Brad Thor, thriller writer and Never Trumper, debates whether Democrats love America after a CNN poll revealed only 32% call themselves "extremely proud" versus 74% of Republicans. He contrasts Obama’s "fundamentally transform" rhetoric with MLK’s vision while dismissing leftist claims of systemic inequality under Trump’s deregulation and judicial wins, arguing critics should leave if they hate the country. Thor defends conservative thrillers—rooted in moral clarity—as Hollywood rejects his work for perceived bias against Muslim terrorists, despite balanced portrayals. A fiscal hawk, he criticizes Trump’s $1.3T spending but praises Supreme Court picks and military actions, warning GOP failures risk Democratic dominance. His move from Illinois to Nashville reflects disillusionment with high taxes and broken conservative promises, framing America’s moral shifts as a cultural reckoning. [Automatically generated summary]
Pro-abortion women are calling for a sex strike to protect their right to have the abortion they won't need if they go on a sex strike.
The women are protesting the selection of a Supreme Court justice that hasn't actually happened yet, and the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which the justice who hasn't been appointed hasn't made.
Roe v. Wade, you'll remember, is the famous 1973 decision in which seven justices said, quote, the right to kill your children is protected by the penumbra of the emanations of the, oh, forget it, we just want you to kill children, so go to it, unquote.
The justices went on to say that the Constitution only allowed you to kill your children while they were in the womb, since once they come out of the womb, they might be able to alert the police.
Now, with President Trump picking a new justice, leftists and other loons are afraid this decision will be overturned and replaced with something actually constitutional.
So, today, as a service to pro-abortion women, I'd like to offer the Andrew Clavin Show's solution to these leftist fears.
From now on, women who support Roe v. Wade should absolutely refuse to have sex with any man who hasn't stood up in public and pledged before an actual religious figure to love and honor that pro-abortion woman for the rest of her life.
These pro-abortion women should further insist that before any man can have sex with them, he must allow her to use his last name as a sign that they are united for life.
And he should even agree to help raise and support any child that arises from their sexual union.
This brilliant protest strategy will render any Supreme Court decisions on Roe v. Wade absolutely irrelevant, since from now on, whatever child these pro-abortion women conceive will be well taken care of and therefore likely to actually increase the joy and meaning of their lives.
I don't know why no one's thought of this before.
Don't say I never did anything for you, pro-abortion women.
You're welcome.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is to give you boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-ding.
Ship-shaped tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
That was a great idea.
Nobody gives me credit for this stuff.
You know, I'm the guy who came up with the one state solution for Israel.
Well, Israel just took over the Middle East.
This is my new solution for pro-abortion women.
All right.
So from the joy of July 4th to the despair of the Clavenless weekend in a single day.
However, before that, we have the show to do, so we're still on the brink of the Clavenless weekend.
And Brad Thor will be with us, one of the great modern thriller writers, and we will talk to him about politics.
It should be pretty interesting because he does not like the President of the United States very much.
So it's worth hearing.
He's a great, Brad is a great guy, but we disagree on this with him somewhat.
You know, it's interesting.
Also, we should be talking about my shirt.
Everyone is talking about my shirt.
Why?
Because it looks great and it's incredibly comfortable because it comes from Peter Millar.
Patriotism And Pride00:15:23
Peter Millar started out making sports clothes, you know, clothes for golfers and things like that, but now they have branched out and you can get anything.
This is the second day in a row I have worn one of their shirts.
I wore it at my July 4th barbecue because they are incredible, maybe because they're built for sportsmen.
They're incredibly airy and flexible.
You know, you really feel, I'm wearing one now.
I think this is called a performance polo.
I think that's the name of it.
But anyway, it's just really comfortable, flexible, and very airy.
And what I really like about them is they offer, they're comfortable, but they really are stylish.
You can wear them anywhere.
You can wear them in a business meeting.
You can wear them when you're relaxing anytime you want.
This that I'm wearing is the most comfortable shirt.
It is one of the most comfortable shirts I've ever worn, truly.
And I can say that about everything I've worn from Peter Millar.
And you can head over to petermillar.com slash Clavin and check out some of my Peter Millar favorites and find a few of your own.
Be sure to use my link and you'll receive complimentary shipping and a free hat.
So for a long time, I've been calling on conservatives to pay more attention to culture and the arts and all this because I believe the arts capture what James Joyce called the uncreated conscience of a civilization.
We tell stories because they contain more than we understand, more than we know, and some things that can't even be put into words.
And for too long, leftists have let the culture slide.
They basically, I mean, right-wingers have let the culture slide and they've let leftists distort the image of our conscience in the arts.
See, the problem is, and the reason there's a point to what I'm saying that has to do with July 4th and my subject.
The problem is art cannot be redeemed by politics, right?
It has to be redeemed by artists.
It has to be redeemed by crazy people like me.
It can't be people saying, oh, art has to say this, it has to say that.
It has to be artists who love liberty who make great art.
That's the way it works.
The arts, as I have written somewhere else, the arts cannot be saved except by those who love them.
And that is the point I want to get to, because I feel the same way about the country.
And on July 4th, from some of the things I heard from the left, I thought it was perfectly reasonable to ask, do the Democrats, the second major party in this country, do they love this country?
And I think we have reason to ask, and I'll tell you why.
I mean, look, when you're an artist, when you write stuff, you get rejected a lot.
That is part of the life you live, right?
And I have always, my policy has always been, if somebody rejects something, I don't want to hear why they rejected it.
I don't care why they rejected it.
Because if you don't love my work, you can't criticize my work because you're not trying to make it what it is.
People reject things because the work doesn't satisfy them in some way.
Don't tell me about it because you don't love the work.
If you buy the work and then say, you know what, this can be better and you can do it better here, or if you love it and you just say, but I've got some criticism, then I listen because then I know you're trying to help me achieve the thing the work is trying to achieve.
