Andrew Clavin returns from Oregon—where a near-sleep-drive accident and Quip toothbrushes dominated his vacation—before pivoting to Trump’s presidency, citing 3.9% unemployment, Jerusalem embassy moves, and North Korea hostage deals as successes, while slamming the NYT and ABC for framing them as crises. He dismisses Mueller’s investigation as unconstitutional, compares it to Watergate’s partisan overreach, and ties Democratic losses to Nixon’s 1974 resignation, arguing Trump’s policies may realign millennials toward conservatism. The episode also mocks "reparation casting" in Oregon theater—like gender-swapped Shakespeare—as virtue-signaling over art, before teasing a feminism critique with Natalie Ritchie’s Like Roar Like a Woman. [Automatically generated summary]
Whoa, one of the greatest Clavenless weeks on record.
I almost didn't come back.
I didn't want to jinx it.
Trump scuttles Obama's crummy Iran sellout, moves our Israel embassy to Jerusalem, and the press reports on Stormy Daniels.
Five top ISIS leaders are captured, and the press reports that someone made a snarky remark about John McCain in a private meeting.
Unemployment's at 3.9%, and black unemployment is at an all-time low, and the media's coverage of the president is 91% negative.
My favorite, my favorite moment on my vacation, never mind the hiking, the kayaking, all that, never mind.
My favorite was while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in North Korea negotiating the release of three American hostages, the New York Times, a former newspaper, runs this headline.
At a key moment, Trump's top diplomat is again thousands of miles away.
So I'm looking forward to future headlines from the Times like, just as world peace is restored, Trump is off playing golf with Kim Jong-un.
Or even as the economy improves, Congress is giving tax cuts to businesses.
Or just as Jesus returns, Christians are nowhere to be found.
I'm not sure the New York Times has figured out exactly how the world works yet, but that's all right.
Neither have their readers.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dee-ding.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is it-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hey, it's great to be back.
What a week.
I had a great week.
I was off in central Oregon.
I was hiking with my wife and kayaking.
We had a lot of incredible adventures.
We were on one trail that didn't exist because it had been snowed under and was closed till June, but we went hiking on it.
But the only dangerous thing I did, I actually fell asleep at the wheel for the second time in my life.
I fell asleep driving a car.
I knew I was dozing off, and I said to my wife, you better talk to me to keep me awake.
But my wife has this soothing, sweet voice.
You know, she's a psychotherapist.
Everything she does is make people feel better.
So I just passed out and she had to punch me.
She punched me on the arm and just barely, I was right on the verge of hitting the divider.
And I pulled over into the other lane.
It was luckily a cop wasn't watching, but that's the word.
I'm hiking in the wilderness, then almost ran off.
So I saw rattlesnakes all over the place.
But the only thing that I did that was dangerous was fall asleep at the wheel.
However, I did have my Quip toothbrush with me at all times because Quip, you know, the best thing for your teeth, it really does keep your teeth much cleaner, does a much better job is an electric toothbrush.
But those ones that plug into the wall, you just can't take them on vacation.
They violate the weight restrictions on the airplane.
They charge you an extra 50 bucks.
All right, I'm exaggerating, but they're big, they're huge, you know.
But Quip is this beautiful, sleek machine.
It's a battery operated, so you don't have to plug it in, and it does exactly what an electric toothbrush would do.
It packs just the right amount of vibrations into a slimmer design at a fraction of the cost of bulkier, traditional electric toothbrushes.
And it also comes with a mount that suctions right to your mirror and unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel anywhere.
Quip subscription plan refreshes your brush on a dentist recommended schedule.
You get a new brush every three months for just five bucks and it includes free shipping worldwide.
Quip starts at just $25.
Sorry I don't have it with me, but it's a sleek, beautiful little machine.
But if you go to getquip.com slash Clavin right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
And I know what you say.
It's this crazy craby guy.
I bring you my teeth.
How do you spell Clavin?
You spell it K-L-A-V-A-N.
No E's in Clavin.
I make it look easy, but there are no E's in Clavin.
First refill pack, first refill pack free at getquip.com slash clavin.
It's spelled g-e-t-q-u-i-p.com slash clavin.
So this has been what an unbelievable week for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is now shading into greatness.
He is shading.
He is very close to becoming a great president.
He had a great first year.
Last week, it was just unbelievable.
And while he is shading into greatness, the left is retreating into pure fantasy.
And I don't actually blame them.
I don't blame the left for sinking into fantasy because reality is hard.
Reality is hard.
Reality has a lot of cognitive dissonance in it.
You have to hold different ideas.
You know what you have to do in reality?
You have to make binary choices.
You have to say yes or no.
Yes, I'm going to get married.
No, I'm not.
Yes, I'm going to have a kid.
No, I'm not.
But all the choices operate in a cloud of gray, a cloud where things aren't always what they seem, where things aren't always perfect.
And Donald Trump, I voted for Donald Trump because there were two people.
I feel it's my responsibility to choose one of them.
I don't think I can say, well, I live in California.
