Andrew Clavin critiques 9/11’s sanitized memory, mocking PC discourse while defending its ideological roots—rejecting Hollywood’s anti-Americanism and praising traditional masculinity. He contrasts Lincoln’s "mystic chords" with modern erasure, citing Ripon College’s censorship of 9/11 memorials over Islamic imagery. Spencer Brown of YAF details campus suppression: UC Berkeley’s $600K police costs for Ben Shapiro, Orwellian bias boards, and Antifa protests, yet notes conservative students often prevail. The episode ties free speech battles to broader cultural decay—from UK "offensive speech" policing to Hollywood’s moral hypocrisy—warning that rewriting history undermines societal cohesion. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, September 11th, a day when we pause to remember the events that took place in New York City 17 years ago.
But since we don't want to say anything politically incorrect or anything that might offend anyone, we all want to be very careful about how we commemorate a day that was perhaps not as optimal as other days for reasons that maybe we shouldn't go into in too much detail.
It's very important on a day like this that we don't stir up any prejudices or irrational phobias against people just because they happen to slaughter thousands of innocent Americans without warning.
After all, maybe they were responding to America's many historical sins, like our belligerent insistence on putting our buildings where they happen to want to fly their hijacked planes.
I'm sure they acted for reasons that seem perfectly valid in their culture, even if in our culture there might seem to be the very definition of homicidal insanity.
Not that there's anything wrong with homicidal insanity, if that's part of their culture, which obviously it is.
And yes, the people from this perfectly valid homicidally insane culture may have believed in a different religion than most of us, but who's to say that the way we worship God by singing hymns and praying is in some sense better than the way they worship God by slaughtering innocent people en masse.
After all, our national philosophy prizes freedom and equality, so we must respect the freedom and equality of people who don't prize freedom and equality and who are willing to kill every one of us until the question is settled and we can all live together in peace.
Except for those of us who have been killed.
So this September 11th, let's all remember not to remember what we remember, lest we remember something truly offensive, something truly politically incorrect, something truly pro-American, namely the truth.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
The birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Welcome to the Andrew Clavin Show, broadcasting live from the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara.
If you're watching, you can see the many pictures, gigantic pictures of Ronald Reagan around me, which are making me feel kind of insignificant.
Even a little more insignificant than when Ben Shapiro leans in my studio every morning and shouts, you're insignificant.
But somehow the Reagan is worse.
And I'm happy to be here.
We're going to commemorate 9-11.
First, I have to pay the rent by talking about 23andMe, which is, I have now used 23andMe.
I haven't gotten my results back yet, but I'm kind of enjoying this part.
You know, you spit in a tube and you send it in to get your genetic information.
And I'm kind of enjoying this part because I can have all kinds of expectations.
Like I'm hoping that I'm actually like one of the very few people of Jewish heritage who is part Cherokee.
You know, that didn't happen a lot.
You know, and then I can join Elizabeth Warren, or as her tribe calls her, lies like a dog, in getting my Indian name as well, which would be something like shines like the moon, possibly.
I don't know.
But really, it really is good.
You can get things like DNA can tell you, play a role in determining your food preferences.
You can find out the bitter taste report, whether you prefer sweet or salty.
The deep sleep report tells you if you are more likely to be an especially deep sleeper, which I can already guess on mine since I haven't slept since 1972.
The saturated fat and weight report tells you based on your genetics how your weight might be affected by saturated fats in your diet.
All kinds of fascinating information.
So I'm really eager to find out.
You can order your 23andMe Health and Ancestry Service Kit at 23andMe.com slash Clavin.
That's the number, 23andMe, A-N-D-M-E dot com slash Clavin.
And of course, in the report, it will tell you how do you spell Clavin, which is K-L-A-V-A-N.
Memories Teach Us Who We Are00:10:10
No ease.
No ease.
There is no ease in Claven.
I just make it look easy.
That's all there is to it.
All right, so I was out.
I don't know how many of you guys are out there.
There was a very, very moving ceremony out on the beach in Santa Barbara by a young American, Young America's Foundation, which runs the Reagan Ranch Center.
And I gave a few remarks, which was very difficult because before I gave these remarks, they had a bagpipe playing, which was just absolutely heartbreaking.
I was afraid I was just going to get up and sob for five minutes, but I managed to push through.
And I was talking about some of the things that we wanted to remember about 9-11 because we're hearing a lot of things from people like we shouldn't talk about it.
And Slate, a college professor today, said, we don't need to memorialize 9-11.
These students have enough on their minds without sitting around just worrying about things that happened before their lifetime.
Joe Scarborough today wrote, he wrote an article in the Washington Post, just reads you the headline, Trump is damaging the dream of America more than any terrorist attack ever could.
So you can tell that people on the left are sort of seizing this moment to sink as low as they possibly can and kind of making this an unimportant day.
