Ep. 564 frames Trump’s 2016 win as a "necessary evil" against Clinton’s progressive agenda, dismissing his legal troubles—like Cohen’s $130K hush-money payment—as minor compared to Obama’s fines or Manafort’s conviction as politically timed. The episode pivots to defending Trump’s economic gains for Black Americans and immigration crackdowns, using Molly Tibbets’ murder to attack Democratic hypocrisy while mocking calls for his impeachment over campaign finance. Mailbag segments blend personal advice—like verifying family secrets before confrontations—with theological debates on Jewish dispensation and video games as art, before ending with a pro-Trump rallying cry: his policies boosted Black entrepreneurship by 400% and deported a 95-year-old Nazi guard, proving his critics’ claims of racism are absurd. [Automatically generated summary]
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, cats and dogs, I sit before you today absolutely shocked to learn that President Donald Trump stands accused of paying off women to keep them silent about his adulterous affairs.
The sleaz of this behavior is out of keeping with everything I know about this president.
Because after all, normally when I look up at a building and see the gigantic gold letters spelling Trump on top of it, I think that's class.
But let's put this in some perspective.
In the last election, we had a choice between a candidate who paid off women to keep them silent about adulterous affairs and Donald Trump.
And I thought to myself, do I want to elect a woman who has promised to gut the Second Amendment and seriously damage the first?
Or do I want to elect a man who's being blackmailed by some seriously banging chicks and will leave my First and Second Amendment rights alone because he has no idea what they are.
And I admit, faced with those options, I look back sadly on America's better days when John F. Kennedy boldly promised we would go to the moon and then bang two women simultaneously in the White House pool.
That's right, simultaneously.
He also got it on with Marilyn Monroe.
America was just a greater nation then.
Now, many Democrats and journalists, but I repeat myself, are accusing Republicans of hypocrisy.
They say if Hillary Clinton had done what Trump did, we would be calling for her head.
And hey, there is nothing I like better than a lecture on sexual ethics from a party that just nominated a guy in a skirt and pearls to run for governor of Vermont.
But they have a point.
I would be calling for Hillary's head if only to stop her from laughing that horrible laugh that sounds like a pterodactyl in heat.
So I say, bring on the Democrats, journalists, late-night comedians, and never-Trumpers to continually insult ordinary Americans for their beliefs, their ways of life, and their political choices, and then to try to impeach the president they elected on a campaign finance technicality.
Do it, Democrats, because I think you'll all look absolutely marvelous in tar and feathers.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Campaign Finance Controversy00:17:05
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All right.
So I know you have all this news, obviously.
Paul Manafort is found guilty on eight to 18 counts.
The other 10 counts was a mistrial.
And Michael Cohen, the even bigger story, made a deal with the prosecutors that implicated Trump.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking about Hegelian aesthetic theory.
That's exactly what I was thinking about.
And I know where else but this show can you go from Michael Cohn to Hegelian aesthetic theory.
And I may be the only person in America who has read Hegel in the original gibberish.
So I know what it's about.
But here, this is true.
Hegel's aesthetic theory had a great theory about what tragedy is.
He had this theory that infinite principles, universal principles, work themselves out in history.
So these principles were on the spiritual level, but they work themselves out in history by two sides coming together and kind of destroying each other and becoming a third thing.
And each time it did this, it rose.
The history rose toward the spiritual absolute, but was always doing it in half measures because these two sides, both of these two sides were partly right and partly wrong.
This is what Karl Marx stole, and he took the spiritual element out of it and turned it into a nonsense so it could be believed by people like Alexandria, Google Eyes-Cortez.
But anyway, Hegel said that tragedy occurred in moments of transition when a hero was forced to choose between one of two options, both of which were right and both of which were wrong.
So no matter what he did, he was choosing the right, but he was also doing wrong, and the dialectic was resolved by the death of the hero.
And that's how it moved on to the next stage.
And that's how tragedy happened.
And that is where we found ourselves in the 2016 election.
See, it actually does make sense.
It actually does make sense.
That is where we found ourselves.
We found ourselves between two choices.
On the one side, we had the party that promised to fundamentally transform the greatest nation on earth into something else.
Like, thanks a lot.
These people are socialists.
People have told us that our most basic concepts of reality meant what men and women are, what gender is, who we are, what freedom means.
All of this they told us for 20, 30, 40 years, completely wrong.
And now, finally, after eight years of weakening the country, of weakening our standing in the world, of weakening our economy when it wanted to take off, they were going to get their next politician in there, Hillary Clinton, to nail down those fundamental transformations by appointing the kind of Supreme Court justices who would rewrite our Constitution from the bench to do all the things that they have been trying to do, yay, these many years, and they thought they had it.
And we had to choose between them and Donald Trump, who is not a very nice individual.
