Ep. 483 dissects how John Brennan allegedly pressured James Comey to weaponize the Steele Dossier, pushing the "Russian collusion" narrative to sway the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton, with claims of pre-election leaks to Harry Reid and Mueller’s obstruction charges as politically timed distractions. The episode then pivots to Mindhunter, arguing that modern society’s rejection of spiritual meaning—mirrored by amoral figures like Hannibal Lecter—fuels disintegration, linking rising teen suicide rates to a void left by Enlightenment-era materialism. [Automatically generated summary]
Mark Zuckerberg says he's shocked that a business he built around stealing your personal data while you were chatting with your friends has been stealing your personal data while you were chatting with your friends.
Zuck says he's going to solve this problem by personally investigating every app on Facebook he doesn't like.
And the government is going to get involved as well.
So what could possibly go wrong?
We are 45 minutes away from the Clavenless weekend.
But don't worry, I have a parachute and I'm going to get help.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-ducky wife is sicky voo.
Wards are winging also singing hunky ducky dude.
It's a wonderful day.
Hawaii makes me want to sink.
Oh ah.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-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, that was Beckett.
It was too cute to use only once.
And I feel I'm pretty cute too, so I thought we'd just mix those together.
We are approaching the Clavenless weekend now, but don't worry.
Former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday told an audience at the University of Miami talking about Trump.
He said, a guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it.
They asked me if I'd like to debate this gentleman, and I said no.
I said, if we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
So Donald Trump answered in a tweet, crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.
Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me for the second time with physical assault.
He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.
Don't threaten people, Joe.
So our national dialogue remains at a high level.
And meanwhile, Congress is about to sign a $1.3 trillion spending bill, and nobody knows what's in it.
So this is going to be a great Clavenless weekend for everybody.
We have the Hudson Institute's Mike Duran here.
He wrote this fantastic timeline, basically, a really dense, long article for National Review, making the very substantial case that the whole Russian collusion story is a frame-up by Barack Obama that was actually planned by Barack Obama.
So we'll talk to him about that.
Meanwhile, whatever you've got that's valuable, I will bet you insure it.
If you have a car, you insure your car.
If you have a home, you insure your car, your home, you have a life, insure your life.
People don't think about this because they don't like to think about why they're insuring their lives.
But if something happens to you, you're going to want your kids taken care of.
You're going to want your spouse taken care of.
You're going to want your parents if they're elderly and need help.
You're going to want them taken care of.
Here is the thing to do.
Why You Need Life Insurance00:10:52
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So, you know, I've talked before about how I got into this business.
You know, I'm a novelist.
I've been a novelist all my life.
I worked in Hollywood by accident.
They kind of dragged me into the movie business and I made some money doing it, so I kept doing it.
But mostly I write stories.
I've written stories all my life.
But there came a point when I became a loudmouth about politics.
There's a certain point in your life.
Politics become very important to you.
The real world becomes very important to you.
You're worried about your kids and you're worried about the future.
And I started to talk about that.
And that kind of damaged my Hollywood career.
And I also found that I really liked hanging out with conservatives because they were smarter than leftists and they were smarter than a lot of people who do the kind of work I do.
And I so I really enjoyed it.
And I found that as I was hanging out at these parties, I kept running into Roger Simon.
And Roger Simon is funny because he is a former mystery writer, a crime writer.
That's what I am, a crime writer, crime novel writer, and a screenwriter.
And that's what I've been a screenwriter with a shaved head.
So it's kind of like, and he's about 10, I think he's about 30 years older than I am, but he says he's about 10 years older than I'm.
So it's kind of like bumping into myself, you know, and he kept saying, you know, I'm building, this is a funny way of talking.
I got very New York way of talking.
He says, I'm building this site, PJA TV, PJ TV, you know, you want to come by.
And I kept running into him.
And finally, I went and looked at PJ TV and I saw Bill Whittle.
And I thought, oh, Whittle can do this.
And he might just send him my dog to do this.
And I got into this.
My first video was called Shut Up.
And it was, I think it actually made a big change in the way people did political videos.
I actually think it had an effect, certainly on PJ TV, because everybody shortened their videos, made them a little more satirical, a little funnier.
And my point was just that the only argument the left ever makes is shut up.
And they do it in a million different ways.
They call you racist.
They call you sexist.
They call you a fascist.
You're worse than Hitler, whatever it is.
It's just another way of saying shut up.
And interestingly, at the time, Obama had just been president for a while, and I was picking on him from going around kowtowing to all these tyrants.
Remember, he was bowing to all those sheiks and everything.
And also for spending a lot of money.
So now everybody's complaining that Trump is doing that.
