All Episodes
July 18, 2018 - Andrew Klavan Show
46:51
Ep. 544 - Donald Trump Offers A Trumpology

Donald Trump’s presidency is defended as a net conservative victory—judicial appointments like Brett Kavanaugh, tax cuts, and deregulation—while dismissing his gaffes as "Trumpology," a term for indirect error-admissions. The host contrasts Trump’s Helsinki blunder with Obama’s alleged hypocrisy, from IRS targeting to "smooth lies," framing both as missteps against Putin’s "scorpion" nature. Kavanaugh’s nomination is praised over Amy Coney Barrett, despite Roe limitations, while theological debates on faith vs. works and biblical pacifism are rejected in favor of moral duty. A UK infant’s NHS denial highlights capitalism’s lifesaving edge, setting up a Gates interview to deepen critiques of leftist "doublethink" and socialist trade-offs. [Automatically generated summary]

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Why We Left Google 00:03:31
28-year-old socialist Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez is coming under fire for being as stupid as a 28-year-old socialist.
Ecasio-Cortez, you'll remember, won a Democrat primary for a New York City congressional seat when Democrat powerhouse Joseph Crowley got too complacent to campaign against her, proving himself to be as stupid as a 28-year-old socialist.
So voters couldn't tell the difference between him and Ekasio-Cortez, who actually is a 28-year-old socialist.
And so by definition, is as stupid as a 28-year-old socialist.
Now, some of you may be saying, well, Clavin or Cleven or Nunez or whatever your name is, just how stupid is a 28-year-old socialist?
Let's find out.
Ecasio-Cortez was asked if socialism is so great.
How come capitalism has made people richer than they ever have been at any time in the history of humankind?
Those things that you talk about, that you discuss, are part of the course of human evolution.
And so I would hope that the most recent economic system, our current economic system, is the one that is most beneficial for everyday people.
That's right.
We just got richer because we evolved over hundreds of years under capitalism.
So now it's time to have socialism so we can have the fun of going back to being guerrillas again.
But what about those great low unemployment numbers?
We look at these figures and we say, oh, unemployment is low.
Everything is fine, right?
Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.
Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.
In other words, everybody has a job because everybody has two jobs.
If everybody only had one job, then everybody would have a job.
And that would be different.
New polls are showing Democrats are abandoning older candidates like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi because they just aren't stupid enough.
Which is the answer to the question, how stupid is a 28-year-old socialist stupider than Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi?
Whoa.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is to kiddie-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's here.
It's mailbag day.
It's my bad, bad, bad.
Now I'm so nervous.
I'm so upset.
I don't know what to talk about.
We had a great conversation yesterday with Alicia.
Great questions.
And we've got those questions that are left we are putting in the mailbag.
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It's working right this minute, so Rob doesn't know what I'm looking at because he thinks I'm looking at my script.
All right, so in the conversation yesterday, we had a really good question.
Someone asked why I'm easier on Trump than Ben is.
And I said, well, this is because Shapiro has a political outlook and I have a cultural outlook.
So Shapiro is judging everything Trump says kind of individually in the political moment, where I'm always looking at the cultural, the large cultural view.
Where are we going?
And if we're getting more free, as I believe we are under Donald Trump, then if he makes a mistake, he makes a mistake.
No big deal.
As long as he's appointing judges who protect the Constitution, I'm for him.
As long as he is cutting back taxes, which makes us more free, I'm for him.
As long as he's cutting back the administrative state and cutting back all kinds of regulations, which he is doing like no one has done in my lifetime, then the fact that he makes a mistake here and there doesn't really bother me.
But there's something else that I didn't say, which is that Ben has a legitimate, one of the things about Ben and me, I talked about this in the conversation, is we almost always see the same facts.
We always almost always see the situation exactly the same and then have different opinions about it, which is different than two people who can't even agree on what's going on.
And Ben is concerned about the conservative movement, and he is concerned about the fact that it has hooked its wagon to Trump's star to the degree that when Trump does make a mistake or when he does one of his kind of off, you know, he talks like a carnival barker sometimes and just says something that has no relationship to the truth.
Ben doesn't like to see his fellow conservatives just follow him down that hole.
You know, conservatives are supposed to be, you know, attached to principle, not to persons.
We're not supposed to look for our salvation in princes.
Look not to princes for your salvation.
So, you know, that really concerns Ben.
Why doesn't that concern me?
Because it's definitely happening.
There's no question that it's happening right now after Trump's fairly, disastrous is too strong a word, but his gaffe in Helsinki, at the Helsinki press conference, with the left just going hysterical, there are people on the right who are saying, no, no, no, it was the greatest moment of his career.
