Andrew Clavin and Michael Walsh expose Democrats as radical forces weaponizing progress, from the Me Too movement’s overreach—like targeting Morgan Freeman—to Hollywood’s anti-military narratives clashing with Trump’s Memorial Day patriotism. Walsh’s The Fiery Angel frames Western civilization as a divine, heroic tradition under siege by cultural Marxism, dismissing critics like Ben Shapiro as cowardly for avoiding leftist parallels. They contrast Trump’s negotiation chaos—effective, they argue—as media fabricate failures (e.g., North Korea summit lies) while defending MS-13 ties, proving radicalism thrives on undermining American norms. The takeaway: competence over morality wins elections, and Western culture’s survival demands reclaiming its classical roots. [Automatically generated summary]
When Donald Trump started talking tough to North Korean President Kim Jong-un, the headlines read, Trump pushes the world toward nuclear war.
When Trump's tough talk brought Kim to the negotiating table, the headlines read, Trump is so eager for peace that Kim will outsmart him.
When Trump responded to Kim's shenanigans by canceling the summit, the headlines read, Trump summit strategy a failure.
Now that Trump's cancellation has brought Kim crawling back to the table, the headlines read, We journalists are so cross-eyed with hatefulness and left-wing bias, we don't know what the hell is going on.
Please don't listen to us anymore.
We're fools and knaves.
All right, I made that last headline up.
But future headlines we can expect to see include, Trump Denuclearizes Korean Peninsula Costing Jobs for Asians, and How Obama's Policies Finally Brought Peace to Korea during the Trump administration.
They say that journalism is the first draft of history, but they forgot to add that it's the first draft written by liars and buffoons.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dunky.
The world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, welcome back from your clavinless moment.
I never know whether to say happy Memorial Day because it's kind of a solemn occasion, but at the same time, you're having barbecues and summer begins.
Mine was not happy.
Usually, you know, my weekend, one of the perks of my job is I don't have Clavenless weekends because I just get to take Clavin home.
It's one of the things they let me do here at the Daily Wire.
But this was a Clavenless weekend.
You know, we're all heading to New York to see Knowles' wedding, which is kind of a spectacle.
It's like a virgin throwing herself into a volcano.
And my wife went a few days early to see our daughter.
And so I was there alone.
I just started working and I never got out of the house.
I never saw anybody.
I think this is the first time I've opened my mouth and spoken aloud for three days.
It was really, something else.
Creepy Weinstein Allegations00:11:12
All right.
You're a mean mad white man.
I am a mean, mad white man.
I'm glad to be back.
Michael Walsh is here.
Michael Walsh, I was reading his introduction.
He has all these awards and things.
I didn't know.
I just hang out with him in bars.
I just thought he was, I thought he was some old drunk, but he's actually a very accomplished guy.
And he's written a new book called The Fiery Angel, which actually is really interesting.
I read his last book.
You know, I don't know about you, but I genuinely generally get screwed for Father's Day.
You know, either people are traveling or they just are not around or whatever.
And guys will never tell you what they want.
But now there is a solution.
Man crates.
Man crates are gifts for men that come in tremendous crates that have to be pried open with crowbars and can be wrapped up in duct tape.
It's everything a guy wants.
He doesn't even care what's inside because the crate is so much fun.
But inside the crate, they have things like knife making kits and whiskey appreciation.
That's the one I got, the whiskey appreciation one.
You've got to try this.
The dad in your family or the many dads in your family will like it.
Get your special Father's Day discount today at mancrates.com slash Clavin.
And I know what you think.
Clavin, how do you spell that?
K-L-A-V-A-N, mancrates.com slash clavin.
Now, this is a limited time offer.
It's only for Father's Day.
So go today, mancrates.com slash Clavin, mancrates.com slash Clavin.
You really will enjoy it.
There's so much fun stuff.
And just opening the box itself is a lot of fun.
All right.
You know, radicals, it has now become clear, radicals ruin everything.
And I have this theory.
I can't prove this because, you know, causation is hard to prove.
You never know whether it's causation or correlation.
I have a theory that radicals actually show up after real change occurs and attach themselves to their change to win heroism without taking any risks.
So this is not, I'm not talking about activists.
They're genuine activists.
You get a guy like Martin Luther King who's an activist.
He brings, you know, he gets rid of the inertia to change.
People don't like to change, and he makes sure people see how bad it is for people.
And he does marches and they're peaceful.
And the reaction of the police, the brutality that's unleashed on him, awakens the conscience.
And people say, hey, we've got to stop this.
Then you get good laws, civil rights laws, and then things start to go wrong.
Do you know that during the time of Jim Crow, some of the worst bigotry in this country, the Jim Crow South, the fate of black people, the state of black Americans got better.
