Ep. 565 – The Michael Cohen Follies dissects how PETA’s circus crackdown forced Mondelez to rebrand animal crackers, then pivots to Michael Cohen’s plea deal—where Jenna Ellis slams left-wing media for hyping "impeachment" over legally dubious hush-money claims, exposing Mueller’s potential politicization while mocking the same media’s silence on Harvey Weinstein. Meanwhile, Sarah Jean Gosney’s memoir traces her escape from crust-punk dumpster-divers to a Christian, family-driven life, warning young radicals against romanticizing failed utopias like Venezuela’s collapse. The episode ends by contrasting outlaw masculinity with Christian chivalry, urging listeners to reject performative rebellion for principled action. [Automatically generated summary]
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, has scored a major success by freeing the drawings of animal crackers from the cruel drawing of a circus that has tormented them so long.
I'm not making this up.
In fact, I wish I were funny enough to have made this up.
But no, it's real.
You know those Barnum animal cracker boxes that have a drawing of a circus on them with the happy drawn animals happily inside their drawn cages?
Well, someone at PETA, ever on the watch to prevent cruelty against drawings of animal-shaped cookies, actually spent some portion of their one and only lifetime writing a letter of protest to the Nabisco company that makes the cookies.
The letter said, and again, not making this up, quote, given the egregious cruelty inherent in circuses that use animals and the public's swelling opposition to the exploitation of animals used for entertainment, we urge Nabisco to update its packaging in order to show animals who are free to roam in their natural habitats, unquote.
Well, I'm happy to report, because I know you're all worrying about this, that Nabisco's parent company, Mondelez International, rushed to rectify this horrible drawing situation and redesign the animal cracker box so that it represents the animals walking on the plains of Africa, so that the drawings of lions are now free to rip the beating hearts out of the drawings of sheep, almost as if the sheep were made to be devoured, like animal crackers.
This effort by PETA to protect drawings of cookies from the cruelty inherent in drawings of circuses so that the cookies themselves can be taken out of a free-ranging cardboard box and devoured just like animals in the wild is a tremendous triumph in the march of progress for delicious cookies.
So to all my animal cracker friends, I say, run free, you tasty treats.
You no longer have to suffer being drawn inside a drawn circus, but can now roam the drawn fields of Africa until I get a hold of you and bite your delicious heads off.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Gym Workouts On Demand00:03:19
Life is tickety boo.
And birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the roam to zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are here on the very brink, the very rim, the very edge of the claviless weekend.
It is time to dive into the show and suck all the clavin-y goodness you can hold so that you can make it like a camel across the desert of the coming weekend.
We have Jenna Ellis, our favorite lawyer, which isn't saying that much.
We love Jenna, but our favorite lawyer isn't saying too much.
She's going to talk to us about some of the legal ramifications of this Michael Cohn thing and the Paul Manafort conviction.
And Sarah Jean Gosny, who has this story to tell about diving into, literally diving, because there was dumpster diving involved into this left-wing community and coming out to reclaim her life as a lady and as a Christian.
And we'll talk about that later.
A really interesting interview.
I also have to thank The Blaze today.
They issued a correction to give me credit.
You know, this Gosnell film that's coming out that tells the story of America's worst serial killer and certainly the worst serial killer who was never covered by the news.
Why?
Because he was an abortionist and he was killing babies.
And so they didn't want to make abortion look bad.
So they just absolutely, the mainstream media just did not cover the trial of the guy who had killed more people than any murderer in American history.
We did a film about it.
I wrote the script with my friends Phelan and Ann, who have done a lot of great documentaries about oil and the environment and all this stuff.
And they gave me credit for that and I appreciate it.
So there we have it.
And I know the other thing you're thinking is, wow, you wrote the Gosnell script.
How did you get such a great body?
Well, it's Beach Body on Demand.
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The Left's Impeachment Fantasy00:15:46
Now, no one would ever say in the wake of Michael Cohn's plea deal and the conviction of Paul Manafort, no one would ever say that the left-wing media in its Trump hatred has just gone over the cliff like Lemmings into complete babbling nonsense.
Oh, wait, I would say it.
That's exactly what's happening.
Yesterday, according to the Media Research Center and their site Newsbusters, which we love so much, CNN and MSNBC said the word impeachment 222 times yesterday in reaction to this.
Let me tell you something.
Ain't going to be no impeachment over this.
This is basically Michael Cohn said that Donald Trump told him to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars to two women to keep them quiet about the fact that they had an affair with him, that he didn't want that to come out, so he paid him off.
He paid him hush money.
And the press is saying, oh, well, because that would be a crime.
It might be a crime under campaign finance laws if Michael Cohn had done it.
