Ben Shapiro dissects Trump’s Khashoggi response, arguing his pragmatic sanctions—avoiding MBS blame for oil/Iran leverage—were smarter than Obama’s naive interventions or leftist demands for performative outrage, while mocking media hypocrisy over Saudi ties. He pivots to mailbag struggles: a Catholic convert’s pornography addiction, ADHD discipline tests, and fiction-writing advice, before clashing with Shaid over Israel criticism vs. anti-Semitism, then closes with a Thanksgiving rant praising white male legacy—all framed as leftist culture-war pushback. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, my friends, Thanksgiving is tomorrow, which means it's probably too late to blow town, so you'll have to have dinner with your family.
Just remember, keep things civil.
Don't tell them their cherished left-wing opinions are the result of the cult-like mind control that's been shaping their play-doh-like brains ever since third grade, when Ms. Clavicle taught them that some men don't have penises.
Although that may actually be true of Uncle Joe, who got married to Aunt Marcy, which, let's face it, would take the penis off anyone.
Instead, in the spirit of seasonal goodwill, let's all say thanks to the wonderful leftist tools who've made this year so much fun.
For instance, I'm thankful for that woman, what's her name, who had the courage to come forward and say something or other about Brett Kavanaugh, which must have been really important, whatever it was.
Otherwise, we all would have forgotten her by now.
And speaking of women we've forgotten, let's remember to be thankful for Stormy Daniels, who became a hero to our friends on the left by exposing herself for a living, then sleeping with a married man, then blackmailing him, then taking hush money in return for silence, then going back on her word, then sinking into obscurity as part of a sordid and meaningless episode that soiled our souls merely by virtue of existing.
Which of course brings us to Michael Avenatti, whom we admire from afar, since he can't come any closer because of the restraining order.
But here's a man who taught us all how to abandon due process and the presumption of innocence and then went and beat the crap out of his girlfriend.
That's a subtle joke.
I'm waiting there for a minute.
And finally, I'm thankful for CNN, who explained to us all how racist we are by saying something I didn't get to hear because my plane started boarding and I had to leave the airport.
To all these and all the other forgotten tools and fools of the left, thank you for making America hilarious again.
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Mailbag Day00:15:49
All right.
Hooray, hurrah.
There's so much to be thankful for.
Most importantly, it's mailbag day.
So before you have to put up with your relatives coming over for Thanksgiving, you will have all your problems solved.
You will be ready.
You'll have this kind of halo of peace that will descend upon you and will, you know, make it easy for them to tear you apart, which will be good for us all.
All right.
Oh, let me say thank you.
Jenna Ellis, was it yesterday Jenna was on or the day before?
It was yesterday.
Jenna Ellis was on and afterwards, we had been joking on the show that we had had an argument on messaging, which is not true.
We had an intelligent discussion back and forth about libertarianism on our message apps.
And during this thing, I had said, you know, you ought to take a look and read my pamphlet, The Crisis in the Arts, which you can get for a buck on Amazon.
And she went and read it, and then she promoted it on Twitter.
And Jenna, you pushed this pamphlet up.
It's, you know, those obscure bestseller lists they have on Amazon that you pushed it up into like number one on weird little pamphlets about the culture by conservative guys named Clavin.
I mean, something like that.
It was just like number one on that bestseller list.
So thank you, Jenna.
I appreciate that.
And as always, I appreciate your coming on and your brilliance.
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So we're going to talk about, this is really an interesting subject.
We're going to talk about what Trump did with the Jamal Khashoggi case and with Saudi Arabia yesterday.
And what is so interesting to me about this is, you know, there's a famous saying, it was François de Rochefoucault, who was a French philosopher who was known for his kind of his practical little aphorisms.
And one of them was, hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.
And what does that mean?
It means that being a hypocrite shows people that you actually know that what you're doing is wrong.
It's a tribute that people who are operating in a bad way pay to the knowledge that there is such a thing as a moral universe and they are violating that universe.
We have to be clear what hypocrisy is because the left always uses hypocrisy wrongly.
It is not hypocrisy if you say adultery is wrong and then one day you get drunk and some girl comes on to you at a bar and you go and sleep with her even though you're married.
That is making a mistake.
Pardon me, that's falling.
You know, it's sinning, whatever you want to call it.
But it's not hypocrisy because you actually believe the thing that you were saying, that you yourself think, oh no, I've done the wrong thing.
I've fallen.
Hypocrisy is putting on a show of living at one moral standard and preaching one moral standard, but secretly living in another way.
So if you're going out there and preaching, if you're a preacher and you're preaching, you know, don't commit adultery, but meanwhile you're swinging with the girls every night and laughing it up, that's hypocrisy.
Yesterday, Trump did the right thing in the Jamal Khashoggi affair, but he left out the hypocrisy.
I mean, basically, he said he was not going to punish Saudi Arabia anymore about the murder of this, I guess we'll call him a journalist for now, a guy who wrote columns for the Washington Post, and he just wasn't going to do it because we needed the allies from Saudi Arabia and business was good.
That's not the way you do it.
You do it this way.
Let me give an imitation of the way you're supposed to do this.
American values and the violation and the moral, this kind of Abraham Lincoln, the truth will we will stand by America.
And then you go back to doing business with them.
And that's the way it's supposed to be done.
