Mike Rowe dissects media’s conflict obsession—how Dirty Jobs thrived on spectacle while exposing shared values—and slams weaponized terms like "blue collar" amid partisan mobs, dismissing ties to white supremacy as baseless tribalism. Meanwhile, the host praises Trump’s cultural realignment via NFL anthem rules and legal wins, framing his presidency as a corrective to leftist narratives, before Rowe’s apolitical work ethic message cuts through polarization. The episode ends with a lament for literature’s decline, contrasting Roth’s American Pastoral with today’s divisive, screen-driven culture. [Automatically generated summary]
Former director of national intelligence James Clapper has a new book out entitled Facts and Fears, Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence.
Although when you edit out all the words that have nothing to do with James Clapper, the book should be titled and Fears from AN, which doesn't make much sense, but then neither does James Clapper.
Clapper, who lied before Congress about NSA spying and then lied before Congress about leaking to the press, and then lied to the press about lying to Congress, says he's really telling the truth in this book.
No, really.
Seriously, no kidding.
This time, it's the truth.
Then he put his hand over his mouth to cover his giggling.
His new book does contain such revelatory passages as this one, quote, when you are a spy named James Clapper, everything you say is a lie, including this.
But then I was never a spy, and my name is not James Clapper, and this is not a lie, unquote.
Clapper has now taken the talents for dishonesty, obfuscation, and deception that he learned in the spy trade and put them to good use by becoming a commentator on CNN.
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.
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All right.
Mike Rowe is with us, the amazing Mike Rowe, really fun interview, funny guy, very smart.
And this is the last day before the long Clavenless weekend begins.
It's Memorial Day when we celebrate and remember all the soldiers who gave their lives so that football players could disrespect the flag.
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All right.
So just as we're going on air, Trump has canceled his summit with Kim Jong-un, which was, I thought, was a great move because Kim Jong-un was doing that thing that Kim Jong-un does where he starts to strud, and I won't do this if you don't do that.
And I'm not going to do this.
And he's like, squashed him.
I'm talking about Dynatrap.
It was like, bang, you know, just like squished him.
Who knows what will happen.
You know, one other thing, I don't report on the future too much here.
I try to report on things that have actually gone on.
Winning the NFL Campaign?00:15:24
So I don't know where this will ultimately go, but I think that Trump is showing that he's in control.
And he put out a letter saying about how big our nuclear arsenal is, and I'd hate to use it, which I thought was also sending a good message.
But, you know, here is the thing about Trump that Trump is doing that I just love.
He is changing our underlying assumptions.
You know, we talk about the NFL.
He's moving the football of our assumptions.
And I think that that, I cannot tell you how important I think this is.
When I sit and talk to people about the culture and how the right lets the culture slip away, the culture doesn't work because they make a movie that promotes some social justice warrior agenda.
It doesn't change anything because somebody makes a movie attacking the war on terror.
It doesn't work through propaganda means.
That is very highly overrated.
What the culture does is the culture establishes what our moral assumptions are and where they stand.
What they call them overton window, what is fine for people to say.
You know, I have a pal, a friend, Owen Brennan, over at Madison McQueen, and he has really done some great work.
He's working, I think, with the Ted Cruz campaign now.
He does a lot of campaign work on YouTube, you know, and videos and commercials.
And he has done a real study about this, about how the left operates to change our assumptions by having one sector of the left state the most outrageous thing.
Maybe they'll put it up on a piece of art out in the public art or something like that.
And that just moves the conversation to the left.
And then the guy who's on MSNBC can move it a little further to the left.
And then the guys who's on NBC can move it a little further to the left.
And they're constantly reinforcing this with their movies, with their novels.
This is what it means for them to own the means of communication.
So it's just, think about movies.
Think about movies.
In every movie, a woman who devotes herself to homemaking is unhappy and dissatisfied instead of happy.
You know, that is just an assumption.
Religious people, small-minded, instead of you meet religious people and they're incredibly forgiving, open-minded, and kind, but in the movies, they always hate gays or they're raping people or something like that.
Every movie is like that.
That just changes the underlying assumption.
See, it starts out by them saying, oh, the priest did it.
Isn't that shocking?
Because we know priests wouldn't do it.
But then it ends up that the priest is always the bad guy.
America is the bad guy instead of the good guy.
You know, if you watch some of those born identity films, the first one is one of my favorite films, The Born Identity.
And then the rest of them are made by, I think it's Paul Greenglass made them.