It was absolutely brilliant.
He was playing seven dimensional chess and he said this and he really made Putin look bad.
That's just not true.
And it's bothersome because Ben cares about the conservative movement and he doesn't want to see people on his own side just going down that primrose path.
The difference with me is, to be honest with you, I never expected much of any movement, of any conservative movement.
Back in the day when it was Obama selling us out to Medved Vivedev, or Nunez or whatever his name is, where he said, you know, I'm going to get rid of our missiles after the next election.
On the right, people were screaming the way they're screaming now on the left.
I remember this vividly of people just saying, this is treason, this is treason.
And even then, I was saying, you know what?
It's not treason.
It's just a guy who's a clown and doesn't really know what he's doing.
And the thing is, I don't feel like conservatives are better people than leftists.
There are plenty of faithful husbands on the left, good fathers and mothers on the left, plenty of people who do their jobs honestly, plenty of people who you could trust with your life on the left, plenty of people on the military serving their country on the left.
The difference is the ideas.
Now, I do believe that the worse an idea is, the more it degrades you.
If you have a really bad idea, it will degrade you personally ultimately if you follow that idea with integrity.
But the funny thing about the people on the left is that the ones who are successful, the rich ones, the rich lefties in places like LA and Brooklyn and things like that, they live conservative lives.
They live lives just like the right would want people to live.
They just have this kind of line of pattern that they put out.
So you lose your integrity because you're not following your ideas.
I just think right-wing ideas are better.
And that ultimately, I think, if you follow them, makes you a better person.
I think freedom is better than slavery.
I think socialism is a soft form of slavery.
No matter how you do it, whether it's democratic or not, it's a soft form of slavery.
It is taking your work for somebody else's purposes, taking the sweat of your brow for somebody else's purposes.
And that's just another difference.
I don't expect much from the conservative movement.
I just expect much from me.
I expect me to come here and tell you the truth as I see it, the facts as I know them.
And that's what I expect.
If some other guy is going off in this reactionary way, you know, I can't do anything about it.
It's kind of what I expect.
There are crazies on our side, just like there are crazies on the other.
And there are dishonest people on our side, just like there are dishonest people on the other.
The big difference here is not between me and Ben.
It's the difference between the reaction to Trump and the reaction to Obama.
It's not even the difference between Obama and Trump.
Obama, Trump, and George W. Bush all made the same mistake with Vladimir Putin.
They all just didn't think that he was the scorpion.
They all got on the back of the scorpion.
You all know the story of the frog.
What is it?
The frog carries the scorpion over.
And the frog says, well, wait, aren't you going to sting me?
And the scorpion says, why would I sting you?
Then you die and we'd both sink.
And they get halfway across the river.
The scorpion stings the frog and the frog says, why did you do that?
And the scorpion says, that's my nature.
I'm a scorpion.
Vladimir Putin is a scorpion.
So Trump has at least acknowledged that he made a mistake.
It's not exactly an apology.
It's a Trumpology.
It's like, you know, the guy will never admit that he's wrong.
He'll never change his mind.
He'll never say he did the wrong thing.
But he did make a Trumpology.
He came out first and said he does believe.
I can't even say this.
He says he does believe that our intelligence services are right, that he has faith in our intelligence services, that Russia did hack into the DNC to mess with our elections.
Kind of.
This is cut six.
I have full faith and support for America's great intelligence agencies, always had.
And I have felt very strongly that while Russia's actions had no impact at all on the outcome of the election, let me be totally clear in saying that, and I've said this many times, I accept our intelligence community's conclusion that Russia's meddling in the 2016 election took place.
Could be other people also.
There's a lot of people out there.
So he just can't do it.
It's not in him to apologize, but it's a Trumpology.
He sort of said, yeah, faith, whatever, you know, whatever.
I have it.
And then this was magic.
I love this.
This is classic Donald Trump.
This is almost campaign Trump when he was really attacking the Pope and everything like this.
He says it was just one word.
He went back and if you just changed one word, it all makes sense.
And a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word would instead of wouldn't.
The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't or why it wouldn't be Russia.
So just to repeat it, I said the word would instead of wouldn't.
And the sentence should have been, and I thought it would be maybe a little bit unclear on the transcript or unclear on the actual video.
The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia.
Sort of a double negative.
Yeah, it's one of those double negative things.
It's a Trumpology.
It's like at least he admitted that it wasn't his best moment, which I think that was the right thing to do.
He had to do it in Trumpian style.
Why?
Because he's Donald Trump.