And that's the way most politicians do it.
Trump didn't do it at all.
So let's review what happened.
Khashoggi was a Saudi Arabian insider who opposed the rise of this new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
He was a proponent, a former Khashoggi himself, was a proponent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then he put some distance between them.
But he believed that the Muslim Brotherhood was the path for democracy, that there's not going to be democracy in the Middle East without some kind of Islamic rule, and it was going to be brought by the Muslim Brotherhood.
So he was a real critic, and he used the Washington Post used him to attack the new regime and to attack Saudi Arabia.
And he used that post and other posts to attack MBS, this new crown prince.
He was lured, I guess.
I mean, it must have, I don't think it was just an accident that he suddenly found that in order to marry his Turkish girlfriend, he had to go to the Saudi consulate in, I guess it was in Istanbul.
This hit team flew in, like out of a bad James Bond movie, apparently smothered him with a plastic bag and cut him to pieces, possibly at the same time.
Vicious, vicious murder.
All kinds of ramifications here.
I mean, Turkey that is opposed to Saudi Arabia because Turkey is making a power play in the Middle East, wants to rebuild the Ottoman Empire.
They gathered all the information and spread it around.
Obviously, we have made peace.
Trump has wisely made peace with Saudi Arabia and a lot of deals with Saudi Arabia because he is trying to counteract the rise of Iran.
It was spurred on by the idiots in the Obama administration.
So he's trying to do that and make deals.
And of course, Saudi Arabia is a big producer of oil.
So Trump comes out and he basically says 17 people, members of the Saudi government, have been sanctioned.
But the CIA has leaked to the press that they have a reasonable certainty.
We don't know what that means, but they have leaked to the press that they have a reasonable certainty that the Crown Prince himself, MBS, ordered this hit on this guy.
So basically, Donald Trump came out and he was doing his usual talk to the press out on the lawn.
And he says, yeah, this is as far as we're going to go.
This is cut number two.
They're buying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of things from this country.
If I say we don't want to take your business, if I say we're going to cut it off, they will get the equipment, military equipment and other things from Russia and China.
Russia and China would be very, very happy because right now we're doing very well against China.
We're doing very well against everybody, including Russia.
And I'm going to keep it that way.
And I'm not going to tell a country that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars and has helped me do one thing very importantly, keep oil prices down so that they're not going to $100 and $150 a barrel.
Right now, we have oil prices in great shape.
I'm not going to destroy the world economy, and I'm not going to destroy the economy for our country by being foolish with Saudi Arabia.
So I think the statement, wait a minute, I think the statement was pretty obvious what I said.
It's about America first.
Exactly.
It's like, that's what they call saying the quiet part out loud.
And that's, you know, like I said, any president would have done this.
I'm not sure Obama was smart enough to do this, but any other president would have done exactly the same thing.
But he would have first made that speech, you know, American values and the violation and we will be a stern, there will be a stern reckoning and I will face it and I will in private meetings.
And then he would have done exactly what Trump did and Trump left that stuff out.
He left out the hypocrisy.
He issued this statement, which he obviously wrote himself because it's filled with exclamation points.
Now, I like, I always put exclamation points when I'm writing it to show that I'm joking about something, but he was actually using exclamation points.
He starts, the world is a very dangerous place, exclamation point, then talks about the violations of Iran.
He says the country of Iran is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
This is an absolute human rights disaster in Yemen.
We haven't really talked about that a lot, but we should.
And Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people.
The Iranians are absolute bad guys.
And he says Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen, and that's why I've negotiated all these things with him.
And he says, here is what Trump says in his statement.
And I want to put this in because I want to make sure a lot of people are saying he didn't say anything about this murder, and that's not true.
He said the crime against Jamal Khashoggi was a terrible one and one that our country does not condone.
Indeed, we have taken strong action against those already known to have participated in the murder.
After great independent research, we now know many details of this horrible crime.
We have already sanctioned 17 Saudis known to have been involved in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi and the disposal of his body.
Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But my decision is in no way based on that.
That is an unacceptable and horrible.
This is an unacceptable and horrible crime.
King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi.
Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event.
Maybe he did.
Maybe he didn't.
Exclamation point.
That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.
And in any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
And Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, he made basically the same point.
Let's listen to that.
It's a mean, nasty world out there.
The Middle East in particular.
There are important American interests to keep the American people safe, to protect Americans, not only Americans who are here, but Americans who are traveling and working, doing business in the Middle East.
It is the President's obligation, indeed the State Department's duty as well, to ensure that we adopt policies that further America's national security.
So as the President said today, the United States will continue to have a relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
They're an important partner of ours.
We will do that with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its people.
That is the commitment that the President made today.
So, I mean, basically, he's saying these guys are thugs and mobsters, but we have to deal with them.
We're not the law in that area.
We're not the sheriff, and we're not going to clean them up.
We got to deal with them.
We got to do the best we can do to get the things that we want for our country.
Again, where's the hypocrisy?
We need some of that hypocrisy.
It's a real question.
I'm not just joking around.
It is a real question whether or not Trump should have been a bit more of a hypocrite.
It's very funny to me that everybody on the left is always complaining, he lies, he lies, he lies.
And now they're complaining, oh, he told the truth, but maybe they have a point.