And they're just like so anti-American.
And every time a flag appears, it's a sign that something bad is going to happen.
Every time an American flag appears, it's a danger sign.
Bum, ba, ba, bum.
The music comes up and all this stuff.
That is a big deal.
You heard Spike Lee say it the other day.
It was infuriating.
Oh, America's not the cradle of liberty.
Anywhere he had said that before there was an America, he'd have been arrested.
Anywhere he had attacked his own country like that before he was arrested.
And of course they did it with gays really very well.
The gay people used to be comical that came on.
Just the fact that a guy was effeminate or flitted around, that was a joke.
Now it's tragic or he's the wise character or it's whatever it is.
They basically just change the assumptions on this.
And one of my problems with Republicans, and I think a lot of people's problems with Republicans, and one of the reasons I think people voted for Donald Trump, is that Republicans accepted the assumptions of the left.
And the people who were really to blame for this were the Bushes.
And this is not a personal attack on the Bushes.
It is a philosophical attack on the Bushes.
The first Bush, George Bush, got up, I think it was his convention speech.
He got up and he said, I believe in a kinder, gentler America.
I want a kinder, gentler country.
And Nancy Reagan famously is said to have turned to Ronald Reagan and said, kinder and gentler than whom?
Because of course he was talking about Reagan and he was accepting the left's idea that Reagan was this harsh, war-mongering, bad guy, and now we were going to be kind.
George W. Bush did it again with compassionate conservatism, compassionate conservatism.
What other kind of conservatism is there?
What can be more compassionate than preserving our freedoms, preserving the Constitution?
So when they accept the left's assumptions, the ball naturally moves downfield to the left.
That is why people were so upset with the basic establishment that Trump overturned.
And Trump, listen, you know, so here's what happens, right?
The NFL just came out and they said, you know what?
You have to stand for the national anthem.
You can stay.
You don't have to come out on field.
If you want to protest, you can stay off the field.
But if you come on field, you have to stand for the national anthem or there's a team fine.
Here is, what's his name?
I always forget.
Goodell, right.
The NFL, the guy in charge of the NFL.
Here he is making the announcement.
Clearly, our objective as a league and to all 32 clubs, which was unanimous, is that we want people to be respectful of the national anthem.
We want people to stand.
That's all personnel and make sure that they treat this moment in a respectful fashion.
That's something that we think we owe.
We have been very sensitive in making sure that we give players choices, but we do believe that that moment is an important moment.
There's been incredible engagement with the players on this.
We've talked to tens, if not hundreds of players about this over the last year or so to get their input, to understand their positions, and again, to respect those, as I think was stated here.
Now, Mike Pence, everybody got angry because Mensch, the vice president, tweeted out, winning, this is winning.
You know, I actually agree.
I mean, first of all, there's no free speech First Amendment thing here.
These guys are paid to play, and when they are on the field, and really all the time, they have to represent the NFL.
So when they are on the field, they owe it to their employers not to destroy their business.
This was unanimous among the teams.
Why?
Because it's destroying their business.
Nobody wants to turn on America's game and see America get the finger.
That's all it is.
And you can talk about, oh, it wasn't disrespectful.
It was patriotic.
It was this.
It wasn't.
It wasn't.
When this started to happen, I was watching ESPN, which I rarely do, and every single commentator said the same thing.
Well, they have the right to do it.
They have the right to do it.
And I was sitting there saying, talking to my television set, as one does, and saying, you know, I know they have the right to do it.
That doesn't mean it's right.
It's not right.
The things that they are protesting, they are protesting on the grounds of American values represented by the flag.
So anyway, but the thing that really bothered me was the assumption that they could just do it, that it was all right for them to just do it.
Because I think for most Americans, they're saying, hey, you've got to protest.
I get it.
You know, you have problems in the black community, which is really what this was about.
Colin Stuperdink was the guy who started all this saying, oh, he's got this radical girlfriend and he thinks the police are mistreating people in black neighborhoods.
I don't agree, but you have a right to protest that.
You have a right to bring that to my attention.
As my fellow American, as my brother American, you have a right to do that and to appeal to my values.
And I will make a decision whether my values are being violated by the police in those neighborhoods.
You don't have absolute authority to say what's right and wrong, but you certainly have the right to bring that to my attention because we're both Americans.
If we're not both Americans, if we don't share the same values, what do I care?
What do I care if you're in Saudi Arabia and your rights are being violated?
That's too bad.