Their employment got more employment.
Their economy, the difference between blacks and whites narrowed in the economy.
Their marriages were holding together and their families were holding together.
Crime was descending.
There were more of them moving into the middle class.
But then the radicals come along.
And the radicals just are putting on a show and they have to keep making things worse.
They have to keep pretending things are bad so they can be heroic.
Since the great society of Lyndon Johnson, all the good trends in the communities of black Americans have reversed.
Marriage has fallen apart.
Their illegitimacy rate is now worse than it was during slavery days.
It's between 60 and 70 percent.
Their economy has gotten worse until Donald Trump, until Donald Trump started actually making things better for them.
And the radicals just make everything worse.
And so you see things that are legitimate problems where right and left could actually sit down together and say, hey, this is a problem.
You know, this is something.
You know, I was watching over the weekend, or maybe it was just before the weekend, Harvey Weinstein turned himself in and he's accused of rape, among other things.
And look, I wasn't there.
I can't convict the guy, but everything I know about him sort of, you know, sort of makes me feel like he should be put away.
And he was always a bad guy.
I know people who worked for him.
He was a bad guy.
And something like 80, more than 80 women have come out and accused him of everything from groping to actual rape.
And so he goes in and first of all, the New York District Attorney scotched an attempt to arrest him before for molesting for groping women.
And the NBC did everything they could to smother this story by Ronan Farrow.
And, you know, so the left was really working hard to cover this up.
But now he's in court and he goes in and his lawyer is outside the courtroom and he makes this kind of hilarious, I mean, I shouldn't say it's hilarious, but he blames the whole thing on the Me Too movement.
And he makes this comment.
My job is not to defend behavior.
My job is to defend something that is criminal behavior.
Bad behavior.
Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood.
And to the extent that there is bad behavior in that industry, that is not what this is about.
Bad behavior is not on trial in this case.
It's only if you intentionally committed a criminal act and Mr. Weinstein vigorously denies that.
So he's conflating the bad behavior of Hollywood, the casting couch, with rape, right?
He's conflating that, hoping that it'll all get kind of messed together.
But the other people who are doing that are the Me Too people.
The fact that the radical feminists have taken radicalism, it ruins everything.
The fact that the radicals have taken over the Me Too movement and made everything that men do seem toxic and it's all men's fault and men, men, men.
It trivializes the fact that people were actually raped by this guy, if indeed they were.
Let's say they were allegedly raped by this guy.
That is not a trivial thing.
And they come after Morgan Freeman.
And it really bugs me.
Maybe he did some stuff that was creepy.
They had this one thing that they're putting out saying, Morgan Freeman makes creepy comments.
And I was asking Jess, my friend and makeup lady, who's, are these comments creepy?
They have this little thing where he's talking to an Entertainment Tonight reporter, and she's very beautiful, and she's, and he's 80, right?
Morgan Freeman's like 80 years old.
So here's the comment that he made.
Do you married?
No.
Fooling around older guys?
Just ask her.
So he's flirting with the guy.
He's 80 years old.
He's flirting with you.
You cut him some slack, right, Jess?
I mean, I just said this is a little creepy, but you cut him some slack.
He's an old guy, wants to still feel alive.
You know, he doesn't want to be out of the game.
And maybe he did some other things.
Some of the other things he did, we got handsy.
You know, obviously I disapprove.
I think women should be able to go to work and not feel uncomfortable.
But, you know, this stuff, the thing about this is the left created the culture in which this takes place.
This is the first thing.
The left created the culture in which things took place.
The radicals who told us that our sexuality needed to be free, we needed to be loose.
We should do anything.
The people who told us that women and men were the same, that women should have the same kind of sexual freedom that men have.
All these people, the radicals who attach themselves, because this is true of the feminist movement too.
There was a point.
There was a point where women said, hey, we've got a lot of technology.
We've got birth control.
We can expand our influence and our field of operation.
We don't all have to be housewives.
We can get out in the world.
You know, that happened pretty quickly.
I was there.
And there were some people who griped about it.
Sure, they got headlines.
But really, it happened pretty quickly that women moved into the workplace and people were, men were mentors to them and men helped them out.
And any woman who's successful and honest, you ask her, you'll find there are a lot of men who help them out.
But it's the radicals who then attach and started burning bras, started yelling at men for opening doors, started saying that men, it's all men is the problem.
Let me show you, let me show you the way Hollywood works in open, openly, okay?
Here's a cut from, I think it's like 2001.
When did that picture, Beautiful Mind, come out?
It's like around 2001, all right?
Jennifer Connolly, who I think is one of the, certainly at this point, was one of the most beautiful women who has ever worked in Hollywood.
I mean, just a stunningly beautiful woman.
