Andrew Klavan dissects a leaked tape revealing Donald Trump’s alleged pre-election hush-money scheme, framing it as media hypocrisy—ignoring Clinton’s scandals while weaponizing Trump’s flaws. He traces modern journalism’s shift to sensationalism, arguing Trump thrives in this environment, and critiques Congress for ceding power on tariffs and immigration. In the mailbag, he defends uncompromising principles after losing Hollywood deals over biblical references in The Homelanders, then advises divorce for adultery, citing biblical law. A Marine-turned-NYPD lieutenant gets tactical advice for debating leftist relatives, while Klavan laments conservatives’ neglect of the humanities due to perceived persecution. Closing with satire on AOC’s economic claims, he uses BLS data to dismantle Warren’s policies, underscoring how Trump’s unorthodoxy exposes systemic media and political failures. [Automatically generated summary]
Journalists and other leftists are absolutely baffled that President Trump's poll numbers actually ticked up after they criticized him so intensely for his press conference in Helsinki.
At the New York Times, a former newspaper, editor-in-chief Blithering Prevarication III, told the waiter at his club, quote, I simply can't understand it.
We've explained to the idiots in flyover country that we, their bettors, disapprove of their choice of president, and yet, for some reason, they continue to cling to their own opinions.
It is completely inexplicable, and I think I'll have the olives stuffed with blue cheese in my martini today.
There's nothing so thrilling as a change of pace, I always say, unquote.
On CNN, several commentators demanded action, raising the important question, if a commentator demands action and there's no one around to hear him, does he actually make a sound?
To try to find the answer, Don Lemon delivered a monologue and then quickly rushed off stage to look at the monitors so that someone would actually be watching his show while he was speaking.
Unfortunately, he wasn't quick enough to catch himself before he left the set, so the experiment didn't work.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters, quote, we have tried to stop the government from cutting taxes.
We have fought to keep the borders open for illegal immigrants, and we have attempted to block the appointment of any judge who might follow the Constitution.
And yet somehow the public won't support us.
It's a mystery, unquote.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also chimed in, saying, quote, either the president is a Russian spy or he is being blackmailed or he has stolen my purse, which I'm sure I had here a moment ago, although I may have dropped it when I smacked my head against that brick wall either yesterday or in 1964, whichever comes first, unquote.
Meanwhile, the president, seeing the new poll numbers, bragged that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and still remain popular until Vice President Pence wrestled the pistol out of his hands.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the round of zippity-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 here.
You waited for it, but it's finally come.
It is mailbag day.
You've been walking around with those problems.
They're about to be alleviated, lifted off your shoulders like a burden that's been lifted off your shoulders.
Boy, that was a really bad simile.
But before we talk about that, here is a sponsor I'd love, the Dollar Shave Club.
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That's dollarshaveclub.com slash clavin, which leads to the musical question, how do you spell clavin?
It is K-L-A-V-A-N, no ease.
Tape Reveals Different Perspectives00:15:14
There's no ease for the wicked or enclave.
All right.
You know, there are times, sometimes I am reading the news, watching TV, and I realize that I see the world so differently from a lot of people that I start to question myself.
Like, is it me?
If everybody else is seeing one thing and I'm seeing something else, you know, maybe it's me.
But I'll tell you the difference.
I'll tell you the way I look at the news that I think is different from the way most people look at the news.
Most people look at the news and they ask, what's happening?
And that's how they judge the news.
Is something bad happening?
Is something good happening?
Absolutely valid.
I do that too.
But I also ask myself, what do I want?
Where am I going?
What do I want?
So for instance, I mean, this is true in my ordinary life.
A lot of people will say, well, some book you have comes out and nobody buys it.
Did I write it to be a bestseller?
Is that what I wanted?
Or did I write it because I know it's going to be read into the future?
I mean, I've had books come out that at the time nobody bought.
And then like I'm still receiving royalties from them because they keep selling because people discover them.
I wrote the book, some of my books, I wrote just because I knew it was going to be good.
And I knew people wouldn't like it right away.
I knew it wasn't a bestseller, but I wrote it.
And I asked myself, what do I want?
So I don't get disappointed when I don't get something I didn't want that I wasn't aiming at in the first place.
Same in politics.
You know, when they did this thing on immigration recently, where they found 2,300 kids had been separated from their parents and all the pictures of the children crying and all this stuff.
And I thought to myself, well, wait a minute.
What do they want?
Because that's the other question you have to ask.
What does the person talking to you want?
Because there are plenty of children, thousands and thousands, millions of children crying at any given moment.
And they're the ones focusing the cameras on these particular children.
So what do they want?
Do they want open borders?
In that case, listen, I don't want the children separated from their parents.
I want things to be handled well.
But in that case, it's not a crisis because what they're trying to do is manipulate me into getting what they want.
And that's why I was talking earlier about character assassination.
When somebody says to you, you know, I oppose socialism, the answer that you slept with a hooker when you were married, that's not an answer.
That's not an answer to I oppose socialism.
You know, the answer is, well, socialism is good because blank, and it's going to remain blank because you've got no argument, right?
But the thing is, character assassination is not an answer to a philosophical question.