And that we had to go take a choice between whether we were going to protect our country, protect our Constitution, protect the simple truth of reality, what reality is, and not feel that every time we said X instead of Y, we were a racist or a terrible person.
When we said, oh, golly gee, those nice Muslim people keep blowing people up all around the world.
We wouldn't be accused of racism.
When we said, oh, there are problems in the black community that have to do with their culture that aren't the fault of the past.
We wouldn't be called racism when we said we wanted men to be men and women to be women.
We wouldn't be told we were crazy.
All of that, all of that stuff, we were defending by voting for a guy.
And we knew, we knew exactly who he was.
And I think that we made, those of us who voted for him, I think that was the right choice.
But it was a tragic choice.
And by a tragic choice, I don't mean that people died when you made it.
I mean that each side had a very tragic price.
The price of getting Hillary elected, of course, was the country.
The price of voting for Donald Trump is we are now defending a guy who does stuff that is not all that defensible.
However, the one thing we have going for us, the one thing we have going for us is the left keeps overreacting.
What Donald Trump is accused of, and I'll get into the details in a minute, what Donald Trump is accused of is essentially a camp, so far, is a campaign finance violation.
The money that changed hands when he was buying off, according to Michael Cohn, and let's face it, it sounds to me like he's telling the truth.
According to Michael Cohn, the money he was using to pay off the women that Trump was sleeping with was less than the money Obama was fined for his over $2 million in illegal campaign contributions.
So normally, normally these things are dealt with with a fine.
We also have this kind of deep state vendetta going after Trump and everyone who's ever come near him.
Paul Manafort would never have gotten caught up in this.
He's been doing this stuff for years.
The only reason he got caught up is because he came within Trump's circle and this silly Russian investigation is going on.
Michael Cohn, probably the same thing, although guys like Cohn do tend to wind up in jail.
Anyway, let's take a listen to Robert Kuzami, who is the prosecutor, the federal prosecutor in New York.
He's the one who announced that Cohn, and this is the bigger case because Cohn essentially implicated Trump in these payoffs.
Here's the part where he's talking about those charges that involve Trump.
What he did was he worked to pay money to silence two women who had information that he believed would be detrimental to the 2016 campaign and to the candidate and the campaign.
In addition, Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement for that money by submitting invoices to the candidate's company, which were untrue and false.
They indicated that the reimbursement was for services rendered for the year 2017, when in fact those invoices were a sham.
He provided no legal services for the year 2017, and it was simply a means to obtain reimbursement for the unlawful campaign contribution.
A couple of points I'd like to make.
First, these are very serious charges and reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over an extended period of time.
So that's a big thing because it reflects a pattern of lies and dishonesty over an extended period of time.
And he's your witness against Donald Trump doesn't make that great a witness.
But nonetheless, the whole point here is that what they're saying, what I've heard them saying on the news, which is just untrue, is that this is a campaign finance violation because he did it to keep the women quiet so he could get elected.
But that's not the case.
The thing is that contributions to candidates, even if they're in-kind contributions, not just money, are limited to, I think it's $2,700.
So this was more than that money.
Now, if it comes from Trump, his contributions to himself are not limited, but it's only a limitation if Cohn was the one making it and it was disguised and they didn't say what it was and all this.
So again, it's the kind of thing where you'd usually get a fine, you'd get a slap on the wrist.
This is a vendetta.
This is Robert Mueller, who's on a wild goose chase after this Russian stuff, I believe.
And he's on this wild goose chase, but he does what prosecutors always do is they prosecute the guys who fall within their ken and he's going after them.
Also, of course, this is a move in the chess game that Mueller is using to turn these guys.
So he's twisting the screws on Michael Cohn.
Trump tweeted out.
I kind of love this.
Trump tweeted out.
If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohn.
It's too bad he couldn't send that tweet back into time to Donald Trump.
It's like, oh yeah, maybe I shouldn't hire this guy because this was like his bud for years.
This was his fixer.
But obviously, this is to turn the screw on Donald Trump.
And Lanny Davis, who was Clinton's lawyer too, right?
Yeah, Lanny Davis, Clinton's lawyer, he is now, even though that in the plea, when Michael Cohen pleaded guilty, he did not name Trump.
Lanny Davis is bringing it against Trump and basically saying, we're coming after you, me and Cohen.
Let me make 100% clear.
The evidence was provided definitively by Donald Trump's lawyers.
They wrote the special counsel and said Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to make these illegal payments.
That's not a dispute.
It's not about credibility.
It's his lawyers in a letter used the word directed.
Rudy Giuliani said, don't believe what Trump said on Air Force One.
It's not a crime to lie to the American people.
And he said Donald Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen.
So to be clear, if Michael Cohen committed a federal crime at the direction of President Trump, does that mean President Trump committed a federal crime?