Everybody on the left is complaining that Trump congratulated Putin on his fake election victory.
And they're saying, oh, he's kowtowing to tyrants.
And of course, if they sign this 1.3, I can't believe they're talking about this.
This is a 2,200-page spending bill.
And nobody knows what's in it.
Everybody's complaining about what's in it, but nobody knows what's in it.
All I know is that Chuck Schumer looks happy, so it's not good, you know.
But the argument that all they ever do is tell us to shut up remains exactly true.
And now we have this Mark Zuckerberg story.
A psychologist or a psychiatrist, I can't remember which it was, went on Facebook, put on an app that had a personality test, and then shared that information with Cambridge Analytica, which used it for political purposes.
They don't like the political purposes.
So now the stuff that Obama was doing, basically data mining, is suddenly a problem.
Everybody's calling, everybody on the left, especially is calling for an investigation.
And Zuckerberg went on TV and he says that he is going to take care of it.
Do we have, yeah, that's just a cut nine.
This was a major breach of trust.
And I'm really sorry that this happened.
You know, we have a basic responsibility to protect people's data.
And if we can't do that, then we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.
So our responsibility now is to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
And there are a few basic things that I think we need to do to ensure that.
One is making sure that developers like Alexander Cogan, who got access to a lot of information and then improperly used it, just don't get access to as much information going forward.
So we are doing a set of things to restrict the amount of access that developers can get going forward.
But the other is we need to make sure that there aren't any other Cambridge analyticas out there, right, or folks who have improperly accessed data.
So we're going to go now and investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we lock down our platform.
And if we detect any suspicious activity, we're going to do a full forensic audit.
So this can't be good.
I mean, it cannot be good.
A forensic audit by Mark Zuckerberg.
They're going to investigate any app that is suspicious to them.
We already know that by this trumpeting of fake news, we already know that the left has infiltrated these sites because they're all very leftist.
All the people there are very leftist, and it's infiltrated sites, YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook, with these guys who are going to so-called, you know, they're going to check for so-called fake news, but they're all leftists, the Southern Poverty Law Center, PolitiFac, Snopes.
These are all left-wing organizations, very left-wing organizations, and even Facebook's commitment to only trusting certain brands of news privileges, essentially, the mainstream news media, which is now so far to the left that it's gone almost completely insane.
And there's Mark Warner and other Democrats are calling for an investigation of Facebook, and they want Zuckerberg to testify.
And Zuckerberg is saying, yes, we may need some regulation.
This is not a good scenario as far as I'm concerned, because we know, we always know what the leftist policy to free speech is.
Here it is.
Don't speak.
Don't speak.
Please don't speak.
That basically is a policy statement from the left.
Every Democrat voted to rewrite the First Amendment to give Congress the ability to determine what speech, what political speech should be allowed.
Here, let me just give you a couple of examples of things that have just been happening very, very recently that show you this strain in our culture that is getting worse and worse.
YouTube is entering the gun control debate with a new ban on videos which demo firearms or link to websites selling firearms or firearm accessories.
Don't speak.
Don't speak.
Please don't speak.
Exactly.
YouTube is entering the gun control debate by stopping the gun control debate on YouTube, right?
It is centrally the move to ban firearm demos, dovetails with the media platform's desire to prohibit videos with instructions on how to assemble firearms.
Of course, guns built at home have not been part of any mass attacks or any.
You know, at one high school in New Jersey, I mean, just keeping this thought in mind, the silencing of conservative speech.
At one high school in New Jersey, they suspended three kids for posting photos of their day shooting guns.
They suspended a kid in New Jersey for a gun, a bumper sticker supporting guns.
His dad went into the school board.
We have a little clip of him talking to the school board.
This is great.
I'd like to see four things happen.
I would like to see the board specifically admit that they've made an error and they've done something they shouldn't have.
They do not need to disclose the students' names or their privacy to do that.
To apologize for that error.
To make a statement that they are going to aspire to no longer violate the Supreme Court decision or the constitutional rights of the parents or the children.
And the person or people who made that decision should resign or be terminated.
There were like 200 parents there applauding.
And it's great that they're fighting back, but just the idea that you could censor kids for what they are saying for their support of the Constitution off campus is absolutely insane.
So recently, I'm going to continue this in just a minute, but recently I just, you know, we had this little incident here at the Daily Wire where the offices caught fire when one of our employees tried to make a thousand copies of his butt on our Xerox machine.
And I thought to myself, you know, we probably should have used ziprecruiter.com when we were hiring people here, because ZipRecruiter is the smarter way to hire employees.
And boy, oh boy, this place would be entirely different if we had used it.
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Oh, oh, oh.