There are things that people do when they violate the law, when they violate certain norms of behavior.
They are things that absolutely disqualify them for public office.
But since we know, as I pointed out earlier this week, since we know from the experience of Teddy Kennedy, not to mention Bill Clinton, but Teddy Kennedy especially, especially, we know they don't care.
The left doesn't care about character.
We ask ourselves, what do they want and what do I want?
Now, here's the thing.
I've said this a lot, but it's important.
I want freedom.
And when I say that, I feel I don't explain that enough.
That doesn't mean I can do anything I want.
I can, you know, run around punching people in the head or live any lifestyle.
Freedom is part of a network, a community, a political entity that allows me to think and speak and do what I want as long as I don't physically harm somebody else, as long as I'm not immediately harming someone else.
I can say anything I want, as long as I don't threaten death to someone, and I can think anything I want, and I can do almost anything I want, but I have to consider, am I harming the structure?
Am I harming the structure that preserves my freedom?
So if I have a child out of wedlock and I can't pay for that child, somebody's going to have to pay for that child.
That means I'm taking away somebody else's money, which means I'm taking somebody else's time, which means I'm owning somebody else's life.
I don't want to own somebody else's life because I don't want somebody to own my life.
So my freedom depends on your freedom, and that means I have to act responsibly in ways that don't call on you to sacrifice your life to pay for me.
That's why all these free things that people like to talk about, free college, free college, there is no free college.
It just means stealing from somebody else, taking their money, which is their time, which is their life.
You haven't got the right to do that.
So in order to be free, I have to act in a certain way.
Now, I know the left does not want to be free.
They do not want me to be free.
They want to be able to tell me what to think, when I can say certain things, what kinds of things I can say.
And that's what I want to stop.
That's what I'm here to oppose.
It's not everybody on the left, obviously.
It is the people that we see at the top who really want the government to be in charge.
And they say it.
They say it.
When you cut back regulations, they protest.
When you say we're going to obey the Constitution, they protest.
We know that this is what they want.
So that is the argument we're having.
We're not having an argument about Donald Trump.
I do not care.
So yesterday, Michael Cohen released a secret tape.
The lawyer taped his clients' conversations.
And the thing is, the tape is a little bit unclear, but it's essentially saying that Trump slept with this Playboy model, Karen McDougall, and she was going to sell her story to the tabloids.
And he wanted to buy the right to the story so that the story wouldn't come out because it was just like two months, I think, before the election.
Here's just an excerpt of the tape.
You can hear how, you know, it's non-decisive, but I'll talk about it after you play it.
I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David, you know, so that I'm going to do that right away.
I've actually come up on the, and I've spoken to Alan Weiselberg about how to set the whole thing up with the funding.
Yes.
And it's all the stuff.
All the stuff.
Because, you know, you never know where that company, you never know where he's going to.
Maybe he gets it by it.
Correct.
So I'm all over that.
And I spoke to Alan about it when it comes time for the financing, which will be, listen, what finances?
Well, I'll have to pay you.
So I got no, no, no.
Just to underscore the irony here, when I say that I know that the left doesn't care about character, the guy defending Michael Cohen is Lanny Davis, Lanny Davis who defended Clinton during the proceedings about the Monica Lewinsky thing.
He doesn't care, but here he is talking cut number five.
Everybody heard just now Donald Trump say the word cash, cash, after Michael Cohen mentioned financing when Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump through Mr. Giuliani accused my client, Mr. Cohen, of saying the word cash.
And I posted a tweet at the time and I said, wait for the tapes.
Richard Nixon couldn't spin the tape that did him in.
And there's no way that Mr. Giuliani, who knows from being U.S. attorney, the only people who use cash are drug dealers and mobsters.
Cash is not what you do.
And it was Michael Cohn who said, no, no, no, no.
And Donald Trump, despite what Woody Giuliani said publicly, the tape contradicts Mr. Giuliani, and the word cash is heard by everyone.
Now, just remember how I started talking about what do I want.
That's what I'm looking at this.
I'm thinking, what do I want?
I want my freedom.
So you're telling me that this tape reveals that Donald Trump banged a Playboy model and then paid, wanted to pay to keep her story secret before the election.
I mean, call me a feather and blow me away, right?
I mean, you are telling me that Donald Trump has a bad character.
You're trying to assassinate, character, assassinate Donald Trump.
You can't assassinate his character.
His character sucks.
He has a terrible character.
I mean, the stuff he said about Ted Cruz during the election, the fact that he fired a guy like Rex Tillerson using his tweet that he used to brag about sleeping with other men's wives.
By the way, by the way, I don't say this in a judgmental tone.
I spent the first 20-plus years of my life practically insane.
I've done terrible things.
I've done things that wake me up at night sweating.
I'm not passing, I don't pass judgment on anybody about this stuff.
But I tried to become a better man.
I think I have become a better man.
I think I put that old guy away.
I think I put him down, basically.
I think I killed him.
But Donald Trump, Donald Trump has been the same guy all his life, all his life.
We knew who he was.
And the wonderful, weird thing about Donald Trump is his crappy character protects my freedom.
Why?