And I feel the same way about this country.
That is why I really distrust.
I mean, listen to the difference.
Play Barack Obama right after his election.
We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
Now compare that to Martin Luther King.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creeds.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
So listen to the difference between what those two men are saying.
I mean, think of that you just married one of these guys, right?
You married one of these guys and you wake up after your wedding night and he says to you, you know, I'm going to fundamentally transform you.
I'm going to fundamentally transform everything you are.
Then you know you've made a tremendous mistake, right?
Because this guy doesn't love you.
He loves his idea of you.
What he really loves is himself.
He loves himself and his idea of what you should be.
But if you wake up the next morning and the guy says, you know, we're going to have a wonderful marriage, I love you, and I'm going to help you become what you said you want to be.
That's what Martin Luther King was saying.
He said, live out the meaning of your creed, become the full, enter into the fullness of your own idea of who you are.
That is a man who loves his country.
And he, unlike Obama, Martin Luther King had every reason to not like his country.
It was a much worse place then for a guy of his skin color.
Certainly not what it is today, which is a much fairer nation in that regard.
Obama had no, Obama had never had anything, things handed to him because he was brown.
I mean, like, that was like, that was his whole career, was just being given things because he was brown.
And yet, and yet he wanted to fundamentally transform the country.
And that is my question.
I think that conservatives can make mistakes when they don't want the country to change.
Of course, the country should change.
Everything that happens changes the facts on the ground, and the country has to change to adapt to the facts on the ground.
You know, things are different.
Attitudes change.
Technology changes things.
A lot of people say, oh, birth control ruined the country.
Well, it may have ruined the country or not, but it changed everything.
When a woman can take a pill and not get pregnant, that changes her life, and it changes the sexual life of people.
Conservatives have to learn that some things can be adapted to and they can be adapted to in different ways, or they have to make different arguments than they were making before because the facts have changed.
But they want the country.
This was Edmund Burke, basic Edmund Burke.
He said, you know, respect your traditions.
They are the wisdom of the dead.
And you want to change within the traditions of your country, within the culture of your country.
That's what Martin Luther King was saying.
So CNN broadcast this poll, and they basically said, oh, people are not as patriotic because only 42% say they're proud of their country.
And really what the poll said was 75% of Republicans are very proud of their country, but only, I think it was 32%.
Let's hear CNN's report and then I'll comment on it.
Is once exploding American patriotism starting to fizzle?
Would you call yourself extremely proud to be an American?
Not at the moment.
I'm sorry.
I'm proud to be an American.
Only 47% of Americans say they're extremely proud to be an American.
That's the lowest level since Gallup first asked the question 17 years ago.
Extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, only a little proud.
I think I could be prouder to be an American.
100% patriotic.
I would say I'm embarrassed to be an American right now.
And you're a proud citizen.
A super proud citizen.
Immigrants gave especially heartfelt answers.
For instance, this naturalized citizen from India.
I used to be very proud.
I would say I'm just moderately proud now.
It makes me heartbroken and hopeful that I shall be extremely proud again.
Those who admit to a slide in their pride tend to blame a president who has wrapped himself in the flag.
I'd be extremely if Trump wasn't president.
It's a shame.
It's disgusting.
I'm going to put you in the not at all proud to be an American.
Not at all.
If I had an opportunity, I would get the hell out of this country.
Excuse my French.
32% of Democrats told Gallup they were extremely proud compared to 74% of Republicans.
The president's patriotism never flags.
Now, I have to say, and by the way, after saying the president's patriotism never flagged, they cut to a Saturday Night Live spoof of Donald Trump making fun of him for being patriotic and for loving the flag.
I think this is a little bit unfair to conflate patriotism with whether you are proud of your country at this moment.
So I'm giving the Democrats, Democrat voters, a break here.
Britt Hume, the great newsman from Fox News, he used to be the special report anchorman, absolutely great reporter, great anchorman.
He tweeted this post that the Post put out a thing saying something like, why do Democrats hate America?
And Britt Hume tweeted, hate may be too strong a word, but they sure don't love it.
And then he got attacked on Twitter for saying that, and he took it down.
He said, you know what, you're right.
I shouldn't have said that.
That's not fair.
Britt Hume was right to take the tweet down because you can understand that Democrats, having lost, as well they should, they might not feel proud of the country.
They might not feel happy the way the country is going.
That doesn't mean they don't love the country, right?
They may feel it's betraying its values.
Obviously, we disagree with them, but that doesn't mean they don't love the country.
So this is not a question of patriotism.
What to me is, so on the voters' part, on the people who vote Democratic, I do not think that that is necessarily, that poll necessarily shows that they lack patriotism.
The leadership of the Democrat Party and certain people who are thought leaders, that is a different story.
Tom Perez, the guy who is the head of the DNC, right, the Democrat National Committee, he puts out the following statement for July 4th.
And you know, you got to remember, everything is context, right?
July 4th is the day we are celebrating the sacrifices that people made to bring this country into being, what they called the suicide pact of the Declaration, where they set their lives and their honor at naught in order to bring this country into being.
It is right and fitting and proper on that day to celebrate what this country is.
It is a country, you know, that when I was talking about the arts and the way they express the uncreated conscience, every now and again as you reach a place, somebody has to write down what has been gathered from those arts, has to write down what that conscience is.
That's what happened with, for instance, the Ten Commandments.
You know, that suddenly you say, oh, these are the rules we live by.
That's what happened with the Declaration of the Constitution.
They said, this is what Western civilization boils down to.
This is what all the great arts that we've had, all the great music, all the great politicians, all the great precedent before, it boils down to this, to these documents.
So that's the day we're celebrating.
And here comes Tom Perez on this day, on Independence Day, with the Democrat comment.