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Right now, my listeners can try Zip Recruiter for free, which is a pretty good discount.
Every time you say Daily Wire, you'll remember why.
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Here's another one.
Last week, a university, here's another thing that's happening, is the silencing and the bullying of any speaker in favor of Israel, the state of Israel.
Last week, a University of Virginia panel featuring Israeli military reservists was forcefully disrupted, apparently violating multiple campus rules.
Several days earlier at the University of California at Berkeley, there was an anti-Semitic death threat against a Jewish professor.
A week prior to that, students wishing to hear the moderate Israeli former minister Dan Meridor at London's King's College were confronted with a menacing mob of screaming demonstrators.
At Princeton University in November, the local Hillel chapter canceled at the last minute a talk by Israelis, Israel's deputy foreign minister in response to pressure from pro-peace students.
You want to hear maybe the greatest one, just I won't keep doing this, but an all-women's college in Massachusetts is telling its teachers not to say women in the classroom.
Don't speak.
Don't speak.
Please do speak.
Exactly.
Professors are instructed to say Mount Holyoke students instead of Mount Holyoke women, and don't use the phrase, we're all women here, because people might discover you're all women there.
Women's Silence00:15:22
Michael Barone has an article.
By the way, women are the worst enemies of speech.
A poll of college students sponsored by the American Council on Education, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Stouton Foundation asked students about free speech on campus, whether it's allowed and whether it should be.
This is from an article by Michael Barone.
Majorities of students polled said they supported both free speech and inclusion and diversity.
When asked which was more important, 53% said inclusion and diversity and only 46% said free speech.
So more people think inclusion and diversity is important than free speech, which is insane.
But the difference between men and women was the most striking thing among men.
61% favored free speech, but only 35% of women favored free speech.
And why?
Why?
Because feminism is dependent on a false narrative about men and women being the same.
And when you are peddling a false narrative, you've got to silence any narrative that is going to be opposed to them because people hear a narrative that's true immediately and they go, oh yeah, that's true.
That's obviously true.
So you've got to silence it.
You cannot peddle a false narrative while other people are peddling the truth.
You will lose that argument.
You know, and we've talked about this before.
You remember a while back, a couple weeks ago, I was talking about a famous story about a little girl who was playing with matchsticks, pretending one was the witch and one was Hansel and one was Gretel, and suddenly ran to her father and was terrified and said, take the witch away, take the witch away, because her play, her imaginative play had become real to her.
And that this is what I feel is happening to our news media and to Democrats.
They have peddled this idea that Donald Trump is a Russian spy and Donald Trump is a tyrant and Donald Trump is the most evil thing, the end of democracy, and now they believe it themselves.
This is amazing.
This is today's funniest two stories, right?
Rich Noyes at Newsbusters, this site I love.
I frequently bring in video from Newsbusters.
I don't credit them enough, but they're part of the Media Research Center.
Rich Noyes has this thing he does called Today in Media Bias History, where he goes back in time and tells you how media bias.
This is from 2003 when the bombing of Baghdad started.
And here's how the New York Times reported it, okay?
To many New Yorkers, the scenes of Baghdad under siege were achingly familiar.
New Yorkers watching the televised bombing of Baghdad yesterday said they were riveted by the raw and uninterrupted display of American military might.
But for some, the bombing brought back particularly visceral and chilling memories.
They could not help thinking about September 11th and how New York, too, was once under assault from the skies.
So the bombing of Baghdad and the attack, completely attack on innocent people, murdering 3,000 Americans, were the same thing to the New York Times.
That was a complete correlation.
And this is the way they get themselves into this flurry.
today, let us visit the New York Times op-ed page, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
So Thomas Friedman, one of the chief knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row, just to show that they're still making these invidious comparisons, right?
He has what Trump and Putin have in common because everybody is so upset about Trump congratulating Putin on his victory.
And I'm not sure I think that that's a great thing to do, but obviously Trump just thought that he's the great deal maker.
He's the great communicator.
He's going to work this out.
So Thomas Friedman writes, first we heard how in 2003 the New York Times told us that the bombing of Baghdad was the same as 9-11.
So now Thomas Friedman writes, he tells a story about a Bedouin chief, and somebody steals his turkey and he cries to his sons, boys, help me find my turkey.
And they say, well, you know, what do you need a turkey for?
But then people keep stealing things from him.
And he says, you know, once we let them steal the turkey, they knew they could take anything.
And that was the problem.
So Thomas Friedman says, I retell that story today because it's helpful in understanding how and why we failed to contain the egregious behavior of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Okay, so Trump and Putin are very similar.
They each started by, metaphorically speaking, stealing a turkey.