But it's not.
It's not an unimportant day.
And remembering things is not unimportant.
I was thinking as I was speaking this morning about Lincoln's first inaugural address when, you know, there can be many arguments about who is the greatest American president, but there can be no argument about who was the greatest writer, who was American president.
It was Abraham Lincoln.
And in his first inaugural address, he was begging, begging the South not to start, not to pull away from America, not to start a civil war.
And at the end, he said, we are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.
Just such beautiful language, the mystic chords being played by our better angels.
Well, the mystic chords of memory are, in fact, very mysterious.
I mean, memory is what makes us who we are.
It's how we know that we're the same person we were yesterday.
It's how we build a picture of our personality from the moment we're born until the day we die.
And I think it is true not just of individuals, it's true of our nation.
And that's why I think it's so important.
Guys like this professor writing a slate saying we shouldn't remember things.
I travel around with Yafta different colleges and I find a lot of kids are being taught A, nothing.
They're being taught nothing about how our government works, about where it comes from, about why we think the things we do, why we believe the things we do.
And they're also being told histories that emphasize the worst things about this country.
I mean, the bad things that happened in this country, as they have in all countries.
And I always tell them that that is as if I told your biography starting with your porn searches online.
You say, who is Bob?
Well, let me tell you this, because this will really grab you.
And by the time I'm finished, you think he's a horrible person when he really is.
It's really not the bad things that we all do.
It's the good things we do in this country has transformed the world for the better.
There's not a single person politically free walking on the earth who does not owe a debt of gratitude to America.
I mean, that is just mathematical fact.
We have really freed the world and taught the world what freedom means.
All these people making speeches in Europe about how they're multicultural countries, which they're not, got that from us.
I mean, they are imitating us.
Even the Soviet Union, a slave state, felt compelled to call themselves the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics because everybody knew that we had gotten it right, except us, because we were admiring the USSR.
We were saying, oh, yes, that's wonderful.
So these memories remind us who we are.
And I want to talk a little bit about my own memories of 9-11 and three things I learned from 9-11.
And you may be surprised to hear that some of these are a little politically incorrect.
But when 9-11 happened, I had only been back in this country a year.
I had left to go to England for a year and had stayed for seven years.
So I was an expatriate.
And I had had this tremendous experience living overseas for seven years, a long time, which was kind of like when the astronauts went to the moon and they took that picture of Earth and they saw it at a distance.
And so for six and a half of the seven years, all I paid attention to was English politics.
That's all I knew.
I knew English people, read English news, was involved in English politics.
Bill Clinton scandals were going on.
And of course, that was part of the English news, so I knew about it, but I wasn't in the country for any of that.
And when I came back and I moved here to Santa Barbara, I found that my opinions had changed.
And as a guy who had grown up in a liberal Democrat family where Republicans, there were Republicans and then there were Nazis.
And the separation was like this.
That was really the way for a Republican got elected president.
My father was packing gold bars into a suitcase so he could bribe his way through the border to Canada.
And so I came back and to my shock, I found that the people who were saying what I was saying in America were Rush Limbaugh, the guys at the corner and National Review.
Nazis, these evil conservatives were saying what I thought had learned to be true about America from seeing it from very far away.
And then I was here one year, I guess, and 9-11 happened.
And I remember waking up.
And you have to understand that my entire family lives on the island of Manhattan.
Now, one of them has moved to the Bronx, but they all are New Yorkers, and they've all lived in Manhattan all their lives.
And so I wake up 3,000 miles away, and I hear that a plane has gone into a building to the World Trade Center.
And the first thing I thought of was I remembered hearing, reading that in 1945 a military plane had crashed accidentally into the Empire State Building.
So that was the picture in my mind when I turned on the TV and saw what had really happened.
And of course I started calling my family and one by one I had three brothers and my father and mother.
And I remember my father, who's now gone, but at the time he was sobbing.
And I will tell you that the one thing you never want to hear in this life is your father sobbing.
You do not want to hear that sound.
And I remember, you know, he thought, this is war.
We're now at war.
And I remember saying to him, it's not going to be a big war like World War II.
It's going to be a lot of little wars because there's no nation to fight.
We're fighting this philosophy.
We're fighting a philosophy.
And that was the first lesson.
That was the first lesson I remember, is that we're fighting a philosophy.
And so much of human life is about philosophy.
So much of history is about ideas, a battle over ideas.
And that was why it was my last stage in becoming an actual open conservative.
I was already a conservative, but this was my last stage in acknowledging it because I saw liberals asking the question.
I remember David Letterman going on TV after this happened and asking the question, why do they hate us?
Now, I've worked on, I've volunteered on a lot of suicide hotlines, on a couple of suicide hotlines.
And every now and again, you speak to a wife whose husband is violent and who hits her.