He says, nearly two and a half centuries ago, a band of patriots gathered in Philadelphia to declare that all men are created equal.
Our nation has changed dramatically since those words were first written.
Generations of brave Americans have fought to expand the promise of equality for more Americans.
As we celebrate our nation's independence, we recognize that America's founding promise remains out of reach for too many families.
Too many members of society are still struggling to find a good paying job.
Well, first of all, that's not true.
We are missing workers.
It is workers we need because we have so many jobs.
Why?
Because Donald Trump has created an economy that is creating jobs out the wazoo.
So Tom Perez is just wrong about that, all right?
He says too many members of society are still struggling or get the health care they need.
Too many women, LGBTQ Americans, people of color, and people with disabilities still face inequality and injustice across our society.
Once again, just on factual basis, untrue.
What rights are women lacking?
What do women not have in this country that makes them unequal to men?
We know that this thing about the pay gap is a complete canard.
We know it's not true.
What rights do women not have in this country?
I mean, that is an absurd statement.
And as for gay people who do have all the rights that straight people have, it doesn't mean people are going to like you.
You have no right to be liked.
You have no right to be approved of.
You have no right to have your actions approved of.
But I will say this, if the only thing we're worried about is that some people don't like gays, man, oh man, what a great country.
What a great country.
At least you don't have to wake up and be worried that the IRS is going to silence your right to speak.
You don't have to worry anymore that the FBI is going to investigate the opposition candidate.
We're living in a country where you are truly free.
Here he goes on.
Everywhere we look, our most fundamental values are under attack.
Are they, are our fundamental, I mean, really?
I mean, the Supreme Court just said the government has no right, said again and again, the government has no right to control our speech.
I don't think our fundamental values are under attack.
He says thousands of children have been separated from their parents at our southern border.
Again, just factually speaking, in a country of 350 million people, that 2,000 illegal immigrants' children have been separated.
I've said this before, I think they should fix that situation, but surely not a crisis, not the worst thing that's happening in the world.
At our highest court, workers' rights are being taken away.
Again, really?
Really?
Are they?
Workers' rights.
I would just like to know what would happen if you joined a union and the union, you were forced to join a union, forced to give it fees, and those fees were spent on MAGA hats.
I would like to know where the New York Times and Tom Perez would be standing then.
He says, everywhere we look, at our highest court, workers' rights are being taken away.
Voting rights are under assault.
Muslim Americans are being discriminated against.
I mean, it just goes on and on.
And I just feel like it's July 4th.
I understand that the guy is out of power.
He wants the Democrats to be back in power.
I get it.
It's politics.
But really, really, on July 4th, you can't say, you know, we love this country.
Let's celebrate this country.
You know, Stephen King, a very, the horror writer, great horror writer, outspoken hater of Donald Trump, he tweeted over the weekend, you know, over the holiday, it's July 4th.
Hugs a friend of yours who loves Trump.
Just for one day, just try to get along.
And of course, they just excoriated him on Twitter.
But that is, of course, where we should be on July 4th.
I mean, July 4th is not exclusively for right-wingers.
It's not exclusively for left-wingers.
The DNC has lost the plot of patriotism.
It has lost the, you know, Peter Beinhardt in The Atlantic, this left-wing writer, he writes, the left and right have abandoned American exceptionalism.
And he talks about the fact that whereas Obama would at least say he would ascribe the country's historical errors to misunderstanding, and he would say the country is moving forward toward greater equality.
At least he would say that.
This new woman, what's her first name, Alcasio Cortez-Anastasia?
Alexandria is right.
This socialist who won the primary in Queens, New York, who is a socialist, she says she depicts American history less as an arc of progress than as a circle in which America repeats rather than rises above its past.
Immigration and customs enforcement, treatment of people of color, she told the intercept continues in American tradition.
Quote, the very first immigration policy law passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s.
And so the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy, the very beginning of it, was a policy based on racial exclusion.
And listen to what Tom Perez says about this woman.
I have three kids, two of whom are daughters.
One just graduated college, one is in college, and they were both texting me about their excitement over Alexandria because she represents the future of our party.
She ran a spirited campaign.
I have great respect for Joe Crowley.
Joe Crowley is a good Democrat.
He was one of the sponsors of the Medicare for All bill.
He's fought the good fight.
So she's the future of the party, and she does not love this country.
Alexandria And The Future00:16:12
You do not love this country if you think it has been.
You know, there was an article by Lila Atachfini, I don't know, in a thing called Broadly, called How to Celebrate the Fourth of July when America is a Constant Disappointment.
And I really think that this is the way a lot on the left feel.
America has always been bad, no matter who the president is or was.
Since Trump's election, however, the qualities that make America particularly bad, racism, sexism, homophobia, the institutionalized manifestation of each of these, et cetera, have been emboldened, forcing many people to reckon with the ugly reality of their beloved USA.
This is not America, I keep hearing, but the truth of the matter is that family separation, a disregard for black lives, homophobia, and every other incarnation of white male supremacy are exactly what America is made of.
Now, my point is simply this.
People like this, who cares what they say about America?
If you hate it here, first of all, there's a plane leaving every five minutes.
I mean, get on it, man.
I mean, why are you sitting around?
But secondly, if you don't love the place, you don't get to say.
If you don't love the arts, if you sit around and say, I hate movies, I hate, no, I don't care what you have to say about movies.
I don't care how you think they're going to be changed by your brilliance.
They're not.
You've got to love the thing you want to fix.
You've got to love the thing you want to change.
Look, I think there are changes that are going to come in America, changes that I think must come, all kinds of things, injustices that I'd like to see fixed, of course.
But I love this country because of what it created out of nothing, out of 2,000 years of European bloodshed.
It created an idea, it caught an idea, it captured the essence of the conscience of the West in the Declaration, in the Constitution, and it has been living closer and closer to those ideals for the last over 200 years.
