertainment networks.
Here are, just, I want to show you two comedians.
Let me just see when this is from.
This is from two, this is before the election.
This is in March.
Susan Silverman, is that her name?
Susan Silverman.
Right.
Sarah Silverman, right, sorry.
Sarah Silverman goes on the Conan show dressed up as Hitler and complains about being compared to Donald Trump.
So here is Sarah Silverman dressed as Hitler and being interviewed by Conan.
My understanding is you want to clear the air because you think you're being unfavorably compared to Donald Trump.
Don't get me wrong, Conan.
I agree with a lot he says, a lot, like 90% of what he says.
I'm like, this guy gets it.
But it's just, I don't like the way he says it.
It's just, it's crass.
Yeah, yeah.
Trump is very, very crass.
Yeah.
So Hitler agrees with Donald Trump, but Trump is too crass for Hitler.
I mean, you know, this is all right.
At least this is when he's just a candidate.
And I have nothing against, by the way, obviously, I obviously have nothing against.
I do it political satire.
But this is a very, very specific thing that they do over and over again.
Bill Maher did the same things.
He played a Hitler speech and then translated it for you.
Watch this.
Look at this Hitler speech and we've translated it for you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We're going to make Germany great again.
That I can tell you, believe me.
Germany doesn't win anymore.
England, France, America, they're laughing at us.
The Treaty of Versailles, a terrible deal.
We have stupid people who are our leaders, really stupid people making terrible deals.
I mean, Mara at least is funny.
But, you know, after all, we had heard this.
It's not like we hadn't heard this about George W. Bush.
It's not like we hadn't been listening to every single conservative be called and compared to Hitler.
So at this point, you know, even if Trump had actually been Hitler instead of who he is, which seems to be a normal Republican with a big mouth, you know, even if he had been, we wouldn't have listened because it's the boy who cried wolf.
You know, the left has a big problem with metaphorical thinking.
They use metaphors and then they believe the metaphors to be the fact, right?
So they'll say, you know, language is violence.
And then they'll beat you up if you try to speak because language is violence.
So it makes sense.
They're only beating you up in self-defense.
And inequality is violence.
So we have the right to take to the streets and riot.
You know, they're constantly, whatever it is, the environment, hurting the environment is violence.
You know, so we have the right to blow up your factories.
We did this a little bit with Obama on the right.
You know, Obama, we were constantly saying Obama is a tyrant.
And I would say to people, you know, I don't know.
Is anybody banging on your door arresting you?
There was one guy, that video maker, got arrested like that.
And there are things that Obama did that toyed with tyranny, but he was not a tyrant, right?
He was not a tyrant.
He was still just an American president with bad ideas.
So this is the problem with this kind of, here we are, we're still free.
We still have our Constitution.
We're still working in our system.
And all this talk is dangerous when we're surrounded.
We are an island of freedom now in a world that is becoming increasingly authoritarian, and this talk is dangerous.
So yesterday I talked about how Trump unleashed this Twitter Twitter storm against Robert Mueller, and the press went nuts.
It's war.
He's at war with the FBI, that metaphorical language.
I mean, if he's at war, you really have to fight.
He said that he talked about the fact that when Andrew McCabe said that he had consulted with James Comey about releasing secret information, that made Comey a liar because Comey had sat and said he did not ever release, leak any information, and he hadn't known anybody to leak information.
Hilariously, the Washington Post did a fact check where they just went after him saying, oh my gosh, the lies.
But nowhere in the fact check did they disprove anything he said.
They talk about his language.
They talk about, you know, they'll say he used, you know, kind of, you know, his typical overstated loudmouth language, but they nowhere do they disprove that Comey did in fact, was in fact in conflict with Andrew McCabe said he did.
So talking about how they get crazy, I have to play this one just for comic relief.
Chris Matthews is talking about Mueller investigating Donald Trump.
Remember how I'm talking about metaphorical language and how once you get into the metaphor, you start to think that the metaphor is the reality instead of a metaphor?
Here's Chris Matthews going insane on actual television.
Mueller reminds me of the starfish, which gets itself tightly around the clam and uses all its stuff to weaken and pry open the clam.
Now, this is a battle to the death as far as the clam is concerned.
If the starfish is able to open him even a little bit, he can get him open all the way.
And that's it, of course, for the clam.
He's the starfish's lunch.
I've watched a number of these starfishes along the way, these special counsels or independent prosecutors, which is what we used to call them.
Like starfishes, they don't give up.
Their purpose in life is to open the clam, get what's in them, and devour it whole.
Whatever else you can say about him, Robert Mohr is a perfect example of a starfish.
He will not stop until he has gotten Trump to open up.