I know it's going to go blue because look at how many people shout, oh, well, Donald Trump didn't have the popular vote, right?
So I wanted to contribute to that.
I just thought one of these people, I don't like either of these people, but one of them is clearly better than the other.
It was an important election with Anton and Scalia gone.
But I didn't like Donald Trump.
Donald Trump was mean.
He was blustery.
He was a braggart.
He talked about winning.
He derided people who didn't have money as losers.
He did a lot of things that I did not like.
You know what?
Talent is blind.
Talent goes where it will.
We in the arts know this.
You read Percy Beiss-Shelley, one of my favorite poets, terrible human being, mistreated his first wife so badly she killed herself.
Auguste Rodin, one of my favorite sculptors, he was also mistreated his mistresses, many mistresses, one of the greatest sculptors since ancient Greece.
Talent goes where it will go.
And by the way, you know who knows this?
You know who always knew it?
The left.
The left didn't care that John Kennedy was like banging every intern who walked past.
They just liked him.
They liked what he was doing.
They didn't care about Teddy Kennedy, you know, leaving his girlfriend to die.
That he was the lion of the Senate.
They knew plenty.
Bill Clinton, another one accused of rape, doesn't matter as long as he votes for abortion.
So they're very, very familiar with cognitive dissonance.
But suddenly, when it's on the other side, we have this guy who's an imperfect human being, a flawed human being, but he is doing a fantastic job as president.
3.9% unemployment.
Today, today, you know what?
We should play this.
You know what?
Before we do anything else, let's play the Trump happiness montage, right?
I mean, this was a week to remember.
We got to celebrate.
Let's do it.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
We're going to win more.
Yay!
He earned that one, boy.
3.9% unemployment.
Five top ISIS leaders captured.
North Korea meeting has been set and they've scheduled a denuclearization event, three hostages released, the Iran deal canceled, which I think is a great thing.
Black unemployment is at its lowest ever.
And in Jerusalem, they move today.
Tomorrow, I guess, is the 70-year anniversary of the founding of Israel, or as the Palestinians call it, the catastrophe or the disaster or whatever they call it.
Trump presidents have been promising to move the embassy to Jerusalem and recognize what is just the case, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
I think Abraham Lincoln promised this.
I think in his Gettysburg address, he said, four score and seven years from now, there will be a country named Israel.
Its capital will be Jerusalem, and I will move the embassy there.
And every president does it, and they never do it.
Trump said he'd do it.
He did it.
I don't believe one Democrat was there, but Lindsey Graham was there.
A couple of Republicans were there.
And here's just a couple of speeches that were going on, because this was this morning here.
It's already evening there, but a couple of speeches that they gave at the dedication of the new embassy.
Exactly 70 years ago, the United States under President Harry Truman became the first nation to recognize the state of Israel.
Today we officially opened the United States Embassy in Jerusalem.
Congratulations.
It's been a long time coming.
In December of last year, President Trump announced to the world that the United States would finally recognize the truth, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
He also declared that we would soon move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
And just five months later, we are standing on these grounds.
While presidents before him have backed down from their pledge to move the American embassy once in office, this president delivered.
Because when President Trump makes a promise, he keeps it.
We have no better friends in the world.
You stand for Israel and you stand for Jerusalem.
Thank you.
Dear friends, what a glorious day.
Remember this moment.
This is history.
President Trump, by recognizing history, you have made history.
So they put out a coin.
Have you seen?
This is a commemorative coin with Donald Trump's face and King Cyrus of Persia, because King Cyrus of Persia, I think we have an image of it.
There it is.
King Cyrus of Persia is the guy who, after the Babylonian exile, like 600 BC, sent the Jews back to Jerusalem.
So Donald Trump and King Cyrus of Persia have their pictures together for the first time.
Maybe not the first time in Donald Trump's mind, but the first time on our coin.
And meanwhile, meanwhile, how is the press reporting this?
There have been demonstrations.
Hamas has been sending people, you know, these poor people, I feel for them because Hamas says, you got to go and invade the border.
Great idea.
You know, these guys go and invade the Gaza border and some of them are getting killed in the melees.
You know, I mean, it's all on Hamas.
So ABC is now reporting basically that Donald Trump has ensured that the peace process, which was working so great, it was such a great peace process.
It had everything in it except for peace.
It had the process, but not the peace.
But now it's all over.
We want ABC on Israel.
It's cut number two.
Almost every other country in the world tried to stay on the fence and keep its embassies in Tel Aviv.
America is now seen by many across this region to be siding firmly with Israel, killing any prospect of peace.
Now, though the reaction was muted in December when President Trump announced his intention to move the embassy to Jerusalem, it could be very different this time round when his daughter Ravanka and son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner attend the official opening this week.
And here's why.
It's 70 years since the creation of the state of Israel that for Palestinians is what they call the Nakba catastrophe in Arabic.
What are the potential national security implications of moving that embassy to Jerusalem?
You know, Dan, just as you said and just as Ian said, you can certainly see more protests across the region.