These people, if they hate it, I do not see how they are actually going to change anything.
And this, you know, this brings me to something else that's been really bothering me about the never-Trumpers.
Now, there are a lot of people who didn't vote for Donald Trump, and I thought that they made a mistake.
I thought that they made a mistake in moral reasoning, that they didn't accept the hard truth that this was a binary choice, that one of these people was going to be president, and that if it wasn't Trump, it was going to be Hillary.
That was a fact.
Was it a nice fact?
Was it a pretty fact?
No.
In a country where John Adams once ran against Thomas Jefferson, it was not the most pleasant thing to contemplate that Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton.
That did not make me sleep well at night, okay?
But that was the fact.
That was the world we lived in.
You had to make a choice.
I believe that people, conservatives who did not vote for Donald Trump, made a mistake.
However, I made a mistake once.
I think it was, what, 1962, I think it was.
You know, we make mistakes.
That's not a sin.
Making a mistake is not a sin in my religion.
What is a sin is when you don't say, okay, you know, that didn't really accomplish what I wanted it to accomplish.
Now I'm going to start thinking about what went wrong and how I can go forward.
There are people who are doing this.
I mean, you know, Ben and I had a big disagreement about this.
I don't think Ben voted for Trump, and I don't even always agree with his balls and strikes attitude because I believe what really matters is the general direction of the country.
So if Donald Trump stubs his toe one day, I'm not going to sit around saying, oh, he shouldn't have stubbed his toe.
I want to know, is the country going in the direction of more freedom, more constitutionality?
I think it is.
I really think it is.
For all the talk about Donald Trump and how evil he is, I think he is moving the country more in line with its proper governance than Obama did.
So I'm happy.
I don't have to criticize him every day.
But I get it.
Ben has taken an absolutely honest approach to this.
And I just feel that a man has a conscience.
He acts on his conscience.
He makes mistakes.
And then he readjusts his ideas of reality.
And that's what I feel a lot of guys are doing.
Ben Jonah Goldberg is the same way.
I have utter respect for what they are doing.
And I do not feel that they should be somehow assaulted.
Two of my friends who I really like, John Nolte and Kurt Schlichter, go after non-Never Trumpers.
I mean, in terms of Nolte, the next time I see Nolte, I got to talk to him about this.
He sends out these tweets where he just calls them these horrible, horrible names.
I don't think men of conscience like Ben and Jonah, who had real problems, and I had real problems with Trump, right?
I voted for him because I thought it was a binary situation.
And I've said I was wrong even in some of my criticisms of Trump because he's been much better than I thought he was.
I have no problem with being wrong on occasion.
That just happens.
I just think that you've got to respect good people's conscience.
I mean, this is part of it.
If you cannot argue with me that I or Ben or Jonah don't love this country and aren't trying to get something good for it, I will listen to anything they have to say.
Now, there are other people like Bill Crystal over at the Weekly Standard who said he would prefer the deep state to the Trump state.
And he has just gone on and on.
George Will, another one.
I mean, I'm not saying George Will isn't a patriot.
I'm just saying that when he, listen to what he says.
He now says that we should all vote Democrat.
If you now vote for Republican candidates, you are voting essentially to, you can't pretend there's pluralism.
You're voting to affirm this man and his leadership of the party.
And I believe it's important for the future, such as it might be of the Republican Party, that they pay a terrible price for what they're doing.
Are people that you know, like Senator McConnell, are they waiting him out?
Sure.
Senator McConnell says, look, I have a job to do, and I can exercise my Article I powers in collaboration with his exercise of the Article II powers to change the nature of the Article III institutions in the country, the federal courts.
Senator McConnell rightly says often, we in the Senate are in the personnel business.
It is our job and the powers of advice and consent to shape the federal government.
And he proceeds to do that, knowing that the president is not his choice.
See, here's the thing.
At this point, you know, now that we know that Trump is not Hitler, now that we know that he's not even a Democrat, which was one of the things I was afraid of, that he was secretly going to be a Democrat, now that we know that he is committed to a fairly conservative agenda and is doing a pretty good job pushing some of that forward,
not just the tax cuts, but the judicial appointments, the rollback of the administrative state, which I think is so important to our freedom, and even some of the confrontational attitude he's taking to our enemies and to some of our friends, which I think is working out pretty well so far.
If you are telling people to vote for Democrats, I think you're more in love with your own ideas than you are with conservatism.
Now, this is not, now we're not talking about love of country.
I'm sure George Will loves this country.
But I think when you are so in love with your own ideas, we have a right to say, are you fighting for your ideas or are you fighting for the country?
Are you fighting for the best thing going forward?
I think never Trumpers, or former Never Trumpers, have a real role to play in the future of conservatism.
I think they have to start thinking about where they went wrong and what they can preserve of what they thought, because I do think that some intellectual conservatism got too much in its own face.
You know, got too much like people sitting around in bars having a conversation and not enough about the people who were out of work and who were suffering and who were afraid in the middle of the country.
And Trump spoke to those people when conservatives did not speak to them, when Ted Cruz somehow couldn't reach them.
And I think it's very important that people who were supporters of Ted Cruz as I was, I think it's important for us to think about, okay, what can we preserve of our conservatism and still reach these people who are on our side and who are on America's side.
So I just think these vicious attacks against people who didn't support Trump in the election, I think are really misguided.
I think it is different to be a Bill Kristol or a George Will who are so in love with their own ideas, so in love with their own pristine morality that they can't just say, okay, now we're dealing with this reality.
They can't shift to reality.
That's one thing.
But the people who didn't vote for him in the first place, I do not think they deserve the attacks that Nolte and Kurt are unleashing on them.
And, you know, it's important.
It's important that we understand each other's conscience.
The people who love this country, the people who love this country, should have a say because they know which way it should go.