So last night, I have to tell you, Knowles came over and Jonathan Hay, and we drank, as we discussed the glory of God, we killed an entire bottle of whiskey.
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It was a great evening.
I got to tell you, it was an absolutely terrific conversation, but it should never have happened.
And I'm deeply, deeply sorry to everybody concerned.
So anyway, you know, the reaction, so the reaction from the left, right?
I'm going to play one cut.
I'm not going to go through all the press people like screaming and crying and weeping over the values of America that are being destroyed.
But let's at least take Philip Mudd, my favorite guy.
He's always got some kind of bathroom.
This is one of the few statements he ever made without a bathroom metaphor.
Oh, no, he has a mirror in it.
So maybe that's a bathroom metaphor.
Usually he's talking about the toilet, but he's an ex-CIA guy on CNN.
Here's his reaction.
The story here is about a president for 22 months who said American values mean dealing with dictators in the Philippines or leadership in the Philippines that routinely murders people outside the courts.
It means accepting people in places like Egypt and Turkey that imprison their opponents, that imprison journalists.
It means saying, I like Vladimir Putin when he sides with a dictator in Syria who uses chemical weapons against his own people.
Let me be clear, Allison.
America first for every American who wants to wake up on the day before Thanksgiving and give thanks for justice, for freedom for a country under George Bush that said America first means aiding people in Africa with tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to fight AIDS.
America first means forget about freedom, forget about justice.
If there's a dictator we like who wants to imprison people and journalists, that's okay.
It's not about the money.
It's about what this shows about who America is.
Look in the mirror.
That's who we are.
You know, I looked this guy up.
I looked up his resume and it said he was the, he was the, he managed Iraq analysis at the CIA from 1999 to 2001.
So he's the clown.
He's the clown who told George W. Bush that they were getting weapons of mass destruction when everybody was yelling, oh, Bush lied, and people thought it was him.
He's the guy.
So now he's on TV telling us, you know, lecturing us about our morality.
the New York Times.
Let's take a quick visit to Knucklehead Row, the op-ed page of the New York Times.
So the New York Times has an editorial...
And first, it's got this picture.
If you're watching, you've got to see this picture they put up of Donald Trump.
This is the drawing of Donald Trump.
Terrifying picture.
Can you put this up?
Can't you save us, Brittany Spears?
Can we be saved?
It's like, that's what comes into your mind when you see this picture.
Can you save it?
It's this dark picture of shadow of Donald Trump with a shadow.
I don't even know, which is the shadow of a dictator.
Graham's Press Talk00:13:03
And it says, Trump stands up for Saudi Arabian values.
He disregarded the CIA's conclusions and American values in swallowing the Saudi version of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
As we read, he did not swallow it.
He said, we may never know, but he didn't pin it on the prince.
He says that Mr. Khashoggi was a resident of Virginia, though not an American citizen, and he was a columnist for an American newspaper, the Washington Post.
It did not serve the safety of journalists or American abroad that President Trump could not summon even a modicum of lip service to condemn the abomination of dispatching a hit team equipped with a bone saw to throttle and dismember Mr. Khashoggi.
But that's not true.
He did pay lip service.
That's what he did.
And what they're calling for is more hypocrisy.
They're saying we want more hypocrisy.
Now, let's be clear about this.
Just because the left is wrong doesn't mean that Trump is right and it doesn't mean that he's doing the right thing.
But it does mean we do not have to listen to these clowns.
These are the clowns who did absolutely nothing.
They stood by as Obama sold this country to Iran, dumped money out of planes on platforms into Iran, one of the worst regimes in the world, responsible, I mean, swearing to wipe Israel off the face of the map, responsible for the deaths of many Americans, executions without number in their own country.
He was dealing with them.
He sold F-16s, I believe it was.
I write this down.
I believe, yeah, it was XF-16s to Egypt after they were taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood, by Mohammed Morsi, and the guy who said that the Zionists are the descendants of apes and pigs.
I mean, we do not have to listen to these guys.
This is part of what we have to do.
I mean, it's part of what we have to do in dealing with this incredibly vicious, vile region where Israel is the only bastion of any kind of democratic values whatsoever.
At least Trump is doing it with the right people.
At least he's making peace with people who might make peace with Israel, who might fend off the rise of Iran, who might oppose Iran.
And, you know, again, just this doesn't mean Trump is doing the right thing.
I'm just saying that we do not have to listen to the left criticize it when it was revealed that Hillary Clinton had been taking $10 million from Saudi Arabia for that phony foundation she and Bill ran.
You know, what the New York Times did then is they did the famous Republican pounce thing.
You know, Republicans are pouncing on the idea that Saudi Arabia gave $10 millions of dollars, $10 millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.
Then the issue was that Republicans were pouncing on it, not the fact that she had been bought and paid for, essentially, by the Saudi Arabian regime.
So all of this stuff.
Oh, and then the other thing, by the way, is letting Khashoggi off the hook for who he was.
I mean, he's an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He may not have been a member of them after a while, but he was certainly speaking up for him.
There was a journalist from Washington Post, Phil Rucker, the Washington Post White House bureau chief.
He was on CNN, and he said Trump was, not only has he sold our values down the drain by not making the big hypocritical speech, but he also slandered the guy.
Listen to this.