And I think from my perspective, having covered this region for so long and people were so hopeful at certain points during history that there might be some sort of peace deal, this just has to make it nearly impossible because you go in with any sort of predetermination about Jerusalem.
That is unbelievable.
She's mourning the false hope that the peace process, you know, that people had over the peace process.
She's mourning the fact that this thing has dragged on forever and people have, you know, at moments have had hope.
Oh, now it's impossible.
Well, since it was never happened, it was impossible before.
Maybe now it is possible because it takes this problem off the table.
Hey, you know, by the way, if you don't know this, Apple News is, the Daily Wire is now on Apple News.
So add us to your news channel and you can get stories on the go just by going to your Apple News story.
The other thing you can do is, of course, you can start to look as incredibly great as me by going to Beach Body on Demand.
Yes, I hike, I kayak, but you've got to work out.
And Beach Body on Demand is an easy-to-use streaming service that gives you instant access to a wide variety of super effective workouts you can do from the comfort of your living room 24-7.
It is great because it's got a history of success.
It's the company behind P90X, Insanity.
Have you ever done insanity?
Insanity is insanity.
You do insanity and use it.
The reason they call it insanity is because you do the work and you go, this is insanity.
But it does work.
21-day fix.
Best trainers are on here.
You get motivated by celebrity super trainers you know, like Sean T., Shalene Johnson, Tony Horton.
Best programs, hundreds of effective workouts for all fitness levels, ranging from bodybuilding to weight training to cardio to yoga and even dance workouts.
And you can do it all on your schedule.
Access it anytime, anywhere.
You've got to try the service because it's going to keep you disciplined doing these great programs and keep you fit.
And right now, my listeners can get a special free trial membership.
Here's what you do.
You text Andrew to 303030-3030-30 and you'll get full access to the entire platform for free, which is kind of inexpensive.
All the workouts, the nutrition information and support totally free.
Again, just text Andrew to 303030-303030 and get a Beach Body on Demand.
Demand.
You can't have mine, but you can get your own Beach Body on Demand.
Why Reality Has Its Voice00:15:40
So Trump shades into greatness, moving Jerusalem, moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
The media and the left shades into fantasy saying it's a war.
What else is a war?
The Iran deal, right?
We end this Iran deal.
And, you know, the thing that gets me about this is I kept hearing people say, Matthew Dowd was on ABC saying, this treaty, he's broken a treaty.
Stephen Colbert was like, he said you have literally broken the promise of America.
But that's not true.
It is literally untrue.
We never made that promise.
There is a constitutional way that you make a treaty.
The Congress has got to validate that treaty.
It never did.
This was just a deal made in a back room between Barack Obama, Iran, and Europe.
And that's all it was.
He was perfectly within his rights, perfectly within the realm of wisdom to get rid of it.
In fact, in fact, David Brooks of Knucklehead Row, one of the knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row, even he, in the most graceless possible way, indicated that Trump between North Korea and Iran.
And by the way, there's a connection here because there's an unconfirmed story that North Korea has withdrawn its help for building Iran's ballistic missiles.
And you know, those ballistic missiles are only being used for one thing.
They were being used for the nuclear weapon they were going to build as soon as they could get away with it.
So that North Korea, in order to make friends with us, is pulling out, this report's still unconfirmed, is pulling out of helping Iran.
Remember, this was the axis of evil that George W. Bush was talking about.
So here David Brooks, in the most graceless way possible, admits that just maybe Donald Trump is doing a good job overseas.
One of the things he noticed with the president is that he comes from a background where basically in the real estate business he worked with a lot of thugs and he cultivated a lot of thugs and he was a little thuggish himself.
But in my view, that helps him, for all his drawbacks, understand thugs.
And so North Korea, he understood that being tough with a thug produces some results.
And we're in a better situation with North Korea than we were otherwise.
He's been much tougher on the Chinese and trade.
And a lot of people think he's adopted the right policy because sometimes you've got to just stand up to people.
And in Iran, I have very mixed views about whether Trump did the right thing.
But President Obama, the argument he made for it, which was that Iran would moderate and become a more familiar member of the Company of Nations, that has turned out to be clearly false.
They're the most genocidal nation on the face of the earth.
They export violence, terror around the earth.
And so Trump standing up to them at least has some legitimacy.
It's possible that he understands people like that better than people who have higher SAT scores.
People, I mean, a really graceless compliment, but still, still, it's like dawning on David Brooks a little cognitive dissonance.
He may not like Donald Trump.
Donald Trump may be a thug in his vocabulary, in his mind, but Donald Trump is doing a good job.
Not so our friends at ABC.
They declared war in Israel.
Now they're declaring war in Iran.
What's going to happen in Iran when they pull out of this deal?
It's war on ABC.
As Trump shades into greatness, they fade into fantasy.
Here is ABC discussing the end of the deal, cut number one.
We've been to this rodeo before.
It cost us thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and it feels like we're going to the same place again.
So all of this hue and cry as if this was a surprising decision.