She goes on to promote her film, and she's on with David Letterman, who we now know was abusing his aides, was sleeping with everyone around there, who created an atmosphere where you basically felt that you had to put out for David Letterman, really creepy guy, now back on Netflix.
No pain, no get, because Letterman was always on the left.
And Jennifer Connolly looks spectacular.
She is wearing this very short skirt and she's talking and the audience is going nuts.
And here's just a little exchange.
There's really a lot of comics here.
What's happening?
Believe me.
Are they being changed to clouds?
Oh, man, I think it may have something to do with the dress.
I just happened to see that.
What was that?
How?
I mean, I think I know the answer to this question, but you're 2002.
It's only like less than just over a week.
How's it going so far?
It's fun.
It's funny.
I love the movie.
And so I'm really happy people are seeing it and seeming to enjoy it.
It's kind of strange for me because I've been making movies that not necessarily a lot of people have been seeing recently.
So it's kind of different for me.
And I've been being kind of recognized more.
Well, is that good?
Or for an actress, do you like that?
It's okay, but it's kind of disconcerting because it keeps happening at the gym with me.
Like, I'll be in the locker room, and the other day I was in the gym in the locker room, and I'm naked, and there's two women next to me, and one of them say...
Okay.
So that's the culture in which all these guys are operating in.
Right now, they're applauding for her being naked.
She knows what she's doing too.
This is a transactional thing.
She's an extraordinarily beautiful woman.
That's why she's in the movies.
That's why we're watching her movies.
She's a terrific actress.
But her beauty, part of being an actor or an actress is how you look, right?
You don't have like, you know, there's an old Cook and Moore routine.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore used to do this routine where one-legged man shows up auditioning for Tarzan, and the guy has to explain to him that he can't be Tarzan because he only has one leg and Dudley Moore is hopping around on the stage going, what do you mean I can't be Tarzan?
And part of being an actor, one of your tools as an actor, is how you look.
A guy like me who writes stories, who writes books, I can write about handsome, daring guys without having to look like a handsome, daring guy, Harrison Ford can't.
He has to look that part of a handsome, daring guy.
She is using one of her tools, which is her beauty, to excite the crowd, and the crowd is going back and forth.
Meanwhile, we know that Letterman is actually a bad guy and mistreating women.
All I'm saying is in that atmosphere, this atmosphere that Left created with their radical attacks on our sexual mores, in that atmosphere, guys like Morgan Freeman are just guys.
They're just ordinary people.
If we lived in the Victorian age, and we may yet, but if we lived in the Victorian age, guys like Morgan Freeman would be a little bit more circumspect.
They wouldn't be doing this.
But I'm sorry, if you're going to drag that guy in and compare him to Harvey Weinstein, then all you've done as far as I'm concerned is trivialize Harvey Weinstein, who actually may have done something really bad.
A Visceral Critique00:14:44
The reason I bring this up is I bring it up for political reasons is because I feel that the Democrats are now radicals.
They are radicals.
They're radically anti-American.
They're radically anti-social norms.
They're radically anti-armilitary.
They're radically anti-everything that we believe in.
And even though they have plenty of things that they can pick on Trump about, he's a big mouth.
He can be rude.
He says things sometimes.
He's very, what's the word, imprecise, I guess would be the word to use.
He doesn't always hew strictly to the truth.
I don't think that's why they attack him so viciously.
I think they attack him because he is tapped in to the anti-radical vein of normal American life.
You know, I was listening to his very beautiful Memorial Day speech.
He sent out a tweet saying, isn't it wonderful on Memorial Day that our soldiers, the soldiers can basically say, well, look what we've defended, the job, the economy's doing so well.
We're moving toward peace in Korea.
And everybody said, well, he made Memorial Day about him, you know.
Okay, fair enough, but so did Obama, and they never picked on him.
But his speech was quite beautiful.
And let's just listen to a little bit.
I won't play all of it because I understand these are sentimental.
I don't want to sit here and burst into tears and make a fool of myself.
But play cut number 10.
They fought and bled and died so that America would forever remain safe and strong and free.
Each of the markers on that field, each of the names engraved in stone, teach us what it means to be loyal and faithful and proud and brave and righteous and true.
That is why we come to this most sacred place.
That is why we guard these grounds with absolute devotion.
That is why we always will remember.
Because here, on this soil, on these grounds, beneath those fields, lies the true source of American greatness, of American glory, and of American freedom.
Really good speech, really well-written speech.
Now, I feel that Trump really does feel this way.
He has a visceral love for the country.
He has a visceral feeling for the country.
I'm not saying he's a great guy.
I'm not saying his business dealings were all in a row or whatever.
I'm not saying he treated his wife well, nothing.