And we debate it among ourselves and we'll figure it out.
All right.
All of that leads up to Brad Thor, who is a never-Trumper.
And we had a really great conversation.
Brad is a great guy and one of the truly great practitioners of my field.
He's in a sub-genre of the crime novel, which I guess is the international thriller.
One of the most surprising things about this interview is that he told me that Daniel Silva isn't a conservative, which I really got to me.
We really have to have Silva on.
I really want to ask him about this.
Thor is a New York Times best-selling author.
He wrote Use of Force, Foreign Agent, Code of Conduct, many more.
He's been hailed as the master of thrillers by BookReporter.com and the ultimate thriller writer by Suspense Magazine.
His latest book is Spy Master, a continuation of the Scott Harvath series and is out now.
These things, if you pick them up, you're not going to put them down.
So they're really great.
Here is Brad Thor.
Brad Thor, thanks for coming on.
It's my pleasure.
Good to see you again.
It's good to see you too.
Yeah, you're looking good.
And I love the flag.
It frames you perfectly.
Yeah, it's very nice.
A buddy of mine flew that for me over Abu Ghraib before they closed it in Iraq on the 4th of July many years ago.
So it's special.
That's great.
Well, let's talk about the things that matter first, namely your new book, Spy Master.
They only sent it to me yesterday, so I haven't read this one, but I've read many of your books.
You are just among the best.
What can I say?
You're among the best thriller writers out there.
Give us a quick synopsis of the plot.
So synopsis of the plot is war-weary American public after being through Iraq, Afghanistan.
We find out that something is up.
And if war is hell, what would you be willing to do to avoid war?
Would you be willing to break all the rules, take your best spies, your best operators, and set them loose on the enemy and let the chips fall where they may to avoid actually being dragged into war.
And that's kind of the seed from which everything springs.
Very cool.
I mean, your stuff is so incredibly readable.
I almost sat down to read this and I thought if I'd start, I'm going to be up till five in the morning.
So I'm doing it.
Thank you.
Now, you're one of, I mean, I think of you as one of the great triumvirate of conservative international thriller writers, Daniel Silva, the late this year.
Silva's not a conservative.
Is he not?
No, Silva's no conservative.
Oh, okay.
Well, I take it back.
Unless I am completely wrong about Daniel Silva, and I don't think I am, but I do not think Daniel Silva, from what I understand, is anywhere near being a conservative.
Because he's so pro-Israel.
I mean, all that guy does is go around killing the enemies of Israel, which is everybody.
So he kills Dutch people.
Yeah.
No, I think, I think, and again, I don't know him personally.
I know some people that know him, and I don't mean, whoa, he's not conservative as an insult to him.
Because of course, it is a great compliment to be referred to as a conservative.
But no, I do not think with all due respect, and I mean that to Daniel Silva.
He's a very talented author and an incredible gentleman from everything I've heard.
And I have not met him, but my understanding is he is not a conservative.
All right.
Well, then, you know, I'll burn his books.
So it's down to two.
It's gone from a triumvirate.
Now you're down to two.
No, well, wait, you got, you know, there was time to say that.
Yeah.
No, Clancy was a conservative.
So what is it about this particular genre within the genre that attracts what we would call politically mature and intelligent people?
I like that.
I like that a lot.
I'll put that on the next book, politically mature.
You know, Andrew, I think it's a belief between that there is good and there is evil, and that you have to make a choice between good and evil.
I think, you know, we see a lot of this in the gun debate, right?
So if you talk to friends on the left, it's all about how the gun is evil.
You know, the person, we don't make the person take responsibility for their actions.
It's the evil black rifle or whatever.
Whereas on the right, if you listen to Dennis Prager or anybody else, they'll talk about it as a constant battle for each individual to choose between good and evil.
So I think the belief that sometimes you have to do difficult things that involve force in the name of good, I think that's, you know, Sebastian Younger is probably one of the most fascinating people I've ever met on the left as far as authors are concerned, because he believes in war.
He doesn't like it, but he believes that it is necessary.
I had a great dinner with him in New York City once.
He and I had both been on a show, Chris Jansing show on MSNBC.
And he and I had a fascinating conversation about war and politics.
And I don't think Chris Jansing knew that I was a conservative because I never got invited back on her show after that.
I've seen Sebastian back on after that dinner.
And that's okay.
Maybe I didn't knock her socks off in my interview.
But so, why did it attract Clancy?
Why did it attract me?
I believe that America is the greatest force for good in the history of the world.
And I believe a lot of that good has been applied via the U.S. military.
I think we've freed more people from oppression via our military than anything in history.
So I just, I think there is a view on the left, again, with my friends on the left, that kind of this Barack Obama, well, every book, every nation thinks they're exceptional.
Why is America any different?
And I think that predominantly is where the difference lies in that belief in American exceptionalism and we should be a force for good and freedom around the world.
Okay.
Do you pay for this?
Does it cost you?
I mean, there has not been, I mean, shockingly, shockingly, there's not been a movie made of any of any of your books, I don't think.
No, no.
I mean, you're, you know, between the two of us, one of us has had movies made and stuff.
And that's you, and it's not, it's not me.
We came very close with a studio in the last few months.
The producers were psyched, huge producers that had big action credits.
And they came back to us after setting everything up.
And they had run it up to the executive floor and they go, oh, the executives at this, if I told you the name of the studio, you'd know it right away.
Said, oh, that Thor guy, all his books are about just killing Muslim terrorists.
And it's not true.
I have a lot of that in, but I have a ton of books.
I have an equal amount of books that don't have anything to do with Islam.
And I always try to balance the bad Muslim guys with a good Muslim person because that's the ratio.
There's more good Muslim people that just want to live in peace and harmony with their Jewish and Christian neighbors and feed their kids and give them a better life than they had than there are those bad guys.