I think Ambassador Bolton is absolutely correct, that people who really looked at the situation understood that Trump was going to do this.
Arguably, the focus of his foreign policy, as Matt said, is to move into a period of confrontation with Iran in the broader Middle East.
And I think that's what makes people so nervous right now.
Rather than a new deal, it's much likelier that there will be a new war in the Middle East.
It's kind of a confusing message, because if you look at the way these two different nuclear matters are being handled, you know, Kim Jong-un is offering some kind of verification of their nuclear program.
The Iran deal included some kind of verification, but that deal's dead and this deal's moving forward.
There were economic sanctions involved to bring Iran into the world's economy.
That's the same thing that we're offering to North Korea, but we're dealing with these.
They don't feel congruent.
And also, you have two parties, North and South Korea, who have already begun talking and already begun trying to make peace.
This is Armageddon.
This is Armageddon.
You know, you remember, that was the healthcare bill.
This is Armageddon.
Net neutrality was going to be Armageddon.
And now the Iran deal is going to be Armageddon.
But this time, they're serious.
This time, by golly, they mean it.
This is really Armageddon.
It's not like the other Armageddons that weren't Armageddon.
This is Armageddon.
So now we've got war in Israel on ABC, and we've got war in Iran in ABC.
But in the real world, in the real world, things are going pretty darn well.
And by the way, you know, we also, oh, we've also got war in Korea, North Korea, because, you know, they're coming to the table.
They released three hostages for nothing, basically, just to make friends.
And this is also a problem.
John Brennan, the corrupt gas bag who helped Hillary Clinton as CIA director, he helped Hillary Clinton sell this idea that, you know, at the end, what is the book called Shattered?
There's a book Shattered that was supposed to cover the first woman president being elected.
And instead, obviously, it covered the failure of Hillary Clinton.
And in the book Shattered, there are scenes of Hillary Clinton after the election saying, we've got to get the press.
We've got to yell at the press and blame them for my loss until they're willing to sell the story of Trump's collusion with Russia.
That's what they did.
That's what they did.
They just sold it.
And John Brennan was out there helping by making sure that James Comey went in to the president to show him this steel dossier full of hookers and so forth in Russia.
And then probably, we don't know this for sure, but then somehow CNN found out that this was happening and used it as a news hook to reveal the steel dossier, none of which has been confirmed.
So here's John Brennan on the Kim Jong-un.
And again, we don't know what's going to happen with Kim Jong-un, but we're in with a chance.
At least something's happening.
Not in John Brennan's mind.
It's Kim Jong-un, who I despise because of the brutality that he has put upon the North Korean people.
But unfortunately, I think he has been masterful in how he has manipulated perceptions and how he has manipulated and quite frankly duped Mr. Trump.
I hope that a summit meeting is going to result in a deliquarization of the Korean Peninsula.
What are the odds?
I think they're probably, you know, less than 0.1%.
This is Armageddon.
It's Armageddon.
Now we got war in Israel.
We got war in Iran.
We got war in Korea.
This is terrible.
It's awful.
I can't stand all this war.
I'm glad it's only happening on television because if it were happening in real life, we'd be in trouble.
And meanwhile, meanwhile, we've now finding out, you know, the New York Times, which is essentially an organ of the deep state, I mean, it's now an organ of the bureaucracy.
The New York Times has been doing these hit pieces on Devin Nunes, Nunuz, Urnunaz, Nini's.
Nunes.
They're doing these hit pieces on Nunes because Nunes is now extracted from, like with his fingernails, has dragged out of the Justice Department with Rod Rosenstein saying, I don't need no stinking badges.
I don't need no congressional oversight.
And Nunez or Nunfes or whatever his name is, has dragged out of them this admission that they had, they had a spy in the Trump campaign.
Maybe before there was any reason for them to have any motivation to put a spy in the Trump campaign.
Kim Strossel, who has been fantastic about this, she was one of the first people to break the story that it might be true.
And now she's saying she knows who it is.
Here's Kim.
Up until last week, all we knew was that House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had initiated a new line of inquiry and was demanding new documents from the Department of Justice.
But then in their desire to make Chairman Nunes look bad and justify why they were not giving those documents, someone in the government leaked a lot of details about what was happening.
It turns out he's asking about a top secret government source who has worked for the FBI and the CIA, who is a U.S. citizen, would seem to have some sort of entanglement with foreign intelligence agencies or maybe is based overseas.
And based on all those breadcrumbs and some reporting, I've got a pretty good sense of who it is.
And it does look as though, indeed, there was an FBI attempt, a successful one, to basically go out and spy with a human asset on the Trump campaign.
Think about that for a minute.
A president of the United States, an administration, putting a spy in the campaign of an opposing candidate.
I mean, think about that.
That is like, that's Venezuela stuff.
That is like really Central America Cuban craziness.
What on earth?
Earth was, you know, this is this thing, because the left is living in a fantasy world of their own making, because they're living in a fantasy world, they think they're justified in doing all this stuff because it's a nightmare out there, right?