So therefore, it's a crime because Trump, if Trump told him to do it.
That's not true.
And we'll explain that to you.
We'll talk to Jenna Ellis about it.
But listen to this montage that our friends at Newsbusters made of the way cable news, especially left-wing CNN and left-wing MSNBC, covered this.
The president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, is named a co-conspirator of a federal crime.
Is that grounds for impeachment?
Do you think impeachment is more likely at this point?
Impeachment, Does this move the needle at all?
More confidence to move forward on impeachment.
The president facing impeachment.
Impeachment will be on the Democrats' agenda.
The I word, impeachment.
The I word, the I word, an impeachment.
Let's take a look at the process of impeachment.
to impeach, or impeachment.
Impeachment, he would have been impeached.
All of it bringing impeachment back to the forefront, talking about impeachment.
Impeachment talk, impeachment is a more viable option.
Do you think it would be appropriate to immediately begin impeachment proceedings?
Impeachment.
Impeachment.
Impeachable.
Now, we're going to get to the legal aspect of this and the political nonsense of this, but one of the things you're seeing here is that the left is caught in its own time warp because it's the left from the late 60s on, the left that corrupted the culture.
corrupted Trump and created people like Donald Trump.
And now they're condemning Trump for stuff that they've been promoting all these years.
And all the ones who do it, you know, we used to be, the conservatives used to be the sexual prigs, right?
We're the one who would condemn them for their sexual promiscuity.
We'll say we would talk about marriage and fidelity and that all the sexual stuff that was coming into the arts and into music was bad for us.
And they said, no, no, no, no problem, no problem.
And then suddenly they're telling us that Trump is a bad guy because of his sexual life, which is the sexual life they preach to us.
They're caught in this time warp between what they sold us in their culture and what that ugly culture has produced in the person sometimes of Donald Trump.
You know, I read yesterday they're making a movie about Roger Ailes and his sexual scandal.
And I thought, cool, that's a good idea.
What about Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose and Al Franken and Kevin Spacey and all the other Democrats who have been part of this Me Too scandal where we find out what life becomes like when women aren't ladies and men aren't gentlemen?
And this is the thing.
We were the prigs.
We were the guys preaching against it.
And now suddenly it's them.
And not only are the men, the left-wing men getting caught up in it, but how does it, do you know how it's pronounced?
Asia Argento.
She was an Italian actress and director who stood up and said, you know, Harvey Weinstein raped me and I'm part of the Me Too movement.
She became a Me Too leader.
Now it's come out that she had quietly arranged to pay almost $400,000 to a guy named Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier when he was only two months past his 17th birthday and she was 37.
The age of consent in California is 18.
And Barry Weiss, the somewhat conservative columnist over at the New York Times, wrote a column about this and she started by saying women are hypocrites, women are opportunists, women are liars.
They are abusers and bullies and manipulators.
They are capable of cruelty, callousness, and evil just like men.
So in other words, if the Me Too movement isn't a feminist movement, and we know it is, and if Title IX isn't just a tool to hurt men, and we know it is, what is it?
Oh, it's conservatism.
They tell us it's feminism, but if it's not, if it's not about women, if women can be just as much a part of the Me Too movement as men, then it's conservatism.
That's what it's about.
It's actually all the stuff that we've been, the Me Too movement is actually all the stuff we've been selling.
And by the way, the left does this all the time.
They tell us our values stink.
They tell us we're racist, we're sexist.
Then they adopt our values and say, oh, yeah, but the conservatives are the bad guys.
We're always the bad guys, even when they're telling us that the values we've been trying to sell them for 40 years are the values they now want to adopt.
So now with Trump, they're caught in this time warp between the thing, the culture they created and the effects of that culture.
And one of the unintended consequences of this Michael Cohn thing is it is undermining their attempt to scuttle the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.
This is really interesting, okay?
Because yesterday, Chuck Schumer, they drop on this any way they can.
They say, oh, we've got to delay because of this, because of this Michael Cohn thing, we've got to delay the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Here's Chuck Schumer.
I asked him a more basic question.
Does he believe that a sitting president must comply with a subpoena or testify or provide records?
He would not say that the president must comply with a subpoena.
I asked him that in the most extreme situation, a criminal investigation against a sitting president where our national security is at stake.
Could the investigator subpoena the president?
He wouldn't say he would.
Now, that was before the news that broke late yesterday.
During our meeting, actually, the news broke that President Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, implicated the president in a violation of campaign finance laws.
The sequence of those two events, Kavanaugh's refusal to say that a president must comply with the duly issued subpoena, and Michael Cohn's implication of the president in a federal crime, makes the danger of Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court abundantly clear.
Okay, so they're pretending, they're pretending.
This is all kabuki.