But I do think he has this visceral love of country.
And, you know, you remember the old poem, breathes there, lives there a man with souls so dead who never to himself has said, this is my own, my native land.
You know, there's something that we all feel, this visceral feeling.
The left has left that behind.
And if you don't believe me, see, they will make this speech on Memorial Day, but that's the rest of the year.
All they do is attack this country.
Remember when the war on terror was on?
Remember every movie?
There was one movie after another.
In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lamb.
In the Valley of Elah, the guys were going to Iraq and it was driving them crazy and they became serial killers.
Lions for Lambs, they were foolish people.
The military were foolish guys whose patriotism was being abused by evil Republicans played by Tom Cruise.
Redaction military were rapists.
They were raping Iraqi women.
Rendition our spies were abducting innocent Muslims and torturing them, sending them off for torture.
That was rendition.
They made at least a dozen.
Green Zone was another Matt Damon where we found out that the whole weapons of mass destruction thing was a scam.
They did this again and again and again.
And then they had the incredible gall to start that thing, we've got your six.
You know, if you come home, because they can deal with the military as victims, you come home and you have PTSD, we've got your six.
Well, screw you, you know, when you were making vehicles of propaganda while our guys, of anti-American propaganda, while our guys were in the field, and they didn't realize why these movies kept bombing.
And when Clint Eastwood made American Sniper and it was this huge hit, suddenly, oh, gee, we didn't realize that people wanted to see war movies where the Americans were the heroes.
That really is radical.
It is radical not to love your country, even in just a visceral level, just an organic way.
And so they keep getting the same thing is true with immigration.
Same thing is true with immigration.
Listen to the president making a perfectly rational case about illegal immigration.
We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants.
You know, we are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.
We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.
Okay, not this president, not making it perfectly rational.
Senator, the president, last president, when he was a senator and still trying to be an American and still trying to sound like an American, and now their idea is basically, you know, let everybody in.
And that's why they get maneuvered into doing things like supporting MS-13.
You know, the New York Times is lying about this.
They had a fact check.
They said New York Times fact checker, Linda Q, Q-I-U, I don't know how to pronounce it, she put out this thing that says it's false.
Democrats have neither cheered Mr. Trump's withdrawal from a summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, nor have they ever defended the violent gang MS-13.
But they have.
We played Nancy Pelosi talking about how wonderful they had the spark of divinity in them.
But over the weekend, or right before the weekend, in my neighborhood, West Hollywood, they gave Stormy Daniels the key to the city.
Now, part of this is gay stuff.
West Hollywood is just an incredible, it's like a gay ghetto almost.
But this guy, Flecka Talks, he does YouTube stuff.
He goes in and he interviews people and he asks them about their feelings about hearing MS-13 called animals.
Did you hear him call MS-13 animals?
Yes, I did.
What did you think about that?
I think he's a pig.
An animal.
I mean, you know, you smell your own, I guess.
Maybe not all people in that group are animals.
No, they're not animals at all.
They're human beings, just like all of us.
I think he's a pig.
He's just using that as an excuse to, I don't know, justify his being such a racist.
And then this week, Trump made the comment about MSR team being animals.
Did you hear about that?
I did.
What do you think about that?
I think he's criticizing his own American people.
What can you say about this guy?
He's the animal.
Would you agree that not all MSR team members are animals?
Absolutely.
Cool.
And then it kind of, yeah, exactly.
It's just like a negative, always negative in the news, always negative in the news.
The guys that are running around gangbanging and killing people, they're animals.
But the rest of the gang, it's a big gang.
It's a big gang.
I love it.
You know, the rest of them are bringing toys for tots, you know, and they're running book drives.
You know, there's, what about the secretary?
What about the secretaries who are just doing the writing the letters for the guys who are killing people?
They're not animals.
It's amazing.
It is amazing.
Radicals ruin everything, including themselves.
They ruin themselves by making them take on these opinions.
Speaking of things, I got to talk about this a little bit.
Speaking of things the New York Times lies about, all right?
Everything Trump does in North Korea is wrong.
It just somehow weirdly keeps working out for the best.
Who knows what he's up to?
So the press is always picking on him.
And now the summit, which was off, is now on again.
And in an off-the-cuff remark, Donald Trump says, hey, maybe we'll even hit our deadline, which I guess was June 12th.
We have just a little cut of him outside the White House talking to people.
Do we have that?
We'll see what happens.
It could even be the 12th.
We're talking to them now.
They very much want to do it.
We'd like to do it.
We're going to see what happens.
We'll see what happens.
We may still hit the deadline.
So the New York Times, Mark Landler and David E. Sanger, in the New York Times, a former newspaper, write this long piece about how he's not even talking to his aides anymore.