And a lot of times the woman will say to you, what am I doing wrong?
What can I do to stop them from hitting me?
And of course, I wasn't allowed to say it.
My answer was, shoot them.
That'll stop them.
So like when I heard David Letterman say, why do they hate us, my first reaction was, well, let's kill them and see if that solves the problem.
You know, that would be the fastest thing to do.
Because they're not acting because of us.
That's demeaning to our enemies.
It's demeaning to our enemies to think that we have some power to make them change their minds.
We don't.
We don't.
They are grown-up adults just like us, and they are acting on their ideas as we are acting on our ideas.
And that's why, that is why when I was working in the movie business at the time and selling a lot of scripts, I write mysteries and ghost stories.
But that's why when I saw Hollywood start to turn out these films in which our soldiers were depicted as rapists and killers and idiots who were being abused by evil Republicans and sent into war where they were risking their lives for nothing, that's why I became an outspoken conservative, effectively ending my Hollywood career.
Because I realized our culture is where we store these ideas that are lived ideas.
Our movies, you know, not only did I think it was wrong to make anti-American films while our guys were at war, which was the real reason that made me so angry I started speaking out, but also this is the way these films last forever.
These films last forever.
They're on at three o'clock in the morning.
And this is the way young people will remember these things.
And that's why I was so glad when American Sniper came out and told an honest version of the story.
Not that we were perfect.
This is not about the fact that we're better people than they are.
It's the fact that bad ideas make cultures bad.
Bad ideas make people do horrible things.
And good ideas ennoble people and lift them up.
So that's the first thing that I learned.
I have to pause for a minute once again, not to keep your lights on, but to keep our lights on at the Daily Wire and talk about stamps.com.
And stamps.com is absolutely great.
I personally, I'm still, I'm old enough, so when I put an envelope in my computer and it comes out with a stamp on it, in my printer, and it comes out with a stamp on it, I'm kind of like, wow, that is cool.
Because you don't have to drive to the post office.
The post office is terrific, but this will put all the amazing services of the post office right into your desk 24-7 where it's convenient for you.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, using your own computer and printer, and the mail carrier picks it up.
Just click, print, mail, and you are done.
Why Rights Are Fiction00:15:22
It couldn't be easier.
Right now, use the code Clavin once again for this special offer.
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Go to stamps.com before you do anything else.
Click on the radio microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin.
Aha, but how do you spell Clavin?
It is K-L-A-V-A-N.
That's stamps.com.
Enter Clavin.
The second lesson I learned is this.
And here's where we get into things that make you uncomfortable, make some people uncomfortable.
Religion matters, even if your religion is atheism.
You know, elites and intellectuals were shocked at 9-11 that anybody could be so primitive as to care enough about God to commit an act of suicide killing.
It had been happening all around them, but they couldn't believe it.
They thought that in the natural order of things, we were all going to grow out of this primitive idea that there's some big bearded man up in the sky, you know, running things.
And, oh my goodness, what a silly thing that you would think about this.
This 9-11 happened before I became a Christian, but already I had come to understand that there must be a God.
If everything, if all the logic of life was to work itself out and make sense, I had begun to believe in God, but I hadn't become a Christian yet.
And when I watched this, I thought, what culture, what nation, what people has not been shaped at the deepest, deepest level by its concept of who God is?
I mean, when we say that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that implies an idea of a creator.
That implies an idea of what the Creator wants.
I'll tell you something.
The people who flew those planes into those buildings and into the Pentagon and who tried to fly it into other buildings in Washington, they and I agree on one thing.
They and I agree on one thing.
We agree on the idea that the government is meant to enforce the will of God.
They think the will of God is that you should be slaves.
I think you should be free and that the government is there to ensure that you are free, to ensure the rights God gave you are put in place.
There's no getting out of that.
There's no getting out of that conflict.
I mean, that is a conflict in two ways of looking at the world.
And when you point out to people who are so advanced and have gotten so far in their intellectual journey that they realize this God stuff is all primitive nonsense, and you say, well, what about the communists?
The communists in China and in Russia enforced atheism and slaughtered more people in about 20 minutes than all the religious wars on earth had ever slaughtered anybody, right?
Their answer is always Sam Harris, the big atheist guy, says this.
Well, communism is a religion too.
Communism is a religion too.
But communism is not a religion.
Communism is not a religion.
Atheism is the religion of communism, and it must be because it is completely a materialist way of thought.
So, you know, when you look at people who are atheists, that is also a religion.
It's a way of confronting the unknown, the eternal, your creation.
Now, I read a lot of scientific books, and a lot of scientific books that come out now put forward the idea that science has taken us beyond the idea of God, and that has consequences.
Let me read you a book.
It's called, read you a little portion of a book called Sapiens, a little portion of an interview with the author, Yuval Harari.