They're pretending that the Michael Cohn plea deal and the Manafort convictions are why they're calling for the delay of the Kavanaugh nomination.
But in fact, they've been calling for the delay of the Kavanaugh nomination since the Kavanaugh nomination was made.
They've been doing everything they can, you know, calling for all his documents.
This is a guy who's made something like 300 public decisions.
You can tell what kind of judge he is.
You can tell what kind of man he is by the records that are right there, but they're trying to slow this thing down.
But here is Corey Booker pushing this.
This is the moment after the nomination is, this is a video from the moment after the nomination is made.
The moment after Trump announces the nomination, here's Corey Booker pushing the same thing they were pushing yesterday.
I'm a little sort of stunned at the way this has all played out.
If you look at the entire list of 20 or so people that he had on, the one person the president could find on that list that would be most assured to rule in his favor should many of the things you're describing come before the Supreme Court is this judge.
He picked the one guy who has specifically written that a president, in fact, should not be the subject of a criminal investigation, which the president is right now.
So this seems to be, of all the people, the most self-serving person he could choose in order to protect himself from this criminal investigation.
So their line of argument now is that Brett Kavanaugh is no good because he won't be tough enough on the president that they're trying to indict.
Okay, they're trying to indict for these federal campaign law violations.
But the day before, or maybe it was two days before, the Manafort conviction and the Cohen plea deal came out, the New York Times floated and is clearly floating the Democrat strategy, floated the strategy that they were going to go after Brett Kavanaugh on a leak that took place when Kavanaugh was part of the investigation into Clinton's adultery, into Bill Clinton's adultery.
So here was their headline.
It was Brett Kavanaugh urged graphic questions in Clinton inquiry.
Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, urged prosecutors investigating President Bill Clinton to question him in graphic detail about his sexual relationships with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.
Mr. Kavanaugh spent more than three weeks, three years, working for Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated the scandals.
The memo was shot through with disgust for Mr. Clinton's behavior and seemed animated by the deep animosity that had developed between the White House and Mr. Starr's team.
They quote Kavanaugh, the president has disgraced his office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles, callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shovel, Mr. Kavanaugh wrote.
So now you remember, if you go back, Ken Starr was the Puritan prig who was trying to burn Bill Clinton at the stake for his sexual malfeasance, right?
And so they're saying that evil Brett Kavanaugh was part of that priggish, you know, backward, sexually uptight world.
Except now it's them.
Now they're going to bring, how can they now bring that against Kavanaugh?
They can't.
So the only thing they can now say, they now have to say, oh, and you're going to be too easy on him.
Because afterwards, Kavanaugh said, you know what, I was too hard on Bill Clinton.
We shouldn't indict a sitting president.
So the very like puritanical Ken Star attack, the attack that people who attack people for their sexual behavior are Puritans, are mean or stupid or backward.
Now they're stuck.
They're stuck in that position.
They're caught in a time warp.
You know, I want to bring on Jenna Ellis.
We love Jenna Ellis.
She is really smart.
I read her book, the legal basis for a moral constitution, a guide for Christians to understand America's current constitutional crisis.
We keep bringing her on because she's such a good observer of the legal scene.
She's the director of the Dobson Policy Center and a contributor to Washington Examiner, the Federalist, and the Daily Wire.
We have her on the line.
Jenna, you're there.
I am.
Thanks very much for having me again, Andrew.
It's always good to talk to you.
Let's start with this.
They're talking about Trump now as if he is in tremendous legal jeopardy from Michael Cohn's plea deal.
Do you feel that's true?
Not at all.
And this has become so much more political, obviously, and that's what the whole impeachment process is.
That's what the Democrats are trying to do with slowing down Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation.
That's what they're trying to do to impact the midterms.
But really what a plea agreement is in context is simply an agreement and a contract between Michael Cohen and the prosecutor that is very self-interested.
He's lessening his potential risk by only having a three to six year jail sentence rather than what he was facing with all of the other charges and an unknown trial verdict.
We saw what happened with Manafort this week.
And so what he's doing is pleading guilty to a campaign finance violation among other charges.
But all that that means is that he's the recipient of a really good deal.
That's not evidence.
It's not a confession.
And Lanny Davis, even on MSNBC last night, who is the attorney for Michael Cohen, said that there is no other corroborating evidence.
And it may come down to Michael Cohen's word against President Trump that what he said in terms of his plea agreement, that he was directed by a candidate for federal office to violate campaign finance law, that it would come down to Michael Cohen's word versus President Trump.
And he's lost all credibility here.
So this is not a big deal.
I wrote a piece for Washington Examiner that came out yesterday explaining the nature of plea agreements, why they're not confessions, why this isn't evidence, and why this is very self-interested for Michael Cohen.