But you're not on my watch.
Here, you're on my watch.
You have a right to say it because of the flag.
So when you say it by disrespecting the flag, you're actually violating the contract between the two of us.
So I thought it was wrong.
Nobody said that.
Nobody said that because the underlying assumption of the press is that America is a bad place.
So Trump responded in his typical Trumpian way, kind of needling them even as he was accepting the win.
I don't think people should be staying in locker rooms, but still, I think it's good.
You have to stand proudly for the national anthem.
Well, you shouldn't be playing.
You shouldn't be there.
Maybe you shouldn't be in the country.
You have to stand proudly for the national anthem, and the NFL owners did the right thing if that's what they've done.
If that is the story, do you feel like you push this story forward and you push this to a conclusion?
I think the people pushed it forward.
This was not me.
I brought it out.
I think the people pushed it forward.
This country is very smart.
We have very smart people.
And, you know, that's something ideally could have been taken care of when it first started.
It would have been a lot easier.
But if they did that, they're doing the right thing.
Okay, and I'll talk about this a little bit more in just a minute.
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All right.
So the point about this is, look, I don't think this is going to change anything.
I think it's probably going to extend the whole controversy.
People will protest.
They'll stay in the locker.
Then that'll become an issue and all this stuff.
It doesn't matter.
The point is, and I think the intellectuals on the right don't get this because they do not understand how narrative and storytelling works.
The point is Trump has undercut, he has moved the football of our national assumptions back to where they belong because this is the way most people feel, but not the elites.
Listen to MSNBC discussing this.
So they're saying they don't want players to express their political views, but the players have to abide by the owners' political views.
That's what this comes across as.
Well, the players aren't, the good news about this policy is that the players aren't conscripted to stand there when they don't want to be standing there.
I personally don't see what the big deal is about kneeling.
Kneeling feels like a pretty respectful activity to me.
But the players aren't able to in an appropriate, respectful way, express their views.
They can either, they don't have to be conscripted, but they don't get to, you know, remember the athletes with the black power salute?
They don't get to express their views during that time.
I have never understood why it was so disrespectful to the flag to have a cow about them doing it.
Seems to me to be respectful to the Constitution to allow some respect.
Here's why they did it, though.
By the way, here's why they did it.
Let's put up the Mike Pence Twitter feed today.
Yeah, I understand.
I mean, Mike Pence believes, hey, winning.
That's what he tweeted.
Winning, Charlie.
Winning by silencing.
Winning.
Ultra war winning.
And you're like, because you got the NFL to be cowed by Donald Trump.
See, every single word of that is based on the assumption that America is not a good place and it is okay to disrespect the flag.
And all Donald Trump said is that for most of us, it's not okay.
This is a service.
This is a business, right?
We talked about this yesterday.
This is a business.
Their job is to please their audience.
It does not please their audience.
And what we were supposed to do is we were supposed to sit there and take it.
We were supposed to say, well, they have the right to do this.
But no, we have the right to say, yeah, okay, I'm not watching it.
And that's what happened.
And it happened because the president brought it to this surface and moved the ball, the football of the assumption.
You know, here's the other, this is true with ObamaGate, too, this thing with Obama, you know, investigating the Trump campaign.
This does nothing, it has nothing to do with who is a nice person and who's a bad person, okay?
Trump is out there with this spy gate.
The left keeps saying, well, he's trying to undermine the investigation.
He probably is.
We know Trump does this stuff.
We know he does it.
But listen to him talking.
I mean, he is playing the press with absolute confidence at this point as he makes fun of Obama spying on his campaign.
All you have to do is look at the basics and you'll see.
It looks like a very serious event, but we'll find out.
When they look at the documents, I think people are going to see a lot of bad things happen.
I hope it's not so, because if it is, there's never been anything like it in the history of our country.
I hope, I mean, if you look at Clapper, he sort of admitted that they had spies in the campaign yesterday inadvertently.
But I hope it's not true, but it looks like it is.
We're not undercutting.
We're cleaning everything up.
This was a terrible situation.
What we're doing is we're cleaning everything up.
It's so important.
What I'm doing is a service to this country.
And I did a great service to this country by firing James Comey.
And excuse me, a lot of people have said it.
And you go into the FBI and a lot of those great people working in the FBI, they will tell you, I did a great service to our country by firing James Comey.
And a lot of bad things have happened.
We now call it Spygate.
You're calling it Spygate.
A lot of bad things have happened.
I want them all to get together.