President Trump committed a criminal act that corrupted our democracy.
That's what the campaign finance laws are about.
The same way that the Russians, complicit with WikiLeaks and evidence that members of the campaign at least facilitated that conspiracy.
So that obviously is the narrative they want to sell, that this has some connection to Russia.
It has no connection to Russia.
And the big language, the big language, he committed a crime that corrupted our electoral process.
He committed a campaign finance violation.
If that, if they can prove that, that's what it is.
Let me tell you just one thing.
Like, if these guys think that they, for 50 years, they can insult the middle of this country, the entire heartland of this country, and tell people their culture stinks and tell people their religion stinks and tell people their flag is worth disrespecting and tell people America, go out and send our president out to apologize for America and tell us America needs to be fundamentally transformed.
And then after 50 years of this treatment, people finally get angry enough that they're willing to break their own rules and elect Donald Trump.
If they think they're going to pull a coup on this president with campaign finance violations, good luck.
I hope they try it because I think first they'll be tarred and feathered.
I really do.
And I think secondly, you know, people are going to turn out.
The big thing that they have in these upcoming midterm elections, the big thing that they have is that Republicans may not be smart enough to turn out.
The Democrats are supercharged.
They're angry as they can possibly be and they are going to show up.
But are the Republicans going to show up?
Because if they don't, you know, the Republicans are saying things like, well, I don't like this candidate here in my district because he's not like Trump.
But he's the guy who's going to stop the impeachment hearings.
Whoever he is, whoever that Republican is, you got to vote for him because he's the guy who's going to stop this from turning into nonsense.
The other thing with the GOP is Donald Trump is more popular among black people than just about anybody and for good reason.
He has improved the lives of Americans with dark skin more than any Democrat has ever done.
Really, he really has.
The economy is doing great for black Americans.
And the only problem is, is the Democrats have built a machine for turning out black votes.
They pay off preachers.
They pay off politicians in bad neighborhoods to bring the people out and bust them out.
If the Republicans leave that card on the table, if they leave those votes on the table, they will suffer in the midterms.
But let's go on a little bit and talk about Manafort.
Manafort is just a matter of timing.
Part of the timing is forced on Mueller.
It both happened on the same day.
Mueller was convicted.
And part of the timing is forced on Mueller by guidelines in the Justice Department not to do political prosecutions within 60 days of a major election.
So that's kind of why these things came together.
But it also meant that the Manafort thing could sound as if, oh, look, all of Trump's friends and pals are crooks, which, by the way, there's a lot of truth to that.
But still, it makes it look like something is going on.
Trump came out and he's kind of mourning about Manafort.
You know, this was not, what happened was he got convicted on eight of 18 counts, I believe it was, mostly on bank fraud and that sort of thing.
But there were 10 counts that are still on the table.
He can be retried for that.
He's scheduled to face trial in Washington, D.C. on money laundering charges.
So he is under the gun too, and he may turn on Trump as well.
So there may be more stuff down the line.
But I have to tell you, is there a place where I would go for impeachment?
Of course.
The only time in my entire life I ever thought a president should be impeached, and this included Clinton, the only time I ever thought a president should be impeached was when they found out about the IRS silencing voters during an election year.
I thought that was traducing, you know, that was crossing the lines of constitutional governance in such a way as it made our electoral system nonsense.
Did far more damage than the Russians ever did, did far more damage than anyone in my lifetime.
That was the only time I thought a president should be impeached.
So I'm not a big, but is there something Trump could do?
Of course there is.
Of course he could cross a line like that.
He could cross the line of constitutional governance in such a way that I thought he would be impeached.
But again, you know, this is who Trump was.
We knew he was this guy when we voted for him.
We knew why we were voting for him.
I did.
I knew I was voting for him to stop the gutting of the Constitution by a corrupt politician.
It's not like he was running against Abraham Lincoln.
He was running against Mob Barker, you know.
And the thing is, all this parading about his morality, all this parading and huffing and puffing about his morality, think about this.
If Trump stepped down, Mike Pence would become president.
One of the most moral men in government, a man they can't put a piece of dust.
What do you think the Democrats are going to say then?
Are they going to say, oh, good, oh, good.
Now we have a man who doesn't cheat on his wife.
We're so happy now.
Now we're fine.
They've been demonizing Pence almost as badly as they have Trump.
It's the Constitution they hate.
It's the freedom they hate.
It's your right to say stuff.
So this is the other thing.
The other news here, which kind of got lost on all this political news, of course, was this young girl, this young student, 20-year-old student in Iowa, Molly Tibbets, who was murdered.
And she disappeared a while back, as beautiful as it's possible to be, as all-American looking as it's possible to be, found in a cornfield.
And the guy who killed her, who was charged with killing her, is an illegal alien.