And if Michael Cohen is telling the truth and he was directed to make this payment by Trump, who then paid him back, is that even a campaign violation?
It shouldn't be.
And, you know, Mark Levin talked about this and he explained it really well on Fox News.
And I would agree with his analysis, as well as Alan Dershowitz, who has, you know, not been a conservative, of course, commentator.
But basically, under campaign finance law, you have to have a campaign expenditure that goes exclusively and solely to advance the campaign.
And these kind of expenditures, if it wasn't even using campaign finance money, if Trump didn't even know about it until after the fact, and these types of things happen all the time for purposes, I mean, that would be the same thing like saying, oh, I'm going to the store and I'm using my personal money to buy food for my sustenance and I'm a candidate for federal office.
Well, then obviously you're using that to influence the campaign to keep yourself alive.
Well, not every single expenditure is solely a campaign-related expense.
And I don't think that they can even tie it this way.
So the underlying crime isn't even there.
And they also don't even have evidence to advance Cohen's narrative.
It's really interesting.
Now, you step back as a lawyer and you're looking at what Mueller's doing.
The going narrative is basically that he's just using these things as a form of pressure as a lever to get Manafort and Cohn to flip on Trump.
Do you see that?
Do you think that's his strategy?
And do you see that as a danger for the president?
Well, I think that's exactly what happened in the plea agreement deal.
By having Cohen plead to a campaign finance violation and say on the record what he did, that was very savvy of Mueller to try to implicate Trump.
Because even if this doesn't come back and actually have any legal ramifications, we're already seeing the optics play before the midterms.
And I think it's really fascinating that the sentencing hearing is not until December 12th, where Cohen may or may not make a statement there, but that's been pushed off till after. the midterms.
And that's giving the Democrats time to try to stall Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, which there's absolutely no legal basis.
That would only be a self-interested political move.
Yeah, they're never going to, that's never going to happen.
I mean, even by the end of yesterday, they were starting to trail off on that.
It was like they floated it and the public didn't buy it.
You know, they said, I heard on the special report last night that Manafort is facing 80 years in prison for what essentially is tax, you know, malfeasance.
Is there an argument that this is just incredibly unfair, that we have so many people, you know, Al Sharpton Jr., I remember, was millions in debt to the IRS.
We have so many people who have been caught.
You know, it was the Treasury Secretary under Obama caught not paying taxes.
It just seems that they're firing bazookas at these guys, where if they had been on the other side politically, maybe they'd be shooting rubber bands at them.
Steele Dossier Revelations00:07:43
Is that just my impression, or is that a fair take?
I think that's absolutely a fair take.
And, you know, whether or not this rises to the level of malicious prosecution is a very different question, but I think that it at least amounts to political targeting.
And for Mueller to go after both of these people just because of their relationship with candidate Trump and then President Trump, if they were just any other lawyers in New York, they may not even be charged and this wouldn't be talked about in the media and they certainly wouldn't be looking at that heavy of sentencing range.
And hopefully the presiding judges will see through that and will go along with regular sentencing guidelines and will not set this up for what could be an appeal.
I mean, and this is where the American people need to recognize that our law enforcement branch is supposed to be non-political and so is the judicial system.
We are supposed, I mean, that's what equal protection under the law actually means.
That's why we have due process.
And for these kind of politically motivated prosecutions, that really undermines and should undermine America's trust in the legitimacy of this entire investigation.
Wow.
You know, I have to ask you this one question.
You're a spokeswoman for the James Dobson Family Institute.
And one of the things that's kind of comical to me is watching the left pick on Donald Trump for his sexual malfeasance.
But we are on the right, and it is sexual malfeasance.
In your book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, you come down really hard on the sexual revolution.
I can't wait to interview you about the book.
I think we're going to do it, take an interview next week, I hope.
But you come down really hard on the sexual revolution when you're supporting a president who has done these things and who clearly lived a life that is not the conservative life that we support.
Does that bother you?
Do you feel as a part of the Dobson Institute, do you feel that the charges against evangelicals, for instance, of hypocrisy are valid?
I really appreciate that question.
And, you know, I think the important thing is lived, meaning in the past.
And nothing has come out during his candidacy or during President Trump's tenure as president in his administration that would lead to these types of allegations.
And the Christian worldview states that you have forgiveness.
Grace does cover all.
And the fact that these allegations were actually when he was registered Democrat, when he had, when he lived a very different life, I think that's really important.
People can change.
People can make mistakes.
I mean, even I went through personally a crisis of faith in law school.
Was a time that I would have identified as a feminist.
And that's that, thank the Lord that I'm not that anymore, that I have refined my understanding.
That was part of the process of writing my book and understanding where these worldviews come from.