His crappy character protects my freedom because every time somebody gets up and does something on behalf of freedom, the left assassinates him.
They don't care about Bill Clinton.
They don't care about Teddy Kennedy.
But George W. Bush, Dan Rather, sacrificed his career to get a 35-year-old plus story about him going AWOL in the National Guard, like who cares?
He sacrificed his career to anything he could do to assassinate that man's character.
Mitt Romney, they assassinate his character, but they don't care about Bill Clinton.
They don't care about Teddy Kennedy.
They don't care about anybody on the left.
So when they try to assassinate Trump's character, they can't.
He's bulletproof because we already know.
We already know what a bad guy he is.
His badness, his personal badness, protects my freedom.
It is a weird, weird thing.
So George Will, who, you know, I always kind of respected George Will.
I've always, Andrew Breitbart used to say about George Will that he was a Republican from the days when Republicans were happy to be in the minority.
There's a long, long period of time when Republicans just had a very comfortable, I think it was like 38, you know, Senate, senators, majority, a minority.
They could never get anything done, but they could complain a lot.
And the kind of general idea, just the feeling in the air, was that the Democrats were going to own the Senate forever, and that was the way it was.
And that was George Will's Republican Party.
Now, now, when Republicans are a living, breathing entity actually accomplishing things through Donald Trump and his bad character, George Will hates Donald Trump, and he has become a bit just a tad of a pompous ass.
You know, I hate to attack the guy because I actually have respected him in the past, but really it's absurd.
But anyway, he's on Lawrence O'Donnell's show.
But he makes the point that when Lannie Davis compares this nonsense, this little nonsensical story, which is blowing up because it's the summer and they haven't got anything, and they don't want to cover the fact that North Korea is actually disassembling one of its nuclear sites.
It's like, nice.
It's like, nice, now, now, because of Donald Trump, the North Koreans are not going to blow up the Democrats so that Democrats can complain about Donald Trump's sex life.
That's basically where we've, that's basically the absurdity of summer news, okay?
But even George Will comes out and says, yes, Donald Trump, horrible, horrible fellow, but comparing him to Nixon is absurd.
This is cut number two.
Well, I'm hearing redundant evidence that Mr. Trump is a seedy man whose incontinent sexual appetites get him into trouble with seedy women.
Now, this is not news at this point in his presidency.
I'm not hearing anything remotely like you referred to earlier tapes, the tape in which Richard Nixon says, well, let's get the CIA to lean on the FBI to cover up a criminal conspiracy.
In the one case, Donald Trump was a private citizen when that tape was made.
Richard Nixon was president of the United States.
I'm also hearing something else on the part of people analyzing this, and that is an attempt to turn all of this into a campaign finance violation.
We really do not want Lawrence to go down the road where we say anything that happens that can be helpful to an ongoing political campaign should be monetized and counted as a contribution and therefore contribute to the criminalization of American politics.
I think that's a terrible way to go.
There are lots of ways of judging Donald Trump without getting into that swamp.
What's really interesting, and George Will doesn't mention it because he's on MSNBC, and if he had mentioned it, it would have been like Thunderball, the James Bond movie.
His chair would have opened up and there would have been sparks and he would have disappeared in a puff of black smoke.
What he didn't mention is all those things that Nixon was doing, Barack Ohama, whatever the hell his name was, was doing.
It's hard to remember now because his legacy is just kind of like, it's almost like the empty breeze just flowing past our studio.
But, you know, Obama was doing all that stuff.
He was spying on Trump.
He was using the FBI.
He was using the CIA.
Obama did it all, the IRS.
So all that stuff that was not on this tape about Donald Trump buying off the babe, you know, which I got to be honest with you, when you listen to the tape, it's really hard to hear what Trump is saying.
It's hard to hear whether he's saying no cash or use cash.
It is difficult to hear.
I'm convinced he was doing this.
Trump can deny it all he wants.
That's who he is.
That's who he is.
Again, when the billionaire Playboy Club gathers together, they would throw him out if he weren't sleeping, cheating on his wife with Playboy models and buying them off.
That's what they do.
But the thing is, what Will should be asking himself, what George Will should really be asking himself, is why does it take a man of this kind of character to do the great things that Trump has been doing, the cutting back of regulations, the appointment of great Supreme Court justices and other justices, the tax cutting, the typical thing, I mean, as Henry Olson pointed out yesterday, the things that Donald Trump is doing,
the things that Donald Trump is doing are mainstream Republican American things.
They are down-home American things that people support.
Why does it take an outlandish man like this to accomplish it?
It's because they have turned the press into a character assassination machine.
And you either have to be perfect, which not many of us, I mean, I may be, but not many of us is perfect, right?
Or you have to be such a bad cat at this point that the stuff just rolls off you because we already know it.
They created this.
You know, I was in the news business in the 80s.
I was a news writer for a very big radio station in New York.
I was there when this transition happened.
It happened in the 80s.
First, earlier on, there started to be this move to make news, which used to be a loss leader.
You know, you put on the news and it was a public service that you did because you were an FCC controlled entity.
So you had the news and it was just a public service.
It wasn't supposed to make money.
But over time, they started, as media branched out, they started saying, well, how do we make money?