So Hollywood, there's a lot of cowardice in, particularly at the studio level in Hollywood.
They want to dictate the culture to us.
And it's fascinating because my dad recently gave me a huge bestseller, big New York Times bestseller that he found in his library from the, I think, late 80s, early 90s, about how Jewish people created Hollywood.
And when you look at the old studio heads and how a lot of them were immigrants to America, they shaped these Jewish movie moguls shaped the American dream.
They weren't allowed into country clubs, so they created their own clubs.
They all voted Republican and they helped give us some of the great, great iconic movies of the 40s and really helped shape that American dream.
So I'm disappointed, probably more than disappointed, I'm frustrated because I know my books would do very, very well.
I know I've got a huge audience and it's just getting beyond that bias in Hollywood.
And I'd love to see President Trump turn his ire from kneeling NFL players and Harley Davidson to Hollywood executives.
I'd actually contribute to his campaign.
So President Trump, if you're listening, I will contribute to your campaign.
If you focus that laser Twitter account of yours on the studio heads in Hollywood, you'll have my full support for the rest of this term and I'll work to get you elected in 2020.
Talking About Our Esteemed President00:08:07
All right.
Let us talk about President.
We're faking news here, Andrew.
Oh, man, you have no idea.
So let us talk about our esteemed president.
You're not a fan, I would say.
No, and in fact, before I came on, I was just thinking about this Harley-Davidson thing where he's threatening to put him out of business with taxes and tariffs.
It is amazing to me.
We complained throughout Barack Obama's two terms that the media never criticized him and his followers never criticized him.
Well, now we've got a certain group here on our side, right of center, where they refuse to criticize President Trump no matter what he does.
So how is threatening to put Harley Davidson out of business with taxes and tariffs any different than Obama picking winners and losers with Solyndra, where he's offering them government-backed loans?
It's the flip side of the same coin.
And I think we ought to be free as Americans to call out things we disagree with, which has been stunning for me.
The tribalism, it's almost like we've got two camps on our side now.
There are the rapidly pro-Trump people.
I don't know any never Trump people.
That ended when he won the Republican primary.
I mean, I was a Rick Perry guy.
Trump won.
Down to the end, I didn't think he was going to be a good president.
I was worried about a lot of his tendencies.
He was pro-assault weapons ban a long time ago.
His answers to everything was big government, tried to use eminent domain to squeeze people out of their private property in Atlantic City.
There were a lot of warning signs there that thoughtful people should have been able to agree on.
Yeah, that's troubling.
And if those instincts get enacted in office, that could potentially be a problem.
So, you know, we talked a little bit off air about, am I running for president?
Am I going to do it?
No, I'm not, because I'd have to be a Republican to primary him.
And I don't want anything to do with the Republican Party anymore because the Republicans told me, Andrew, that if we just gave him the House, things would be different.
Then if we just gave him the Senate, then if we could just get a Republican in office, everything would be different.
When I let go with that tweet about wanting to run for office and challenge Trump to a debate in the primaries, it was after the $1.3 trillion omnibus got signed.
And Republicans told me they would be fiscally conservative.
I'm a libertarian, except when it comes to the money and the regulation stuff.
And they haven't done it.
They lied to me.
So, you know, I'm not going to support that anymore.
If they in control of Washington can't rein in spending and they're going to leverage, they're going to mortgage my children's future.
You and I don't own this country.
We are stewards.
It's our job to hand this republic to the next generation better than when we found it.
$1.3 trillion in this budget in adding to the debt so dramatically.
I don't understand it.
The same people that will just bow down and say Trump is fantastic are some of the same people that were screaming like stuck pigs and rightfully so about Obama's debts and deficits as well as George Bush's.
But now, you know, here we are.
And I think it's an absolute travesty that Republicans can't even get a balanced budget.
But here we are.
We still have Obamacare.
There is no wall.
There's no infrastructure stuff going.
I like tax cuts.
That's great.
But I don't like tax cuts along with a $1.3 trillion omnibus.
It's just, it's unsustainable.
What about the Supreme Court, which is just this week, has turned out a series of excellent decisions.
Absolutely.
So in the Janice decision that just came out today, that is a public employee union member from Illinois, which I fled to move to Nashville.
So I love that.
But here's my thing.
Gorsuch, great pick, okay?
But we're getting to the point now where it's like being on a Navy SEAL team and some guy went in the room first and shot three Taliban guys and saved the entire team's life.
Okay.
Great guy.
We like this guy.
We want to go out in the field with him again.
But he doesn't get a pass for the rest of his time in the SEAL teams.
He doesn't get to screw the commander's wife without jeopardy.
He doesn't get to steal from the team fund.
One good deed, one good action doesn't buy him permission to do whatever he wants going forward.
You know, this idea that there shouldn't be due process for people with their firearm rights.
There's a lot of stuff that I don't like.
But, you know, heaven forbid you say it now.
We're so divided even on our side that it's just, you know, I've kind of thrown up my hands with Twitter because it's just this big echo chamber and it's so vitriolic.
It's troubling to see conservatives in the past actually didn't worship their leaders.
They were even Reagan.
They hounded him throughout his years in office when he didn't follow the conservative line.
And there is a lot of that on the Trump side.
I'm amazed he's doing, I think he's doing a terrific job.
I really do.
Except, I agree with you about the spending, but I think he's, I'm shocked because I hated the guy.
I still don't like the guy, but I think he's doing a good, a good job in certain areas.
Yeah.
And you've got, yes, I agree.
And, you know, I'm all in the call balls and strikes, right?
So I was on Fox with Dana Perino when ISIS was just getting crushed.
And I'm like, great job.
And then he sent out a tweet: Brad Thorne, Dana Perino, thank you for saying great job.
And I'm like, that's the fair thing to do.
The first strike he did on Syria, the very targeted missile strike, was excellent.