So he does things like a Trump, like as if he were Donald Trump.
But he did make a Trumpology.
And so he did acknowledge that this was not his finest hour.
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And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, that's great.
It's KLAVAN for crying out loud.
Stop asking me.
You keep asking me.
I can't stand the pressure.
All right.
So the difference is Trump does come out and he makes this mistake and he admits in his Trumpian form that he made a mistake.
The difference is the reaction.
It's because they own the press.
They keep complaining and complaining and complaining about Fox News, but they own everything else.
They own ABC, they own CBS, they own NBC, the New York Times, CNN, all of them, leftists, LA Times, Washington Post.
So this hysteria, this wave of hysteria.
I just picked, you know, let's just go back in time for a minute when Mitt Romney, remember we've talked about Barack Obama promising to get rid of the nuclear defense shield or not put up the nuclear defense shield in Europe, and he whispered to Medvedev, you know, tell Vladimir that I'll have more flexibility.
And Medvedev said, I stand with you, I stand with you.
So he was dealing away our defenses.
Because of that, Mitt Romney attacked him and said, you know, Russia is our biggest geopolitical enemy.
Here is MSNBC Chris Matthews reacting to that moment and with an expert.
Listen to this.
Mitt Romney hoped to exploit President Obama's open mic moment the other day with the president of Russia, but once again, Mitt stepped in at calling Russia our number one geopolitical enemy.
What's this?
The evil empire again?
Is Romney running for president in 2012 or 1952?
The fact that he declared Russia the preeminent geopolitical problem that the United States faces in the world is an antiquated worldview, but it's not something that's been hidden from Romney's policy platform.
He's articulated stuff like this in the past.
The problem that he confronts is that it's a much more complicated situation than it ever has been, that Russia is a much different country than it's been in many decades.
It sounds like that news.
Yeah, but it's okay.
Back in the day, Chris Matthew loved the Sims Ruskies.
Today, on MSNBC, and I know I'm using a liberal platform, but it is catching the atmosphere of the mainstream press.
They have this expert on, their legal expert, Jill Wine Banks.
Here is her reaction, seriously, to Trump's press conference.
You can't make sense of it.
It's very hard to possibly analyze.
And you're quite correct.
The burglars were Americans.
They worked for the White House.
They worked for the committee to re-elect the president.
They weren't foreign agents.
And yet, we were burglarized this time by foreign agents.
And it's just as serious to me as the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of an attack or the 9-11 attack.
The president is taking the side of the people who attacked us instead of trying to prevent a future attack.
He has done nothing to make sure that the elections four months away are going to be safe.
And I would say that his performance today will live in infamy as much as the Pearl Harbor attack or Kristallnacht.
Pearl Harbor attack, Kristallnacht, you remember, 1938, that's when they broke all the windows of the Jewish shops in Germany, a prelude to the Holocaust.
They called it Kristallmach because of all the broken glass.
100 Jews, I think, were killed.
It's Pearl Harbor.
It's the Cuban Missile Crisis.
She's comparing the hacking of computers by maybe these 13 guys in Russia who basically phished the DNC.
They said, send us your password.
And their password was password.
And they sent it to him.
I mean, that was the level of security these master spies had to overcome to get these embarrassing emails.
That's Pearl Harbor to this woman.
And that's Pearl Harbor to a lot of these people.
So it's this difference of hysteria.
And that is where you get this reaction from people who fight back.
It's reactionary.
It's literally reactionary.
They're reacting to that hysteria by getting hysterical themselves and saying, oh, this is Trump's finest moment.
This is Trump's greatest hour.
It's not.
Trump is making the same mistake with Russia that Obama made, the same mistake that W make.
You cannot negotiate with a scorpion.
And even this thing he keeps saying about how 90% of our nuclear weapons, we have 90% of the nuclear weapons with Russia, and we've got to dial that back.
You do not want to be negotiating an arms treaty with Vladimir Putin.
Why?
Because he won't uphold it.
He will not uphold it.
And he was even talking in that Chris Wallace interview about how hurt he was that we didn't follow the ABM treaty, which ended when the Soviet Union fell, because he knows that they break the treaty and we don't.
So you do not want to be negotiating with this guy.
The difference is the noise.
The difference is the reaction.
And that's what creates this atmosphere around you that you react to.
And you got to keep your eye on the facts.
They're still doing with Obama, by the way.
Obama is in South Africa in Johannesburg celebrating the celebrating the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth, I guess it is.
And so here's the report from CBS about this.
They still love their Barack.
Obama fever has certainly gripped Johannesburg.
The former U.S. president is extremely popular both here and across much of this continent.