Here's the DCI guy, the Department of Criminal Investigation guy, Rick Ron, is that his name?
Let me make sure I've got his name right because he did the good job.
Rick Ron, yeah, announcing how they found the guy.
We have confirmed with Homeland Security investigations that he is an illegal alien, and we believe he has been in this area now for four to seven years.
How did you come into contact with him?
How did he get on your radar?
Well, during the investigation, we reached out to the public, as you well know.
Illegal Alien Speech00:15:36
And during our neighborhood canvas, we came across an individual that had security cameras.
We took those cameras.
He was kind enough to give us the footage from it.
And through that, we were able to identify a vehicle that we believe belonged to Mr. Rivera.
It was a black Malibue.
And from that, we were able to track his pattern and the routes in which he took.
We're also able to find Molly running on this video.
And we're able to determine that he was one of the last ones to have seen Molly running based on the video, again, that we were able to see from the general public.
So an illegal immigrant kills this girl.
And I just, this is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about comparing Trump's character flaws, which I fully acknowledge.
He has character flaws, even things that make him corrupt, even things that I find absolutely untenable and unacceptable.
Okay, now listen to Elizabeth Warren, right, one of the icons of the left.
Listen to her react to this news about this girl being killed by an illegal alien while Congress sits on its hands.
Both sides, for years and years, they have sat on their hands without fixing these laws, without fixing our security.
They sit there and Chuck Schumer, to his incredible shame, one of the most shameful moments in this administration, had nothing to do with Donald Trump.
It was Chuck Schumer shaking a pen at the press and begging Trump to act like a king and pass the law when he is a master of the Senate who's supposed to be doing that, compromising, facing down his constituents and doing what needs to be done.
Now listen to Elizabeth Warren reacting to the murder of this girl.
You know, I'm so sorry for the family here, and I know this is hard not only for the family, but for the people in her community, the people throughout Iowa.
But one of the things we have to remember is we need an immigration system that is effective, that focuses on where real problems are.
Last month, I went down to the border and I saw where children had been taken away from their mothers.
I met with those mothers who had been lied to, who didn't know where their children were, who hadn't had a chance to talk to their children.
And there was no plan for how they would be reunified with their children.
I think we need immigration laws that focus on people who pose a real threat.
And I don't think mamas and babies are the place that we should be spending our resources.
Separating a mama from a baby does not make this country safer.
That is like a little computer flipping to Democrat talking points.
Yes, yes, this girl is killed.
Yes, yes.
But what about the mamas and babies, which has been going on long before Trump and which they're playing because it makes good TV and they think we're all locked in the same echo chamber they're locked in, but we're not.
We're not.
And that is just a callous, stupid, political thing to say.
It is the words of a woman who is not thinking with her human compassion, but is simply thinking politically.
She has that speech in her head and she gets to it as quickly as she can.
And if you think that's bad, listen to, go over to MSNBC and listen to this Fordham professor, Christina Greer, on the same subject.
The separation of powers is not working because the Republican Party has not stood up to this president, not once.
So even if there's a guilty verdict from Manafort, even though Cohen has turned himself in, the fact that he was even sworn in as president after the Access Hollywood tape, let me know for a fact that the Republican Party is actually not working on behalf of the American people.
They are working on behalf of Donald Trump.
And he's been able to bully them into their silence.
And I don't think that today changes much.
Unfortunately, I'm sure we'll hear what he has to say about this at his rally.
But Fox News is talking about, you know, a girl in Iowa and not this, right?
And tomorrow morning, we know he'll wake up and tweet and sort of, you know, besmirch the reputation of Michael Cohen and all the people around him and really go back to Mueller.
And this is obviously going to boil down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
A girl in Iowa.
What is he talking about?
Some girl in Iowa.
The White House AP reporters, the AP White House reporter Zeke Miller tweeted about the story of this guy getting arrested for the murder.
This is likely coming to a Trump rally near you.
In other words, it's just a talking point.
But it's not.
It's not a talking point.
This is something that energizes the people.
Let's listen to Trump talking about it.
This is Cut Five.
You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in.
Very sadly from Mexico.
And you saw what happened to that incredible, beautiful young woman.
Should have never happened illegally in our country.
We've had a huge impact, but the laws are so bad.
The immigration laws are such a disgrace.
We're getting them changed, but we have to get more Republicans.
We have to get.
So, I mean, you choose.
You choose.
Trump has a bad character.
Trump paid off, you know, cheated on his wife.
Trump paid off the women he cheated with.
That's bad stuff.
That doesn't become good because we get what we want politically.
But he is, there is another side, right?
He's up against another side.
We're choosing between a bunch of bad acts.
We're choosing between a government system that has gone terribly awry, that needs reform, that needs to be addressed, that it's filled with people like this.