And I think that the evangelical support of President Trump has been because he has been so consistent with his protection of religious freedom.
He's been so consistent with his conservative viewpoints since his candidacy.
People can change.
And I think that he has proven that and we should take him at his word.
And everything that he's, I mean, we're talking about 12, 15 years ago.
Do we really want to say that nobody can think anybody else would want that?
And so I don't see it as a conflict.
And I think that supporting this president and especially what he's done for American families, for pro-life, especially for religious liberty, those are things that all evangelicals and Dr. Dobson would certainly be strongly encouraged by and strongly support.
Jenna Ellis, thank you.
It is always a pleasure talking to you.
And we will talk to you again soon about your book.
Sounds good.
Thanks so much, Andrew.
Thanks a lot.
You know, really interesting to watch what is happening, but the unintended consequences of these.
I just have to play one more cut before we go into our interview.
One of the unintended consequences of this is that a lot of stuff that Michael Cohn has said are kind of blowing back on him because he's now under oath before a court.
And one of the things that he said was, first of all, that as far as he knew, Donald Trump had no prior knowledge of the meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer, which is a very big lever the left is hoping to use to pry Trump out of office.
But the other thing that he said was that the Steele dossier, remember the Steele dossier said Michael Cohn was in Prague meeting with Russians.
And here is Lannie Davis, who has been just ferocious against Donald Trump.
Here's Lanny Davis talking about that charge in the steel dossier, which you remember is what they used to get a FISA warrant to tap and spy on the Trump campaign.
Here's Lanny Davis talking to Chuck Todd about the Steele dossier's validity in regards to Michael Cohn.
Can you say definitively whether you know if Michael Cohen ever was in Prague in 2016?
Never, never in Prague did I make that never, never, never in Prague, ever.
Ever.
And the reason, just to let your viewers know talking about is that the dossier, so-called, mentions his name 14 times, one of which is a meeting with Russians in Prague.
14 times false.
It was posted as an extensive letter rebutting, but about Prague, which is an illusion that's been repeated indefinitely.
The answer is no, never.
And Todd is trying to cut him off because that kind of completely overturns the idea that the FBI acted properly in getting a FISA warrant using the Steele dossier without telling the FISA judge that it was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton.
All right.
So there is just some interesting unintended consequences of this moment.
We see the left caught in this time warp where they are becoming the sexual prigs.
They are becoming the defenders of conservative sexual values.
Hey, welcome aboard.
Welcome aboard, gang.
We love it.
You know, please support conservative sexual life.
That would be a good thing for the country and a good thing for everything.
But just give us a little credit for bringing you along.
You know, don't accuse us of stuff.
Give us a little credit for bringing you over and finally convincing you that your culture stank.
The culture that you pushed on us for 50 years was awful.
So anyway, we're going to move on to this interview.
We're not going to cut you off if you're on YouTube and Facebook because we want you to hear this.
But all the more reason for you to feel incredibly guilty, for you to slap yourself and just finally say, all right, I'm going to subscribe to the Daily Wire.
It costs you a lousy 10 bucks a month.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
We solve all your problems.
100 bucks.
You also get the leftist tears tumbler.
You're going to need it.
You're going to need it.
It's going to be full.
Sarah Jean Gosney.
Listen, let me recommend.
Sarah Jean Gosney has a Twitter feed.
She is, it's S-A-R-A-H-J-E-A-N-G-O-S-N-E-Y.
You should go on her Twitter feed because she is under fire.
She is promoting values of femininity and religious life and an attack on feminism.
And the feminist SJWs are coming after her.
And you should go on and give her some love and give her some support.
But she knows what she's talking about.
She is the author of a book called All the Cool Girls Are Anarchists.
All the Cool Girls Are Anarchists.
And it covers her journey into a group of radical progressives and she became a social justice warrior and how she came back and made it back.
And the book is out now on Amazon.
All the cool girls are anarchists.
Sarah Jean Gosney.
Sarah, thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you so much for having me.
So this is an interesting memoir because it's both a political memoir, but also kind of a romantic one.
Lifestyle Choices Explained00:15:00
Start your story by telling us a little bit where you come from.
What was your background?
Yeah, so what I tell on the book jacket is what is true.
I basically had a relatively typical suburban Southeastern upbringing.
The only unusual thing about me was that my mom was Jewish, is Jewish, and my dad was raised Methodist and converted.
So that made things a little weird.
But other than that.
Were you raised Jewish?
I was.
Yeah, my dad converted when I was a few years old.
But, you know, you can't, you can take the, you can convert a Methodist, but you can never take the Methodist out of the Methodist, quite frankly.
You brought his Methodist to his Judism.
All right.
So what happened?
So things were going good.
You go off to college?