He opened a youth center run by his pop sister.
And it didn't take much convincing to get Obama onto his feet and dancing.
Oh, he's dancing.
It's Obama fever.
They never stopped.
They love this guy.
So here's Obama.
Here's the speech that they sent around that made a big splash on Twitter because it sounded like a rebuke to Donald Trump.
This is cut number one.
This is another one of these things that I didn't think I had to lecture about.
You have to believe in facts.
Without facts, there's no basis for cooperation.
If I say this is a podium and you say this is an elephant, it's going to be hard for us to cooperate.
Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth.
People just make stuff up.
They just make stuff up.
We see it in the growth of state-sponsored propaganda.
We see it in internet-driven fabrications.
We see it in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment.
Political Leaders' Lies 00:06:22
We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they're caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more.
So that's what Obama said, but I wanted you to hear what I heard.
So I had the guys here, Rob and Emily, and Austin, I had them put together what I heard as Obama was speaking.
This is another one of these things that I didn't think I had to lecture about.
You have to believe in facts.
Without facts, there's no basis for cooperation.
Blistering report tonight out saying the Obama administration in general and former Attorney General Eric Holder in particular repeatedly lied to the family of a slain Border Patrol officer about the weapons used in his death and stonewalled efforts to get at the truth.
If I say this is a podium and you say this is an elephant, it's going to be hard for us to cooperate.
Let me take the IRS situation first.
I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.
Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth.
There was a hateful video that was disseminated on the internet.
It had nothing to do with the United States government, and it's one that we find disgusting and reprehensible.
It's been offensive to many, many people around the world.
That sparked violence in various parts of the world, including violence directed against Western facilities, including our embassies and consulates.
People just make stuff up.
If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous.
And there's no place for it.
And they have to be held fully accountable.
They just make stuff up.
We see it in the growth of state-sponsored propaganda.
You're saying there's no corruption there at all.
No.
That's not what I'm saying.
That's actually.
No, no, but I want to know what you're saying.
You're the leader of the country.
You're saying no corruption.
No.
None.
No.
There were some boneheaded decisions out of a corner.
No mass corruption.
Not even mass corruption.
Not even a smidgen of corruption.
We see it in internet-driven fabrications.
The notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order.
That's just not the case.
We see it in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment.
We have stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in this region.
Because of this deal, the international community will be able to verify that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon.
We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they're caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more.
You can keep your plan if you are satisfied with it.
If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.
If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you won't have to do a thing.
You keep your plan.
If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan.
If you've got health insurance, you can keep it.
If you like your health care plan, you will keep your plan.
It was exactly the same, his form of lying.
I noticed Obama's form of lying when he was a candidate.
I actually wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal that the Wall Street Journal didn't publish, and I sent it to them while he was running the first time, the first time he was running in 2008, saying this guy doesn't lie like other politicians lies.
He lies with a smoothness and an ease and an immediacy that is not even like other politicians.
When he says Bill Ayers was just a guy in the neighborhood, when he says, oh yeah, I never really heard what Jeremiah Wright said in church, even being there for 20 years.
He lied and his lies were much more substantial than Trump's.
Trump's lie is, oh, you know, I said would when I wouldn't meant wouldn't.
They're really carnival Barker lies.
Obama lied about substance and they just worshipped him.
And that is the difference, is the kind of the noise that overrides everything that Donald Trump does and didn't override the silence that surrounded everything that Obama did.
Obama is still over there.
You know, he made this remark on prejudice.
Yeah, about cut number 10.
He's in a foreign country.
He's talking to the country that had apartheid, right?
The country that had the systematic separation of blacks and whites, allowing whites, a small number of minority of whites to run the country over the majority of blacks.
And this is what he said.
It is a plain fact that racial discrimination still exists in both the United States and South Africa.
And it is also a fact that the accumulated disadvantages of years of institutionalized oppression have created yawning disparities in income and in wealth and in education and in health, in personal safety, in access.
So he's comparing us and South Africa and nobody says a word, nobody says anything.
YouTube is redirecting you when you try and get back to home.
They're redirecting you to the speech because they think it's so great.
Well, by the way, every time, every single one of my shows that goes up on YouTube, they tell you you can't have commercials on it because I'm just too controversial.
They don't even do that to Ben.
I always think of Ben as a little to the right of me, but they won't even do that to Ben, but they do it to me.
So that's the thing.
You're getting this absolute creation of an atmosphere, and that's what you're reacting to.
You can't help but react to it.
We all react to the narrative.
They create the narrative.
And that is the big difference between what happened in Helsinki and what Obama did when he was talking to Medvedev.