But, you know, ultimately, I'm not going to throw this guy under the bus and the Constitution with him over a campaign finance violation, even if it does make my skin crawl.
Finally, and most importantly, I think, I got to play this one last cut.
It's kind of long, but it's worth listening to.
All week long, we've been talking about the, more than all week long, we've been talking about a lot this empire strikes back of the mainstream media trying to shut down the Democrat machine, the Democrat corporations, the corporate social media, trying to shut down our voices.
We have fought so hard to break through with using, you know, social media, using computers, using the internet, to break through and get a little bit of a grip on the culture, to start speaking to college students, to start telling people that, no, it is not the way the left tells you.
There is another way to live.
It's a better way to live.
It is the way the founders wanted us to live.
And now they're trying to shut us down.
Now, all they talk about is Trump being a danger to free speech.
Remember, if like 300 newspapers ran the same editorial about how Trump was a danger to free speech while they were shutting down Alex Jones, while they were taking Dennis Prager off Facebook, while they're shadow banning people on Twitter, they're talking about Donald Trump is the big danger.
Here is Donald Trump on fake news and free speech.
Listen to what he's saying.
We are protecting, again, religious liberty.
And we're also standing up to social media censorship.
That's the new thing.
That's the new thing.
You know, I'd rather have fake news like CNN.
I would rather have fake news than have anybody, including liberals, socialists, anything, than have anybody stopped and censored.
We got to live with it.
We got to get used to it.
We're going to live with fake news.
There's too many sources.
Every one of us is sort of like a newspaper.
You have Twitter, you have whatever you have, Facebook.
But everyone, you can't have censorship.
You can't pick one person and say, well, we don't like what he's been saying.
He's out.
So we'll live with fake news.
I mean, I hate to say it, but we have no choice because that's by far the better alternative.
You can't have people saying censorship because you know what?
It can turn around.
It could be them next.
It could be them next.
We believe in the right of Americans to speak their minds.
So Facebook is taking down Dennis Prager.
The New York Times on its front page is telling us that conservatives are weaponizing free speech.
One of their Supreme Court justices, Elena Kagan, is saying this is weaponizing free speech.
And there's the president of the United States defending free speech.
I will take that every time.
We know we made a tragic choice.
We knew we had to vote for a guy we didn't entirely approve of.
We knew we had to stand by him when he was being accused of things he probably did that make our skin crawl.
I did it then.
I would do it again today because he's defending the things that matter most, our Constitution, our country, our freedom.
And they are actually against those things.
So listen, young people especially don't like to hear that some choices are tragic.
Young people, especially, think there's something, there's an ideal that we can reach.
We're always trying to move toward that ideal, but sometimes we have to do it in a tragic manner.
This is one of those times, and I will stand with this guy as long as he's making speeches like that.
I will stand with him against for any number of prostitutes.
All right, we've got the mailbag coming up.
We got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to thedailywire.com, subscribe, then you can be in next week's mailbag and you won't have to carry around your troubles.
You can take your troubles out of your old kit bag, put them in the mailbag, we'll solve them all.
All right, the mailbag.
All right, from Leo.
Hello, Andrew, the omnipotent bald leftist tears generator.
My parents got divorced when I was two years old.
I've recently gotten into small arguments with my two older sisters about how they should not have gotten the divorce after having three kids.
Other than infidelity or criminality, I said there's basically no excuse after kids to get a divorce.
I don't know too much about the details of their divorce, but know that until very recently, I'm now 23, so this is 21 years ago, until very recently, my parents hated each other with a burning passion.
Should I ask them for more details?
Also, I want to forgive them for what I think was a selfish decision, but how do I bring this up without putting them on the defensive?
Well, first of all, my takeaway from this is that this bothers you.
This is haunting you.
And you should leave your sisters alone about it.
It's not for you to tell them what they should think about this.
It's not for you to impose your upset on them.
You have to deal with this and you have to expunge this from your life so you can move forward because the divorce is over.
That part of your life, your childhood is over.
It's now time for you to move forward into adulthood.
I don't see anything wrong with sitting down with your parents and asking them about what happened in this divorce.
You don't want to pass judgment on them.
You don't want to yell at them.
You don't want to tell them you think this and you think that, but you might listen to them and hear what their experience was.
In general, philosophically, I agree with you.
I think once you have small kids, you keep your marriage together, you work it out, you stop hating each other.
If you hate each other, you stop.
You sit down with a therapist.
If you have to, you stop.
I agree with you about this.
But now it's over.
Now it's done.
You've got to move past it and build a life in which this doesn't happen.
That's your job.
So if it helps you to talk to them about it, talk to them and listen.
You don't have to condemn them.
You don't have to yell at them.
But talk to them and listen and see if that helps you forgive them in your heart.
Once you hear what they were going through, it might help you to forgive them.