And when we didn't respond, they kept ratcheting up their wretched behavior to the point where Trump thinks he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and Putin thinks he could poison a wayward spy in London and get away with it.
Now let's pause there for a minute.
Trump made the joke that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
Putin poisoned a wayward spy in London and it's not the first time he has poisoned and murdered people.
So now he talks about where they started.
Trump's turkey was his tax returns.
He knew that once he compromised the GOP into giving him a pass on his taxes, they'd roll over for anything.
So Trump's turkey, his first sin, was not releasing his tax returns.
What about Putin's turkey?
It was the shooting down of the Malaysian civilian airliner, killing all 298 people on board.
So Trump not relaxing his tax returns and Putin slaughtering 300 people.
That's the same thing.
I mean, this is the way these guys are thinking now.
They're selling this narrative to themselves first.
And then they come running to you and say, oh, daddy, daddy, take the witch away.
I'm scared of the matchstick.
I mean, that is what is happening to these guys.
So, you know, Trump is making these, telling why he ignored the counsel of his security people and decided to tell Putin congratulations.
Of course, you know, Trump has no obligation to follow his advisors.
And the fact that they leaked this is a big deal because there couldn't have been that many people who knew what he was being advised.
So Trump tweets, I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory.
Obama called him also in the past.
The fake news media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him.
They're wrong.
Getting along with Russia and others is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Russia can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran, and even the coming arms race.
Bush tried to get along, but he didn't have the smarts.
Obama and Clinton tried, but didn't have the energy or chemistry.
Peace through strength.
So that's nonsense because all of the problems that he's talking about, North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Putin's on the other side of those issues.
He's not there to help.
That's not the point.
But obviously, this is the way Trump thinks.
He does think I can make this deal.
I'm the great deal maker.
On the news, John Brennan, we played a little bit of this yesterday, but I'm going to play another cut.
John Brennan, Obama's former CIA guy, is suddenly suggesting that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin.
And he says, he has said openly he has no proof of this.
So a former CIA guy is accusing the president of being blackmailed with this smug little look on his face.
You know, that is an amazing lapse of professional and personal integrity.
That's an amazing lapse.
I mean, nothing Trump has done, really, nothing Trump has done has ever risen up to the level of what Brennan is saying.
But listen to this montage.
This is, again, from our friends at Newsbusters.
This is a montage of the media picking up this completely fake story.
I mean, talk about fake news.
This completely speculative story saying the president of the United States is being blackmailed by a tyrant, completely made up.
Listen.
The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump and may have things that they could expose.
Something personal, perhaps?
Perhaps.
Perhaps.
There's obviously something that we all have been talking about for months that he, Russians have on Donald Trump, whether it's related to money or sex, I don't know, or both, but there's something there.
Do you think there's a nefarious reason?
Is there something sinister going on?
Or is this just Donald Trump having great confidence in his own personal diplomacy?
Well, that's a good question.
And I don't think we fully understand the answer.
And I think that's one of the reasons why the special counsel's investigation is so important.
It's just astonishing behavior by the President of the United States to make this phone call.
What is going on?
So do you agree with John Brennan that it looks like possibly this is about the Russians having something on President Trump?
What is with the president's interest in these dictators broadly?
And Vladimir Putin specifically, what is the blind spot there?
Well, that's the biggest question of all.
And that's the question I don't think we know the answer to.
That may be something that turns the key in the Russia probe is figuring out why this president is so deferential to Putin and to Russia and if there is some sort of compromise that they have on him, if there is another reason why he may be susceptible to basically blackmail by the Russians.
So they now feel free to make up any narrative they want, basically.
They feel that they have worked themselves up into this horror at Trump's existence and they can make any narrative they want.
I mean, they could be saying, yeah, you know, Trump likes power.
He said this stuff about Tiananmen Square, that the Chinese were strong in Tiananmen Square when they crushed their own people who were protesting peaceably.
That was a stupid thing for Trump to say.
You could call him on that.
But what on earth are they doing?
You know, there's a theory going around today.
I think I've spoken about this book, Sapiens, which is a big bestseller, Yuval Harari, an Israeli guy, has written this book.
And he puts forward this theory, which has been going around anyway, that we are all, that what makes humans unique is their ability to link themselves together by telling what he calls fictions.
Okay?
So he says, sapiens rule the world, that's us, sapiens, because we are the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
We can create mass cooperation networks in which thousands and millions of complete strangers work together towards common goals.
The mysterious glue we use is stories, not genes.
We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money, and human rights.
Yet none of these things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell to one another.
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, and no human rights except in the common imagination of human beings.
Now, as a man who has created fictions all my life, I can tell you that this is completely backwards.