So he can do good things, but he's playing to this 35, 40% base of his.
And the job of a leader is not just to support a small group.
He represents all of us in the United States.
And I really don't see any effort to bring us together.
He's almost like a wrestling, a WWE guy, where unless he's demonizing and vilifying somebody else, he can't articulate himself.
So it's always got to be, I stand in opposition to this.
The Democrats suck this, that, the other thing.
Instead of, you've got an incredible bully pulpit there.
And I think he should be working harder, particularly with his vitriolic as things are, to bring the country together.
It doesn't mean you can't advance an agenda, but he's not really a leader.
You can't run the country like you do a family grocery store.
You're the top of the org chart, maybe in the Trump organization, and you can tell people what to do, tote that barge, lift that bail.
That's not really leadership.
That is dictating as the boss, you can't fire me, okay?
I'm a citizen of this country.
You can't fire me.
And you can't fire my Democratic neighbor.
You should be working as a leader to move the country forward.
And Andrew, you know this.
There's so much more that unites us than divides us.
And yet, here we are becoming further and further divided.
And guess what?
The shoe's going to be on the other foot.
There's going to be a Democrat in there, and the Democrats are going to have control of both houses of Congress.
And we will have nobody to blame but ourselves because we didn't behave better while Trump was in office and Republicans controlled everything.
The chickens, as Reverend Wright says, are going to come home to roost.
I have to ask you this.
You left Chicago for Nashville.
Nashville is one of my favorite cities in the world.
I published with Thomas Nelson down there for a while.
I just love that town.
Are you glad you did it?
Absolutely.
It's four years ago this month that we did it.
You asked my children why we moved, and they'll say freedom.
Listen, Illinois' tax and broadband, they had a sugar tax.
If the states are laboratories of democracy, Illinois is a meth lab.
Okay.
They have even worse bond ratings than you do in California.
It costs more to borrow money in Illinois.
And the problem is that their constant answer for the failures of their economic policies is: we didn't go big enough.
We didn't spend enough money.
And so when you and I were kids, we'd see these cartoons where there are two characters marooned on a desert island and they're starving and one looks at the other and suddenly he looks like a pork chop with eyes and hands.
Illinois politicians saw me and my family as ATMs with eyes and hands.
And I just didn't want to, I was paying higher and higher property taxes.
There was more and more violence creeping into our neighborhood.
I had to tell the babysitter: don't take the kids to the beach, don't take them to the zoo, don't go to the park.
Sarah Caudwell's Eccentricity00:05:43
And I thought, you know, I'm enabling this.
And I would do talk radio in Chicago and people would attack me on Twitter.
You're going to move.
You should stay and fight.
You're not a fighter.
And I'd say, at what point was it okay for Tina to leave Ike Turner?
At what point?
Brad Thor, one of the masters of the thriller genre, Spy Master is the new book.
Thank you very much for coming on.
I know a lot of people who are listening are going to disagree with you about Trump, but I also know you're a man of conscience, and I think that's the important thing.
Everybody's got to state their case.
Terrific.
Thank you, my friend.
Great to see you, bud.
All right, stuff I like.
Like an old familiar snowman, he's a jolly happy soul.
So the list of all his likes is just about enumerable.
Even better, books, to reassuring polls, the last name you'll ever hear on his mic.
All right.
That was from Austin Ford.
You people are out of your minds.
It's like, no, it's like, I actually lost all my faith in my listener.
So I had a really interesting experience the other night.
I'm up late.
I'm channel surfing.
And I come to the movie Cabaret, 1966 musical by Bob Fosse, the great musical director, great choreographer.
And I don't know if you've seen Cabaret.
It is a movie well worth watching.
It is based, there was a novel called Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, a gay guy who was living in Berlin as the Weimar Republic was collapsing, basically.
And a lot of these guys who came, a lot of the artists who came out of World War I were gay guys, which is really interesting, very anti-the society they were in, very at odds with society.
Wilfred Owen, the Great World War I, poet Siegfried Sassoon, a lot of them.
And Isherwood charted in this story, it's a novel, but it's based on a true story about this woman, Sally Bowles, who's a singer at the Kit Kat Club.
And it became a play called I Am a Camera, and it then became the musical by Kendar and Ebb Cabaret.
And they made it into a terrific movie.
I had a personal, I've told the story in the air before, but I'll tell it again.
It's a good one.
I had a personal relationship to it because when I started out as a mystery writer, one of the first people to give me a blurb was the excellent mystery writer, Sarah Caudwell, the now late Sarah Caudwell.
And she was, so we became friends, and she was an English woman.
And when I moved to England, we became really drinking buddies at times.
She was a genuine eccentric.
She may be the single most eccentric person I ever met.
She smoked a pipe.
She wore these glasses that were so thick.
I mean, I always kind of assumed she was gay, but she was always getting these incredible crushes on men.
She was not the most attractive, physically attractive person in the world.
And she had a voice like a sergeant major.
You could not, for the life of me, I could not understand half of what she said.
So she would say, And I would go, I have no idea what she just said, but I guess we're going drinking somewhere.
And Sarah Caudwell, who was related to Alexander Caudwell, who was the famous left-wing.
She herself was very left-wing.
She would get so upset when she would hear me talk politics.
She'd say, she had to bark.
And I go flying off the back of my chair.
But it's a big lefty family.
Olivia Wilde, I think, was Sarah's, the actress was Sarah's great niece, I believe.
But her mother, Sarah's mother, was the real Sally Bowles.
Sarah's mother was the woman on whom Sally Bowles was based.
And she never saw Cabaret because her mother hated it because she said it wasn't fair to the people there.
They were just scratching to make a living and it showed them as being decadent when they weren't decadent.
They were just trying to make a living in a very tough economy.
And so when I lived in London, Cabaret was put on at the Dunmar Warehouse, a very famous kind of off-beat theater.