He's not even talking to the people who are supposed to advise him.
And he says, as with so many issues involving this president, the views of his aides often have little effect on what he actually says, as if he's supposed to echo his aides.
That's the first thing.
He says, on Thursday, for example, a senior White House official told reporters that even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12th would be impossible, given the lack of time, the amount of planning needed.
So Trump answers back and he says, the failing New York Times, you should pick up my thing of a former newspaper, failing New York Times quotes a senior White House official who doesn't exist as saying even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12th would be impossible given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.
Wrong again, use real people, not phony sources.
All right.
So he says, the guy who said that it's impossible doesn't exist.
There is no aide who says that it's impossible to do this.
All right.
So Yasha Ali, who writes for New York Magazine, gets the audio of this aide, this official, and he plays it like this aha moment, proving that this guy exists.
So here's the audio of this official.
The main point, I suppose, is that the ball is in North Korea's court right now, and there's really not a lot of time.
We've lost quite a bit of time that we would need in order to, I mean, there's been an enormous amount of preparation that's gone on over the past few months at the White House and state and with other agencies and so forth.
But there's a certain amount of actual dialogue that needs to take place at the working level with your counterparts to ensure that the agenda is clear in the minds of those two leaders when they sit down to actually meet and talk and negotiate and hopefully make a deal.
And June 12 is in 10 minutes.
It's going to be, you know, but the president has said that he has Someday that he looks forward to.
So he says it's tough.
It's going to be tough.
Tough to do.
He doesn't say it's impossible.
He never says it's impossible.
Somebody pointed out, climbing Everest is tough, but you can do it.
You know, impossible is impossible.
So there is no White House aide who said this is impossible.
Donald Trump is correct.
The guy doesn't exist who did this, right?
So now, Maggie Haberman, a Clinton operative who has now been hired by the New York Times to cover the White House because she is a Democrat operative, as came out in some of the leaked emails from the Clinton campaign.
She puts out a tweet.
Imagine being the White House background briefer who led this briefing, who now has his boss, the president of the U.S., say she doesn't exist.
They're holding to their lie.
They're holding to their lie.
And they say, here's Alex Mallon.
I guess he's from ABC.
He says, real Donald Trump is slamming the New York Times for citing a senior White House official who doesn't exist, but the portion of the article he appears to be referring to directly cites comments, made it a background briefing, but we just heard it.
He didn't say it.
The guy who said that doesn't exist.
The New York Times could have said, we got this story wrong.
We mischaracterized his comments.
You know, he did say something, but he didn't say impossible.
But their radicalism, their hatred for this president, and they, I'm telling you, they do not hate him for the reasons he can be hateful.
They hate him because they're radicals and he represents an America they hate, which is America.
These guys ruin everything.
Hey, we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But Michael Walsh is coming up.
He's a really interesting journalist and screenwriter and has a new book, The Fiery Angel.
So you want to hear that?
What you can do is you can either listen to it right there on YouTube or you can come on over to thedailywire.com and listen to it and then subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
You can watch the whole thing right there and we wouldn't have to boot you out and humiliate you in this fashion.
So come on over to thedailywire.com.
All right, who have we got?
Mike?
We got Michael?
Michael Walsh.
I know Michael Walsh is a guy who hangs out in bars that I'm sometimes in.
I give him a couple of bucks, maybe buy him a drink, but it turns out, turns out, who knew that he is an award-winning journalist, screenwriter, and author.
In addition to writing a hit Disney movie, he is a former classical news critic and foreign correspondent for Time magazine.
He's won the ASCAP theme's Taylor Award for Distinguished Music Criticism and the American Book Awards Prize for Fiction for his gangster novel and All the Saints.
Now that I know that he's done all this stuff, I'm never buying him a drink again.
His latest book is The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle of the Soul for the West.
And it says here on the sheet that it is out today.
Is that correct?
That is correct, Drew.
Yes.
Hey, how are you doing, buddy?
It's good to hear you.
Yes, good to hear you too.
Thanks for having me on.
It is a pleasure.
So we're going to talk about your book, The Fiery Angel, but I want to talk first about some politics, all right?
Sure.
You were an early Trump adopter and a fierce Trump adopter, far, you know, far earlier than me.
And I think you deserve cheers because the guy is doing a great job.
So I'd like to hear how you feel about where Trump is now, what he's doing right, and what you think he's not doing right.
Okay, well, I was on Parks and Friends actually a week ago to talk about a column I wrote in the New York Post about how if the Trump administration is chaotic, let's have more chaos.
Because obviously it's working.
And just a few days ago, I was on Irish radio in my adopted country of Ireland, and they were saying, well, ha ha ha, the Korea summit is off and Trump just walked away from it.