Sometimes people do bad things, but you can understand why they did them and you can move on.
But the purpose here is for you to move on.
That's the purpose.
That's your chore.
Your chore is not to convince your sisters of anything.
Your chore is not to pass judgment on your parents.
Your chore is to let it go.
So if that helps you to let it go, do it.
If it doesn't, don't do it.
It's that simple.
The whole point is for you to go forward.
From Mike, Dear Director Claven Abraham Hartwell, I just finished listening to Werewolf Cop on Audible, and I enjoyed both the story and your narration very much.
How long did this take you to write and then record?
Could you tell us about some of the most interesting steps in this timeline?
Thanks from Mike.
You know, there are a lot of questions today about writing, so I'm going to, I'll sort of pile them on together.
Werewolf cop, I don't know.
I think non-little takes anywhere from a year to two years.
You know, there's also a lot of like thinking about it.
You get the idea, but then you got to let it generate.
You kind of dump it back in the water and let it come back up again with new things attached.
And then there's an outline.
I am a very big outliner.
I hate it.
I don't hate it.
I dislike it.
It's the only part of my job that bores me.
I love writing.
I love what I do.
But writing an outline is boring grunt work because what you got to do is you got to make sure the plot is going to work.
And every time you're writing an outline and you hear yourself say, well, I'll fix that in the writing.
You got to stop and say, no, I will fix that here.
Because once you're writing, you want to be able to write.
You want to be able to create characters.
You want to be able to create moments.
You want to be asking yourself which of these two ways of phrasing a sentence is going to create the effect that I want to create.
And so you want the outline to be there every day when you sit down.
And sometimes I'll abandon an outline midway.
Sometimes I'll fix it midway.
But I want it to be there so at least I know what I'm doing each day.
And that's the first thing I do.
And then, of course, there's the research.
And research is really important because research gives things a verisimilitude.
I don't really care if my things are realistic.
Obviously, a story about a werewolf is not going to be that realistic.
But I want it to be filled with kind of weight so that when you read it, it feels like it's real.
And Werewolf Cop, there's a huge backstory that is based on a true story, a true medieval trial, in which I read the transcripts of the trial of a werewolf.
You know, a guy was charged with being a werewolf.
And that leads into some of the German mythology that runs through the story.
And the research is really important.
And finally, the writing is my favorite part.
And I write everything, I don't know, 20 times.
I mean, I write every word 20 times.
I go over it and over and over it.
I'm doing that now with Another Kingdom, which we're doing for the podcast in the fall.
I just keep writing it, keep writing until it sounds exactly the way I want it to sound.
And I think I can safely say that I am known in the publishing industry for my clean manuscripts.
By the time they get to the editor, there's very little for them to fix.
And finally, recording takes about three days.
I mean, you come in and it's hard work because you sit in a little studio in a box of a studio for maybe seven, eight hours and you just read.
And it's fun in the sense that when you take a break, there are a lot of actors around and actors are always fun people to talk to.
So you get to sit around with actors, but it's just, you know, it's three days of hard work and then you're done.
And then they produce it.
I think that answers everything.
And a lot of people ask, how do you write such and such people who are budding writers?
But, you know, the outline thing is a big deal.
The outline thing is the thing that keeps you.
First of all, it means your research is done.
You don't have to take off.
You don't suddenly get to a place and think, I don't know how a cop would do this because it was already in the outline and you researched it.
And it's just preparation.
Like everything, preparation makes everything else easier.
From Joshua, Supreme Sunhead Clathin.
I don't even know what that means.
On episode 560, you said you would likely get flack for saying the Jews are part of the body of Christ who doubt but are ultimately part of that body.
Here is your flack.
I was waiting for it.
You know, I didn't hear from anybody.
This is the only thing I got.
But I don't always see the ones.
Maybe you saw some more of them.
Yeah.
Why wouldn't other religions like Muslims or atheists be included in that category of doubters who are also part of the body of Christ?
Romans 9 distinguishes the hereditary dissonance of decedents of Israel from the true Israel.
Is there a special need for the Gentile atheist or Muslim worshipper to submit to the lordship of Christ but not the Jew based on their genetic heritage?
I have to tell a story.
Before I answer this, hilariously, I went on Audible.
I like to look sometimes at the reviews for The Great Good Thing, my memoir of my conversion to Christ.
Faith and Artistry00:06:51
It's called The Great Good Thing, a Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
And it's on Audible.
And what I love about a lot of these reviews is people say, oh, this book helped me find God.
And I find that very gratifying and moving.
And that is what the latest review actually says.
But beneath that is a huge review of a guy who says, don't read this book.
He betrays us because 75% of the book is really great because it's about his conversion.
And then he's nice to the Jews.
He says there's a chapter in the book about where I think anti-Semitism comes from.
The way this guy describes the chapter is totally false.