Is that what happened?
And then you suffered a breakup?
I did.
Yeah.
So essentially, I was dating this guy in high school, all very, you know, normal type high school sweetheart situation.
And I, being young and naive, thought that we were going to be in love forever and get married and just have a really boring lifestyle, just like our parents did.
And turns out hookup culture got the best of that vision of mine.
And my boyfriend of the time broke up with me, almost cheated on me, in fact, but got caught and ended up, you know, dallying around with other women.
So not only a betrayer, but an incompetent betrayer on top of it.
Yes.
Sounds like a lucky escape for you, though.
Yeah, I mean, I don't have any regrets about that now, but at the time it was pretty devastating.
Now, when you say you were looking, you were planning on a boring life, were you looking forward to that?
Is that the life you wanted?
It was sort of neutral.
I mean, I kind of wanted something more than that, but I also was relatively okay with it, too.
Okay.
I just sort of thought that it's what you did.
So now you go off to college and your heart is broken.
What happens next?
Well, just to make things interesting, I promptly repeat my mistakes immediately.
So I get into another, you know, intense relationship, have my heart broken again by a guy who didn't want to be serious.
And that's really heartbreak number two is really when I start looking into, you know, what else is out there if I can't have this, you know, committed relationship, fast track to marriage, kind of normal cookie cutter lifestyle, what is there out there that actually is possible?
Because, you know, from my point of view, it seemed like the life I'd been shooting for, it just didn't, it wasn't a possibility anymore.
So that's when I started exploring my sister's friend's lifestyle, which was a more radical leftist type lifestyle.
Okay, you've got to describe this lifestyle.
I mean, the descriptions of it sound incredible.
Now, was your sister in college with you?
Yeah, she was.
She's several years older.
So she was just finishing up as I was getting there.
So a lot of them refer to themselves as crust punks.
What was that?
Crust punk, like the crust of a bread, but punk.
I got it.
Okay.
Yeah, so definitely bicycles were central to this lifestyle.
It was very much anti-car.
You know, you bike everywhere.
If you can bike without putting your hands on the handlebars, you're extra cool.
They definitely were all about, you know, secondhand clothes, like not anti-consumerist type attitudes, anti-capitalist attitudes, very much pro-communist.
They enjoyed dumpster diving quite a bit.
There was a, yeah.
Dumpster diving for what were they getting out of the dumpsters?
Food.
Food is what they were.
They were getting out of the dumpsters.
Yes.
At least they were true to their anti-capitalist beliefs.
Yes, they were, although, you know, I never did bring it up to them.
But, you know, the point is in order for them to be able to dumpster dive, you have to have the excesses of capitalism.
But that's beside the point.
So they're riding around on bikes.
They're dressed in hand-me-downs.
They're dumpster diving.
Are they working politically for change or anything like that?
Sort of.
I mean, there were a few who were involved in local politics, but for the most part, most of them talked about forming their own collectives.
You know, there was a, it was essentially a community center, but they called it a collective house.
And they talked about getting, you know, organic farms where they could start their own little collective villages, basically.
So they weren't honestly that active in real politics.
They sort of just had all of these grand plans to create their own vision of the world that they wanted.
Now, are you doing this too?
Are you actually eating out of dumpsters and riding around with your hands off the handlebars?
Which, by the way, was very cool when I was like 11.
Yeah.
So, no, are you actually living this life or are you just kind of observing?
I sort of had one foot in the door and one foot out.
So I definitely wanted to be a part of them, but I never fully felt like I fit in.
So I definitely was riding my bike everywhere.
I did not have a car.
And I did eat out of the dumpster, but I didn't like it very much.
I did it a few times.
But there's this nonprofit organization.
I don't know if it's official in any capacity called Food Not Bombs, where it's essentially across the country.
And essentially, once a week, the volunteers create a free meal for the public, which sounds all well and good, but the food comes from the dumpster.
So every week they're serving people, you know.
I mean, trash is a harsh word, but that's what it is.
Well, that's what comes out of a dumpster.
Now, I have to ask, you get into this situation through heartbreak, through learning that boyfriends are cheating on you.
I assume that this group had a very loose attitude towards sex.
So they were very anti-establishment in this area as well.
They were very into polyamory and open relationships.
They were pretty well against traditional marriage.
And while they would accept monogamous relationships, they really weren't that popular.
I didn't really see this working out very well for any of them because in my experience, which is witnessing it, a lot of the time, one person is wanting the open relationship and the other person wants an exclusive relationship.
But that didn't stop them.
They went full force into this.
And to me, coming from all this heartbreak and disappointment with what I saw as a traditional paradigm, I thought, well, maybe they're onto something here.
Well, yeah, that's what I'm wondering.