Fiction is a way of communicating truth, right?
Fiction only works when you are communicating the truth.
It's just not the sort of truth that people like Yuval Harari understand because it's not material truth.
Countries do exist.
I understand why he says they're a fiction, that they are.
He gives credit to what he calls intersubjective reality, things we all create together, but he doesn't understand that that intersubjective reality is, if it works, if it works, is based on a truth.
Jonah Goldberg does this in his book, and I love Jonah, and he's a really good writer, and he's written this book, The Suicide of the West.
But he says, you know, John Locke, the great philosopher who inspired some of the founding fathers, John Locke said, we are all born as a blank slate.
And John Locke used that to counter the idea of the divine right of kings and the rights of the aristocracy.
And Goldberg says that's just a story, because we're not, in fact, born with blank slates.
That's true.
We are not.
But the part of the story that's true is the part that works.
See, the thing is, he got the science wrong, but he did get the story right.
That is the way stories work.
And, you know, I mean, math is a fiction.
You know, there's no two.
There's no such thing as two.
But we find that it's a fiction that correlates to reality.
When we do our calculations right, we can predict the future.
Fiction is a language used to contain and communicate spiritual truths the same way that our body, our flesh, is a language that is used to express the spiritual truth of us.
And Jesus is a language used, Jesus' body is a language used to express the logos.
Religion is a fiction to describe the spirit, but it matters whether that description is true.
It matters whether a religion gets it right or not.
And because they think that all of these things are equal fictions, they think all of these things are equal fictions, then all they think is they have to sell the fiction.
If any fiction is as good as any other, all you've got to do is sell it.
And how do you sell it?
I sell it by silencing the person telling a fiction I don't like.
That's the theory.
That is the thesis going on by what you're seeing in the press.
And you've got to keep your ball on the truth because the stories we tell have to relate to truth.
All right, we got Michael Duran here from a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, terrific writer.
He has taught NYU, Princeton, and lived to tell the tale.
And he's written for every place, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.
His latest book is Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East.
It's out now.
It's about President Eisenhower's handling of the 1956 Suez Crisis.
But unfortunately for Mike, we haven't brought him up to talk about that, but about this terrific article he wrote for National Review called The Real Collusion Story.
How you doing, Mike?
It's good to see you.
Great.
Great to be here.
So it's hard to ask you to condense this story, which is a long, very detailed story.
But give us at least the idea of what you think the real collusion story is.
The real collusion story is that senior members of the Obama administration teamed together to frame Trump as Putin's puppet.
And the key guy in it, which was a surprise to me when I put it together, is John Brennan.
I assume that President Obama is standing behind Brennan, and I tried to lay this at Obama's feet as much as I could.
But I think I have to honestly say that I didn't prove that case.
It's just hard for me to believe that if you have Brennan and Comey and Loretta Lynch all working together to prop up Hillary and tear down Donald Trump, that the president isn't somehow aware of that.
So when we're watching Brennan attack Trump now, we're watching him carry out something that he had planned before this, essentially.
I think so, but I think now he's in defense mode.
I think he's trying to inject himself into partisan politics so that when the investigators come and they uncover what he did, he will have a lot of partisan support behind him.
He can present it as a partisan witch hunt when it's actually justice being done.
So what is it that he did?
What exactly did John Brennan do to get this story?
I mean, it's amazing that now for over a year, we've been covering the story and there is still not a jot of evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians.
I seriously just don't believe that happened.
It seems ridiculous.
You don't believe that Carter Page was the...
I mean, they were investigating Jeff Sessions, you know.
Yeah, Jeff.
Jeff Beauregard.
The third is actually a Russian mole.
Mueller's Assessment: Trump and Russia00:09:58
I know.
That Beauregard is pronounced Boris, I think.
So what did Brennan do?
I mean, what exactly did he do to get the story rolling?
He started out, he wanted, I didn't go into this bit in detail in the story because I didn't think I could prove it enough to my satisfaction and it would have taken me three more pages and, you know, an incredibly long article to do it.
I think the first thing he did was he trumped up the Papadopoulos, the Papadopoulos case.
I don't believe the Papadopoulos case, but let's leave that aside because I don't have the goods on him there, but that thing stinks to me, the whole, and I'll go into it just for a second, actually, because I worked in the White House.
And, you know, I unmasked people when I worked in the White House because there are spies all over Washington, D.C.
And there are lots of people bumping into spies, foreign spies.
And there are FBI and NSA who are tracking foreign spies.
So the fact that somebody bumped into a spy, this is everyday business that people encounter intelligence.
So what do they, I mean, what do they prove about Papadopoulos?
They prove that he bumped into a spy.
Maybe.