He says, I blame Christianity for the Holocaust.
I do exactly the opposite of that.
But I just love the fact that he says, I don't blame the Jews enough for their own part in the Holocaust, which was dying.
That was their part in the Holocaust.
So I mean, it's just the absolute ravenous anti-Semitism.
But I just thought I'd share that with you because it did make me laugh a mordant laugh.
That's the word I want.
Anyway, first of all, I put forward this theory impishly.
I understand, you know, you understand I'm not a theologian.
I do believe that, and I believe the Catholic Church says this, that there is a special dispensation for the Jews.
They are not the same as the Muslims.
They are the chosen people of God.
They were selected as the doorway back into God's doorway back into the world after the fall.
So they have a special relationship.
I do not believe that special relationship gets canceled.
I don't believe in what's called replacement theology, that Jesus replaces the Jews with other people.
I think that that relationship remains, your relationship with God remains what God says it is, not what you say it is, not what I say it is.
It remains what God says it is.
But again, I very rarely speculate on the afterlife.
I don't know anything about it.
Neither do you.
There's very little about it in the Bible.
And so all the speculation is just that.
It's speculation.
And why not assume that God's mercy is greater than our mercy?
God's love is greater than our love.
And it's going to look a lot better than some small-minded people think it is.
And I think the other thing about this is, as C.S. Lewis said, we know that you were only saved through Christ, but we don't know who is saved through Christ or how that affects people who are outside of the faith.
So that was my take on it.
I stand by it.
I think it's actually a good theory.
But if you want to pass judgment on the Jews, go ahead.
It ain't going to mean anything.
It's not going to mean any more than my judgment.
From Joel to Clavin, teller of tremendous truths.
Over the years and especially through college, I've tried extremely hard to be open-minded, fully aware that I grew up sheltered and with very conservative beliefs, both religious and political.
I've delved into any opposing viewpoints or worldviews that I encounter in search of arguments or evidence that might make me rethink my beliefs.
Most people seem to agree that changing one's beliefs upon hearing better arguments is a sign of integrity and honesty.
I often hear it stated that if you can't point to a belief or viewpoint that has changed over the years, you must be bigoted or closed-minded.
And I get frustrated when I hear that because despite all my efforts and research, I can't think of one significant change that's taken place in my thinking since at least high school.
I don't know how old you are, but that is kind of interesting.
I don't know if I'm reading the wrong material, if somehow there is more subconscious stubbornness in me that I haven't found, or I got lucky and already believe all the right things.
Do you have any advice?
You know, personally, I wouldn't worry about it.
I mean, I have seen people get caught on a track.
Everything, every argument gets dismissed.
The least you can do, and I do this all the time, the least you can do is read good books that make other arguments.
If nothing else, if nothing else, it will hone your arguments for what you believe.
Because people have other things to say.
They see the world differently.
I myself believe that you can make an absolute logical argument for nihilism, for the absence of any God, the absence of any morality.
I believe those are the two ways you can look at the world, that either there is no God and there is no morality, or there is a God and there is a morality.
I don't believe you can make the crossover belief that there is no God, but there is an absolute morality.
That makes no sense.
But I believe you can make a logical argument for nihilism.
I choose not to.
That is my leap of faith.
My leap of faith is that bad things are bad, even if all the people in the world think they're good.
That's the only leap of faith I ever took, is to believe that, to believe that in a world where everybody thinks slavery is right, even the slaves, slavery is still wrong.
That is the foundation of my belief.
So, you know, listen, listen to other people.
If you don't want to change your beliefs, don't.
But it is a good thing to keep listening.
I mean, I have very set beliefs and very set ideas, but I still listen to people who disagree with me, especially reading books, because those are the ones that are most thought out.
From Dustin, a Lord gesture of the offense of a verse.
During the conversation last month, you said that you consider video games a modern repository of art.
Would you care to elaborate?
Are there any games you might point to as exemplifying your perspective?
Love your show.
You know, what I think is, I think that art, basically with the invention of the camera, I think art fell apart.
I don't believe abstract art is art per se.
What I mean is, I don't believe it relates anything really important about the human condition except kind of theories about the way we perceive things.
I don't believe it's moving.
I don't believe it's touching.
I don't believe it gives you an actual experience.
I do believe that its theories are interesting.
And sometimes I've seen a work of art, a work of abstract art, and it's explained to me.
And I think, yeah, that's an interesting theory.
I still don't want that thing hanging on my wall.
Whereas I do think that representative art is incredibly moving and beautiful and the difficulty of doing it.
Tom Stopper, the playwright, said this once.
One of the things about art is that it should be hard.
I don't think that some of the stuff Picasso did, and he's the best, I think, of the modern artists.
I don't think some of that is just hard enough to really interest me.