The other thing the president did in that statement is he maligned Jamal Khashoggi.
He advanced baseless theories about him, conspiracies about him that have been pushed by the Saudi government.
There is no evidence that he's a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
There is no evidence that he's an enemy of the state, as the president advanced in that statement.
Let me read you just a little clip of the last column that Khashoggi wrote for the Washington Post.
The United States' aversion to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is more apparent in the current Trump administration, is the root of a predicament across the entire Arab world.
The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes.
In turn, this will mean the continuation of the causes behind revolution, extremism, and refugees, all of which have affected the security of Europe and the rest of the world.
Terrorism, the refugee crisis have changed the political mood in the West and brought the extreme right to prominence there.
He was a spokesman and a, what can I call him, a defender of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This is absolutely right.
There's nothing wrong with what Trump did there.
And then he's getting also, he's getting flack from the right, from Republican lawmakers.
Rand Paul, who doesn't want to be nice to Saudi Arabia.
He's got that Paul thing about we shouldn't be involved in the world at all.
It's kind of a crazy libertarian stance where, you know, we let the world destroy itself and one day you open the front door and there's the world outside in ashes waiting to attack you.
So Marco Rubio said our foreign policy must be about promoting our national interest.
It is in our national interest to defend human rights.
And Jeff Flake, who is so, he's like the Corey Booker of the right.
He's like so bad at being the crusading Spartacus type, but he says great allies don't plot the murder of journalists, Mr. President.
Great allies don't lure their own citizens into a trap and then kill them.
I mean, the Soviet Union was our ally during World War II and did a lot worse than that.
And of course, the one guy who kind of has been straightforward, Lindsey Graham, who hates this guy, hates MBS.
Graham is a real hawk when it comes to this.
He was on Sean Hannity's show, and he spoke very clearly about where he stood on this.
I thought he made a certain amount of sense.
Let's listen to this.
I'm not talking about ending the relationship.
Everything you said is true about the strategic nature of the relationship.
But here's what I believe.
Saudi Arabia needs us more than we need them.
It's not too much to ask an ally not to butcher a guy in a consulate.
This is not World War II, so I'm not going to look away at what MBS did.
I think he did it.
I think he's absolutely crazy about what he's done in the Mideast.
The bottom line here is I care about the strategic relationship.
I'm going to support Israel completely, but I'm not going to turn my back on this guy.
We've got a historic opportunity here to tell the people in the Mideast there's a new sheriff in town.
If you disrespect us and you trample over civilized norms, you're going to pay a price.
If you want to keep MBS, that's your decision to make Saudi Arabia.
As long as you make that decision, you're going to have a hard time with me.
If you want to replace him with somebody who's not crazy, that would be a good move.
So that's Lindsey Graham talk.
It's straight talk.
You know, I'm not going to destroy the relationship, but this guy, I don't like this guy.
Trump can't do that because Trump perceives everything as a personal relationship and as a business relationship.
He doesn't take criticism himself.
He assumes that this guy is not going to take criticism, so he's not going to come out and quite say it, you know, that he's guilty.
Here are a couple of questions, though, just to put the thing in perspective.
And before I finish this, just to put the thing in perspective, this thing about ignoring the CIA, he didn't ignore the CIA.
He ignored the people who leaked to the press from the CIA.
If you're in the CIA and you're our spies and you're gathering secret information for the benefit of the president, why are you talking to the press?
Why are you talking to the press?
You're talking to the press because you're putting forward a political position.
You are trying to make things happen.
You're anti-Trump, probably.
You're probably pro-globalism.
You may be some of the Iran favorite pro-Iranian leftovers from the Obama administration.
The CIA isn't saying anything.
Sources in the CIA are talking to the press for their own political purposes.
So the fact that Trump is ignoring them or saying when I talk to the CIA they haven't got full information, I think that's perfectly fine.
That's perfectly fine.
The idea that Trump is somehow beholden to people in the CIA leaking to the press for political purposes is ridiculous.
The fact that he's worse than Obama is untrue.
He was elected in part to dial back George W. Bush's spread the democracy that came up after 9-11.
George W. Bush, I think there's no question about this, that he went too far and he did it badly.
I mean, those were big mistakes.
You know, he panicked.
He said he overreacted.
He said, we're going to spread Middle East.
We're going to spread democracy wherever we go.
It's not going to work.
It hasn't worked.
It cost us a lot of money, a lot of blood.
We didn't get very far.
It's not that we've accomplished nothing in the Middle East.
I mean, some of the things that happened, unfortunately, Obama so fumbled the Arab Spring that a lot of that work went to waste.
I think George W. Bush's intentions were good, but he went too far.
And one of the reasons Trump was elected was to dial that back.
That's what he's doing.
He left out the hypocrisy.
And, you know, that can be a problem with a president.
I'm absolutely serious.
A little bit of lying in diplomacy is diplomatic.
Donald Trump, it's really remarkable to hear a president speaking as bluntly as he did, as truthfully as he did, about what any wise president would have done, right?
That's any wise president is not going to blow up this relationship, as Lindsey Graham said, but could have made more noise, as Lindsey Graham just demonstrated how you do it.
You know, our values and this man, and this is a terrible crime.
And then you go and do the thing that you do.
Trump should have called me.
I would have given him that advice.
A little bit of hypocrisy.