We're at war with Korea, we're at war with Iran, we're at war in Israel.
I mean, you know, in that fantasy world, I guess they felt justified in doing anything.
But you know, a little bit of reality.
I mean, reality has its own voice.
Reality is breaking through.
We have a piece up on the Daily Wire today.
Let me give credits, Emily Zanati.
A new poll, the blue wave is collapsing because the blue wave was a fantasy to begin with.
It never happened.
But millennials and minorities report declining trust in the Democratic Party.
Why?
Because they're loons, that's why.
But you know what?
Guess what the most read piece in the New York Times was over the weekend?
Most read, you know, they have those things in the online version of the New York Times, which I look at, so you don't have to.
I sacrifice for you.
I am a martyr for you.
I read the New York Times, so you don't have to.
The main, the most read article was by Gerard Alexander, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia.
It said, liberals, you're not as smart as you think.
The point of this piece was, he says, liberals dominate the entertainment industry, many of the most influential news sources, and America's universities.
This means that people with progressive leanings are everywhere in the public eye and are also on the college campuses attended by many people's children or grandkids.
This makes liberals feel more powerful than they are, and it's a double-edged power.
Liberals often don't realize how provocative or inflammatory they can be.
They're stuck in their bubble.
They're talking to themselves.
Liberals are trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle.
When they use their positions in American culture to lecture, judge, and disdain, they push more people into an opposing coalition that liberals are increasingly prone to think of as deplorable.
In other words, if you're living in this fantasy world where everything Trump does is spiraling into disaster, it's Armageddon.
What did Nancy Pelosi say?
Let's hear from Nancy Pelosi or her opinion on this.
This is Armageddon.
This is Armageddon.
If everything is Armageddon, you're justified in hating the people who do it.
You're justified in calling the people who voted for Trump racist.
You're justified in spying on a presidential candidate's campaign.
And while you do that, more and more people start to say, hey, you suck.
You stink.
You guys are terrible people.
And then you hate them even more.
So eventually what you've got is professors, newsmen in Hollywood talking to themselves while the rest of us enjoy what is turning into a great, great administration.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, May 15th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, all your questions will be answered by the Daily Wire's own Michael Knowles, and here he is to tell you all about it.
Join me, Michael Knowles and Alicia Krauss, on Tuesday, May 15th at 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 Pacific, for a new episode of The Conversation.
It'll be on Facebook and YouTube for everyone to watch, but only Daily Wire subscribers can ask questions like these.
Well, is Hillary really your cousin?
I love that this is true.
Do you think history will ever be honest looking back on Obama's legacy?
Yes, but not anytime soon.
If the White House offered you a choice to spend the day with one of the Trumps, who would it be and why?
I'm going to say that's the safe answer.
But was it Melania or a Bonca?
Well, what is your whiskey or bourbon of choice?
I prefer Scotch whiskey.
It's my favorite kind of whiskey.
But again, that's only for breakfast.
Evan is asking, where do you get your dresses?
Subscribe to dailywire.com to ask questions and join the conversation on May 15th.
I'll see you then.
All right.
And you've got to get with Knowles quickly because he's going off to be married and we'll never see him again.
He's coming up on this very show.
We're going to talk about a little history that is coming up.
But we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can hear the whole show there.
If you subscribe, you can watch the whole show there.
You never have to be cast into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you can avoid both the wailing and the teeth gnashing.
I heard YouTube was brutal on me last week.
Oh, unbelievable.
YouTube is demonetizing me and throwing me off the air.
They say, you know what they do?
They don't do this to the young Turks.
They don't do this to the left.
You know, if I play anything that comes from NBC or anything that comes from something, they'll say, oh, it's a violation of copyright.
Pull it off and pull it off.
And they do and they demonetize us for, I don't even know what I'm saying.
I'm such a sweet, lovable person.
I don't even know what they're doing.
YouTube, knock it off.
Come on.
Play fair.
Play fair.
Everybody gets a voice.
All right.
Michael Knowles is coming up.
Come on over.
All right.
Knowles.
You're back.
I'm back.
I know.
I was hiking.
I was kayaking.
I was driving my car into a divider.
I was.
Usually these sort of things, like falling asleep at the wheel, you know, half hung over, driving off a cliff.
That's the sort of thing that I would do.
I do not expect this from you, Drew.
We almost lost you.
You know, it's hilarious.
Ellen and I are so crazy.
We do these things like we're in the middle of nowhere.
I mean, absolutely nowhere.
And weather is moving in.
And I'm going, like, maybe we shouldn't hike.
And Ellen's going, oh, come on, let's go.
So we go off in this hike and the weather is coming in and all this, and we're fine.
And then we went off in this other hike and Ellen is going, there's no trail is covered in snow.
And I'm going, oh, come on, let's go.
So we go hiking off into the, we're fine, nothing.
But we get in the car, like we were like at an inch from death.
You know, all it took was just driving across Oregon.
And that's how we almost.
This is true.
Like all of my millennial friends, you know, they want to go to bed by 11 o'clock.