And local newsmen started to become handsome.
They started to become funny.
They started to joke with each other during the news.
And this was written about a lot.
People were writing about, you know, why are they joking?
Is this going to pollute the news?
Finally, in the 80s, what they did is they started to gut news departments.
Trade Tensions and Tariffs00:08:06
And I was there.
I saw this happen.
They cut out the reporters because reporters are expensive.
They go off and do stuff.
And it takes a long time to come up with a story and you have to pay them all that time.
They started to gut them.
They came in into this radio station where I worked.
The new boss came in and he told us.
And we were known as the New York Times, which at that point was a compliment.
When I call them a former newspaper, it used to be a good newspaper.
were known as the New York Times of the Airways because we would write, I would write it, come in and write a story about, say, the federal budget.
My story would be 40 seconds long.
In radio news, that's an eternity.
And the new boss came in and said, no, we're not doing that anymore.
Our stories are going to be 12 seconds long, and they're going to be about as many stories about condoms and AIDS and anal sex as you can get in there because that's what people are talking about.
That's what they care about.
Well, this guy and I got into, it's the last time I've ever got into a nose-to-nose screaming match with anybody.
I mean, it really, really, I do not have a big temper, and I certainly don't get in arguments when I think I'm in control.
You know, I don't, when I think I'm going to win, but I was a nobody.
I was a writer.
It was a low-level position.
I was arguing with the boss, and man, oh man, I made his life a living hell.
Now, I can't guarantee that that's why he left, but a lot of people figured, felt that I had chased him out.
He quit the job pretty early.
I then moved to England because I couldn't stand political correctness anymore.
A couple of years, I come back and I ask about this guy, this boss whose life I had made so awful.
And he's running one of the biggest networks in town.
I even went and talked to him.
We sort of had a friendly, you know, bland conversation.
And I realized I had been a pebble on the beach and he had been the tide coming in.
That was what the news was going to be.
It was going to be about sex.
It was going to be about what caught your attention.
It was going to be that because they didn't have the news people anymore.
They weren't spending the money on the news people to get the news, right?
And so they were making money by the more audience we get because we're talking about AIDS and we're talking about condoms and we're talking about sexual acts that had never been spoken about before.
And our stories go by in 12 seconds.
So we're not reporting on the budget.
Nobody cares about the budget.
Nobody cares what's in the federal budget.
The legacy of that press is the press that now attacks politicians not on the basis of their ideas, but on the basis of their private actions.
And it's an all-leftist press, which wasn't always true.
The press used to be a working class guy's way up.
If you were a working class guy, but you were smart and you could write, you might become a reporter.
And the only thing you cared about was bringing down the powerful, left or right.
You didn't care.
But once it became a profession, once you went to journalism school, once you went to Columbia Journalism School, then the elite were reporting on the elite and they wanted to get what they wanted to get.
The press has become corrupt.
It happened since the 80s.
I was there.
I saw it happen.
And it needs to reform itself.
It can't be done by government because of the First Amendment.
It shouldn't be done by government.
But that's what we're seeing.
So Donald Trump is a creation of the press.
Donald Trump is not the enemy of the press.
I always compare him to Godzilla.
They set off the nuclear blast that created the monster that they are now trying to shoot at with their little puny rifles and they can't touch them.
His bad character protects my freedom.
My freedom is what I want.
I don't care if he paid off a Playboy model.
I just don't.
All right.
But I do care about this trade thing.
I have to talk about this a little bit.
I've stayed away from this.
And the reason I stay away from it is because I know that Donald Trump is a negotiator, and that means he's in motion.
He's trying to get somewhere.
The place that he is at is not the place that he perceives himself going.
It's not a matter of playing 3D chess.
This is basic, I've been in negotiations.
We've probably all been in negotiations.
That's the way it works.
I say something, but it's not exactly what I want.
It's a place that I'm willing to negotiate from.
So Trump has levied tariffs on China, and China has responded on levying tariffs on our agricultural products, like soybeans.
So now Trump has responded to that by giving $12 billion to people in agriculture, supporting, basically supporting their industry with government charity.
So this is the way socialism works, basically.
You support industries because they're not becoming profitable.
And everybody's yelling at him.
And what he is saying is he's saying, give me time because I need time to negotiate with the Chinese.
Here's a cut of him explaining this to the audience, cut number one.
And my administration also understands that we cannot be a safe country if we are not a prosperous country.
We have to think of ourselves.
You have to see these trade deals I'm working on.
They're a disaster.
We're losing hundreds of billions of dollars with individual countries a year.
And they're sticky, and you got to stick it out.
You got to just, we've got to fight it.
Nobody else fought it.
I went to some of the countries.
I said, how did it get so imbalanced?
They said, nobody ever called.
They said nobody ever called.
They do whatever they wanted, and we just put up with it.
Not any longer, folks.
Not any longer.
We're making tremendous progress.
They're all coming.
They don't want to have those tariffs put on them.
They're all coming to see us.
And the farmers will be the biggest beneficiary.
Watch.
We're opening up markets.
You watch what's going to happen.
Just be a little patient.
See, here's what...
I don't know.
He also sent out a tweet, one of my favorite Trump tweets ever.