We're going to have to commit acts of vice as we deal with this dangerous world, but we should pay a little bit of tribute to virtue with a little bit more hypocrisy.
This is one example of Donald Trump not being a big enough liar.
All the attacks on him for not telling the truth.
This is a moment when he should have lied a little bit more.
I have to just play this one thing from Obama because it came up and it made my eyeballs roll.
Obama is turning into Jimmy Carter, a bitter, nasty little man who mishandled the country, governed it badly, messed it up terribly, and now is becoming angry and bitter at the country that rejected him.
And the country did reject him.
The country liked him personally.
They found him pleasant.
They found him presentable.
They were happy with themselves for having elected a black man and putting paid to the history of true bigotry, true history of true bigotry in this country.
But he was a clown.
He was a corrupt left-wing city politician.
He did a bad job, and now his legacy is being erased, and he's growing bitter.
He went out and he campaigned for the people in Florida, for Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson and Stacey Abrams, and they all lost.
A couple of people he campaigned for didn't lose, but the big ones that he went out there for, they lost.
He was speaking into those little half-empty auditoriums while Donald Trump was holding those huge rallies.
And he's getting angry, and he's here having a conversation about global warming, how we can fight global warming.
And this is what he says.
Right now, I could take off the shelf existing technologies.
We could reduce carbon emissions by, let's say, 30%.
Without any, you know, it's not like we'd all have to go back to caves and, you know, live off fire.
We could have electricity and smartphones and all that stuff, which would buy us probably another 20, 30 years for that technological breakthrough that's necessary.
The reason we don't do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.
I mean, we are fraught with stuff.
Can't you save us, Brittany Spears?
Can we be saved?
Stop the hammering.
We can just play gag recordings after that.
You know, everybody said, put that out there, and I guess because he said mommy issues, everybody's, well, he's attacking Trump.
He didn't say Trump.
He did not talk about Donald Trump.
He said we, we.
And when he says we, he means you, because you know he's never afraid to use the word I and me.
When he says we, he means you.
We are still fraught with hatred and fear and racism and mommy issues.
That's why we're not doing what he and his wisdom would have done, which was taking technology off the shelf.
What the hell is he talking about?
What business is it of the president to take technology off the shelf?
I mean, he's that same scolding, nasty, pinched little man.
And as time goes on and as his legacy disappears into the dust where it belongs, he's going to become much, much more bitter.
And the press is going to keep telling us what a lovely guy he is, just like they did with Jimmy Carter.
And you're going to watch his face, just like Jimmy Carter, collapse into that bitterness and nastiness of a guy whose legacy has been rejected.
Good luck to him.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, Mr. President.
Why Therapy Over Medication?00:11:31
And we feel the same about you.
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All right, mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
Yeah!
The Thanksgiving mailbag from Anonymous.
Hail Clavinus Decimus Meridius, commander of the armies of the North.
I'll just get right into it.
I'm addicted to pornography and the action that often goes along with pornography.
My wife knew this about me before we were married, but she didn't sign up for how it's been going.
I told myself classic lies, like I'll be able to quit once we're married and I'll be able to quit once we have our first child.
I'm a left-brained Catholic convert.
But anyway, that is to say that I fully understand how wrong it is to act out on my addiction theologically, morally, physically, mentally.
I go to Mass and confession weekly.
I'm truly sorry, truly want to sin no more.
I have been going to essay meetings.
I guess that's Sex Addicts Anonymous, where I hear testimonies of what could happen to the life I have if I continue down this path of half measures and white knuckling, but continuing to relapse again and again.
I look at my growing two-year-old son.
Oh man, think of how I have to be as an example of true manhood by showing him how to treat women and how to be strong in the face of challenge.
But I am weak.
How can I teach him how to tame the beast within himself if I have never mastered my own?
Wow, that is, first of all, I'm sorry for your trouble.
That is true trouble.
You've got a true problem.
I'm sure you're not even telling me how bad it is.
I suspect this is a really, really bad addiction, an absolutely soul-destroying addiction.
And you are going to have to bring everything you've got to defeat it, to fight it.
It's going to be, this is going to be a tough battle.
It is the fight of your life.
But everything you say in this letter about the consequences is true, especially for your son.
You are degrading yourself.
You're degrading your mind, your imagination, and you are an addict.
And like I said, I'm sure this is much, much worse than you are portraying it.
I can tell just from the voice that you're speaking in.
And it's great that you are in SA.
That is the right thing to do.
You've got to do everything.
You've got to pull out all the stops to try and beat this.
I'm not telling you you can beat it.
I don't even know.
But you've got to pull out all the stops.
You've got to be in therapy.
My guess, just from what I know about psychology, my guess is that you have suffered a trauma in your youth, probably having to do with sex, but maybe just having to do with your relationship with your father, something like that, where you are using this as a comfort mechanism and as a repetitive, you know, when people suffer trauma, they do repetitive actions that kind of relive the trauma and re-ingrain it in the brain.
It's a natural reaction.
Somehow, you've got to get to what this trauma is and excise it if you can.
Two things that I can think of is a real course of serious therapy with a trained psychologist or psychotherapist who won't drug you but will get down to the business at hand, that what it is that's started you out with this.
You know, it can do amazing things.
It did amazing things in my life, amazing things in my life.