They'll sit in a room.
Hopefully they'll be able to work it out among themselves.
You can say that that's just Trump being Trump.
And I think it is just Trump being Trump.
It's Trump undermining the investigation, making sure that nobody cares about what anybody says at the end.
It's also confusing where they just put him out.
You can see him dictating the narrative to him.
But, but he's moving the assumption.
He is moving the assumption that Obama was a worthwhile president doing the right thing.
Because if Trump is just being Trump now, Obama was just being Obama when he overreacted to any kind of Russian fears by basically, you know, it may be too much to say he was spying on the campaign, but he was infiltrating the campaign.
The intelligence community did not have to react.
They could have gone to Donald Trump and said, hey, you know what?
Russians are trying to affect the outcome of the election.
Be a little careful here.
Be watchful.
They could have done that.
But instead, they did a full court press, and that's Obama being Obama the same way he did when he used the IRS to silence his opponents, the same way he did when he so corrupted the Justice Department with Loretta Lynch and Eric, what's his name?
Colder, thank you.
And Eric Holder, that even James Comey didn't trust them to do the right thing.
That was just Obama being Obama, and that is the assumption that he's moving there.
And of course, the other assumption that the press is honest.
This is the big one, the one that he has really changed, is the assumption that somehow the press is a voice of truth against power.
Assumptions Shattered00:05:01
You know, recently, Leslie Stahliel, CBS reporter, made a comment about how Donald Trump, she talked about Donald Trump being Donald Trump.
Let's listen to this cut six.
Before the interview, I met with him in Trump Tower.
And he really is the same off camera that he is on camera, exactly the same.
And at one point, he started to attack the press.
And it's just me and my boss and him.
He has a huge office.
And he's attacking the press.
And there were no cameras.
There was nothing going on.
And I said, you know, that is getting tired.
Why are you doing this?
You're doing it over and over, and it's boring.
And it's time to end that.
You know, you've won the nomination.
And why do you keep hammering at this?
And he said, you know why I do it?
I do it to discredit you all and demean you all.
So when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.
So of course the press went nuts.
See, see, we told you, we told you.
But they didn't report this thing that she also said, cut number two.
Democrats think that reporters are on their side.
They expect reporters to be kind to them and gentle.
They expect it.
because they assume we're liberals and we're going to be on their side.
And when we're not and when we're tough, they feel betrayed.
They feel that there's been a family break of some kind.
The Republicans expect us to be tough and they just accept that we're tough and we're all treated the same.
It's very professional.
They don't call you up at night and yell at you.
See, the press is right.
Trump is just being Trump, but he can only get away with it because the structure he's attacking is so rotten, because the assumptions are so untrue.
And, you know, the assumption that America is bad, that Obama was good, that the press is fair, they're so untrue that he, that even though it's a technique, it works.
It works because they have been selling us this bill of goods, undermining the basic kind of values that we have lived by, undermining them, and sort of telling us, oh yeah, those aren't our basic values.
Those aren't the right assumptions.
And that's what Trump is moving.
That's the football he's moving.
And I think it's a good thing.
And I think a lot of our guys on the right who are, you know, who think, who live too high, they live up in the stratosphere of intellect, they don't see what he's doing.
And it really is a good thing.
I have to talk about this Twitter feed thing because this was a big deal.
A federal district court judge on Wednesday ruled that President Trump can't block people from viewing his Twitter feed because of their political views.
And I read a lot of commentary about this.
I didn't think people really understood it.
They were saying, oh, this is an attack on free speech.
Why can't Trump, well, on the left, they're saying, ah, this is free speech.
And why can't people, Trump block anybody he wants and they can do their own Twitter feed.
But what the judge was saying was actually not that bad.
It's a close call, but what she was saying is that since the president uses Twitter in his official capacity, even his private one, that it becomes a public forum.
And on a public forum, you can't censorship has to be, it depends on what kind of public forum it is, but it either has to be content neutral or viewpoint neutral, right?
So what she was saying is he can mute them so he doesn't have to hear them because the government doesn't have to listen to you when you speak.
It just has to let you speak.
But because his Twitter feed, not all of Twitter, but a public official's Twitter feed being used as an official Twitter feed is a public forum.
He can't block you.
He can't stop you from expressing your opinion in there.
And I kind of, I'm very sympathetic for that.
Now, you know, the courts have recognized that the president is not always speaking as the president.
So if the president gets up and says, God loves America, God is protecting America, that's not the official government line.