Tariffs are the greatest.
Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on trade, negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with tariffs.
It's as simple as that, and everybody's talking.
Remember, we are the piggy bank that's being robbed.
All will be great.
That's the part I love.
All will be great.
So I have two questions about this, a small question and a big question.
My small question is, if he's just buying time with this $12 billion buyout for the farmers, if he's just buying time, doesn't China know he's just buying time?
Isn't it kind of like when Obama said he was going to pull out of Afghanistan at a date certain?
I mean, the Taliban were going, oh, good, we'll set my watch and we'll be back, you know?
So why isn't China thinking the same thing?
How can he negotiate when they know that he's just buying time?
He cannot starve the farmers forever.
They're part of his base.
And he can't do it anyway because he doesn't want the economy to collapse.
I get what he's saying.
I understand China has been cheating us.
We're in a trade war with China.
He's just fighting back.
But the suggestion is the other way to do this is he should have been part of the TPP, the Pacific plan where we all would have ganged up on China with the other Asian countries.
Look, I'm willing to give him a chance, but that's my first question.
If he's just buying time, doesn't China know he's just buying time and won't they just wait him out?
But my bigger question is this, and it doesn't actually have to do with Trump.
Why is Trump levying taxes?
Why is the president levying taxes?
The Constitution says Congress is supposed to do it.
But like everything else, they have seeded their authority on this.
And this is where my freedom comes in.
If we're not obeying the Constitution, a document that I know, a structure that I know will protect my freedom, why not?
Why isn't Congress passing immigration law?
Why isn't Congress upholding its constitutional duty to pass tariffs?
Why are they complaining about Trump instead of saying, hey, this is on us?
We get to do this.
Trump says it's national security to lower tariffs.
Ah, give me a break.
Give me a break.
You can say it's national security to do anything.
Why has Congress gotten rid of its responsibility and then they accuse Trump of being authoritarian, but they won't do anything?
I mean, we saw Chuck Schumer waving the pen around saying, well, we want just, we're not going to make a law.
We want Donald Trump to just pass, you know, just say what the law is.
That's the thing that really bothers me about this trade stuff.
Why, if the Republicans are fighting with Trump and Congress, why isn't Congress fighting back?
Why are they just mouthing off?
But I'm still, I'm holding fire.
I'm willing to wait and see what Trump is up to.
I trust that if the economy starts to go south, he will pull out and stop what he's doing.
All right, we got the mailbag coming up.
Pay Price for Principles00:15:14
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for the whole year.
Then you too can be in the mailbag.
You too can ask any question you want.
You too will receive answers that are 100% correct and you too will have your life changed.
You too for the better.
I have no idea.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
All right, the mailbag.
Oh, I miss that girl.
You know, I see her on Twitter.
She's a singer.
You know, she goes around Texas and she does all these performances.
And she sometimes thinks about coming back here, but I hope she doesn't because he can't perform in LA.
You know, she can perform in Texas, which is what she really loved.
But anyway, I miss her.
All right, from Zach.
Dear Andrew, oh, Captain Michael Havan, I have been listening to your podcast for over a year now and have always marveled at your dedication to upholding the values you believe to be both true and right.
How does a man stay true to what he holds in his heart and mind to be just and true in a society that is ever shifting away from Judeo-Christian values?
Love the show, Zach.
You know, first of all, that's very kind of you.
I have failed a million times, as I'm sure everybody has, to uphold my values.
And as I say, I spent the early part of my life a really twisted guy, and I worked very hard to become a better guy.
I will say this.
I do, on my own behalf, I do look back in my life and I see that I could have had a lot of things that I don't have because I chose the path of being what I am.
It always seemed to me, it always seemed to me that there was no point in living by my pen, which is how I have made my living my whole adult life.
There was no point in living by my pen if the words that I was putting down on paper weren't at least what I thought to be true at the moment I was writing them, if they weren't at least that.
And I mean, I look back at moments.
I think I've talked about this before.
I had a very popular young adult series called The Homelanders.
I sold it for good money in England, and they wanted to remove all the biblical references in it because they hate God and they hate the Bible at the bookstore.
And they said the bookstores, the big bookstores won't handle it.
I refused.
I refused five times to do it.
And it cost me a lot.
They killed the book, basically, in England, where I'd had this great contract.
And it was terrible.
You know, it was a terrible thing.
So you ask the question, and the answer is, you pay the price.
That's the answer.
You pay the price.
I knew when I made that decision, it was going to cost me.
And I've never regretted it, but I paid a price.
And I paid a lot of price.
I mean, I don't work very much in Hollywood anymore, though.
I still get some opportunities because of being a bit, because of what I'm doing right now, because of what I'm saying right now.
When they Google me, this is the first thing that comes up.
And they read my books.
They love my books.
They read my scripts and my writing samples.
They love those.
And they call me in, but then they Google me and they see this stuff.
And it costs.
So when people ask this question, I always feel that the second half of the question isn't being asked, which is how can I do right without paying the price?
And that's the answer.
You cannot.
You cannot.
You've got to resolve to pay the price.
And it goes back to how I opened the show.
It depends on what you want.