Sapiens is a huge bestseller.
Bill Gates thinks it's the most brilliant thing ever.
And it's all about the fact that we are human beings because we tell these fictions, untrue stories, and they bind us together.
And Harari says, if you think about human rights, human rights are a fictional story, just like God and heaven.
They are not a biological reality.
Biologically speaking, humans don't have rights.
If you take Homo sapiens and look inside, you find the heart and the kidneys and the DNA, you don't find any rights.
The only place rights exist is in the stories that people have been inventing.
If you don't believe in God, that is absolutely right.
That is absolutely true.
But I am a fiction writer.
I'm a writer of stories.
And stories are not about, are not made up.
They are ways of communicating truths that you can't say in any other way.
We all do it.
We all use metaphors to say, you know, what was it like to pitch a no-hitter?
You say, well, it was like waking up on Christmas morning because there's no words.
There's no words to say what it's like, what the experience of being a human being is like.
So we write stories and we use art to communicate these things.
So when you write a story, the question is, is the story true?
Is the story true?
And that is the question that Yuval Harari doesn't have to ask.
But if we lived in Yuval Harari's world where human rights were a fiction, how hard is it to guess?
How hard is it to guess what that world is going to look like about 10 seconds after it gets founded, right?
Because how do you defend your rights?
How do you defend your rights if they're just a fiction?
He has a better fiction.
His fiction is that the world is going to end through climate change and so you have to give up your rights.
You know, his fiction is something else.
The question is not whether we're telling stories.
Of course we're telling stories.
There's no way to communicate the essential facts of life without telling stories, but are the stories true?
And that is really the question we're asking.
Harari's religion is atheism.
So is Steven Pinker, another science writer that I like.
And so he thinks our rights are a fiction.
But I believe, and I think, you know, I don't have to quote the Bible.
I believe in a God who made us in his image and wants us to be free.
And I don't have to quote the Bible to prove that because I think all of nature cries it out.
All of the human heart cries it out.
So the objection to this, the thing that makes people so upset when you start talking about religion is they say, well, wait, wait.
Are we going to have holy wars?
Are we going to have holy wars?
Is that we're going to go back to the world of holy wars?
I remember I was judging a journalistic contest and I was on the phone with other journalists who were also judges in this contest.
And somebody, one of these women, a very big, I won't give her away, but it was a very big journalist.
And she said, I heard that George W. Bush prayed before he went into Iraq.
So this is just a holy war.
He's no better than bin Laden.
You know, Bin Laden prays to his God and George W. Bush prays to his God.
What's the difference?
Well, that's a good question.
What's the difference?
If the difference is our God wants us to be free and there God wants to enslave us, there's a big difference.
So I never want to attack anybody because of his religion.
Not anybody.
I never want to fight with anybody because of his religion.
But if somebody attacks me because of his God, I do want to fight back.
And I do want to fight back in the knowledge that freedom is better than slavery.
Why is freedom better than slavery?
Because we are created beings with God-given rights.
And the third one, and you're going to love this one, the third lesson I got from 9-11 is that men must be men or the world comes crashing down.
Now, whenever you speak in praise of manhood now, there is always somebody who says, well, a woman could do that.
And here's my answer.
No, she couldn't.
A woman could do it.
But if men abandon their posts, if men abandon the rules of manhood, which require bravery, which require sacrifice, which require standing up for the women in our lives, the world comes crashing down.
And this is a good time to stop for a minute and remember the men of 9-11, the firefighters and police, and this is something I can barely keep in my head, who charged into the buildings as they were crumbling to get people out.
Without men like that, the world comes tumbling down.
I want to remember, I should remember the Engine 54 Ladder 4 Battalion 9 in Midtown lost 15 men, 15 men that day.
I mean, engine companies are not that big.
I don't know if you've been to New York anywhere, even in a big city, they're not that big.
15 men is a huge, huge number.
Talk about Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick, and Todd Beamer, who took back United 93 and drove it into the ground before it could reach what they think it was.
They think it was D.C. What made those guys so American, such American men, is not that they had courage.
All kinds of people have courage.
But that they broke the rules when new information came in.
That was an incredibly American thing to do.
The rules, the thing that people were trained to do when a plane was hijacked was to let the hijackers do what they want.
They were just going to fly to Miami, park the plane, you know, get their ransom or whatever, and let everybody go.
So there was no point in fighting back and getting killed.
But one of these guys, Tom Burnett, was on the phone with his wife, Dina, and she said, that's not what's happening.
They're hijacking planes all over.
They're crashing them into buildings.
And they decided that they were going to take back the plane.
An amazing act of courage.
Without men like that, the world comes crashing down.
I mean, I could go through so many, but I also want to mention Chris Stevens and Sean Smith and Glenn Daugherty and Tyrone Woods, who died 9-11, 2012 in Benghazi.