And Jane Horrocks, a very, very talented singer, actress, and Alan Cummings, who has since gone on to become, you've probably seen him in The Good Wife.
He's a big actor now.
Alan Cummings played the MC and Jane Horrocks played Sally Bowles.
And we took, I called up Sarah and I said, I'm going, do you want to go?
And she said, yes, I am.
And it was set up like a nightclub where you sat in the actual nightclub in the Kit Kat club as the play was going on.
And Sarah sat through that play and she wept the entire time.
She just sat there and wept for her mother the entire time we were there.
And afterwards, she went up to Jane Horrocks, the actress.
I went up to Cummings because he gave such a great performance.
I told him what a great performance he gave and he kind of sniffed at me.
He wasn't that nice to me.
But she went up to Jane Horrocks and Horrocks was so lovely to her.
It was very hard to under it, really was hard to understand what Sarah was saying half the time.
And Sarah buttonholed her and kept her talking for 20 minutes.
And Jane Horrocks could not have been nicer.
It was a very beautiful moment because she was talking about how she played her mother, basically, how she played her mother.
So the other day, I'm channel surfing, and I come upon this story.
And it's a story about this incredibly interesting Sally Bowles and this gay guy who basically goes and stays in her boarding house at the same boarding house and gets to know this woman who is committed to being as decadent as she can possibly be.
And here is the show, the scene where Michael York playing Christopher Isherwood essentially meets Sally Bowles.
Guten Tag, Fräulein.
Bin ich bei Schneider?
Moments of Sexual Decadence00:04:39
Könnte ich Sie sprechen?
Ich so kein Zimmer.
Fräulein Schneider, nix zu Haus.
Have you a cigarette, darling?
I am desperate.
Oh, yes.
Yes, I think so.
Fantastic.
You're American.
Oh, God, how depressing.
You're meant to think I'm an international woman of mystery.
I'm working on it like mad.
I was told there might be a room to rent here.
Not too expensive, eh?
Divine decadence.
I'm Sally Bowles.
I'm Brian Roberts.
Come in, Brian, darling.
Oh.
English and cigarettes.
Oh, God, I've even begun to think of German.
How long have you been here?
Forever.
How long has that?
Almost three months.
It's the most marvelous boarding house.
Marvelous lodges.
Everybody's broke, of course, but who isn't these days?
And she's so impressed with her own decadence.
They're so impressed with the fact that she sleeps around.
She's so impressed with the fact that she knows gay people.
She's so, in fact, impressed with the fact that she knows transvestites and that they're living in this club.
And of course, we know that the Nazis are moving in and the society is doomed.
And what got me as I was channel surfing late at night and bumped into this movie, which I've seen like three times, and I've seen the play once, was how their decadence is nothing compared to the way we live in America today.
You can't even understand.
A young person watching this movie without having any historical reference would not even understand why what they were doing was shocking.
The idea that women might be virgins, might be shocked that another woman wasn't a virgin, the idea that it was shocking that they were gay people, the idea that it was shocking that people dressed up as the opposite sex, all of that stuff has become the norm in America.
And it made me start to think, wow, you know, their idea of decadence is our idea of Tuesday.
You know, it's our idea of an ordinary day.
And, you know, it's interesting because we know they're doomed.
And there have been theories throughout history that sexual decadence and more what they would call moral decadence is the harbinger of a society's doom.
They used to say this about the Roman Empire.
It was the, you know, the whoring and the craziness and the feasting and the eating that brought down the Roman Empire.
Now, I think we think very differently about that.
But it is true that the two pinnacles of the two recent pinnacles of Western civilization, the Victorian age and the 1950s in America, were both times of great sexual restraint.
You know, it doesn't mean there wasn't hypocrisy.
It doesn't mean people weren't doing things on the side or under the radar.
But it is true that the society at those moments was dedicated to sexual propriety.
And in moments of sexual decadence or sexual, what do we call it, looseness, at those moments, the society is really shifting into something else.
We had them before in the 1920s.
We had a time of great sexual liberation, but it led to Depression, was followed by the Depression and the World War.
And then we had these fantastic times in the 50s that were marked by sexual, I don't know what you'd call it, sexual decorum.
I'd call it sexual decorum.
And same thing was true in the Victorian era.
Before that, in the 18th century, in the Romantic era, there was a lot of sexual radicalism going on, but it solidified into the sexual propriety of the Victorian age, much more powerful and progressive, in the good sense of the word, age.
So I guess I was just wondering as I was watching Cabaret.
I was thinking, gee, we are at the high.
There has never been a society that accepts more sexual behavior than this one.
Never been a society that has normalized sexual behavior like this one, that actually calls you on account if you think it's strange that a man dresses up as a woman, calls you to account if you think maybe being a homosexual is not moral.
We've never lived, there's never been a society like that before.
And it really is interesting to know whether sexual decorum and greatness are correlated or caught or causative, whether sexual decorum causes a society to rise up or whether sexual impropriety causes a society to fall.
But guess what?
We're going to find out because there has never been a society as sexually loose as this one.
Cabaret is almost incomprehensible now and it made me sad to see it.
Anyway, it's a great movie.
If you haven't watched it, it is worth watching.
It is worth seeing.
The recreation of that era and the character of Sally Bowles is really one of the great creations.
That's it.
So fast, so soon, the Clavenless weekend is upon us.
Come Blow Your Horn00:01:40
Run for your lives.
Hide for the rest of the weekend.
Come back if you survive.
And I will be here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show and here is Cabaret.
What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come here the music play.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret.
Put down the knitting, the book and the broom.
It's time for a holiday.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret.
Come taste the wine.
Come hear the band.
Come blow your horn, start celebrating.
Right this way, your tables waving.
What good's permitting some prophet of doom to wipe every smile away?
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
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.