Are you trying this out?
Are you trying seeing if this works?
Well, the polyamory was the main thing that I did not actually get involved in myself.
And I'm glad that I didn't because I saw it really crashing and burning for a lot of people.
But most other aspects of their lifestyle, I did try to get involved in.
So you mentioned before, you said they're eating out of dumpsters, which ignores the fact that there has to be capitalism and it's the fact that it produces so much for there to be food in dumpsters.
Were any of their other philosophies bothering you on a logical level, let alone the realistic level?
Well, sort of going back to what you asked before about their political activism, you know, they had all these ideals about smashing capitalism and forming collectives and all this stuff, but they never really seemed to get their act together to form any organizations that could get off the ground.
It seemed like they were constantly trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of how to get things done.
And they were also very anti-hierarchy as well.
So it was all, like I mentioned before, a collective effort.
So, you know, if everyone's a leader, no one's a leader, but I mean, everyone knows in reality that someone is going to lead, even if they're not supposed to be.
So just their approach to getting things done in activism sort of rubbed me the wrong way a little bit.
It just seemed really inefficient and uneffective.
So how long were you with these people?
Well, how long were you with them?
Yeah, it was probably a couple of years.
I mean, I never moved in with any of them or anything.
Like I mentioned before, I was always sort of one foot in the door, one foot out because in part I just didn't feel like I belonged, but in part, you know, I was still going to school and a lot of them were working jobs part-time or some of them were going to school, but they were in their own sort of world.
So it was a couple of years that I spent time with them.
And after that, I still saw some of them, but I wasn't nearly as involved in their activities.
Did it have an effect on your life?
I mean, what was your life like in general?
I mean, my life was pretty comfortable in that, you know, I got a full ride to a state school and my parents were helping me pay for living expenses.
And I lived in air conditioning.
They were very against air conditioning because they were trying to keep their utility bills as low as possible.
And it was also sort of an environmental effort.
So I was sort of living a slightly more comfortable lifestyle.
Eventually I got a car, which was sort of sacrilegious.
And, you know, I was going to school.
I was still tapped in with normal people, I guess you could call it.
So, you know, my life in part looks like that of a typical college girl.
But at the same time, I sort of, you know, I still was highly involved in this subculture too.
You know, even though I might be going to school during the day, I would go to some do-it-yourself punk show where, you know, the bands were called things like mother of sh, excuse my language, but uh, and, you know, people were taking their clothes off, playing instruments.
And, you know, probably the any snacks involved were from the dumpster.
So I was kind of moonlighting as a radical, I guess you could say.
Okay.
And what got you out?
Well, in the book, I present it this way, and this is how it happened.
I ended up meeting the guy I'm currently with who he wasn't trying to convert me away from this lifestyle or anything, but he sort of was just the foil to everything that they were.
He, you know, had experience building things.
These radical folks were all about, you know, I want to farm, I want to build a house, I want to do everything from scratch, you know, build things, don't consume.
And here I was meeting this guy who actually had, you know, helped to build houses before, who had done farming before, who had done all these things in reality that they were trying to do, but also had a very different worldview.
You know, he, I mean, sort of a redneck, but at the same time, a very well-educated, well-spoken redneck.
And I love rednecks personally, so that I didn't think that was an insult.
But he basically just did what they kept saying they wanted to do.
And that plus meeting one of his friends who is from the Soviet Union, he grew up there the first few years of his life.
You know, they had experienced actual hardship, whereas these radicals were just kind of playing at it.
So I sort of just was opened up to a little bit more reality.
And that and my sister graduated from college and she sort of started pulling away from those people.
So yeah, I just saw that there was a way to achieve some of what they wanted to do, but that it really wasn't how they were going about it.
So what do you want for your life now?
What do you want your life to look like, say, five years from now?
Well, five years from now, I want to be some of what I want for my life, they would approve of.
I want to be living on a patch of land, married to the guy I'm with with five kids and a giant garden and maybe a bunch of animals running around.
Wow.
Wow.
That's my dream for myself.
No, no, that's a hell of a dream.
And five kids is, you'll certainly have your work cut out for you.
That's, you know, if you could say something, you know, a lot of kids go to school and become radicalized.
They hear ideas from their professors.
Things become acceptable that weren't acceptable.
It's the thrill of getting away from your parents.
If you could say something to those people, what is it you would say?
Yeah, so obviously I'm very much in that category.
I would say that, for one, don't reject too much the lifestyle your parents have just because it seems boring because when you get older, your priorities really change for what you want out of life.
And you might find that that lifestyle is actually what you want once you're a little bit older.
And also try not to be swayed too much by what the professors say and try to find some opposing ideas and, you know, especially look at the history of communism.