You know, these ideas that we hold, these ideas that come from our God, because of these ideas, there's certain things you can't have.
If you want people to be free, you can't be equal.
Because if you're free, you're going to be better at something than me.
Maybe I'll be better at something than you.
If you're free, people are going to rise at different levels.
So you can't be equal.
You can't have equal outcomes.
But if you want to be free, you can't be always at peace.
You have to fight sometimes because people want to enslave you.
That's human nature.
People want to enslave you, and some people want to give up their freedom because it's too much trouble.
Without men to fight those battles, without men to fight those battles, you will not be free for long and the world will come crashing down.
And today, and I'll talk about this later on at the end of the show because we've had a huge, in Hollywood, we've had a huge bout of Me Too toxic masculinity.
But we hear all the time about toxic masculinity.
And believe me, like I said, I work in Hollywood.
I see a lot of toxic masculinity, all right?
But on 9-11, I think we should remember what real masculinity looks like and how much we owe it.
You know, how much we owe to the men who fulfill the roles of men, you know?
And I think that that is the third thing I took away from 9-11.
We're not all soldiers, we're not all firemen, we're not all policemen, we're not all heroes.
But I think that I do believe that each and every one of us have a little piece of this beautiful idea in our hands, and we have to defend it with all the courage we have, no matter how they shout at us, no matter how they scream at us.
And I think ultimately that there is going to have to be a phalanx of men who stand for these things and hold them up, because that's the only way that they'll survive.
So that is what I take away from 9-11.
In the end, you know, we can't remember pain.
It's a really interesting thing about the human mind.
We can't remember pain.
If we could actually remember pain, no woman would ever have a second child.
I mean, you forget, you forget how bad it is, and you go back into the fray.
And because we can't remember pain, all of history eventually becomes literature.
That means all of history eventually becomes a story that we tell.
And we have to tell that story and we have to tell it truthfully and we have to remember because there are always people willing to tell stories that aren't true, stories that promote bad values, stories that promote bad ideas.
And we stand on a tower of great ideas.
And as I said at my speech this morning, that tower is still standing and we have to never let it fall.
All right, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We're going to take a break and when we come back, Spencer Brown of Young America's Foundation is going to come up here, the poor man, and I'm going to interrogate him until he can't stand it any longer.
Weep for him.
Here he comes.
Spencer Brown is Young America's Foundation's spokesman.
He routinely travels to colleges and universities to manage some contentious situations.
You've traveled with Mr. Shapiro, have you?
And yet here he is alive to tell his story.
He helps out the YAF students around the country and he is also an opinion contributor for The Hill.
I did not know that.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
So when you look at this culture, when you hear someone like the professor at Rippon University saying we don't need to remember 9-11 and you've seen so much around the country, what do you think?
What is your response to that?
Well, I think the first thing to look at is just how bad higher education has gotten.
This is a professor at Ripon College who's basically telling students they don't need to learn anymore because it's something that happened before they were born.
And obviously that's sort of the form that YAF's 9-11 Never Forget Project has taken on now.
It was started in 2003 in order to sort of push back on the left's attempts to make it a politically correct sanitized remembrance that you talked about.
But now, you know, students, high school freshmen especially, they weren't alive when 9-11 happened.
College freshmen, a lot of college students today have no memory of that day.
I was only in second grade when it happened, so even my memories, you know, are hazy at this point.
But when you look at professors who are saying we don't need to remember bad events in history because they happened before we were alive, you know, where does that stop?
Is he going to stop teaching about the Holocaust because it happened before he was alive?
Is he going to stop teaching about anything?
Where does the line fall then once you start trying to censor history in a way that it basically protects this fragile leftist ideology?
It is the ideology.
I mean, one of the things I remember on 9-11 is thinking, well, there goes multiculturalism, but they cling to it like a stone, basically.
Absolutely.
Multiculturalism, but not any sort of ideological diversity.
They're all about certain kinds of diversity.
But what I see especially on all these college campuses, if you're a conservative, you don't have rights when you walk through the door.
And obviously, that's unconstitutional.
And the grounds for several lawsuits YAF has right now, but it's something that we continue to push back on.
But the left is not easing up, especially in the age of Trump.
So when I go for YAF and I talk at universities, I see these young people.
You cannot, I mean, if you ever want to feel like hopeful, you look at these young people.
They're so smart, so bright, so brave.
But talk about a little bit of what you see them facing on a day-to-day basis.
Yeah, I think most people would be surprised.
You know, the media, somewhat to their credit, has started to cover these situations, and it's part of my job as the spokesman at YAF to make sure that people understand what it's actually like to be a conservative on these campuses.
But it takes so many different forms depending on the school.
At some schools, it is the students who are so intolerant.