And I said, give him five minutes and Korea will be back.
And sure enough, it is because they haven't read The Art of the Deal.
They didn't live in New York.
I lived in New York all during the sort of first Trump era in the 80s.
So I got plenty of exposure to him.
And what he's doing is no different from what he's always done.
He plays the media like a fiddle, and he puts his last, best, and final offer on the table first.
And then if you don't like it, he walks away.
And then you chase him down the hall like Madeline Albright chasing after Kim's father in North Korea.
I mean, it's a funny spectacle, but it seems to be working fine.
And I would, you know, other than the fact that he churns a lot, which the media thinks is terrible, but I think is fine, I don't really have any even grounds for criticism for what he's doing.
Trump's Media Tactics00:15:41
You may not like him as a person, and who does, but you got to like him as a president.
That's the point.
That is the way I feel right now.
The press, as far as I can see, is utterly disgracing itself.
I mean, in ways that are kind of beyond, it disgraced itself.
The press disgraced itself during the Obama years by not covering the things that Obama was doing, the IRS scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal, all the stuff that he was doing that was really bad.
They just kind of turned a blind eye.
But this guy.
And you're like Benghazi?
Yeah, I think the other one's a little Benghazi.
There's a little Benghazi going on.
You know, and I heard they've been spying on the Trump campaign, but we're not allowed to call him a spy.
But do you see, do you see any chance?
I mean, is it too naive?
It probably is, but is it too naive to think that there's some chance that these guys are going to look in the mirror and say, maybe we should clean up our act a little bit?
You know, we're not as bad as Trump says, but no, it's not going to happen.
No.
No, I've been in this business since 1972.
And I know a lot of the guys at the top of the media food chain.
They're all superannuating baby boomers like myself.
So we all started at the same time.
We cut our teeth watching the Watergate coverage in 72, 73, 74, as that was all developing.
And they will never go back on their core principles, which is to despise conservatism, America as founded, and Trump as the embodiment of that.
They just won't do it.
They'll go down with the ship.
They'll go down.
So, last question about this, and then we'll get to your book, The Fiery Angel.
But do you see any when you talk about the fact that you don't like Trump?
And he's a hard guy to like.
I mean, I wouldn't leave him alone in a room with my daughter.
He's, you know, he's a strange guy.
Do you see any disadvantage that?
This is the thing we hear from the Never Trumpers and the former Never Trumpers, that we are making excuses for behavior so that we and we won't be able to criticize the left for this behavior anymore.
Oh, that's the stupidest argument of all time.
I mean, honest to God, grow up, people, and I'm talking to Ben Shapiro and Eric Erickson and David French and whoever else has been peddling this since the day Trump got elected.
This isn't a morality contest.
We are not electing the Pope.
We are not electing the Pope.
We just elected the Roman Emperor to sort things out.
These people have got to get over themselves.
I frankly find that argument incredibly offensive and very juvenile.
Wow.
Okay.
All right.
And we're not allowed to criticize it.
Yeah, I do.
I'm sorry.
But you know how I feel about this, Drew.
I know.
We're not allowed to criticize Ben Shapiro.
He's paying for the phone line.
No.
And I actually love Ben, so I will object.
But here, let's talk about the fiery angel.
You know, I read your last book, and I've only started this one.
And you are launching a deep defense of Western culture per se.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, that's absolutely true.
It's a crusade.
I decided to use the word crusade.
I am a proud, if honorary, graduate of St. Louis High School in Honolulu, Hawaii, class of 67, and we are and remain the crusaders.
So crusade is good enough for me.
So give me a sense.
Give me the short version of what it is about Western culture that you find unique.
Well, let me put it this way, Drew.
Again, I grew up in a military family.
I moved every two or three years.
So I'm, in large respects, an autodidact, which is both a strength and an egregious failing, which means I had to come to culture myself.
Luckily, I was a talented pianist and musician, so I won a scholarship to Eastman and the Eastman School of Music, where I practiced, you know, learned the piano and the musical trade.
But I had to come to culture on my own.
And to see it now being stripped away from us after working all my life to master it insofar as I have, I take that personally, too.
So this crusade is partly a rebellion against the trashing of everything that people of our generation, and I know you're 30, 40 years younger than me, but I just use that to make you feel like you're part of this conversation.
That we grew up believing to be true.
And furthermore, it is true.
Furthermore, the Western civilization is the best thing that ever happened to planet Earth.
And to see it now denigrated and demeaned and called racist and home, all these Marxist isms is just intolerable.
So I wrote Devil's Pleasure Palace in 2015.
It turned out to be a surprise hit.
And so Roger Kimball, who was a mutual friend of ours, commissioned the second book, which is The Fiery Angel, which is out today.