In video games, the imagination, the basic imagination of humankind has come to life in sometimes incredibly gorgeous ways.
And the way you can maneuver in a video game so that you are submerged in that work of art is a new thing.
It is a new way of looking at visual art.
I'm just talking about visual artistry.
That's all I'm talking about.
The games themselves, I don't think, have actually, maybe one or two of them has elevated itself to the level of art in terms of storytelling.
But in the level of the visual arts, I think it's amazing stuff.
It is amazing stuff.
And the worlds that are created, I don't know, which give me one.
ICO is a beautiful world.
Thank you.
My son Spencer is here.
Yes, we've been playing video games together for as long as one of us has been alive.
Yeah, ICO is a great one.
Very beautiful, soft, imaginative world.
And I just think there's a lot of them, actually.
And the fact that you move through them is a new thing in the arts.
And I think it's really beautiful.
All right.
Visual Artistry in Video Games00:04:38
One last one, I guess.
From Evan, Dear Clavin.
All right.
I recently found out that my mother cheated on my father.
They've been divorced for a long time now, so this alone wouldn't be too much of a shock, except the affair took place just before my little brother was conceived.
So there's a chance that the man who raised him is not his father.
I don't know what to do with this information.
I hate keeping this from my brother, but at the same time, I don't want to do anything to ruin the relationship he has with our dad.
At the same time, I find myself losing a lot of respect for my mother, both for lying about the affair for 24 years and for making me keep this secret.
Do I tell him and risk fracturing my family further?
Or do I continue the lie?
You know, this actually is a very tough dilemma, but the letter does not contain enough information for me to quite get it.
I'm not sure where you found out about this.
The letter suggests you found out about from your mother, in which case, you know, the thing about your brother's parentage is stuff you're spinning.
It sounds like you're spinning that in your imagination.
They did have birth control 20 years ago, so like there's every reason to believe that that's not true, that he is a legitimate child.
This sounds like something you should sit down with your mother and talk to her about because you do not want to ruin people's lives for no reason.
The fact that your mother had an affair, if it did not affect your brother's parentage, is really nobody's business but hers at this point.
You don't have to spread that information.
It's not lying to people to keep a confidence.
I mean, you have to sometimes keep confidences in life, even with people you love.
But I think you should sit, from what I can get from this letter, I think you should sit down and talk to her and find out the whole story because the stuff about your brother's parentage is just, as far as I can tell, in your imagination.
You know, there's a lot of good questions here, Rob.
We should maybe bring some of them back next week because I'm out of time.
tickety-boo news.
Well, yesterday, there's no denying this was a bad day in Trump world.
Not a good thing for Trump.
A lot of ominous things about how this investigation is going to go on, how the Democrats are going to have fuel for their fire.
So it was not a great day in Trump world.
But at the same time, there are a couple of stories that just came to me, two of them.
One is that the last known Nazi collaborator living in the United States, a 95-year-old former camp guard who played an indispensable role in the murders of thousands of Jews, was deported to Germany from his New York City home, completing what the U.S. Ambassador to Germany called a difficult task.
This happened after Trump got the U.S. Ambassador Richard Grinnell to put more effort, asked the Germans to put more effort into this, and they got it done.
This has been going on for years and years and years.
And this guy's 95.
I doubt they'll actually prosecute him, but at least he was deported.
At least his life was made a little bit miserable, which I think is not too much to ask.
That's Donald Trump doing it.
The other thing, the other story that goes with it is that African-American business owners are on the rise, according to the Minority 2018 Small Business Trends Survey.
Listen to this: the number of black-owned small businesses in the U.S. increased by 400% in a year-over-year time period from 2017 to 2018.
Huh, I wonder who gets the credit for that.
400% in a single year after Donald Trump's election.
So, all I want to say about this is we hear that Trump is a racist.
We hear that he's a Nazi.
He is a really bad Nazi and a really bad racist.
I mean, he's done really well with the judiciary.
He's done really well with the economy.
He's done really well fighting ISIS.
He's done really well with regulations, but he is a lousy Nazi and a lousy racist.
So, we will hold him responsible for that.
We want better racism, better Nazis in our government.
No, I'm kidding.
That is great.
So, remember, remember this when it comes when you have to vote in your district this November.
Remember, you may not like the guy you're voting for, the congressman, but if you don't want these impeachment things to go forward, you should do it.
And the RNC should pay attention to the black vote.
They should pay attention to getting the black vote out for Trump, because I think it's going to be an important, make an important difference if they are not kept home by the Democrats.
I got to say goodbye.
Tomorrow is Thursday, the last day before the Clavenless weekend.
Do not miss it.
You'll want to suck all the Clavin-y goodness you can out of this like camels to lead you across the desert of the Clavenless weekend upcoming.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
Remember To Vote00:00:35
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We will see you again tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.