And so you'll have them, you know, anytime a Young Americans for Freedom chapter tries to table on their campus and pass out, for example, pocket constitutions, the students will run over and tell them, you know, this is inappropriate behavior.
This is triggering to me.
I don't like this document because it was written far too long ago by racist slave-holding white men and all these things.
And then other times, you know, sort of more nefariously, there's this anti-conservative bias that's sort of institutionalized in higher education today.
And so you see these schools, whether it be UC Berkeley or the University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Connecticut, where they use the bureaucracy of the administration in order to shut down conservatives through preventing them from using rooms, telling them that they can't speak in a certain venue at a certain time of day because they don't want conservatives on campus after dark because that would be dangerous.
Conservative Students Under Assault00:09:58
That's what Berkeley initially told us when we were working to bring Ben Shapiro there.
And so they just sort of use this multi-pronged approach in order to make it so that way conservatives don't have a voice on their campus.
Because again, what we find on these campuses when YAF is able to bring in one of these speakers, there are a lot more conservatives than you think exists.
They're just sometimes so suppressed that they just feel like it's useless for them to even get out and be active.
For a while, it seemed to me, I mean, Shapiro went, faced virtual riots.
I mean, he was really surrounded by violent people.
Some of these Antifa people are really dangerous.
And yet, from a distance at least, it seems a little bit, this has calmed down.
Is that fair to say?
I think it's interesting right now because we're just coming back into the school year.
So over the summer, things sort of calmed down just because there's nothing happening on campuses.
But already kicking off this year, we had Ripon College told the students there who were doing the 9-11 Never Forget Project Today, one of more than 200 schools doing the project, but they told them that the never forget posters we have, which if you're familiar with them, they have a photo of the Twin Towers that are burning.
They have photos of other attacks carried out by radical Islamic terrorists.
And the school said that these are inappropriate posters because they're just only singling out this one religion.
And so they told the students, the body that held this meeting is called the Bias Protocol Board, which just sounds like hell to go into a meeting with them.
But they basically told these students that if you're going to single out one religion, these constitute bias and they're not welcome on our campus.
And so they said things like the Iran hostage crisis was not related to Islam at all.
They said that they didn't think the Pulse nightclub shooting was something that should be included because it means more to the LGBT community.
And so by using it on their poster, the YAF chapter was sort of appropriating LGBT culture.
And they just run through all these weird objections to try to tell students that what you're doing is either stupid or useless or at worst offensive and harmful.
And so you have to push back against it.
And you mentioned being bold and needing people to stand up.
And what we find is when students are standing, when they stand up and are bold advocates for conservatism, they usually are able to win the day.
It is amazing the way they strip Islamic Islamist terrorists of their own personal motives.
I mean, the guy who shot up in the gay nightclub was on the phone with police saying, I'm doing this for ISIS.
So that was his statement.
And yet then we see guys, people who write for the New York Times actually explaining, no, no, no, that's not why it is.
When you go in, do you go in and have conversations with things like this Orwellian board?
It kind of depends.
A lot of times, you know, it's the students who are on the front line.
So they're really the real brave ones because every single day they try to stand up and hand out a constitution or, God forbid, a Bible or whatever it may be.
You know, they're the ones who get the brunt of this assault from the left on campuses.
But from time to time, you know, when it comes to these campus lectures, I travel to a lot of them to help make sure that our story is getting out there because often the press will try to carry water for the leftist administration and whatever else.
And so I'll go in and say, you know, this is ridiculous, what's happening.
I had to do that at Berkeley.
I had a little kind of guerrilla press conference on the steps of one of the buildings there because the school's chancellor had called a secret press conference to try to throw us under the bus and say that how dare we cause them to spend $600,000 and bring in 700 police officers, to which I held my little press conference and said, how dare you have a college or a university where your students can't handle opposing ideas?
This is ridiculous.
This is all your fault.
It's not our fault that your students need Play-Doh and a puppy in order to have Ben Shapiro somewhere in the vicinity.
And so when it comes to those sort of things.
I also need Play-Doh and a puppy to have Ben Shapiro.
But it's just, you know, when you talk to these administrators, they just think it's so beyond the pale that there would be a conservative who dares to want to speak on their campus and that you would try to bring in a differing viewpoint because for them they need their echo chamber.
Because as you see, if a conservative idea is expressed, the leftists kind of have to question what they're saying because it's not based in fact, it's not based in history.
And I think that's why we see them trying to just erase history.
That's sort of the inconvenient truth.
Well, at any point, I mean, these are theoretically intellectuals.
These are people dedicated to thought and dedicated to teaching.
Have you ever encountered anybody in campus administration?
Because I'm appalled that the administration would be a part of this.
It's one thing to have radical students.
We've always had those.
But to have anybody in the administration shut down speech, do you ever meet people who sort of are willing to talk it out or actually receptive to what you're saying?