And I think that that's something you should use.
There's a kind of therapy specifically designed for trauma, which is called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, EMDR therapy, EMDR therapy.
And the benefits of it are that you don't have to explore your life so much.
It works by manipulating your eyes in ways that are supposed to manipulate the brain.
They've had some good success with it.
Try that.
Try anything.
Try everything you can to get through this thing and get away from it because it will.
It will hurt you.
It will hurt your marriage.
It will hurt your children.
I feel really bad for you.
It's a tough, tough thing to be addicted.
And that's what it is.
You're addicted.
But I think it has a source in trauma and you should find out what that trauma is.
You should know, know thyself.
It's the only way you're going to get through it.
And definitely do not stop praying because that's going to be the only way out of it as well.
From Nicholas, hi, Andrew.
How do you know when you found the right girl to settle down with?
I always find myself feeling pangs of fear that I won't know, that there will be a fear of missing the right person if I make the wrong choice in the current moment.
In other words, it's sad to belong to someone else when the right one comes along.
I'd really appreciate advice.
Your relationship and religious advice have always been helpful, even when others ask the questions.
You know, this is, if you're not currently in a relationship, if you're worried about this in the abstract, my advice would be stop worrying.
This is one of the problems that goes away if you don't think about it.
There aren't that many, but there are a few that go away if you don't think about it.
The worry itself is the problem here, because I'm not going to tell you, oh, you know, it's not like a song you'll know when your love comes along.
But in the event when you meet somebody and you take the time to get to know them and you don't run off on the first wave of infatuation, which usually lasts about six months, if you take some time to get to know them, find out whether you like them, find out whether you enter into harmful cycles of action when you're involved with her, which may stem from you or from her or from a relationship.
And especially just find out that beyond the passion that you feel, the love that you feel, you like them, and you're friendly with them, you know, as well as love them, then you'll feel that you are with the right one.
I really do feel it's important to find the right person, but I do think also that it's not as hard as you think to know that you found the right person as you get to know somebody over a period of time and you give it time, you know, for the relationship to develop, you'll start to think, yeah, this is going to work.
This is going to work.
And then, you know, again, then you have to learn how to be in a marriage, which is a whole other question.
But for now, if you're not in a relationship, I just stop worrying about it.
I just go out and meet some nice people.
From Edward, question on writing fiction.
Have you ever written anything on the craft of writing fiction?
When questioned on the subject in interviews, you always give very useful advice.
You once quipped in a show that the only secret you know is how to write an effective action scene.
I am the best action writer in America.
As your novels prove, you have indeed mastered this and other technical aspects of writing.
I think there are a lot of us who would be interested in reading more from you on things like outlining a story, character development, good openings, and so on.
If you yourself have not written anything like this, could you recommend something?
I've never actually read a good book on writing.
I've read good books about the craft of writing.
Stephen King wrote a good book called On Writing that I enjoyed.
You know, it's funny.
There is a tape of this somewhere.
I once, it's kind of a funny story.
I once was asked to give a speech to a class, a writing workshop.
And I never do this, but I agreed to it.
I guess a friend asked me or something like this.
And he said, all you have to do, all they want to know is how do you get an agent?
That's all they want to know.
How do you get an agent?
How do you get started?
I said, fine.
So a week before I'm supposed to give this speech, the pamphlet shows up that's the syllabus of what speeches are going to be given.
And it says, Andrew Clavin gives a masterclass on how to write a thriller.
So I called the guy up and I said, what the hell, man?
You said all I had to do is tell him how to find an agent.
He said, that's all they want.
Don't worry about it.
Don't worry what it says in the book.
Just tell them how to find an agent.
That's all they'll care about.
So I thought, well, no, I can't do that now.
It says I'm going to give a masterclass on writing a thriller.
So I put together a speech on how to write a thriller and I started giving this speech.
And I realized I had one of those moments in the middle of the speech where I realized I was on fire.
I was giving a masterclass on how to write a thriller.
It was some of the best.
I was sitting there as I'm talking thinking, man, I wish I'd heard this speech when I started out.
I didn't have to learn all this stuff.
I was telling them how to write action scenes, how to build suspense, how to build characters in suspense, how to match guys.
I just thought, this is great.
This is great.
And I finished and I thought, wow, these kids have really got something here.
And a hand went up and I said, how do you find an agent?
So, well, that was a waste of time.
This thing is, it is on tape somewhere if you can find it, but I've never written anything about it.
It is a subject.
There is practical information that you can learn about writing, but in the end, the best thing you can do is read.
And people always say to me, what book should I read?
And I should tell them there are 100 books that you should read.
The classics, read the classics, read the great books, read the books in your field, read the genre books that you want to write in.
Read, read, read.
And so when people say, what book should I read?
It's like, my answer is all of them.
That's how you learn how to write.
From Riley, dear Supreme Lord of the Multiverse, I have listened to your podcast every day for about three months, and I finally have a problem so large it requires your help.
I'm a high school student and I'm having trouble motivating myself to get my work done.
I get depressed and lose any motivation I have.
Whenever I get free time, I always try to use it to cheer myself up, which leads me to not getting my work done.
The cycle then repeats itself all over again.
I don't drink, but I do take medication from my doctor-diagnosed ADHD.