The government is not taking a line on God, but the president is expressing his personal view.
He can do that without being held to government standards of expression.
But still, when he is talking, it still is some kind of public forum and people can, you know, in that vehicle that he's using, people can express their ideas.
So it's not changing Twitter.
We're not going to now be able to sue them for shadow banning us, which I wish we could, but we're not going to be able to do it.
It's not changing any of that.
It actually is a considered and intelligent decision.
It may get overturned down the line.
But she was careful not to make sure the judiciary didn't push the president around, which I thought was really good.
She said, I'm just going to tell you what I think the law is and expect the president to respect the law.
And I thought that was a really good thing.
It's not something that a lot of our judges have been doing.
This woman is a Clinton appointee, not an Obama appointee.
The Obama appointees think they just get to declare what the law is.
They're just living in Obama world, in the Obama fantasy world.
All right.
Blue Collar Code00:15:33
I am not going to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube because I want you to get the chance to hear this excellent, excellent interview with Mike Rowe.
He is, I hardly have to introduce him.
He's a TV host, writer, narrator, producer, actor, spokesman, rose to national fame with his hit show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel.
He participated in all sorts of jobs from Batcave Scavenger to Maggot Farmer.
He launched Mike Rowe Works in 2008, which is designed to reinvigorate the skilled trade.
And Mike is currently working on a number of different projects, including his show, Somebody's Got to Do It on TBN at Returning the Favor on Facebook and the Way I Heard It, which is Mike's weekly podcast.
He is just a really good guy and a really good presence, I think, in the media.
And here is my interview.
Oh, before I say, well, I'll talk to you about when I get back.
Here's my interview with Mike Rowe.
Mike Rowe, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
I'm sorry it's taken so long.
No, no, yeah.
You know, we've never met in person, but I know you came in to the Daily Wire once when I wasn't here, and I had to listen to the women talk about how good looking you were for like five days.
Believe me, I was completely sick of it.
There's no accounting for taste, Andrew, but nevertheless, I'm nothing but grateful.
We only let women here who have poor taste because otherwise they wouldn't work with us.
So you've got this show that is an unbelievable phenomenon, this returning the favor.
It's gotten, you know, gets millions and millions of hits.
And it's beginning its second season on Saturday, I think.
Is that right?
Yeah, well, there's a bunch of stuff.
Returning the favor is this Facebook thing.
And I don't even think they're in a world of seasons.
They just keep ordering them and we keep shooting them.
And every week a new one pops up.
This Saturday is a show that I really didn't think was ever going to see the light of day again called Somebody's Got to Do It.
And years ago, I got it on CNN of all places.
I needed an hour of prime time somewhere.
And they had it.
And I thought, well, you know, maybe a light-hearted show about normal people might work over there, but it didn't.
So I took the show back.
And that is debuting this Saturday over on TBN in what can only be the weirdest evolution of any television show in the history of broadcast.
Well, you got kind of attacked for this, didn't you?
I mean, they were saying you shouldn't be on TBN and Mike Huckabee was introducing it and they didn't like that.
I mean, this kind of became almost controversial.
Well, it did, but in the exact same way that it was controversial on CNN three years earlier.
The problem is, as you know, being a keen observer of our deeply schizophrenic culture, it's not enough to have an opinion that may or may not find traction in the mainstream or the intellectual dark web or wherever you happen to be.
We're judged today not for what we say, but for whom we're sitting next to when we say it.
And so, you know, I've got four or five million friends on my Facebook page.
And when I put a show on CNN, many of them needed to explain to me why they could never bring themselves to watch the show because it was on a network they had sworn to never see.
And likewise, when it goes on TBN, you know, all my buddies on the left come over to say, listen, you know, you're great.
Love your foundation.
Love what you do.
But we really can't watch that network because, you know, it's on our list of thou shalt nots.
And so A couple years ago, weird week and Bill Maher within the same week, you know, and people's heads exploded, not because of anything I said, but just because I was sitting next to the wrong guy.
That's the world we're in.
I'm used to navigating in it now, but it did take a while, which is a long way of saying, yeah, I got a lot of heat, not for the show I was doing, but for the place I put it.
But this is kind of, this is, you hold a unique position in this way.
I mean, I don't, I can't think of anybody else who does this.
You represent certain basic, what I would hope were close to universal American values, but values that I would think almost every American, if you asked him, would hold to.
Obviously, there's no value that everyone would, but a lot of them, a majority of people.