That's the difference.
That's the only difference.
I mean, Trump made a Trump, you know, there is one bigger difference.
Trump made a mistake because he's so angry at the corrupt people in the Justice Department that Obama put there to go after him.
Trump made a mistake, but Obama was constantly apologizing for America, and it wasn't a mistake.
He meant it.
That is a big difference.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up, but we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Kavanaugh's Stance on Roe v. Wade 00:15:18
Come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe because then you too can be in the mailbag.
It's a little uncomfortable in there, but while you're in there, you can ask me questions and my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
10 bucks a month is all it costs, 100 bucks for the year, and you get the leftist tears tumbler, which I guarantee you it may not fill up today because they've got a little bit of a case today.
Don't worry.
Tomorrow will be another day.
All right.
The mailbag.
All right.
From Joe.
I come to you with a question about relationships.
I've recently been pursuing a girl who just ended a long relationship.
We have lots of superficial differences, but we're able to make it work because we both really felt there was substance underneath that we saw in each other.
Recently, she has insisted on reverting back to just friends and seeing where this takes us.
She doesn't want to pretend nothing has happened between us or that there's nothing there, but things just move too quickly and she needed some time to be alone.
I wanted your take on giving people space and trying to be just friends with someone who you clearly want to be more serious with.
As always, thank you for your wisdom.
So she's breaking up with you.
That's the thing.
You know, when somebody asks for space, when somebody asks to back off, that we're going too quickly, she is apples, you know, I mean, nickels on the dollar.
You know, you could bet that she is breaking up with you.
And the thing to do is like take that with grace.
I mean, say to her, you know, you want to split up.
You don't have to say, let's give me some space.
You know, she may still carry on the charade and maybe you guys will get together again.
You know, I don't know.
But right now, I would say let her go.
That would be my advice.
That would be my reaction.
I would not want to be strung along myself.
I would just say, listen, it's fine.
I don't want you to be in a relationship.
You don't want to be in.
I care about you.
Go your way.
And if ever you want to start up with me again, you know my phone number and then live your life as if you were gone.
That's my advice.
You probably don't want to hear that.
Okay.
You have spoken in the past about, this didn't have a name on it.
It says, you have spoken in the past about you and your father disagreeing.
I am looking to join the military because I believe I need to protect this country, but I know my father would like me to stay with my current financially safe job.
He would not stop me from joining, but I'm worried about making him unhappy.
I always felt your parents know what is best, but cannot help myself and feel this is the huge turning point I need in my life.
What are some ways I can help my parents understand?
Okay, first, your parents don't know what's best for you.
You know what's best for you.
Even if your parents are right, you have to live the life that's inside you to live.
Even if you're making a terrible mistake, it's one thing to listen to your parents' advice.
You should listen to your parents' advice.
But in the end, you have got to do what is in your heart to do.
And this sounds like you really mean it.
It sounds like it is something that is incredibly important to you.
Your father is just going to have to understand.
You're right.
It may hurt his feelings.
You just got to sit down and explain it to him as kindly as you can.
Tell him it is not about him.
It is not about his advice.
It's not about rejecting him.
It is about what you know in your heart you have to do.
You cannot abandon your own life.
You know, your parents created you to have a life.
You're like, what's the old saying?
You're like an arrow that they shot from a bow.
Ultimately, you've got to go on your own flight and do what you know is right.
And if they care about you, ultimately they will understand.
You're right.
They may be hurt.
But that's part of the price of living your own life.
Part of the price of living your own life is sometimes hurting people who love you but maybe want too much control over you or who love you but see your life in a different way.
You know, you're not your father's partner.
You are your partner's partner if you have a wife or, you know, if not when you do, you are on your own and you've got to make that decision.
It sounds like you're serious.
From, it looks like Tayson, dear overlord of logic and reason, Clavin, is it enough to believe in God or should I actively worship?
What a strange question.
It's a really interesting question.
I used to be non-religious, but after becoming a conservative, many of my worldviews changed.
So is my outlook on what God is.
Is it okay to just be religious in my own way?
Can I worship you?
Thanks.
Huge fan.
No, you cannot worship me.
I am not here to be worshipped.
I'm here to be adored, just loved, and possibly have people bring me things.
But no, you cannot worship me.
You know, the reason I find that kind of an offbeat question is, you know, a lot of times we have philosophical religious conversations here at the Daily Wire.
And one of the conversations that comes up very often is, are you saved by faith alone or do you need acts, right?
This is in the Bible.
Paul says you are saved by faith in Christ alone.
And James says facts, not acts, works.