They don't, they, oh, we got to obey the rules, whatever.
The Clavins, though, they're out all night.
They're driving.
They're skiing.
It's healthy living.
And you, sir, are about to become a husband.
I am.
I'm working on it.
She still has a little while to just scurry away, you know, and leave an Elisa-shaped hole in the wall.
I think Shapiro is outside the window with a ladder.
Come and say, don't tell me the trampoline.
But that's exciting.
Coming up.
It is.
Yeah, it's very, I've got to get all my bachelor dome out of me now, which I may end up like you on your trip, you know, careening somewhere.
But hopefully not.
Hopefully it'll all go well.
No, it'll be great.
It'll be great.
Marriage was certainly the making of me.
And if anything can be the making of you, it would be Alyssa.
That is the best shot.
The making of me, the unmaking of sweet little Elise.
It's okay.
Everything has trade-offs in life.
Watergate Revelations00:08:43
So I read this piece while I was gone about Watergate, which really I found illuminating at this point.
In terms of what's going on now, did you read this in Bloomberg?
Oh, it was so good.
This piece, yeah, it was making the rounds on the internet.
It was so, so good because in the reelection campaign for Richard Nixon, the slogan was, President Nixon, now more than ever.
And that's kind of how I feel.
Bring it on.
Now more than ever.
People look at Watergate.
They don't realize, first of all, especially on the left, that Watergate was a political struggle.
They say, oh, he broke the law.
Apparently it's against the law not to tape doors correctly at the Democrat offices.
So there was this minor little dirty trick.
And they took down the president over it.
And they don't realize what a naked political battle this was as well.
In 1974, when the House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of three articles of impeachment, the Democrats had a majority in the Senate and the House.
So when Nixon resigned, he said, I no longer have the political support to maintain my position, right?
He knew he was going to be impeached.
So there's this political aspect of it as well.
But, you know, it was pretty naked power grab, and people have been fighting over this.
And it's not like it was some great win for Democrats.
They got their president.
They finally got Nixon.
They stole an election from him in 1960.
They'd been trying to get him since basically since he took down Alger Hiss.
That's exactly right.
They hated him since that.
They hated him because he was a firm anti-communist and he was right.
And they never forgave him for it.
They tried to take him down for decades.
They finally got him.
And then, so they get him in 1974.
What happens six years later?
We get the Reagan Revolution.
This initiated a period really of 28 years of basically conservative governance.
I include Clinton in there, one, because of the Gingrich Revolution, and two, because we reformed taxes, lowered taxes, we reformed welfare, right?
Crime bill.
It was basically a conservative administration, some decent free trade agreements.
So anyway, it was really a pyrrhic victory for Democrats in 1974.
It killed a quarter century for them.
And we're seeing these same kinds of forces at play again.
As they point out in that great Bloomberg article, during the Nixon administration, the Democrat Nixon advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said that the New York Times and the Washington Post were hostile to the American government and hostile to American society.
Talked about how the bureaucrats were working to undermine the president.
And everyone said, oh, you're being conspiratorial.
You're being crazy.
Until a bureaucrat turned over classified documents to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
What are we seeing today?
We're seeing the same thing play out.
The media totally against Trump.
The bureaucracy against Trump largely.
And we're seeing huge overreach here, particularly in this Mueller decision.
There was a good piece in the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Calabresi.
You saw that piece?
That was by the former assistant to Ed Meese, AG for Reagan and law clerk for Scalia.
And he said that the Mueller investigation is unconstitutional.
It's simply unconstitutional.
And it's unconstitutional under the Morrison v. Olson.
Not only the dissent in that case, but also the decision.
It's actually unconstitutional by both sides.
Scalia wrote a great dissent in that case.
The case was about really in the wake of Watergate, what these special investigators and independent counsels could do, what the scope of their role was.
And whether it was constitutional at all to even have them.
And whether it was constitutional at all.
Scalia had a famous dissent where he said this whole thing is unconstitutional.
But William Rehnquist, you know, the future great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, even in upholding the independent counsel statute, he said that it has very strict limits, that principal officers must be appointed by the president with the Senate's consent.
And there's a difference between principal officers and inferior officers.
An inferior officer is not subject to Senate approval, has a boss.
This would be the role of Robert Mueller.
Robert Mueller has a boss.
It's Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.
So Rod Rosenstein is a principal officer.
Robert Mueller is an inferior officer.
And yet Mueller is vastly exceeding the scope of this investigation.
This is no longer about Russia collusion.
They're getting Manafort for some money laundering.
They're indicting whole scores of people for reasons that have nothing to do with the purpose of the independent council.
And they clearly haven't got this.
They haven't got the Russian collusion.
I mean, it is just, it's just absurd.
How long?
To think that Trump was like on the phone with Putin, you know, saying, you know, run some more of those Facebook ads.
That's what's going to turn the tide.
I don't get it.
Another $100,000 of Facebook ads.
I mean, this investigation has now been going on, I think, since the Coolidge administration.