And yet you managed to stay unpolitical.
Do you do that on purpose?
Well, I have opinions, and they're pretty obvious to anybody that wants to peel back the layers, but I never lead with them.
And if I'm in a situation where I'm inclined to persuade, or at least try to persuade, I've learned that you really can't do it by putting on your Make America Great hat or whatever the corresponding bit of wardrobe is on the other side, because we're all in our uniforms and we've all taken our sacred vows and we've all clearly identified our enemies.
So to your point, what's really interesting today, at least from a rhetorical standpoint, is to look at basic themes that are universal.
You're absolutely right.
Dirty Jobs was a rumination on the universal decency of work.
Somebody's got to do it is a rumination on the universal importance of passion within your vocation or your avocation.
Returning the favor is a rumination on the universal ideas of decency and basic kindness.
And if I can stay focused on the underlying themes of any of these projects, then I'm in pretty safe territory because all I'm really trying to do is look for people with whom I might disagree politically and without turning it into a polemic,
find out how and maybe why we do still have some things in common with regard to those big, broad, epic themes that I still believe make us more similar than different.
Well, that is another thing I wanted to ask you about.
I mean, you get out a lot and you meet a lot of people and you meet all these different kinds of people.
And as you say, you talk to people on both sides.
I always have this sense, you know, obviously we all talk about how divided the country is, but I have this sense that a lot of these divisions are in the media, not on the street.
And I would like to hear what you think of this, that ordinary people, I always feel like 70% of ordinary people probably agree about 70% of the stuff.
And yet on TV, all we hear is the most extreme things.
Am I wrong about that?
Well, I'm not an expert, but from what I've seen, there's not a lot of money in violent agreeance.
There's money, there's money in conflict, there's money in tension.
This is not a new idea.
We all know if it bleeds, it leads.
We all know that, you know, to get somebody's attention, you need to shake them by the lapels.
Dirty Jobs had big, giant themes and agendas in it that were important to me, but nobody wants a lecture.
So the only way I could get you to watch that show was to have a toilet explode or go through some highly detailed misadventure in animal husbandry, right?
I mean, we had to do things to get your attention.
The problem with the news, in my view, and with a lot of what passes for discourse today, is that we don't have anything underneath the pure ale.
We don't have anything underneath or beyond the conflict.
So all that's left is a ratcheting up of rightness and wrongness.
And so, look, my pitch for dirty jobs, somebody's got to do it.
The way I heard it and returning the favor was identical.
Over the last 15 years, every show I've ever sold is me sitting across from an executive and saying, for the love of God, isn't there enough bulging veins and spittle flying through the air and strom and drain in my news feed, isn't there enough in yours?
What can you find a half hour or an hour where we can focus on the 70% you're talking about and where we can maybe smash together the Venn diagrams of opposing ideologies and focus on that which is somewhat comparatively common?
And if the answer is yes, then I come up with a new title and go about the business of producing the same damn show I've been doing for 20 years.
Well, it's funny because it's amazingly successful.
And you'd think, I mean, I always wonder about this.
You'd think everybody would be imitating it, but they go back to the screaming and yelling because they know it works to the level that it works and they don't want to push it up beyond that.
I mean, but even so, even the fact that you're just, you're representing basic work ethos, you know, a basic, some would say a blue collar ethos, but you've even been attacked for that.
I mean, at one point they said somebody started in on you about the fact that, well, because you're blue collar and you represent blue collar work ethos, you're a white supremacist.
I mean, how do you reply to people like that?
Well, you know, I know.
Look, it's me and that guy having a beer would have a very different conversation with regard to your question than I'm going to have on a Facebook page where I know 5 million people are watching.
That, for me anyway, is an example of where I would rather persuade than respond.
So it forces me to think, you know, and it forces me to consider the essence of cognitive dissonance and the basic tension that's forcing people into this crazy us or them black or white sort of bifurcated choice.
Blue collar has become code for something.
Actually, it's become code for a lot of things.
And amazingly, white supremacy is one of the things.
Uneducated is another thing, right?
So it's the language is being tortured and twisted to reflect the same divisions that currently exist in 2018.
So all kinds of words have become, I was going to say triggered, but now I realize that, you know, the word trigger is a trigger.
Right.
If you say trigger, you're going to trigger people who actually suffer from real triggers and those people, et cetera, et cetera.
So, you know, the language is a fascinating thing.
And I know you've spoken a lot about it.