And this one is more prescriptive.
It's less an analysis of the cultural Marxist revolution that is tearing down Western society and more of a, here's how you fight back.
You have to know these works of art because as I like to say, there's more wisdom in Homer than in the Kennedy School of Government about our political situation.
I mean, that is certainly true.
I have a very similar background in the sense of having come to culture on my own.
I mean, even though I went to college, I didn't get anything out of college except the books, which I then proceeded to read.
And I had the exact same experience of thinking, oh, Lord, this is really the pinnacle of human life, is the pinnacle of human achievement.
But there's a very distinct religious fervor.
I mean, you use the word crusader jokingly, but at the same time, you talk about the fiery angel.
You talk about, you talk about culture as if it were conveying a deeply religious meaning.
Isn't that fair to say?
Yes, it's absolutely, excuse me, it's absolutely fair to say.
And in the fiery angel, I went into a lot of religious stuff.
Now, I know you're a convert to Christianity.
You wrote that wonderful book called The Great Good Thing, which, by the way, I recommend to everybody to read.
No, it's just spectacular.
But I'm a cradle Catholic, so I also grew up in that environment.
And I've thought about this whole notion of God and man and where are we going and all that sort of stuff from both a religious and an artistic point of view.
But the point I want to make is that the basic thrust of Western civilization, I believe, is the heroic narrative.
We're all the heroes of our own movie.
We're not cogs in a machine.
We're not just ants in the anthill.
We're individuals with our own story.
And that is the basis of Western religion, certainly the basis of Judaism and Christianity.
But it comes even before there was Western religion, is my point, that it's something so deeply buried in the human psyche that I think it's a plant from God.
So reversing ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I like to say.
Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.
And there's a sentence you can't wrap your tongue around three times in a row.
You know, it actually is, it's a wonderful point, and I noticed it in The Fiery Angel, that so many of the things that are conducted to us through Christianity were in the classical world.
I mean, I frequently think of Plato and Aristotle as the goisha prophets, you know, that they were prophets before we had Jewish prophets, or at the same time, we had Jewish prophets, and really informed a lot of the Christian culture that finally came to us.
And including the Romans' multiculturalism, the allowing people in.
Now, you talk about being prescriptive.
What is it that you want people to do?
What is the call to action here?
Well, I want them to get out and read a book, for God's sake.
That's the first thing I want them to do.
And I want them to start with Homer and Aristotle, which are great places to start.
But I also want them to understand that Western civilization isn't just sitting in the opera house, a place I've spent many, many happy hours of my life in professional and personal capacity.
But it's also understanding, for example, there's a chapter on beauty and the beast.
And we all know the fairy tale, and some of us read it in the Andrew Lang Blue Fairy book, and many of us saw the Disney version of it.
But it has so much deeper resonance than just the cartoon or just what we think we know about it.
So read that and then understand what it's actually trying to tell us.
I also spent some time in this book.
This is the X-rated part of the book, with the Arabian Nights, the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, as translated unexpurgatedly by Richard Burton, Sir Richard Burton.
And you will be stunned.
Have you ever tried this?
Pick up the Arabian Nights at random.
At random, and you will find pornography on every page.
The sexual dysfunction of the Muslim culture is so spectacularly revealed in the pages of what you think of as Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.
It's just amazing.
So I picked three passages almost at random to show you why Islam has such difficulty integrating with the West because our notions of the equality of the sexes are very Christian and come from Aristotle and Aquinas to us.
But Islam rejected that even though it translated Aristotle, it didn't learn the lessons of Aristotle.
And it's one of the reasons these two cultures are so antithetical.
You know, it is, I love the Thousand One Nights, but the whole story is a woman telling stories to keep from getting killed because the guy kills his wife every night.
Right, she breaks off right at the good part every night.
Oh, every night to keep him going.
That's right.
So is there anything, you talk about the culture coming under assault, but is there anything going on that you like?
Are there things that, aside from going back to the old operas and the old plays, anything on TV that you're seeing that you enjoy?
Well, I think there's a connection.
What I'm trying to get at here is that there's a through line from all of these stories.
I mean, there's only, you know, a handful of plots, and Aristotle lays them out in the poetics, you know, especially the movie structure plot, beginning, middle, and end, reversals of fortune.
Everything we know as screenwriters, Drew, is in Aristotle.
So what I want people to do is, you know, look at Breaking Bad, for God's sake.
It's like a five-year Shakespearean tragedy, right?
Charting the downfall of a good man who turns evil.
And many of the, I'm watching The Walking Dead.
At this point, I don't know why, except that I feel like one of the zombies, and I'm waiting for someone to put me out of my misery.
But we do, we sort of admire the plucky band of heroes staving off this seething mass of pod people.