They haven't even said that.
And, you know, and then Mueller has come down on Papadopoulos with all the power that Mueller has to destroy your life if you don't tell him everything that he wants to know.
And what have they proved?
That he told Mueller something that wasn't true and that he bumped into a spy.
So I think that whole thing was trumped up to begin with.
But what Brennan really wanted from Comey is he wanted Comey to, first of all, agree with his assessment, with Brennan's assessment, that not just was Putin intervening in some ways in our election, but that he was trying to get Donald Trump elected.
You see, what he was trying to do was get an intelligence community assessment that corresponded to the propaganda of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was saying just that.
And the other thing that Brennan wanted from Comey was an investigation of the Trump team for colluding with Russia, which O'Comey could then leak to the press in order to help out Hillary in the campaign.
So, you know, yes, Hillary had this email investigation, but Trump is colluding with Russia.
And Comey, for most of the summer, didn't really play ball with Brennan.
But in the end, he did.
He leaked to the press that there was, or the FBI, I'm assuming Comey was witting that, that the FBI leaked to the press that Carter Page was under investigation for conspiring with the Russians to help Trump get elected.
And then they, and we now know they also trumped up this investigation of Carter Page, and they got a surveillance warrant on the basis of totally bogus information from the steel dossier.
And they basically ensured, I mean, Comey basically ensured that the steel dossier would become public by sharing it with Obama and Trump.
Right, yeah, yeah.
I left off that bit because I had to end at some point so I ended at the election.
Yeah, they did that.
Now, what is your evidence exactly that this starts with Brennan instead of Comey?
Well, if you go back and you, what's interesting about it is that these guys, they told lies.
Right.
And then after the election, they told new lies.
And so if you just go back through the press, through the New York Times and the Washington Post, I enjoyed doing that in the article saying, according to the New York Times, according to the Washington Post, Brennan felt a need, I'm not sure exactly why, but at a certain point after the election, he felt a need to cover his tracks.
And so he told this whole big story about how he was absolutely convinced as of early August that Putin was trying to influence the election in order to help Trump.
And he had this incredible information at his fingertips, information that nobody else seems to have had and so forth.
So if you just go back through all the New York Times and Washington Post stories, they tell you the story.
See, the thing about this kind of conspiracy is that you can have conspiracies, but usually they're behind closed doors to do something that people can't see.
In this case, they wanted to influence an election.
So they wanted to get information out to the electorate.
That's something that you can see with your own eyes.
And then they had to go back and explain why they were doing what they were doing.
So one of the things I go into in the article is how John Brennan organized, I think with Obama's Okay, according to the New York Times, these briefings of members of Congress about what Brennan believed about Putin intervening.
And he did that without an intelligence community assessment.
He told the, it's clearly now in the press as a matter of record that he said things that were that he shouldn't have been talking about at all, about members of Trump's team being under suspicion and so forth.
And he, you know, it's just my the only way that I theorize is I say, you know, when he tells these things to Harry Reid one month before the election, it's because he wants Harry Reid to go out and talk about them, not because he's doing his due diligence as a CIA officer, trying to keep Congress informed.
You know, they make fun of people for talking about deep state conspiracies.
But the fact is, it doesn't even have to be like a movie with people in trench coats meeting on park benches.
It can really just be a dishonest guy in a powerful position talking to another guy in another powerful position and doing something they shouldn't be doing.
I mean, this is deep state collusion.
It is deep state conspiracy without the cloak and dagger.
Yeah, I mean, the problem with the deep state idea, although I use it too sometimes, is that we're really talking about Obama administration and Obama officials.
You know, it's not the average CIA officer.
It's these political appointees who are working together.
The thing is that I think the key we have to remember is that they all believed that Hillary was probably going to win.
And a good chance of it.
They never thought that we'd have Jeff, whatever Beauregard Sessions III setting up a special counsel to go check and see what they did.
And I mean, Obama was a master of giving orders in plain sight.
I mean, you talk about his Charlottesville speech.
I believe it was Charlottesville, where he gave a speech that kind of pointed people in this direction.
He did this with the IRS where he talked about dark money.
And he didn't have to call people up on a black phone somewhere and tell them this.
He just gave the speech that he knew what to do, kind of.
I think so.
I think so.
And I've never seen, I know you talk about this all the time very effectively.
I've never seen the press so helpful to another politician.
You know, so eager to change the subject when they do something wrong and so eager to pretend that he's saying one thing when he's not clearly saying another.
So let's talk about Mueller a little bit now.
I mean, the other fantasy that the press keeps going into is that Trump is going to fire Mueller and they keep talking about this as if it were a pending thing.
It's right around the corner.