If you have any advice on breaking or even just managing this cycle, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks.
You are my favorite Daily Wire podcast.
Well, thank you.
All right.
First of all, let me say before I say anything else, I'm not a doctor and you shouldn't do anything without consulting a doctor.
But if you're taking medication for ADHD, it should not be coming from your family GP, your general practitioner.
It should be coming from a psychiatrist, somebody who at least knows what he's doing.
I hate that this is an overdiagnosed condition, ADHD.
I don't know Riley can be a girl's name or a boy's name, but usually for boys, they just overdiagnose it.
They think you're an active, healthy boy who wants to run around a little bit, so they diagnose you with ADHD.
I do not know if that's your case.
You should go to your doctor, especially with the Christmas vacation coming up.
If you don't have schoolwork, go to your doctor and ask him if he will take you off the medication for a short period of time.
Just request this.
Don't do it without a doctor's help and advice, right?
But it's not, you can go off ADHD medicine with the doctor's advice.
Go off it and try to create a regime for the Christmas holiday of exercise and prayer and going to church and being very, very active and doing stuff and see if that helps you with your depression and see if that cheers you up.
It would be an interesting experiment to do without the medication to see what that has to do with your depression and what that has to do with this cycle of procrastination.
Can you build a disciplined life in a couple of, however long you have for Christmas vacation without this medication?
Don't do it without your doctor.
Don't do it without a doctor, but it should be a psychiatrist giving you this stuff.
And then try and build a regime of discipline every day.
Get up, exercise every day, jog, work out in the gym, do write something if that's what you do or whatever it is you do, do it.
Go to church, pray, go help people, maybe get a job, whatever, during your Christmas vacation.
And see if that helps you out.
Suspicious Narratives00:04:36
Because it's a tough problem.
And when you're on the drug, it's hard to get to the real you and to see how much the drug is affecting you.
From Shaid, dear Mr. Clavin, I love the show.
I watch every day and I'm reading some of your books.
I only have one bone to pick with you.
Why do you, like Ben and Knowles, equate criticism of Israel, the Israeli government, to criticism of the Jews, as if the government and the citizen were one monolithic body.
This tired old refrain evinces an incredible intellectual dishonesty.
Israel is not the Jews.
Jews are not even a single people, but rather groups of disparate peoples.
I know plenty of Orthodox Jews who are incredibly critical of many actions taken by the Israeli government.
Are you calling them anti-Semites too?
How do you square this glaring double standard when it comes to defending Israel, your plain identity politics, by reading Muslim statements as coming from a place of default anti-Semitism?
I'd like to see a bit more nuance in your analysis, but I'm not holding my breath because you really have it in for the Muslims.
That's all I love this season of Another Kingdom, and I'm purchasing the hard copy of the book as we speak.
Keep the episodes coming.
Thanks.
A couple of issues here.
First, I do not equate criticism of Israel necessarily with anti-Semitism.
I am suspicious.
I am suspicious when non-Israelis, and I don't care if they're Jews, there are plenty, plenty of anti-Semitic Jews.
I am suspicious when people take this incredibly huge area of the Middle East, which does not have a free government in it except for Israel, and find the source of all its problems in Israeli behavior.
I'm sure the Israelis do things wrong.
Americans do things wrong.
Everybody who is a human being does stuff wrong.
And I'm sure there's stuff that can be criticized in Israel.
I'm suspicious when they identify the problems of the Middle East coming out of Israel's actions.
I believe that is the opposite of the truth.
And I'm suspicious when they use overblown phraseology like genocide and apartheid to describe the policies of a country that is the size of a shoebox and is surrounded by enemies on every side.
You can climb a hill in Israel and see four countries that want to wipe the country off the face of the earth.
So they have to behave in different ways than we in America behave where we're so safe and so free.
So I'm suspicious of that.
It's not necessarily anti-Semitism, but I'm suspicious that it is based in anti-Semitism.
Then I want to talk about this thing about Muslims.
I myself feel that I sometimes misspeak on the issue of Islam, that I sometimes paint all Muslims with the brush of radicalism.
I know that's not true.
I've said many times that I know it's not true, but sometimes I'm just talking fast, and instead of saying Islamism or radical Islam, I'll just say Islam.
I do have questions about Islam as a religion.
I have serious questions about it that I would love to talk to somebody about.
And I've listened to a lot of experts about this, but it's very hard to, I'd like to hear a debate about it by two experts who disagree.
I have questions whether the basic tenets of Islam are essentially anti-Christian and therefore anti-Western, which doesn't mean you can't be a good Westerner and Islamic.
It does mean that the philosophy itself is working against the best, what I think is the best form of government on earth.
And that's a problem.
That's a genuine problem.
If there was a place called Nazi land, there would be many nice people living in that land who ascribe to Nazism.
But when they came over here, it would be a problem because Nazism is antithetical to everything that we in the West should believe in, right?
So I'm not saying, I'm not equating Islam and Nazism.
I'm just saying philosophies can be wrong.
Religions can be wrong, and they can be wrong in ways that are antithetical to the things that we hold most dear.
And if so, that's a problem.
You know, I have a problem with these two Muslim women going into Congress who are obviously anti-Semitic and who are anti-Western as far as I can tell.
And that is a problem.
So I have questions about Islam.
I have serious questions about it.