And I really wanted to be the guy that I am.
I mean, I can say that I can say, that the person I am now, imperfect, flawed, make mistakes, but it is the guy I set out to be.
And that is incredibly important to me and an incredible source of joy to me.
I mean, I can look at my wife.
I can look at my kids.
I can say, I told you who I am.
This is who I am.
I am that guy.
So that's an incredible source of joy to me when I sit down to write and know that I'm writing exactly what I think and know that I'm willing to pay the price of not writing a bestseller, but of writing something that's going to be a little offbeat and say things that aren't popular with the in crowd.
I know I'm going to pay that price, but it gives me tremendous joy to be the guy I set out to be.
That's the answer.
You got to pay the price.
All right.
And again, I'm not touting my honesty over anybody else's.
I'm just saying that I set out with those goals and And I can point to places where I've paid the price for them.
All right, from Adam.
Dear Andrew, I've been married for only two months, although my wife and I have been together for over four years.
Since moving to San Francisco, she's been turning into a feminazi and just told me she wants to have sex with other men, as well as she thinks she can't stay married to me.
I don't believe in divorce, but don't want to be with a woman who has decided infidelity is the only thing that can make our marriage work.
It's been only two months, and I can't believe my wife is already giving up on our marriage.
What should I do?
You should get divorced.
That's the answer.
We say, you don't believe.
I tell you, my son, believe.
Even Jesus, even Jesus, who was no friend to divorce, and even I, who am no friend to divorce, believe that adultery is a cause for divorce.
If she wants to, you've been married for two months.
You have no kids, I assume.
There's no reason to stay with this woman, dumper.
I got to say, I have a lot of friends, an extraordinary number of friends, who got married for like a month and then got divorced and then had a wonderful marriage.
And many of them said the same thing.
Many of them said, I had already sent out the invitations.
I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't pull out.
So don't torture yourself for the rest of your life because you made a mistake.
Eat the mistake, get a divorce.
All right, from Chris, dear vacations in Connecticut.
This is from an old book.
It said, I vacation in Connecticut and Shapiro has never let me forget it.
I've got to be a Shapiro listener, right?
How long does it take to come up with your opening monologues?
They're always hilarious.
Do you write them alone or like they do in Hollywood with a bunch of funny Ben Shapiro types?
I write them by myself.
And let me tell you something.
It is one of the hardest things I've ever done.
I have cut them.
At one point, we got rid of them because people didn't like them.
You know, we thought that people didn't like them.
I brought them back because they set the tone of the show and I really enjoy them, but I've cut them in half.
I mean, they're much, much shorter.
So it's really not as hard as it used to be.
The hard thing is coming up with the ideas and making sure they're funny.
I mean, so I will tell you, I used to write these things, Claven on the Culture and the Revolting Truth.
I took a lot more time with those.
I was a lot happier with them.
I was proud of them as some of the best political satire around.
These I just think are enjoyable and fun and funny.
And I'm glad they start the show and I'm glad you like them.
But they are hard.
They're hard to do.
From Spencer, Hail Claven, God King of the Hairless.
Three questions for you because I'm trying to get my money's worth for my subscription.
How do you take your coffee black?
In fact, I always hated coffee until I accidentally drank it black.
I always thought, like, yeah, it's kind of sweet and soft and all that stuff.
Then I had a black cup of coffee and I thought, oh, that's really good.
I like black, strong coffee.
Two, do you have any plans for speaking engagements this fall?
Yeah, YAF is offering it up on their website.
I don't know whether they've scheduled any.
I've got one next week, don't I?
Yeah, I'm going to Washington, D.C., I think next week and talking to YAF, but we'll announce them as we come up.
We've been very bad about announcing them, and it's all Rob's fault, and we'll do it.
We will do it as they come up.
Three, what is your spirit animal?
I know your colleague, Mr. Shapiro, says Nikki Haley is his, and I was wondering if you had one as well.
Thank you and keep up the good work.
You know, my political spirit animal, I really think, is Ted Cruz.
Not because I always agree with Cruz.
I don't always agree with him, but he is a staunch, conservative, and honest guy.
And I really like the fact that Donald Trump treated him like garbage.
He treated him during the campaign.
He said terrible things about his wife.
He said terrible things about his father.
And Cruz fought him and fought him down to the wire.
But once he lost, he worked with him.
And to me, that's amazing.
I'm not sure I'd be able to do it, but I'd like to think I would be able to do it.
And it goes back again to the opening of the show.
What do I want?
I want the country to do well.
And if Donald Trump is doing well, I want to help him do well.
I don't want to make a name for myself by attacking him.
I do not think that Ted Cruz was doing that purely out of self-interest, though we're all got self-interest in our minds at all times.
I don't think Cruz was doing it.
I think he did it for the country.
He ate the fact what had to be, what had to be a brutal campaign.
He ate it and he went and worked.
And I loved him for that.
In my artistic life, which is a huge part of my life, my spirit animal is Wordsworth.
Wordsworth was a radical who loved the French Revolution, saw what came of it, and then really took a big career hit by becoming a conservative.
And it cost him a lot and still costs him a lot in his reputation.
And I've always loved him for that.