He will use the charges he has against Trump's family as leverage, the witnesses he's gotten from plea bargains, the power of subpoena, and time.
If you haven't noticed, Mohr's in no hurry.
He just keeps prying, and that clam in the White House is now snugly in his grip.
Does anyone think this is going to end well for the clam?
Makes me want to take Robert Mueller home, dry him out, and hang him on my wall, a little starfish decoration like we used to do at the beach when we were kids.
The thing about it is, is, you know, using metaphor, he's using a metaphor badly.
It's called running your metaphor into the ground.
But still, still, that kind of thinking leads to this kind of thinking.
Here is John Dean, who was obviously a guy in the Nixon administration, got caught lying.
He testified against Nixon.
Listen to what he says about Trump's tweet.
Trump tweeting that the Robert Mueller investigation is a witch hunt.
He compares this to Richard Nixon's attempt to obstruct justice.
Listen to this.
Are you surprised President Trump has now started going after Mueller by name?
I am not.
What I think we're witnessing is a very public obstruction of justice.
He, as I see it, has already exceeded everything that Nixon did.
He's really much more intimately involved than Nixon ever was in the cover-up.
Nixon, the first eight months of Watergate, just learns a little bit now and then from his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman.
Public Obstruction of Justice00:15:45
He's not really in it.
It's later when things get hotter that he gets hands-on.
But Trump, from the very beginning, he's involved in this.
And so I see a very different profile.
And the big difference being Nixon was behind closed doors, or everyone was surprised when there were recordings of it.
Trump is just right out front on it, and he's dealing it very publicly.
That's a pretty stunning statement.
I just want to have you repeat that.
You're saying, in your opinion, Donald Trump has gone farther than Richard Nixon did to obstruct justice.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
I think Trump is Nixon on steroids and stilts.
But he just sent out a tweet.
How does a tweet obstruct justice?
It's an insane example of metaphorical thinking.
There is no obstruction.
First of all, as far as we know, there's no crime.
Now, legally, you can obstruct justice even though there's no crime, but it's kind of absurd to charge somebody with it.
And what on earth is he talking about?
What is he talking about?
Why doesn't Donald Trump have the right to go forward and defend himself?
Now, look, you cannot say that I haven't spoken about my misgivings about Donald Trump, about his manners, about the way he operates, the chaos in the White House, all these things.
I have.
I talk about them all the time.
But a president has to be judged by his policies and by his actions.
And so far, first of all, he's been much tougher on Putin than Obama ever was.
I mean, the main thing, the main battle weapon we have against Putin is fracking, is taking away the power of his petrodollars, which support everything he does.
I mean, they haven't got any business.
It's all petrodollars over there.
So if we could frack them into the ground, you know, and actually, you know, undercut him entirely.
But there may come a time when Trump does something authoritarian, when he subverts the Constitution, when he oversteps the role of president.
There may come that time, and we will talk about it here, and I'm sure a lot of people on the right will talk about it, but the time hasn't come.
It hasn't come.
And if we're not, why aren't we supporting him?
What is it about him that is driving the left so crazy?
Well, meanwhile, on the left, on the left, the move away from democracy is clearly on the march.
The move to shout down free speech, the move to destroy capitalism.
I mean, let's talk about capitalism for just a minute.
Was it yesterday, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore, Bernie Sanders, whose combined net worth, okay, they could buy and sell me a gazillion times.
These are three multi-millionaires sitting around selling socialism.
Listen to this.
Over the last 40 years, the middle class of this country has declined while oligarchy is on the rise.
It's so crazy, the rich right now, the greed, the level of greed.
This is an organized effort just simply to take over our government and make the government work better and better for a thinner and thinner rich slice in America.
Like us, people who are sitting there.
I mean, what is, let's talk about this for a minute.
What is the problem with capitalism?
Capitalism is a brilliant system, which I don't think you can have capitalism without democracy or democracy without capitalism.
People keep telling me, oh, China has got it.
China is going to, oh, yes, China has invented capitalism with authoritarianism.
Talk to me again in 10 years because I think there will be an economic collapse or will have democratized, one or the other.
But what is wrong with capitalism?
Capitalism is a system, just like American democracy.
The American Republic is also a system that pits our natural instincts against one another for the common good.
Okay, so I'm greedy.
I want to make money.
I want to do things for me.
Under capitalism, under democracy, the best way for me to do that is to collaborate with you, right?
So the best way for me to serve me is to invent an iPhone that you want to buy.
And you give me the money for that iPhone because it's worth more to you than the money.
You would rather have the iPhone than the money.
And then I get the money.
And that's the way capitalism works.
What is the problem with that, the problem with it?