And I really appreciate the fact that you do because I think it informs every single debate that's going on from higher education to alternative education, from blue collar to white collar.
You know, the minute we assign or over assign value to a term, we just open the door for all the other attendant terms.
And now, pretty soon each side has their own language.
I can't, I don't even know what safe spaces mean anymore.
It used to mean like, yeah, I would like to be in a safe space if I'm trying to write or if I'm trying to live.
But now the last thing in the world I want is to be associated with a safe space because to me, it's come to represent a kind of cowardice and a kind of narrow-mindedness.
So, yeah, we're in a giant rush to redefine words that I always thought I understood.
So, to answer your question, what I say to that guy is I say, look, man, the evidence demands a verdict.
And now we can have a conversation with 5 million people listening.
Persuade me, or at least make a cogent case that my predilection for skilled trades is in some way contemporaneous with your assertion that I'm a cross-burning white supremacist.
I'm all ears.
I'm listening, you know, but I'm just not being persuaded.
So, yeah, that's how you deal with them.
You ask them straight up to respectfully make their point.
Let the audience judge.
My last question, because I'm running out of time, but I feel that there's so many people who basically, whose livelihoods depend on making us feel that we are racially divided, sexually divided.
And yet, and yet, in my personal life, when I look around, I don't find most of the women I know are screaming about men and how awful they are.
You know, except I live in Hollywood, so some of them are, but like most of the women I actually know aren't like that.
And when I meet people of every single color, and one of the things I love about this country is that we're all such mutts and we all look different and everything.
But I don't find this to be true.
And when you are going out and you're talking obviously to people of all colors, do you find this racial animus actually does infect as much of the country as it seems to?
For me, you know, my foundation is called Microworks.
And I called it that because literally M-I-C-R-O, small works, you know.
And then Bill Gates was going to sue me.
So we changed it to Micro My Name, which is okay.
You know, individuals, you know, I deal with one person at a time, Andrew.
I mean, obviously I broadcast, but to your point, if you get a group of people together, their opinions are going to change and morph into something very, very different than I've experienced one-on-one.
It's the thing that I think is most fascinating in the country right now of all of the divides.
It's not the divide that's purely ideological.
It's what happens to an individual who gets in a group, because a group is a click closer to a crowd and a crowd is a click closer to a mob.
And there's nothing more threatening to democracy than a mob.
We are essentially dividing ourselves into two giant mobs.
So the individual is getting lost.
You know, I've never found a man or woman who can't sit down and agree with me, for instance, that the differences we seem to be so frightened of are in fact the things that make life so worth living.
Ultimately, no individual has ever disagreed with me when we've had a chance to really talk through what that means.
Put them in a group, conversation's over, party's over.
A party line is drawn.
Morals and dogma are clear.
We take up sides.
And the next thing you know, blue collar means white supremacist and back down the rabbit hole we go.
Right, right.
Mike, where's the, what's the easiest way for people to find you?
I hate to say it, but Facebook is pretty well ubiquitous.
I'm there all of the time.
Talking About Philip Roth00:06:17
But you can also go to micro.com and, you know, click on links.
And there I am.
It's like stepping in gum, Andrew.
There's no getting away from me.
Micro, you're doing a great job.
I appreciate your coming on.
Thanks very much.
I so appreciate the invitation.
Have me back sometime in person.
I love what you're doing.
Thanks a lot.
I will do it, no question.
You bet.
All right.
Really, it's a unique figure at the moment in the culture.
He's doing a terrific job.
You know, out of the Christian kindness of my heart, we allowed everybody to watch that on whether you're on Facebook or YouTube.
We didn't cast you out into the exterior darkness where there would have been, there really would have, trust me on this, trust me, there would have been great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And we didn't do that.
That creates in you an obligation to subscribe to the website now.
So you've got to come on over to the website and subscribe.
It's only a lousy 10 bucks a month.
You can afford 10 bucks a month, especially when you consider the money you will save on psychiatrists by being in the mailbag and getting all your questions answered with the answers guaranteed 100% correct.
We had a good mailbag yesterday.
It was really some deep stuff.
And now all those people's problems are solved.
You probably saw them skipping down the street.
All right, stuff I like.
Stuff alive.
Stuff alike.
Stuff I love.
Do you know who that was?
Claire Green.
Claire Green, thank you.
I think it was Brandon Toy.
I'm sorry, Brandon.
Toy.
Brendan Toy?
Yeah.
All right, Brandon Toy, this was Claire Green.