You know, when I was young, my spirit animal was John Keats, who was the young guy, but he died when he was like 26, I think.
I could be off on that, but he died when he was like 26.
Wordsworth lived into his 80s.
I hope to do the same.
So I guess I've started to identify with him.
All right.
Name withheld.
Hey, Mr. Clavin, no ease.
I served in the Marine Corps in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.
Thank you for that.
I married my high school sweetheart, and I love her very much, but her family are hardcore leftists that I disagree with constantly.
At most family gatherings, I keep my mouth shut to avoid turmoil.
I'm currently a lieutenant in the NYPD.
I love Daily Wire.
It's my safe haven.
I'm not a very educated person.
As I went directly from high school to the Marines, I'm trying to better myself in that light.
But I ask you, what is the best way to deal with my hardcore left family?
I love them very much, but they are all very educated and it becomes tough for me to speak to them without sounding feeble-minded.
He says, please do not use my name as the NYPD will crucify me just for being associated with a conservative outlet.
Wow, I didn't know that about the NYPD.
Here's the thing.
Family trumps politics.
So you don't want to be in constant fights with your family.
I have a couple of things to say about this.
First, don't think that you're less intelligent than these people.
They may be more sophisticated than you are because, like you said, you didn't go to college.
They may have a kind of knowledge you don't have.
But one of the things I learned very young, and it really changed my life, was I grew up an educated man in an educated family, a family dedicated to education on the coasts.
And the idea was in flyover country, everybody was an idiot.
And I left home and traveled around the country, and I've met a lot of people.
And first of all, I found out that wasn't true, that people around the country were not idiots.
They were very smart, very intelligent.
But again and again, I met people who would say, who didn't trust their own intelligence because they didn't have the sophistication and the education of the people they saw on TV.
And they thought, well, if this guy's saying it, there must be something wrong with me because I didn't go to college.
Do not feel that way.
Going to college does not make you smart.
And, you know, it's a wonderful thing to live a life of mind, but it doesn't make you smart and it doesn't make you right.
And I think that you in the Marines in Iraq and as an NYPD guy, you have seen a lot of things that they haven't seen and you know a lot of things that they don't know.
And you are just as intelligent.
You should have confidence in your own ability to think things through and to be realistic.
That said, you don't want to start political fights with your family every time you see them.
And when you do start them, when they are in a political fight, you want to do them in a certain way.
So here's my advice.
Listen quietly when they're ranting because leftists think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with them ranting.
But then if you answer them, they think you've committed a crime.
Listen to them with a superior smirk on your face.
That's all.
Don't say a word.
Just listen and just have a superior smirk on your face and wait for them to come to you and say, what?
Why are you smirking like that?
And then say, well, you're asking me the question, do you want the answer?
And when they say yes, then you answer them.
But don't answer them about people.
Don't talk about Donald Trump.
Don't talk about Barack Obama.
Just talk about principle.
Just talk about why the things they're talking about won't work and why they're wrong.
And that's it.
And don't get, and if things get heated, bail.
Bail.
You're not there to convince them.
You're just there.
You're just there to stand your ground right.
You're there.
You have a right to believe what you believe.
But if you can guide the conversation away from that and have friendly relations with your relations, have friendly relations with your relations, it's much more important than arguing politics.
I hope that did that answer the question.
I think that did.
Yeah uh, from Jamie O, Grand Pubah of THE Multiverse.
I'm a conservative.
That actually is my title.
I'm a conservative pursuing a phd in philosophy uh, with the eventual goal of going into academia.
From what I can tell, part of the difficulty in hiring conservatives and academic feels like philosophy, english and music is that, in my experience, most conservatives simply don't value the humanities.
When I tell conservatives that i'm pursuing a phd to go into academia, I usually get a bunch of befuddled looks as if they could never fathom doing such a thing.
Why do you think that conservatives, by and large, don't seem to value the humanities and how do you think we could foster conservative culture in which these important subjects are held in higher esteem than they currently are?
Man, oh man.
If I could offer answer that I would be a happier man.
I got to tell you.
You know, first of all, there are parts of the humanities that conservatives go into, the classics especially.
But we don't support the arts, we don't support the humanities, and because of that now, now listen part of this is we've been blacklisted.
We're blacklisted in Hollywood, we're blacklisted in publishing, we're blacklisted in academia.
So eventually you say well, you know, if they don't want me, i'm not going there.
I got a life to live.
I'm going to go do something else.
But the, the rank and file the, the thing about conservatives is, conservatives are the most intelligent people in the country and the simplest people in the country.
Right, the smartest people in the country are all conservatives.
If you don't believe me, read the op-ed of the NEW YORK Times to see how stupid these people are.
And and then and then simple people are conservatives because they got a lot of common sense and they've got a lot of lived experience.
So they are conservatives too, and they don't care as much about the arts, and the people who are at the upper level just kind of go along to get along.
So you know, I I don't know why we haven't figured this out.
They're so important.
It matters so much what people are being taught in school.
It matters so much what's coming into their heads through their music and through the?
Uh, their television shows.
I have pled with conservatives, conservative think tanks, to start divisions, to start artistic divisions.