You know, study places like the Soviet Union with the gulags, study Venezuela.
You know, don't be fooled by the Scandinavian socialism trope that gets thrown around so much.
Know that.
That convinced me to a degree that socialism was a positive thing.
But really just educate yourself.
You know honestly, if you read things like the Gulag Archipelago, that will illuminate a lot of the faults of capitalism and might sour your idea of this communist utopia, which I really don't think is possible.
Yeah uh, Sarah Jean Gosley, thank you very much.
Reinventing Masculinity00:07:29
Uh, the book is.
All the cool girls are anarchists.
Uh, I appreciate it.
I appreciate you coming on.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
A horror tale though, joining the left, all right, stuff I like.
Hey, that's a repeat of Brandon Toy's version of Stuff I Like.
If you have one you want to send it in, send it to Aclavin at Dailywire.com.
Is that at Aclavin at Dailywire.com?
If I have to tell you how to spell Clavin, you are not suited to doing a stuff I like song, and we'll choose one of them and actually make it our, our final stuff I like uh intro.
So this week I was talking about manhood and the need to kind of reinvent manhood, not reinvent manhood such that it isn't manhood, but actually bring an ideal of masculinity back into the culture, which is something I really do believe the conservatives should be talking about and thinking about and displaying both in the art they make and in the lives they lead.
And I talked about the fact that there has always been a tension between Christendom and manhood and the idea of the outlaw manhood.
male.
As I said at the beginning of the week, if you outlaw masculinity, only outlaws will be masculine, and that's kind of where you get guys like Tony Soprano and guys like the guy in Breaking Bad and Donald Trump to some degree.
But there was a version of manhood which was chivalry, which was the Christian attempt to incorporate manhood into the ideals of a Christian ethos that put forward things that are not necessarily uh, traditionally manly, like sacrifice, like service like, uh being leading by serving, and things like that.
That went into chivalry and and they fashioned an idea of manhood.
And part of the Shakespearean creation of modernity was the I was his idea of putting men in Christian situations.
The most successful one is Henry V, but then there are all the failures, like Macbeth and Richard Iii and uh, and and people like Hamlet who can't fulfill the traditional male roles that they're supposed to fulfill, and that's a lot of what Shakespeare was writing and a lot of where our ideas of art and modernity come from, and and and things like the Sopranos and Breaking Bad grow out of that, and they come from Cervantes as well, and it made me think back to my own inspiration for becoming a writer, and I know i've talked about him a lot,
talked about him before, one of which was one of my my inspirations was Raymond Chandler, and it was because I was looking for a role model of manhood which I didn't see around me and which I thought had to be there somewhere, and I was looking for it.
Fiction, and I look to the tough guy writers, but all the tough guy writers, and I write about this in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, all the tough guy writers sort of failed me in the end, except for Raymond Chandler, because Raymond Chandler created an idea of a man who carried the notion of chivalry with him into a world that was so corrupt that it had lost that notion entirely.
And I always say that the paragraph that turned me into a crime writer is one of the opening paragraphs of The Big Sleep.
If you haven't read The Big Sleep, one of the great works of American literature, a new voice that comes into the tough guy writing realm.
He's kind of the second wave Dashel Hammett and James M. Kaine preceded him creating the tough guy language, but Chandler then entered it.
He started writing in his 50s and entered it and sort of refined it into literature.
And he talks about as he walks into this millionaire's house, he says, over the entrance doors, which would have led a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.
The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere.
I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him.
He didn't seem to be really trying.
And what I loved about this, the minute I read it, I must have been like 15 years old, I remember reading that and thinking, ah, you know, here is a guy who contains within him the vanished idea of a knightly man, but he's bringing it into the corrupt world of Los Angeles.
And he wrote, Chandler wrote a famous essay which I made reference to a while back called The Simple Art of Murder.
It was published in The Atlantic, and it became the introduction to a short story collection called The Simple Art of Murder, in which he framed the famous, he created the famous phrase, mean streets, down these mean streets.
And he talks about who his hero is.
And I'm going to end the week reminding you of what a man might look like if he were such a man as Raymond Chandler envisioned.
I have never read before the entire paragraph.
It's a long one, but it's worth hearing.
This is from Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder, Who the Hero of a Detective Story Should Be.
He says, Down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
The detective in this kind of story must be such a man.
He is the hero, he is everything.
He must be a complete man and a common man, and yet an unusual man.
He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
I do not care much about his private life.
He is neither a eunuch nor a satyr.
I think he might seduce a duchess, and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin.
If he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all.
He is a common man, or he could not go among common people.
He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job.
He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge.
He is a lonely man, and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.
He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.
That's Raymond Chandler's depiction of the hero.
Let that be true of us and of all of us.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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