He's going to fire Mueller.
The White House keeps saying, nope, we're not going to do it.
We're not going to do it.
First of all, do you believe, just out of curiosity, do you believe that Trump would fire Mueller?
It just seems like a bad move.
I think it probably is a bad move.
I think he is morally, he has a moral right to do it.
I think he has a legal right to do it.
I think politically it would be harmful to him.
So where do you stand on Mueller?
I mean, it's very hard in the kind of swamp of online opinion.
The right thinks he is some kind of Democrat agent.
The left keeps saying what a wonderful guy he is.
Although you know, if tomorrow he comes out and says there was no collusion, they're going to talk about how he was bullied and blackmailed or whatever.
Where do you stand on Mueller as just as an investigator?
Well, I think that the Mueller investigation is corrupt in the sense that the foundations are the Trump-Russia collusion investigation that I talk about in the article.
Mueller is just the logical culmination of it.
So I think that the whole thing is bogus to begin with.
And he's shown no signs to work outside the frame set up by Comey, McCabe, Stroke, and so forth.
The guy, I don't know.
I don't have a strong judgment about the guy, but I just look at the logic of what he's doing.
The logic of what he's doing is furthering the injustice that began with this abuse of power.
He strikes me, you know, as a certain kind of Marine that I've come across in my time.
You say to a Marine, you know, typically, look, I want you to take that hill and you can go by the road, you know, or you can go up that path or you can go through the jungle, but don't go through the jungle because you can't do that.
The minute you tell him that, you know, he's going to go through the jungle.
He's going to take that hill.
So I'm out of time, but just where do you think this is going to end?
Do you think Mueller is going to come up with some kind of charge against Trump?
Absolutely.
Obstruction of justice.
He's going to do it either right before the summer recess or right at the end of the summer recess so that the election in November is going to be a big issue.
And he can't help himself.
These guys, the special counsels, they feel that their manhood has been taken from them if they don't have some real significance.
That's a terrible thought.
Michael Duran, the article is called The Real Collusion Story at National Review.
Michael is also the author of Ike's Gambit, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East.
Thanks a lot, Michael.
Hannibal Lecter's Dilemma00:10:13
It's really interesting.
I hope you come back.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye.
All right.
Out of time on that stuff I like.
Stuff I like.
Somebody's got to write us a tune for stuff I like because I can't stand that anymore.
You know, I put off, I haven't finished this yet, and I usually like to finish something before I recommend it, but it's so good.
I'm actually as close to binge-watching as I get, which is like I'm watching one and a half episodes every time I sit down, which I really almost never do.
I put off recommending it because it's based on a book that was written by my cousin, and our families were very close when I was a kid.
Mindhunter, which is on Netflix, is based on the book Mindhunter by John Douglas and Mark Allshaker.
Mark Allshaker is my cousin, and he wrote the book.
John Douglas, of course, is the FBI agent who sort of started or mastered the behavioral sciences at the FBI.
And his idea was you could profile when they talked about profiling killers and all this.
But Mindhunter, it kind of fictionalizes the story as far as I can tell.
It's set in 1977, and it's got these two guys, Jonathan Groff is the young guy, and Holt McKelany plays the older guy, these two FBI agents who are in this world of old-fashioned old-time law-busting and start to think, you know, we're starting to see a kind of criminal who operates without motive.
And the young guy, the agent is named Holden, what is his name?
Holden Ford.
The young guy says, you know, we should go talk to these people, talk to these serial killers and find out what makes them tick.
And everybody says, why on earth would you talk to these evil people?
And the guy says, well, they're in prison.
They're not doing anything.
So here he is getting ready.
In this very brief scene, he's getting ready to go talk to one of them.
Cameron Britton plays Edmund Kemper.
It's a terrific performance as a serial killer.
And his partner is basically upbraiding him for actually doing this.
What are you doing?
Just in case.
Holden, they're not going to let you in with a sidearm.
The guy is six foot nine, weighs 300 pounds.
That's right.
So what's he going to do?
He's going to take the thing away from you.
He's going to kill you with it.
And then he's going to have sex with your face.
Why are you so tense?
No, I'm not tense.
What really makes the thing cook is Cameron Britton is wonderful as Edmund Kemper as the killer.
But Jonathan Groff also plays Holden Ford.
There's just something not quite right about him.
He looks like the all-American boy, and he's kind of an innocent Midwesterner, but there's just something off about him.
So you get the feeling there's a connection.
And this is the question.
And this is why I find I feel this show is not just so compelling, but it's also kind of profound in a way, because it actually speaks directly into the issue that I'm kind of circling around all the time, which is the way in which we have gone forward in this world following science and leaving religion behind and feeling that those two are somehow at odds instead of that they should be working together and that we have all these wonders, all these terrific,
wonderful things around us, and yet children, teenagers, are killing themselves.