I've pled with them uh, to start think tanks that are dedicated to the arts.
Uh, they look at me, I always.
My joke is always that they look at me the way my wife looks at me when I explain to her that even when you buy something on sale, it still costs money.
You know, because when I say that to my wife, she looks at me like you're very cute, but I have no idea what you're talking about.
That's the way conservatives look at me when I tell them they should be involved in the arts.
Um, all right, I got to stop and uh, and go on.
Uh, there are a lot of good questions left.
Maybe we'll bring them back next week, so we'll keep them up.
Tickety-boo news.
So Ali Stuckey did this very funny satire, splicing up an interview, a pretend interview that she was doing with an interview that Margaret Hoover did with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the dolt, who is the socialist running in Queens, New York, for Congress.
Unemployment Rates and Minimum Wage Jobs00:05:11
And she put out...
Here's just a little bit of it.
Socialism into your own words.
Unprecedented concentration of wealth at the very top, tippy top of the 1.
Wow, i'm.
I'm kind of surprised to hear you admit that.
It sounds like what's going on in socialist Venezuela.
What do you think about what's going on in Venezuela?
Just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition, and to me it would just be completely unacceptable if that happened on our shores.
Well, couldn't that happen here if, if we adopted socialism?
It's hard to say what direction that that takes.
I am not the expert on geopolitics.
I saw this early in the day on Twitter and cracked up.
I just thought it was really funny.
I'd seen the interview, so I knew it was satire, but it seemed very obviously satire.
It's cut.
The way it's cut, it's very lumpy and all this stuff.
And Allie was clearly not trying to fool anybody.
The left goes nuts, right?
Oh my God.
And she went nuts.
Cortez went nuts saying, you know, oh, they're so afraid of me.
They have to put out fake news videos.
I mean, this is how, but you know, I'm not going to say they're dumb because they do this all the time.
This is an old leftist trick is take conservative jokes and take them seriously.
So if I make a race joke or if I make a sex joke, oh, Clavin thinks, you know, I've made these jokes about women not having the capacity for reason.
Oh, Clavin thinks women don't have the capacity for reason.
You know, they do that all the time.
They take your satire, they take your jokes, and they take it seriously.
The thing is, you don't have to satirize this woman because she is a walking satire.
See, this is the other part of the joke.
She's the one who said that there's low unemployment because everyone has two jobs, right?
Which, if you just think about it, just give your mind a minute to go through that mathematically, right?
If there's low unemployment, if everybody has one job, there's low unemployment.
If they have two jobs, the unemployment is exactly the same.
That has nothing to do with it.
So the woman's adult.
She is adult.
So it doesn't really, you don't really have to satirize her.
What I loved is after she said this, Elizabeth Warren came out and she thought she didn't like losing her socialist thunder.
So she comes out and she doubles down on what she said.
Here's Elizabeth Warren on low unemployment and the Trump prosperity is cut eight.
There was a time when Wall Street numbers reflected that the economy overall was doing well, but not so much when not many people own shares of stock and when corporations are doing well, they no longer share with their employees.
There was a time when saying, hey, the unemployment rate has gone down, that's a great thing.
But you know, when people are working at minimum wage jobs that won't support them or they're working two, three, or four jobs to try to pay the rent and keep food on the table, then simply saying the unemployment figures have gone down just doesn't get you there.
The way I see this is the lived experiences of most hardworking Americans across this country are not improving.
You know, this is amazing.
I got to tell you, this is why I call this tickety boo news.
First of all, almost everybody has, a lot of people have stock because you have it in your retirement funds and things like that.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, this was in the Wall Street Journal today from Andy Puzder, who is a restaurateur.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show only a small minority of Americans work multiple jobs.
That percentage has been around 5% of working Americans since 2010, though it was higher before then.
Last month, 7.6 million or 4.9% of the 155.5 million working Americans had multiple jobs.
Are people working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, as Elizabeth Warren says?
Rarely.
But for a brief dip during the recession, private sector employees have worked an average of 34.2 to 34.6 hours a week, right, since they began tracking the data in 2006.
Man, I work like twice that.
I work like 60 hours a week.
BLS considers 35 hours a week full-time, so working 70 to 80 hours would be equivalent to two full-time jobs.
Only 360,000 people work two full-time jobs in June, 0.2% of the workforce.
Ms. Warren also claims people are working minimum wage jobs that won't support them.
No doubt some people work minimum wage jobs, particularly younger employees, getting their first work experience, that they have access to such jobs is a positive rather than a negative.
But the fixation on minimum wage jobs is increasingly disconnected from reality.
On a year-over-year basis, wages for all employees increased 2.7% in June.
That's good, not great number, but individuals working production and non-supervisory jobs in the retail and hospitality and leisure sectors did much better.
In June, wages increased 3.8% year-over-year for retail sector employees.
And the thing is, as the job market gets tighter and tighter, as there's less and less unemployment, wages will go up.
They're always a lagging indicator.
They always come last.
So the news, the economic news is great.
Wages On The Rise00:00:46
These women do not know what they're talking about.
It's because women have no capacity for a reason.
I'm joking.
But I will continue to be joking here tomorrow where I will be, and I hope you will be.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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.