I think these things resonate throughout our culture.
And even in the golden age of television, which we're living through now, we have great writers working on it.
We have great stories.
And they're the same stories.
They're just clothed in different zombie costumes.
So reading the old stuff actually informs your enjoyment of the new stuff.
I mean, that's the same thing.
Oh, absolutely.
This is something that if you, you know, I lived almost half my life in Europe.
So I spend a lot of time there.
And you go into the art galleries and you see St. Jerome and we see St. Catherine and you see whatever in the paintings of the Renaissance and Middle Ages.
And if you don't understand the Bible, you don't understand anything about what you're looking at in those pictures.
And therefore, you don't understand when those characters come back, as they do constantly, in contemporary fiction.
These are archetypes, and we now have been cut off from our culture, deliberately, I would argue, and do argue, so to make us culturally illiterate in our own world, and then we can be taught to hate it.
And that's what's going on right now.
Michael Walsh, the author of the fiery angel, Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.
Michael, it's good talking to you.
I don't see enough.
I hope to see you soon.
Hope.
I'll be back in L.A. sooner than you think.
All right, the drinks are on you.
Thanks.
I'm looking forward to that drink, by the way.
All right, we'll do it.
Thanks.
Okay, anytime.
All right.
It is nice to talk to him.
You know, I used to bump into him all the time, and now I don't see him that much.
sexual follies.
Still cracks me up that thing as a guy.
Sexual.
Now, I want to be careful about this.
This was in the New Yorker, and it's called Seven Signs That Your Man's Masculinity is Non-Toxic.
And it is written by Karen Shee and Jason Adam Katzenstein, and it's comedy.
They mean it to be funny.
And I didn't think it was that funny, but at least.
But the thing about it is, is I want to read it because it doesn't sound like, like a lot of people mistook it, and they thought it was really the New Yorker telling you how to make sure your man's masculinity is non-toxic.
They didn't see it as satire.
And I just find this really fascinating.
So just listen to it.
It says, one, he carries a tote bag that's at once pro-environment, pro-feminism, and pro-reading.
Two, when he goes into a sports bar to use the bathroom, he buys a glass of white wine to be polite.
Three, he openly cries during Pixar movies, even the parts that aren't sad, just beautiful.
That one's pretty funny.
Four, he opens doors for women at work, but they're metaphorical doors, like the ones that lead to promotions.
Five, he laughs calmly when called a cuck.
He laughs loudly when women are funny.
He does not laugh when men are not.
Six, he makes references to Kurt Vonnegut because he's genuinely interested to hear other people's opinions of Vonnegut's work.
He never makes references to David Foster Wallace.
And seven, he strictly follows all traffic laws when he plays Grand Theft Auto.
Sims world is a matriarchy.
He does not have a Twitter account.
What struck me about this, though, is first, that it's so easy.
It's so easy to look at it and think it's serious.
I mean, when I first looked at it, I thought, oh, my, I'm going to really go off on this to bring this in.
Then I thought, well, it's got to be a joke.
It's got to be.
But it's so easy because it really does sound like feminism.
It really does sound like feminism.
You know, I've got a Prager U video coming out.
I've already recorded it.
They haven't finished it yet.
Prager U video coming out about why I oppose feminism.
And it is because, it is because it mistakenly, it mistakenly sees Western masculinity as inherently toxic.
And the thing that, you know, if this had been real, that, you know, he carries a tote bag that is once pro-environment, pro-feminism, pro-reading, I thought, yeah, you know, you better check his phone because he's probably dating another guy.
You know, I think that that's a problem.
But then I thought, so I thought, all right, it's a joke.
But then I thought, well, what is the joke?
Why is it funny?
Who is it making fun of?
I mean, it really is, in some sense, making fun of the feminists who do this.
They really do do this.
I'm not even sure the New Yorker understood what the joke was, you know, because when you read this, you immediately say, you know, why are we laughing?
Why am I laughing when I'm saying he openly cries during Pixar movies, even the parts that aren't sad, just beautiful?
Because that's something that, you know, in other words, they're saying, in order for your man to be non-toxic, he would have to be a woman.
Isn't that basically what they're saying?
And it's only funny.
The only reason it's funny is because the feminists are really saying this.
The feminists are really saying it.
And it goes back to what I was saying about Morgan Freeman.
I don't mean to just defend Morgan for me.
I don't know what he's like.
I've never been around the guy.
I don't know what he's like.
But he is a terrific actor.
He's been a wonderful presence.
He's been a contributor to our culture.
And I think when you pick on guys for just being guys, and there is this kind of edge to being a guy, just living as a guy, I think that you are doing serious damage to a world that has been essentially wonderful for women, really.
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The West, Western civilization.
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