They've turned up absolutely nothing.
They don't have him, so they're just trying to get him on something because you can indict a ham sandwich.
That's what we're seeing.
This is a huge overview.
In fact, Mueller indicted a ham sandwich, an imaginary ham sandwich.
He indicted a Russian company that doesn't even exist.
It's like, I'm just thinking of a ham sandwich and he indicted it.
That's right.
One of the best Mueller gets is a company that does not exist.
That is what a perfect analogy for this investigation.
So you look at that and you look at the legal similarities between Watergate and the Supreme Court decision after Watergate, but you look at the political ramifications.
I think this is why you're seeing certain Democrats now saying, well, we're not going to impeach necessarily.
Adam Schiff came out and said, we're not exactly looking because they saw what happened in the wake of Watergate when the bureaucracy and the media team up to overturn an American election.
It doesn't work out well for them.
Right.
You know, and it's the one thing, I always say this about politicians because people are outside of politics.
They're always going, this guy's an idiot.
This guy's a fool.
This guy's.
The thing is, politicians are good at politics.
They are good at politics.
When you watch a major league baseball team, you are watching the best people who play the game.
When you watch the federal government, you are looking at the best politicians in the country.
They may not be good people.
They may not be good administrators.
They may not be good legislators, but they're good at politics.
And every single one of the Democrats knows what happened at Watergate.
I mean, what happened basically is, you know, they was there.
I remember how much they hated Nixon.
I mean, it is like Trump.
And Nixon was a flawed, like Trump.
He's a flawed guy.
He did have paranoia.
He did have like old-fashioned attitudes about things, but he was a good civil rights president.
He was actually kind of a liberal president, too far to the left for me, you know, but like he was, but he was not somebody, they just hated him personally and they hated him.
You're absolutely right because Alger Hiss, people don't know this story anymore.
Hugh Hewitt, you know, is always quizzing people whether they've heard of Alger Hiss because it was a huge deal that this guy, he was upper class, he was sophisticated, and the guy who took him down was a former, you know, communist spy basically named Whitaker Chambers, who was fat and grotesque and didn't really fit in with everybody.
And so the left just stood up for Alger Hiss and he was guilty and Nixon went after him.
And by the way, have you ever read Witness?
Have you ever read it?
Actually, it's one of the greatest life-changing book.
It is a life-changing book.
Nobody reads it anymore.
It is like the must-read, right on that list up there with Edmund Burke or whatever for American conservatives.
It's so, so good.
I agree.
I agree.
What are you talking about on your show today?
Today, I'm talking about how the kids are all right.
You know, obviously, during the Clavenlist Week, our pal Ben wanted to sound a very pessimistic note and say conservatives.
I knew I shouldn't leave town.
He gets like that.
He does get like that sometimes.
And about how conservatives are losing the youth.
And there are some problems.
But I think things are looking great.
I think recent polling shows that we're experiencing a cultural shift.
And I think the kids are all right.
Not the grown-up kids who are these Democrats who cry all the time and yell and shriek, but the actual millennials, I think there's a good chance that just as Ronald Reagan was able to do from 80 to 84, Donald Trump could win over a good segment of the young voters for the Republicans.
You know, I really do think you're right about this because, as I keep saying, reality has a voice.
Suddenly these kids are going to have jobs.
They're not going to be living in their parents' basement.
And after Carter, which was just the most depressing period of my lifetime politically, I mean, nobody had a job.
People were so unhappy.
When Reagan re-jiggered the economy and it took off that way, it's like laughing gas because you not only have the good economy, you have the contrast between the kind of Obama economy where it's a 1% growth and 1%.
The new normal.
Yeah, the new normal.
There's nothing you can do.
They did that with Carter too, by the way.
It's like the country's ungovernable.
It can't be done.
It can't be done.
And then Reagan was like, oh yeah, I can do this.
Colorblind Casting Debate00:06:48
Man, I did it.
And Trump's the same way.
He's like, you know, yeah, yeah, we can do this.
And I think that the kids are not stupid.
They're just inexperienced, and they do see this, and it makes a change.
I agree with you about this.
I think things are going to be a lot better than we think they are.
And if we win these this midterm, if the Republicans win this midterm, the resistance is over.
It's over.
I think if that happens, because history is so against us holding the house, if we manage to hold the house somehow, I think I'm going to have to just staple the MAGDA hat to my head.
Get it right in there.
Oh, that sounds like fun.
I'll help you with that.
All right.
Sounds like a good show.
Thanks a lot, Nolan.
Our crappy culture.
So here's something I just want to talk about from my vacation.
All right.
In Oregon, where I was, there is every year a Shakespeare festival in Ashland.
It's not just Shakespeare.
It's all kinds of different theater.
You know, they do kind of classic shows and sometimes musicals, but they also do a lot of Shakespeare.
And they have these beautiful theaters they've built for it.
There's a little town, Ashland.
It's a very beautiful little town, but it's a very, very left-wing town.
It's a really woke town.