And why do people, why do people who are so blessed to live in some kind of capitalist country, why are they constantly working to turn it into socialist countries when all around them, socialist countries are collapsing.
In Venezuela, where they're eating cats, not even dogs.
I mean, dogs in Venezuela would be a delicacy.
Cats, fat, right?
You know, you're eating cats.
Seriously, they're starving in this country that is just awash in oil and food and everything you need because of socialism.
Why does it happen?
It happens because freedom and capitalism do not supply meaning.
This is why our founding fathers said repeatedly, you're going to have to have religion.
If you want to live by this constitution, all our founding fathers said this, you're going to have to have religion.
It wasn't because religion constrains you morally.
It wasn't because religion will tell you, don't do this, don't do that.
It's because religion will supply you with meaning in a system that's not meant to supply you with meaning.
It's meant to leave you free to find meaning.
And what is happening in the West is that we have lost the idea of meaning.
You know, I'm reading, I told you yesterday, I'm reading this book by Steven Pinker called Enlightenment Now, and Pinker is basically a materialist.
When I say that, what I mean is he doesn't really believe that you're there.
He thinks you're a machine that produces the kind of illusion that you're there.
Also, this book, Sapiens, that I read by Yuval Harari, he also says this basically the same thing.
You're not really there.
You don't really have free will.
That's just an illusion over time.
At the beginning of Pinker's book, he's giving a speech selling these goods.
And I really like Pinker and I like them both.
They're really good writers, really interesting books.
They're just wrong.
You know, I just happen to be wrong about a very important thing.
Somebody gets up and says to Pinker, why should I live?
Why should I live if what you're saying is true?
And I'm going to give you his answer as he says he has rewritten it for his book.
He says, in the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you.
And there are so many reasons to live.
As a sentient being, you have the sentient being.
You have the potential to flourish.
You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating.
You can seek explanations of the natural world through science and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities.
You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist.
You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world.
As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn.
You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy, the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness.
And you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself.
You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace.
History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.
All of those are beautiful things.
None of them answer the girl's question.
The girl's question is, why should I live?
That means she needs a purpose.
It's not meaning comes through purpose.
All the things that he talks about are pleasures.
They are deep, deep pleasures, very important, and they do enhance life.
But let me just give you a reason why it's not a sufficient answer.
If I took a gun and held it to your head every single day, every single day, I followed you with a gun to your head and told you what to do, and all my advice was good.
I told you how to take care of your health.
I told you how to treat your wife.
I told you how to raise your children.
I told you what job to take, and all my advice was right.
Your life went great.
You lived long and prospered.
You were healthy.
Everything went great.
Your wife loved you.
Your kids loved you because of everything I was telling you to do with that gun to your head.
And you lived to be 100 and died suddenly in your sleep, I would have taken away from you everything that matters because it's all about your purpose and your purpose depends on your free will and your presence as a human being, as an actual being expressed through your body.
He, Pinker, does not believe that is true.
He makes fun of people who say, you know, who belittle the great gifts of science, and I don't think they belittle them, but some people belittle the great say, oh, well, it's just longer life.
It's just more health.
It's just more cleaner drinking water.
Well, of course, those things are great, great blessings, but they are not the meaning of life.
You are the meaning of life in your relationship to God, because it's only through God that any of this makes any sense at all.
All the things that they don't believe in, all the things that they don't believe in, provide the purpose.
If you don't believe in free will, how can you believe in freedom?
If you don't believe in free will, why should people be free?
I mean, you would have to make some kind of complex game theory argument that only working together could we come up with the right answers.
But that's not true, and they don't believe it.
Obama was always saying, I wish I could just run by the rule by the experts, but we have all these annoying democratic laws.
Freedom is there for you to find the meaning and purpose of your life, the development of yourself into its fullest expression of what God intended you to be.
If you don't believe in that, you have lost the plot of freedom.
That's why Europe has no leaders.
That's why the left is so insane about Trump.
It's not that Trump has done anything authoritarian, though he may, he hasn't yet.
It's not that.
It's because they want to be authoritarian and they think he is getting in their way, which so far he is, which is great.
So, you know, I think that underneath all this, underneath all this, we have to recover this sense of meaning.
And I'm sorry to tell you that it comes through God, but it does.
I'm sorry that it probably only comes through Christ, but it probably only does.
But, you know, those are the things that we're going to have to start looking at.
We're going to have to start talking about.
We're going to have to start recovering logically through wisdom, through insight, through reading for ourselves, and then give them to each other.
We can't force them on each other.
We have to give them to each other because otherwise we are going to lose the plot.
And this great sea of authoritarianism that is growing throughout the world is going to close in and cover us.
sexual follies.
So this is not off the subject.