But I know that there are many good Islamic people, many patriotic American Islamic people.
I'm not saying that's not true.
I'm simply talking about the philosophy itself.
So, you know, I'm willing to be educated, but I am somewhat educated.
I've read the Quran.
I've read a lot about it.
And I just, these questions remain.
I worry about it.
I wonder why every Islamic country is in a fight with not only the Muslim people in their countries, but with the non-Islamic countries on their borders.
Everyone, there's violence on the borders of Islam almost everywhere.
And I think there's oppression in almost every Islamic country.
Maybe that grows out of the philosophy itself.
Maybe not, but it does seem suspicious to me.
And I think it's a question worth asking.
The Power of Gratitude00:05:59
I got to stop there.
time for tickety-boo news before we go to Thanksgiving.
Hey, let me play this one little clip of a comedian named Jim Jeffries.
He's...
He's from Australia.
He comes on and he makes jokes about Trump and anti-American jokes all the time.
And then he announced that he's becoming an American citizen.
Here's the clip.
I'm Jim Jeffries and I'm about to become a United States citizen.
Now, I know many of you are wondering, Jim, every Tuesday night you take a giant dump on America.
Why would you want to become part of the problem?
Well, it's for the same reason I date the women I date.
You're large, you're fun, you're trashy.
Some parts of you are fake and over 300 million people have been inside you.
But deep down, I think there's something good in there.
All right.
Fair enough.
And welcome to the country.
I'm glad you're a citizen.
You know, with Thanksgiving coming, I just want to talk for just a minute about the nature of gratitude.
And it is one of the problems, one of the true problems I have with the left is the lack of gratitude.
There's nothing wrong with being culture critical.
There's nothing wrong with being critical of your own country.
We should all be a little critical of our country and try to make it better.
There's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The absence of gratitude changes everything.
You know, there's a review of Michelle Obama's.
I was talking to Knowles about this, Michelle Obama, who I admire.
You know, she worked herself up from a very modest beginnings, has good working class values, became First Lady of the United States.
Her lack of gratitude is appalling.
And somebody reviewing her book, Angie Thomas, the author of The Hate You Give, has a headline in Time magazine, Michelle Obama's Becoming is a book America needs from a woman it does not yet deserve.
Let me tell you something, sister.
This country not only deserves Michelle Obama, this country made Michelle Obama.
There is no Michelle Obama without this country.
If you don't start with gratitude, you do not know what you've got.
You are living in seriously the greatest, freest country on earth.
You're living in the center of freedom.
You're living in the center of wisdom and prosperity, political wisdom and prosperity on earth.
You lucked out, you won the lottery of life.
And to know that and to wake up with that gratitude changes everything.
Every day is a gift and every day you're here is a gift with a ribbon on it.
And that's why I look at people like Colin Kaepernick, the guy who started the quarterback who started the kneeling thing and he says, oh, I'm not going to kneel for the flag of a country that oppresses me.
Listen, it's not like I feel like you fall into being a quarterback.
I understand how hard people work to hone their talent.
It's a beautiful thing.
One of the reasons I love sports is I love watching young people who have taken the talent God gave them and made it into something fantastic.
But listen, you're in a system that allowed you to do that too.
You're in a system that rewards you copiously for doing it.
A little bit of gratitude to the fans, to the flag you play under, a little bit of gratitude changes everything.
I feel the same way about the feminists.
I'm happy that women have more choices.
I truly am.
A little bit of gratitude to the men who built the world you live in, who gave you every piece of technology you have.
Just a little bit of thank you, sir, for all the women you took care of, of all the times you brought home the bacon, of all the roofs you put over the heads of all the children.
And now let me enjoy my rights.
And maybe here's some criticism I have.
Would change everything.
It would change the entire dialogue.
All these people who say, oh, the white men are obsolete because now we're more immigrants are coming in.
How about starting with this?
How about thank you, white men, for building this country that we all want to live in?
How about thank you, white men, for creating a philosophy that includes us, that says, yeah, you can come in if you just adopt this philosophy of freedom.
How about beginning there?
How about thank you, Christianity, for creating the moral wisdom that I am using to protest the things that I don't like.
If you just started there, if you just started there, the conversation between the right and the left would change utterly.
The college students who protest, who are the luckiest kids on Earth, who will probably live to be 150, who may end their careers on Mars, who are going to see things that I'll never live to see, that are so amazing and so beautiful.
How about just a little bit of, hey, God, thanks for putting me here instead of the year 1200 where I'd be dead by 35.
You know, it just changes everything.
So in this Thanksgiving, how about starting with that?
How about starting with that?
That maybe your enemies are really your friends.
Maybe the things you hate so much and criticize so much are things you should be grateful for.
It's true on the right as well, but I think it would change the conversation entirely if we heard it a little bit from guys like Barack Obama instead of how full of hate and full of racism we are.
How about thanks for elevating me, a black man without much experience, to the highest office in the land?
How about starting there and then saying yes, and now I have some criticisms.
Nothing wrong with criticizing your country.
There's nothing wrong with being a strong proponent of your party.
But how about beginning with thanks for the ability we have to do that, to have this fight, to move forward together as Americans?
Have a beautiful Thanksgiving.
It's going to be a long Clavinless weekend, but those of you who survive will be back here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.