Every now and then there are a few closeted conservatives who will come up to me who are in the administration or somebody will come up and very quietly sort of pull me aside at an event.
This happened at the University of Utah last year and pulled me over to the side and just sort of quietly said, like, just so you know, we have your back, but I can't make a statement supporting your right to be here because if I do, the students will revolt.
But what about a leftist who says, well, let's sit down and reason together?
That's very rare.
I think I have, there was one event we held actually at Berkeley last spring where Dennis Prager spoke with three different leftist students there who were able to agree to sit down with him and just have an honest, frank conversation on a stage in front of a packed house talking about what do you think about free speech?
Why do you think conservatives are so mistreated here, all these things?
And it was, I think, kind of unfair for the leftist students because they're going up against Dennis Prager who has a career of doing this.
And they're just students in college trying to figure everything out.
But it was interesting to see that when there is an open exchange of ideas, there were points of agreement on both sides.
But oftentimes, the left doesn't want to concede that.
And more often than not, we warn our students against people saying, let's have a conversation about it.
Because typically the left, that's sort of one of their dirty tricks, is they say, like, okay, you want to bring Andrew Clavin in to speak.
We think in order to better serve the students, we need to have a counterpoint present as well.
So they would try to force the students to have a leftist on stage with you to sort of couch all of everything you say with what they want to have said.
And so We warn against the word conversation dialogue because to the left it doesn't mean actual conversation or dialogue.
It means we tell you what you're going to say and you quietly kind of go in the corner.
Wow, because I have to say that sometimes talking to left-wing students, when I challenge their ideas, they actually start to breathe rapidly.
I'm not joking.
They breathe rapidly and their eyes start blinking as if you had awakened them from a tremendous thing.
That's called triggering.
That's triggering.
That's actually triggering.
I was wondering what that was.
I say that all the time.
So since you have a lot of experience doing this at this point, what are the things that keep you up at night?
What are the things that you were afraid, the bad trends that you see?
I think one of the really scary trends is schools who are unafraid of being held accountable at this point.
Where we had, for a while, there were schools where if you were to send a demand letter, if they were trying to prevent a conservative from speaking in a venue or something, we would send a demand letter.
They would realize they were about to violate the Constitution and would make amends.
And now we see schools becoming more bold, partially at the administrative level, because they're so afraid of their students, because they've seen what students do.
When conservatives speak at CSULA, the leftist students will go camp out in the president's office for three days and have a hunger strike in the office until he recants and says, you know, I'm sorry, we shouldn't have had a conservative at this school.
And so I think people being unafraid of the fact that the Constitution is there and binds their activities is something that's alarming.
And it becomes a really big issue where we've been engaged in this lawsuit against UC Berkeley over their treatment of Shapiro and other conservatives for almost two years now.
And so the schools know that they can drag out these lawsuits because especially with UC Berkeley, it's all taxpayer money and everybody knows California can tax until, you know, they literally bankrupt the state.
And so you have these situations where they are just trying to delay basically due process for conservatives.
And that's something that's alarming because it gets you in a place where you can't bring a conservative in while this lawsuit is going on because they won't make amends for what they've done.
I see.
I think the other really concerning thing is students who are just becoming, everybody always uses a snowflake metaphor, you know, these students are so fragile.
But I think what we're seeing is students sort of adopting the Trump derangement syndrome side of things and not just being fragile, but also becoming just outwardly violent and taking it out on conservative students where we see more threats against conservative students.
We see more conservative students being sort of almost assaulted.
I don't know if assault is the right word.
That might be a little too strong.
But we do see them being less drawing away from the situations where there are conservatives and more trying to be active in suppressing conservatives.
Wow.
And what about if there is a positive side to this?
Do you see any positive trends?
I would say so, absolutely.
You know, every day, it's a rare day where I don't get a phone call from a student on some campus saying like, hey, this just happened.
What do we do?
How do we fix this?
And so we have, through Young America's Foundation, we have our Young Americans for Freedom chapters.
It was founded by Buckley back in 1960.
So this is an organization with all this history.
And even today, these students are the bold people who are standing up for true conservatism on their campuses.
And I think anywhere you look where there's good stuff happening, today across the country at more than 200 high schools and colleges, these Yaffers are setting up 2,977 flights to make sure that even if their school doesn't want the truth of today to be heard, they're bringing their school together to remind their peers what happened today.
So I think all you have to do is look at that.
And that is honestly the greatest part of my job is giving the conservative movement, hopefully some optimism that the rising generation is conservative.
Our ideas are applicable to them and they love conservative ideas.
It's just they never get the chance to hear them because of these suppressions that are put on them by these leftists.
Do you think these kids have effects on other kids?
Like, in other words, do you think they're student?