There is this Stormy Daniels thing going on, and I'm not covering it very much because I don't care.
And I don't care.
You know, this is something that Trump did before he was in office, or they say he did.
They say he slept with a porn star and then paid her off to keep quiet.
In keeping with the comedians who just can't stop spewing this hatred, I mean, it really is hatred.
It's not even funny.
Stephen Colbert has this completely unfunny show called Our Cartoon President, is that what it's called?
And so he makes fun of this Stormy Daniels thing here.
Her birth name is Stephanie Clifford, but elementary school history books will forever refer to her as Stormy Daniels.
In 2006, she allegedly had sex with a recently married Donald Trump, his chin dripping with a Lipitor bull hormone cookie dough milkshake.
Then she accepted $130,000 to stay silent about what Americans already instinctively knew in their amygdala hindbrain.
Here now is President Trump's side of the story.
Stormy Daniels is lying unless she says I'm a wildcat in bed, in which case it's all true.
So, you know, obviously it's just a way of running down Trump that he's a billionaire, ran beauty contests.
We know exactly what kind of life he led.
He's never been, it was not a big secret that he was leading that life.
He was not leading the life of a politician or a priest.
He was leading out in the open the life of a billionaire playboy.
So that's who he was.
Meanwhile, over at the John Oliver Show, what is his show called?
Last week, this week, last week, last week tonight, John Oliver, he is picking on Charlotte Pence, who he had Vice President Mike Pence's daughter, wrote a children's book about her bunny Marlon Bundo touring the house, turning the vice president, following the vice president through the day.
Proceeds from this book go to charity, and John Oliver decides to make fun of this book.
The child of the vice president, right?
This is not the vice president, make fun of this book because he doesn't like Mike Pence's attitude toward gays.
At the end of our hop, I said, Wesley, I don't want to hop without you ever again.
And Wesley said, that's funny because I never want to hop without you, Marlon Bundo, ever again.
And we both said, we will get married and hop together forever.
Said the stink bug, you can't get married.
The stink bug was in charge.
All the animals listened to him, even though he was very stinky.
Boy bunnies don't marry boy bunnies.
Boy bunnies have to marry girl bunnies.
But don't worry, we had a plan.
A plan that involved all the animals in the garden.
And if you want to know how the story turns out, you are going to have to buy the book.
Please buy it for your children, buy it for any child you know, or just buy it because you know it would annoy Mike Pence.
So what I want to know is this, aside from the fact of why John Oliver can't leave the daughter of the vice president alone and let her sell her book for charity, aside from that, what I want to know is we can make fun of Donald Trump for having consensual, what was obviously consensual sex that was, if it happened, assuming it happened, was adulterous.
But Mike Pence can't have his opinions about other people's sex lives.
So where do we draw the line?
What are the rules now for what's right about sex?
Is homosexuality right after 2,000 years of people thinking it's wrong?
Is it just right because John Oliver thinks it's right?
Is having sex with a porn star, is that wrong because we don't like Donald Trump?
I mean, it's kind of a mess, isn't it?
And you know, I read this story that they're now, you know, they make these sex bots now.
They're trying to make more and more realistic sex bots.
And they're now thinking of making child sex bots for pedophiles.
And somebody wrote an article saying, we've got to stop this.
It's going to be, you know, it's going to be like an entry, a gateway drug for pedophiles.
Now, we don't know that, right?
We don't know it because for all, we don't know whether porn actually inspires pedophiles to commit pedophilic acts or if it relieves them, if it gives them a release, you know, if it gives them a release from their desires and maybe stops it.
It's ugly.
It's a terrible thing to do.
But how are we going to know?
How are we going to know what is the right thing to do if the only way we know is whether comedians are making fun of us or not?
The only way we know how to judge sex acts, ours and others, is whether comedians happen to be making fun of it because they dislike Mike Pence and they dislike Donald Trump.
There's no logic to what they're saying.
There's no particular through line to their morality.
It's just their political hatred.
Why We Shouldn't Pay Attention00:01:28
So how are we going to know?
And again, I just want to go back to the idea that if you do not know what a human being is, if you do not have a sense of your own free will and your own purpose in life, there's no possible way to come up with a moral system for sex or for anything else.
So this spewing hatred on the left, they always accuse us of being hateful, racist, sexist, but this spewing hatred on the left is a sign of their confusion and their lostness and their misunderstanding of the American way and of the Western way.
And it really is not what we should be paying attention to.
We should be paying attention to rebuilding the consensus of what our lives as Westerners and as free men and women are about.
All right.
Mail back tomorrow.
Get your questions in now.
I will answer as many as I can, and my answers will change your life.
For some of you, it will be better.
For the rest, I cannot tell you what it's going to be like.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.