James says faith without works is dead.
And how do you reconcile those things?
Martin Luther thought the book of James, the Epistle of James, should just be cut out of the Bible because he just thought you were saved with faith alone.
But my reaction to that is how you square that circle is that when you believe in things, you act a different way.
I believe that gravity is a real thing, so I don't walk off cliffs, right?
I believe in gravity, so you have to show me how a plane works before I'll get on it.
When you believe in things that you can't see, like gravity or air, you behave in certain ways that you wouldn't behave if you didn't believe.
So my reaction to your question is, I can't tell you what to do.
I can't tell you whether to worship God or I can't tell you whether to go to church.
I can tell you to act with integrity.
If you believe in something as important as God, and it seems to me God is of central importance, then maybe you should be asking yourself what that means.
What does it mean to you to believe in God?
What God do you believe in?
What is God like?
What is the God you believe in like?
What does he do?
How does he operate in your life?
Does he operate in your life?
And therefore, how do you want to react to those things?
You react to gravity by not walking off cliffs.
How do you want to react to the fact that now you know the truth that there is a God?
So how do you want to react to that?
And how are you going to behave in that belief?
So just act with integrity is my suggestion and see where that leads you.
From David, dear Mr. Claven, Shapiro and other legal scholars are saying Kavanaugh will slowly chip away.
This is the Trump Supreme Court pick.
Brett Kavanaugh will slowly chip away at Roe v. Wade, but he won't overturn it like Amy Barrett would have.
Why aren't we at least seriously discussing the idea of scuttling the nomination so Trump will appoint Amy Barrett to the seat?
It would only take one Republican senator to do it.
I get that the idea is a bit crazy, but isn't it worth debating?
No.
It's more than a bit crazy.
It is hugely crazy.
Kavanaugh is a great pick.
We don't know.
Here's the thing.
This is what we're debating.
Kavanaugh, in a decision, did not, in a decision basically limiting Roe, did not attack Roe v. Wade as much as conservatives wanted him to.
When we're arguing about that, we've won.
That's a win.
We're just arguing about some little, you know, itty-bitty thing.
Roe v. Wade is not the Constitution.
What we want is Supreme Court justices who, to the best of their ability, will interpret the law as written in the Constitution, not as what they want it to say, but what they feel it does say in the light of history and precedent.
So I don't know.
I think Kavanaugh is going to be a little bit harsher on Roe v. Wade than people do.
I don't think John Roberts will join him.
That's what I think.
I think John Roberts will stop them from overturning Roe v. Wade.
And it's possible they won't have the votes.
Remember, they have to decide to hear cases.
It's possible they won't have enough votes to hear the case, cases against Roe v. Wade that would cause it to be overturned.
I don't know what Kavanaugh is going to do, but I do know that he is a constitutional judge.
He is not an absolute originalist the way Clarence Thomas is.
He is more an Antonin Scalia type.
Scalia called himself, I can't remember what he called himself, a weak originalist.
That is, you know, if it says, just to use an example my son-in-law gave me, that if the Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, Scalia would say, well, yeah, but cruel and unusual punishment is not what it is in the 18th century, where Clarence Thomas might actually let you be put in the stocks.
And so I'm a little bit more on Scalia's side than on Clarence Thomas' side.
But Kavanaugh's a great pick, a great pick.
And the fact that we're arguing over this little kind of language in one of his decisions just shows that we've won and we should not get in the way.
We should certainly not risk losing a great pick like this because we want 100% of what we want right now.
That's ridiculous.
Mark, hey, Andrew, my wife is buying more and more into the feminist narrative that's being pushed in our culture.
Uh-oh, this is bad.
She uses the words white men, man, white man as a pejorative, constantly laments how women have it so hard, and officially has Trump derangement syndrome.
This is driving a wedge between us.
She sees my gender as her adversary, and it's hard to believe her when she says she doesn't include me in her disdain for men.
I think this path is leading her to outrage, bitterness, and hate.
How can I bring her back to sanity?
Wow.
Tough, you know, that is exactly the same as to me as if your wife came home and started saying racist things.
The only difference between feminism and racism, in my opinion, is that there really are no differences, real differences between the races where there are differences between men and women.
So you can have a little bit of legitimacy attacking the opposite sex if that's what you want to do.
If what you want to do is hate 50% of the world, you have maybe like 1% more legitimacy in adopting feminism than racism, but basically it's the same thing.
So the problem you've got is not, this is not a philosophical problem.
This is a marriage problem.
You can't force your wife to believe certain things.
All you can do is take your stand and listen to her.
She is your partner in life, right?