You guys are doing a great job.
Keep them coming because we'll keep using them until we find, totally on the exact one we want.
I got to talk about Philip Roth.
There's no way around it.
He's not my favorite novelist, but he was a terrific writer, sensational writer, actually.
He died.
He is the last, I believe, of that generation of great writers.
There was John Updike, Norman Mailer, obviously Tom Wolf.
Who else?
John Updike, Philip, and there's one.
Oh, Saul Bellow.
Saul Bellow is really the big one, probably the best of all of them, I would think.
And the one who has been excluded from all the conversations because he was kind of a conservative.
And so he has been sort of excised from literary history, Saul Bellow.
But that is the thing about Philip Roth.
Philip Roth was the guy who wrote the story of Jewish intellectual America.
He had in his books, he had an alter ego named Nathan Zuckerman.
And so he was kind of representative of the people who ran the New York Times.
So he always got these great reviews.
He won all the awards and all the stuff.
And he was tremendously, he wrote tremendously beautifully.
His first book was Goodbye Columbus, kind of a novella and really powerful, really pictured and showed the kind of Jewish suburban world that he was writing about.
And then he exploded with Portnoy's complaint.
And Portnoy's complaint, when I was a kid, you had to go out, he had to tear the cover off it or wrap the cover up because it was so sexually explicit that it was just shocking at the time.
And really, it captured the kind of frustration that exploded into the 60s sexual revolution.
And that was really his big theme was men's sexual release in the sexual revolution.
It was like a prelude to Me Too.
You could see it coming in reading Philip Roth.
But his best book, the best of the books I've read, I shouldn't say that because I never was a big fan of his, so I didn't read that many of his books.
But the best of the books I read was American Pastoral.
And the reason American Pastoral was such a good book was it was the first time, the only one of his books in which he created a character who was American.
He was a Jew.
All his characters were intended to be Jews.
But he was an assimilated Jew who just wanted to be part of America.
And the story is that his daughter becomes a radical terrorist, and he just can't understand and talk about assumptions and where the assumptions lay.
It is that moment when the assumptions of the 60s and the assumptions of the 50s just tear apart from one another.
And it was made into a not very good movie by Ewan McGregor and with Ewan McGregor.
And Ewan McGregor plays the father, and here he is talking to his daughter who is on the verge of going bad and becoming a violent terrorist.
And you can just see the two assumptions.
You can see them split apart.
One of them assuming that this world into which he assimilated is the good world, the good America, and her assuming that that world, that very world, is the enemy.
You want to protest the war?
Protest it right here in Old Rimrock.
Why am I going to do a march around the post office?
Bring the war home.
Isn't that the slogan?
Look, they gave me this award.
It's just a stupid black, but it means one thing.
If you take a stand, people notice.
If you oppose the war right here with all your strength, this is part of America too, you know.
Read Marks.
Revolutions don't begin in the countryside.
We're not talking about revolution.
You're not talking about revolution.
You think about what I'm saying.
He says, protest.
She says, that's not revolution.
He says, we're not talking about revolution.
She says, you're not talking about revolution.
It is two generations torn apart by their different assumptions of what America is and what the proper response to the American way of life is.
It really is a beautiful book.
Parts of it are so well captured.
If you want to know about what the 60s and 70s were like, Philip Roth, certainly a prominent American novelist.
Like I said, not one of my favorites, but certainly of an extraordinary talent.
And the end of the novel.
I mean, that generation, those guys were part of what made me want to be a novel novelist.
They were the guys, the stars of the arts at that time.
But in fact, the novel is now kind of off the off in the sidelines of the American arts and most of mostly it's TV where most of the good work, the really good work, is being done.
Clavenless Week Begins00:02:18
The Clavin week is over.
The Clavenless Week begins.
It's three days.
I hope you have a great Memorial Day.
As good as it can be without me, you know, being a Clavenless Memorial Day.
I hope it's as good.
And I hope the survivors will gather here on Tuesday.
This fellow, I do not know how to pronounce his name.
His name is Acegir, A-E-S-G-I-R, which I guess would be Easter.
He's Icelandic and he has released his first English album called The Silence.
This song is called Summer Guest.
I just really like the lyric: My bird flies home from afar, brings the joy of spring to me, or the ocean's endless blue.
He never fails.
His path is clear and true.
Let the same be said of all of us.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll see you on Tuesday.
His path is clear and true.
Earth upon a branch of freedom.
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.