I think it's like 70%.
It's gone up in the last 10, 12 years.
And when they study this, they find they have no religion in their life.
They have no meaning in their life.
And when you read these books about the Enlightenment and about science, they all say, oh, people are unhappy because they want to go back to this primitive way of religious way of thinking.
But it never occurs to them that maybe we got one thing right and one thing wrong.
What happened during the Enlightenment is scientists started to say the human mind is deceivable, right?
It sees the sun moving, but it's really the earth moving.
So the human mind can't be trusted, A.
And B, we were misled by attaching value to material.
So we were misled by ideas of teleology, that things have a meaning or a purpose.
Or for instance, Plato saying the perfect shape is a circle, therefore the orbits of the planets must be in a circle.
Plato didn't say that.
I don't think, I think that was the Neoplatonist, but the point is that the idea that we should have kind of spiritual theories that explain material instead of doing experiments on the material themselves.
So they ditched the values, they ditched the religion and went after the science, and it worked great.
And so now they're saying, well, that religion was a problem, right?
Because this is working so great, which is kind of like me.
You know, I'm an artist.
My wife knew when she married me.
She was marrying an artist.
Sometimes when I get completely wrapped up in something, I become useless, right?
I become emotionally unavailable.
My mind is all wrapped up.
I become so absent-minded that it's like I'm almost insane.
My wife wants to ask me about scheduling.
I'm completely not there.
And it works, right?
It helps me finish the book that I'm working on.
And the book comes out, and I love the book, and it's terrific.
And it would be as if I thought to myself, well, that worked really well.
So now I'll never pay attention to my wife.
In other words, science is an exercise.
It is one thing that we do.
It is one thing that we do.
And it requires a cold mind unfettered with theories or with spiritual ideas, unfettered by ideas of what material should be telling us.
It should just be a way of finding out what material does tell us.
But that doesn't mean that science is the only thing we do and the only way forward.
When you have this world of wonders with our longer lifespans and the good health and food and all this stuff, and people are killing themselves, something has gone terribly wrong.
We have left something behind.
And this is what I think this story is about, because here is this guy who wants to study serial killers and everybody keeps saying, but they're evil.
And he says, yes, but if I get caught up in the evil of them, then I won't be able to study them.
If I get caught up in the moral questions, I won't be able to study them.
Therefore, the moral questions are not meaningful.
And of course, the great story that examines this exact division is Silence of the Lambs.
The boss character in Silence of the Lambs is based on, is a fictionalization of John Douglas, the guy that Mark Allshaker was writing the book about, right?
And he sends Clarice Starling out to get the insights of Hannibal Lecter, this scientist essentially.
They get the insights of Hannibal Lecter about another serial killer.
And Hannibal Lecter, Lecter means reader, and Hannibal, of course, is the great barbarian who almost destroyed Western civilization.
So Hannibal Lecter is science.
He's like complete science, a completely rational mind, and he's crazy.
He's out of his mind.
And this is the moment when you can see that he's trying to seduce the FBI agent into his world.
But you're not more than one generation from poor Wire Trash, are you, Agent Starling?
And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed, pure West Virginia.
What does your father do as your coal man does this thing of the land?
You know how quickly the boys found you?
All those tedious, sticky fumblings on the backseats of cars, while you could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the end of the five.
You see a lot, Doctor?
But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself?
What about it?
Why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see?
A census taker once tried to test me.
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
The reason that line is so famous and so resonant is because the census taker represents this world of science and he devoured him because once you take the spirit away from people, they just become meat.
That's what cannibalism is.
That's what zombies are.
It's this idea of people as meat.
And so even though Lecter does deliver the insights that the FBI agent needs, she needs to go back into the world of morality in order to keep from becoming him.
And that is what all the Hannibal Lecter books are about.
And it really is a fascinating story.
And Mindhunter tells it from a more realistic and historical perspective.
But it's the same story of how you deal with the physical world without losing your spiritual sense of yourself, because that is exactly what has happened to our society and why we've lost the logic of freedom and the West.
All right.
But don't worry because the Clavenless weekend is here, so we're all doomed.
However, some of you may survive.
If you do, come back here on Monday.
I will be here.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show, and we will see you then.
Strike up the band and make the fireflies dance.
Silver moon sparkling.
So cute.
Swing me.
I've got this hanging tie.
Bring, ring.
Bring your flowered hat.
We'll take the chain mark on your father's mat.
Oh, kiss me.
Andrew Klavan Show Produced00:00:23
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.
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And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.