She's not your enemy.
So you want to sit down and talk to her, hear what she thinks, hear why she thinks it, tell her in a kind way why you don't agree and why it's kind of offensive to you as a man for her to be saying this.
I believe here, you might want to find out what it is, what her animus against, where her animus against men comes from.
It may come from something in her life you don't know.
I suspect that she is actually just suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.
Trump really does have this effect on women.
There's something about him that just gets their hair up, gets their backs up.
And I'm not sure I entirely blame them.
There's something about him that bothers me as well, but it's not as bad, I think, because I've known guys like him my whole life.
I'm from New York.
Some of the ways he talks are just very familiar to me.
But it may just be that she has got Trump derangement syndrome.
And it may be that listening to her, having sympathy with what she's saying, getting at the underlying problem, what is it that makes her so angry about men, and not constantly jumping down her throat, not constantly attacking all of her opinions, even though you stand firm at what you believe, that might help.
What you've got is a problem here with somebody who is believing in a, I think, a very harmful philosophy.
I think feminism is just a terrible philosophy, I really do.
And I think that, just like racism, I think, is a terrible philosophy.
And so if your wife came home with that, she'd have exactly the same problem.
But you might want to listen to her.
You might want to hear what, you do want to listen to her.
You do want to hear what is underlying these opinions.
Have some sympathy, have some kindness, listen to what she says, and see if you can get to a place where you can live with each other and maybe calm her down a little bit.
From Michelle, what do you think the Bible says about pacifism, if anything at all?
Well, yeah, that's a great question because I hate it when people take Jesus' remarks that you should turn the other cheek or that you should forgive 70 times, seven times and take it to mean pacifism.
Jesus never said if your wife is attacked, you should stand by and watch.
He never said if your country is under threat, you shouldn't defend your country.
What he was talking about was a level of patience, a level of forgiveness that is what he feels is the patience and forgiveness of God that would echo that in this life.
So I don't think he's a pacifist.
I don't think pacifism is a moral philosophy.
And I think Jesus was the son of God, so he's likely to have moral philosophies.
Pacifism is not a moral philosophy because somebody has to fight.
Somebody is going to have to fight.
If you are sitting here, if you're not enslaved, if you're alive, it's because somebody is willing to fight for you.
It may be a cop on the street.
It may be a soldier.
When I hear people talk about how they hate guns and how they hate war and how they hate law enforcement, I just think, try living without them for 20 minutes and then get back to me if you're not dead, you know, because they protect us.
These people protect us.
They are fighting for us.
So to pretend you're a pacifist while someone else is doing the fighting for you is not a moral point of view.
Pacifism is not a moral point of view.
And I don't see any evidence that Jesus supported it, though he supported what I hope we all support, which is patience and forgiveness.
From Garrett, Darth Clavin, I am a dog.
I forgot about that.
I said a dark part of my past.
I have heard an argument that we have no free will because we can't control what we want.
And all our actions are based on what we want to do.
If you reply with examples of how you acted against your desires, a defender of this argument would reply that you only did that because you wanted to act against what you wanted.
And therefore, we are back to square one.
What are your thoughts on this?
To me, it seems like all it did was prove that we can create an ad hoc justification for any of our actions that is related to wants.
Thanks and love the show.
You know, you're absolutely right.
It's just a circular argument, right?
Because you say, we only do what we want.
And you say, well, really, I wanted to cheat on my wife, but I didn't.
Yeah, but that's because you didn't want to cheat.
You wanted to not cheat on your wife.
It's a circular argument.
There's no way out of it.
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
My problem with people who say we don't have free will, and plenty of smart people are making this argument now, is that it is an argument, what is it called?
Ad absurdum.
You know, it's just, once you think about it, it makes no sense whatsoever.
If you have no free will, you're not the person that you think you are.
If you're not the person that you think you are, who is it who is telling me that you have free will and why did you choose to do that?
It is like the argument for materialism.
People think that everything is material and you think, well, that's an interesting idea, but what's the idea made of?
It's not made of anything.
So materialism can't be true.
You have free will.
By the way, this argument has been going on since Christianity came around because once you have a God who is all-knowing, people start to think, well, if he's all-knowing, he knows what I'm going to do.
So do I really have a choice about what I'm going to do?
And that argument is answered by the fact that time is not the same to God.
All time is at one with God.
So he's not really seeing the future.
He's simply seeing a world that is complete, which is very different.
You have free will.
Not only do you have free will, you actually are a soul, a person.
Those perceptions are not hallucinations.
That is the kind of thing that is so stupid that only an intellectual could believe it.