I know there are not adults on the left who are willing to talk, but are there students on the left who are willing to?
Absolutely.
And I don't even think they go into it thinking that they're going to be acceptable or perceptive to hearing the other side.
But a prime example, actually, when Ben spoke at California State University, Los Angeles, and it basically descended into riots, and you had Malina Abdullah and people, we had a professor threatening to fight our students, asking, do you lift bro?
Just absolutely ridiculous stuff going on there.
But there were students who showed up to protest that lecture that ultimately went on, but was just crazy.
They pulled the fire alarm, everything else.
But there were students who showed up to protest, who today are some of the most active members of the YAF chapter on that campus, who are now out there trying to introduce their peers to the same ideas that literally changed their lives.
And so you see, you know, in that totally chaotic day that led to a lawsuit and everything, and you know, we had to sneak students in three at a time through a back door with a police escort just to get them in a room to hear Ben Shapiro.
But the people who are outside screaming about him being a fascist are now the ones working to bring in conservatives to their other peers.
That's a great story.
I think I'll end there.
Cbs One's Chaos00:04:54
This was terrific.
Thank you very much.
Spencer Brown from Young America's Foundation.
You know, there's a story out of the UK today.
UK police urge citizens to report neighbors for offensive speech.
When I lived in the UK, one of the first things that happened to me very early on is I was invited to a dinner party, and the fellow next to me said, What is this with your First Amendment?
What is it with your written constitution?
Why do you have to write your Constitution down?
And I said, because our politicians are so bad that if we don't write our Constitution down, they won't obey it.
Even with it written down, we have a hard time keeping them in line.
So here's the story.
English police are now calling on citizens to report hate incidents.
Reporting friends and neighbors to the police has terrible historical connotation.
This is from the Federalists.
And for good reason, it's legitimate fascism.
The latest call for action in England is from the South Yorkshire Police on Twitter.
Similar reporting requests are posted on the United Kingdom government website.
Here it is.
This is from South Yorkshire Police.
Hate can be any incident or crime motivated by prejudice or hostility, or perceived to be so, or perceived to be so, against a person's race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or disability.
Hate hurts, and nobody should have to tolerate it, report it, and put a stop to it.
Imagine that world, which we are threatened with, I think, here too.
Yeah, imagine a world where if you feel that something I said has offended you, I get a visit from the police.
And with that, I think we will close.
Usually on Tuesday, we close with sexual follies.
So now, usually, as you can tell from the Can Canon music, usually the sexual follies thing is kind of funny.
This time, it actually isn't.
You know, Les Moonves, I don't know if you heard this.
This is an earthquake in Hollywood.
I mean, an earthquake.
Les Moonves ran CBS.
He took CBS from one of the least watched networks to being the lead network.
For as long as he was there, decades.
When you were at CBS, you were doing one thing, which was serving Les Moonves.
And now two articles by Ronan Farrow, the guy who started the whole Me Too fuss with Harvey Weinstein, two articles by him in The New Yorker have brought forward charges against Moonves that he really violently abused women in the place.
Now, obviously, he says they're not true.
So I don't know whether they're true or not, but he did step down.
There was some talk that he is in a battle for control, was in a battle for control of CBS with Sherry Redstone, who wanted to have a merger that he didn't want to have.
And so there was some talk that she had engineered all this, but right now it looks very bad for him.
The thing that gets me about this, and the thing that I just want to point out as a Hollywood guy, a guy who's worked there, is that Moonves was famous for keeping his shows clean and basically based on good and evil at a time when TV was exploring darker ideas like on the Sopranos and Breaking Bad and things like this.
His shows were CSI, Miami, CSI, Blue Bloods, one of the most conservative shows on television.
And it is just a reminder, just a reminder, I think, to all of us that Hollywood is fake.
Hollywood is show.
People are, you know, talent is blind.
All kinds of people get talent.
All kinds of people get ability.
Good people, bad people.
There's no telling anything.
But everything you see, The stories people tell, as Plato warned us long ago, the stories people tell are sent to them by their gods.
The stories are sent by the gods, but the people themselves are not elevated by the stories they tell.
And so, the next time you see somebody get winning an Oscar and telling you you're an idiot because you voted for Donald Trump, or winning an Emmy and telling you you're an idiot because of your belief, your religious belief or whatever, just remember the stories they tell may be great.
The stories they tell are sent by God, but the people themselves are no better than anyone else.
And frequently, in Hollywood, particularly, they're a whole lot worse.
Anyway, it has been great having you here.
I thank you so much for being an audience to this show at the Reagan Ranch Center.
I thank Spencer Brown for joining us.
We have mailbag tomorrow for those of you listening.
So, go on the dailywire.com website, subscribe, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, and then send in your questions about anything you want, religion, politics, your personal life.
My answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life sometimes for the better.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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