So 10 years ago, I think it was me, my wife, and my son, Spencer, went to Ashland to see the plays, and they were great.
I mean, we saw Othello, we saw a couple of really good Shakespeare plays, we saw a couple of non-Shakespeare plays.
And then in a day, we would go out, we went on a whitewater rafting trip down the Rogue River.
It was really fun.
So I thought on our way back, this time we were going to central Oregon to hike.
I thought, on our way back, let's stop off at Ashland and see a couple of plays.
And they were terrible.
They were terrible.
Why were they terrible?
It was because, you know, there's such a thing, they call it in the theater, they call it colorblind casting, which is where you don't mind if you cast a black man in a role that's usually played by a white man.
I am deeply, deeply in favor of colorblind casting with one caveat, okay?
I'm in favor of colorblind casting for one reason.
I want to see great actors play great parts.
And great actors come in all colors, and there is this vast, untapped reserve of great actors who are black and who are not white.
I don't want to see King Lear limited to only people who look like King Lear would have looked.
I want to see all the great actors.
I have an imagination.
I understand if Denzel Washington is playing King Lear, I understand Lear would have been white in real life, but I can get over that.
The only time I don't agree with that is when colorblind casting confuses you.
So if I can't tell whose brother is who, or if I can't tell that this is supposed to be a mother, I have to constantly be thinking about it and translating it.
Because the play is for the audience.
The play is not for the actors.
The play is not for the producers.
It's not for the director.
The play is for the audience.
When you are putting on a play, your purpose is to communicate great writing, great theater to the audience.
So in Ashland, they no longer have colorblind casting.
They have reparation casting.
They have woke casting.
Every single part, every single part is played by somebody of a different color.
I don't even think there were any white men in it.
Not only that, but they were putting on a production of Oklahoma where the guy's role is played by a female.
So basically, and we saw Jane Austen, I want to tell you about this in a minute, but we saw a production of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.
And if you ever want to see a great production of that, watch the movie with Ang Li if you haven't read, or if you've already read the book, watch the movie by Ang Li, and it is just fantastic.
This was like, it was like everybody was something else.
Everybody was black.
There was a midget.
There was.
I mean, I'm not exaggerating.
It was like everything.
And you know, the thing is, Jane Austen's world was a very specific world.
It was a very specific British white world.
And so these actors, it's not the actor's fault.
It's not the actor's fault.
They want a job.
They're good actors, but they were miscast.
And it was just, it was just off-putting because after a while, what I was thinking was, you're not putting on this play for me.
You're putting on this play to show me how virtuous you are.
You're not going to be held back by the fact that women aren't men.
By golly, if women want to be men, they're men.
You're not going to be put off by the fact that some white people are white and some aren't black.
And the actors, part of what an actor is, is the way he or she looks.
That is part of what an actor is.
Just like part of what we are is the way we look.
And so that translates into the theater.
It's not colorblind casting when it overwhelms the theater itself.
And that is really crappy culture.
I do have to end on this note, though.
Jane Austen, who is, in my mind, the only great female novelist.
Now, there are female novelists who have written great books, right?
Because like Jane Eyre, fantastic book.
Middle March, one of my favorites, absolutely excellent book.
But Jane Austen is the only novelist who is up there with Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, of presenting a vision and a world.
And it is such a powerful vision.
She was writing about the virtues.
Alastair, I can't remember his name.
The guy who wrote After Virtue, one of my favorite books.
He says that she was the last writer in the Aristotelian tradition.
She was a genius.
And so her characters, I know they're always looking for love and you think of them as romantic stories, but they're really stories about virtue.
And sense and sensibility is, it's funny.
It's a really anti-leftist thing.
And when you think about it, because the emotional sister is the one who's doing everything wrong and the sister who says, yes, I have emotions, but facts don't care about my emotions.
She's kind of a Shapiro character and she's the one you want to see happy.
And in the moment, this woke audience watching this woke play with this reparation casting, which was even making fun of itself.
It was even making fun of Jane Austen by putting in outmoded dances, anachronistic dances, and all this.
But that moment when the man comes in and proposes and gets down his dancing, the audience, seriously, the audience gasped.
They gasped with pleasure.
It was like, Jay, the power of Jane Austen just overwhelmed all the crappy casting, all the virtue signaling, all the leftism.
And people understood what virtue is and that virtue should be rewarded because Jane Austen was a genius.
It was an amazing moment.
But shame on you.
In the Ashland, you've ruined the Ashland Shakespeare Festival by your woke casting to prove how virtuous and how lefty you are instead of delivering the play to the people.
All right, that's what I have to say.
Tomorrow, what do we got tomorrow?
Natalie Ritchie.
Natalie Ritchie.
Oh, terrific.
Natalie Ritchie has written a really interesting book called, it's called Like Roar Like a Woman.
Is that the name of the book?
Yeah, and it's about feminism and how it elevates male values over female values, which I've been saying for a long time.
She will be here tomorrow.
I will be here tomorrow.
I hope you will be here tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show00:00:35
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This 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.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.