Doublethink and Freedom 00:04:51
All right, I'll take one more of these.
Mark, doublethink is a word coined by George Orwell in 1984, meaning the acceptance of contrary beliefs at the same time.
Leftists seem to be guilty of doublethink around words like diversity, progressive equality, and freedom, to name a few.
Are there examples of where conservatives suffer from doublethink as well?
First of all, not really.
I mean, George Orwell was writing about the left.
He was writing about communism and its need for doublethink so it could convince you to give up your freedom.
That is what communists, socialists like Ocasio-Cortez, that is what they want from you.
They want your freedom and they're buying it from you.
They're saying, yes, but you will have free health care.
Yes, but you'll have free this.
You'll have free college.
Yes, just give me your freedom.
Just give me the fruit of your labor.
I will take your freedom.
I will decide how to spend your money, which means I will decide how to use your time because your time is money.
So I'm taking your life away, but I'll give you all this free stuff.
So they need doublethink.
We don't.
The only thing that I would think that sometimes conservatives can be a little bit unclear on is the concept of liberty, because liberty requires order.
Liberty requires self-restraint.
Liberty requires self-control.
So sometimes they say, well, you know, you believe in liberty, but you don't think people should go out and sleep with 17 people in a single night.
Well, I don't believe people should, I believe people should be free to do that, but I believe if enough people do that, liberty will collapse because there'll be so much disease, so much disorder, so much chaos that the government will have to step in and take your freedom away.
That's why the left loves sex and loves drugs because they know it will ultimately add to chaos and ultimately give them a chance to enslave you.
So that's the only thing I can think of where we have to explain ourselves.
Our liberty is ordered liberty.
It is not license.
But no, we don't need, we're offering people freedom.
We don't need doublethink.
That's it.
Tickety-boo news.
So here's a story I just loved.
Baby Oliver, right?
Baby Oliver.
Now you've heard these stories from the UK and I lived in the UK for many years.
There's a picture of his picture going on.
What a cute little baby.
So there's a picture of baby Oliver.
Baby Oliver is in the UK.
You've heard these stories in the UK where basically the courts have said, we're not going to save this baby.
Take the life support off the baby, and the baby died.
And when the parents said, Let us go to another country where we can get health care for the baby, they said no, and they wouldn't let them leave.
And that is the end result of Obamacare.
That is the end result of socialized medicine.
Well, the parents of Baby Oliver took their kid to the National Health, and the National Health came running on there with two horses.
They had two horses on their carriage.
So, because this is what the National Health is like: it's like getting 19th-century health care.
But the horses arrived and they took a look.
The baby had a tumor, a non-cancerous tumor on his heart.
And the doctors arrived with their stethoscopes and their horses and their carriages.
And they said, No, there is nothing that can be done.
They didn't have the doctors with the right expertise.
But then they called Boston Children's Hospital, and they said, Yeah, we've done this.
We have actually gotten rid of these tumors.
What they wanted to do in the UK is wait for a heart transplant, which never comes for babies because it's just very rare that you get a baby heart.
So the parents said, We want to go to Boston.
They raised the money themselves, and because the NHS wouldn't pay for it, they went to Boston.
The doctors in Boston removed this tumor, and the baby seems to be doing really well.
Let us hope and pray the baby continues to do well.
What I love about this story, though, was that everything they did required capitalism and freedom.
They raised the money themselves.
They didn't use the NHS.
They came to people and they said, Give us some money.
We need some money to help the baby.
You take a look at that face, you give the baby some money, right?
That's what you do when you see a baby's face like that.
And because our medical care is more advanced, because we know more, because we're not dependent on the government to pay for our medical care, and because they can make all those terrible profits that everybody complains about, we have better RD, we have better health care here.
We really do have great health care here, and there are problems.
They can be smoothed out.
I think we do need some government intervention, but not the kind that the left wants.
This is a perfect story.
And really, really, they had to teach people in Britain to worship the NHS.
It is virtually what they have instead of God.
They worship the NHS.
They had to teach them that so they wouldn't want to give it up.
So every time a politician said, give it up, just like when people talk about reforming Social Security here, it's stepping on the third rail.
They ought to get rid of it.
They ought to scrap it, have a bottom rung of care, and then have tiers of care that you can buy your way up through, through the glories of capitalism.
Congressman Gates Interview 00:00:47
All right, that's it.
We got a great interview.
We're going to interview Congressman Gates tomorrow.
Yeah, it was a terrific interview.
Really, really interesting.
Said some things I hadn't heard before, and I think you'll really want to hear it.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show, and we will see you then.
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.
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