Ben Shapiro’s Three Stories, Three Lies dissects Tolkien’s orcs as a metaphor for media bias, mocking Twitter’s selective censorship while defending Trump’s pardons and Saudi policy against "Yemen lies." Grover Norquist joins to slam Democratic tax hikes, pushing a consumption-based system post-2017 cuts, warning of carbon tax traps. The episode pivots to The Favorite, praising its wit over modern gender narratives, then pivots to Melania Trump as a silent resistance icon—all while framing leftist culture wars as a coordinated assault on conservative truth. [Automatically generated summary]
A science fiction writer says that the Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien was racist because he didn't like orcs.
True story.
Author Andy Duncan told Wired magazine, quote, and this is a real quote, it's hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others.
In the long term, if you embrace this too much, it has dire consequences for yourself and for society, unquote.
Duncan, who has won many science fiction and fantasy awards, including the award for making a fuss about utter nonsense and the prestigious award for attacking the author who created the genre in which he wins awards, has a point.
We must not regard orcs as evil warriors raised from the earth by the Dark Lord just because they're evil warriors raised from the earth by the Dark Lord.
People might soon begin to prejudge orcs and feel they shouldn't move into their neighborhoods riding on the backs of battle wolves and driving their jagged swords into the hearts of the innocent.
Before you know it, every time an orc gets in an elevator, the women there will instinctively clutch their purses so that their severed hands will later be hard to detach from the purses they were clutching when the orc cut them to pieces.
Tolkien did indeed speak in very bigoted terms about the multicolored goblin-like creatures whom he said had hearts of granite, deformed bodies, and foul faces which smile not.
He also displayed his privilege by criticizing the orc habit of eating human flesh.
Obviously, different cultures have different culinary tastes, and it would be the height of small-mindedness to condemn a person's dining habits just because he struck off your leg with a battle axe and then tore it to pieces with his dagger-sharp, blood-drenched fangs.
In reaction to Duncan's woke remarks, J.R.R. Tolkien was banned from Twitter, where phrases like, orcs are not human beings, have been deemed hateful.
Although it's still fine to say that about Jews.
A Wonderful Feeling of Security00:03:24
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
And birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-ding.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right.
Boy, this week went by so fast.
The Clavenless weekend is already looming above us like a mountain that is about to collapse or maybe an avalanche of sheer terror and blackness.
But here it is, but stave it off.
Do not go gentle into that Clavenless weekend.
Stave it off by listening tomorrow to the latest episode of Another Kingdom, which will be available to everybody.
That's chapter eight, The Darkest Hour.
There's only two more after that.
So you want to tune in and hit it while you can.
That will be released tomorrow for everybody.
It's been available to subscribers all week, but now it'll be released to everybody.
And you can find that on iTunes.
And please go on and subscribe and leave a five-star review if you like it.
Same thing with the show.
It really helps us out when you do that, when you subscribe.
And even if on YouTube, if you're watching on YouTube or listening on YouTube, you hit that little bell and you can get a subscription there.
That helps us out as well.
And if you would like to get the copy of the book, I know this is my audience, so not too many of you can read, but those of you who can actually read books, if you want to get the first season of Another Kingdom in novel form, you can get that at anotherkingdom.editorsexclusives.com.
That's pre-ordering it.
It comes out in March, but you get all these goodies, including a prequel I wrote.
So you can get it at anotherkingdom.editorsexclusives.com.
You can get the book there.
That's all another kingdom stuff.
Now, let us talk about, I love this.
This is Calming Comfort Weighted Blanket.
Over Thanksgiving, I had relatives and friends came over and my Calming Comfort weighted blanket was actually sitting on a chair and everybody started trying it out and it was really amazing.
The thing about this was a weighted blanket, so it kind of imitates the feeling of being hugged.
It just gives you, it's like that, remember the little blankie you carried around like Linus when you were a kid?
That's what it's like.
And you put it on the bed, so help me.
So even I slept better, and I never sleep.
Even I slept better under this weighted calming comfort blanket, but everybody was trying it out and they put it on there.
You just hear this kind of sigh like, ah, I like this so much.
You can experience a great feeling of really, it really is this kind of feeling of security, the wonderful feeling of having a blanket.
The Calming Comfort weighted blanket comes with a 90-day anxiety-free, stress-free, best night's sleep of your life guarantee from Sharper Image.
And right now, just for our listeners, you can go to CommingComfortBlanket.com and use the promo code Clavin at checkout to receive 15% off the displayed price.
And because you can't cut a price on a great night's sleep, go online now at calmingcomfortblanket.com and use the promo code Clavin.
You can sleep like a log or just lie awake asking the big questions like, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No E's in Clavin.
I just make it look easy.
So you want to try it out.
It really is a lovely feeling.
Pardon Offered to Manafort00:16:02
So, you know, I'm watching the news this week, and there have been a couple of stories, and we're going to cover a bunch of them.
There's one breaking right now that's kind of interesting.
But I ask myself, I look at the news and you ask yourself, what's the purpose of the news media?
And this has been something that's been on my mind since I was in the news media as a young man.
You think, like, what am I doing here?
What is the work that I'm sent here to do?
Because it's, you know, it's basic Aristotelian logic.
You cannot know whether a thing is good until you know, you cannot know if you're doing a good job until you know what the job is for.
You can't know the nature of something until you know what it's supposed to do.
Well, what's the job of the news media in a free society?
It's obviously to inform the people so they can make good choices about the government because they are the sovereign of the government.
Their government represents them.
They are not in the government, but they are the power of the government, the sovereign of the government.
You want them informed so they make good choices.
And Donald Trump is just right about this.
The news media fails.
They fail in this in every way because of their leftist bent, because of their bias.
And, you know, it ain't right.
It ain't right.
There's nothing we can do about it by law because of the First Amendment, and that's the way it should be.
But there is, there should be some appeal to conscience.
It's not enough to say, oh, this is what people want to see.
It's not enough to say, you know, it's capitalism and we're here to make a profit.
Capitalism doesn't excuse you from virtue.
You know, we all want to make a profit, but capitalism doesn't excuse you from being a virtuous person.
You still want to do the thing.
You want to make money by doing the thing that people are showing up for.
And people show up for the news, or they should show up for the news to be informed.
And every story, every story, they are misinforming us.
And Trump is right.
I don't know if it's right to call them the enemy of the people.
I get that that's a weighted phrase that's been used by tyrants, but they are certainly working against the best interests of the people.
So let's take a look at some of the stories that have been coming down today that we've been covering.
And the way they're just being twisted, I mean, we have to start with the Mueller investigation because there's a breaking story here.
Michael Cohen, who was the kind of tough-talking fixer, the guy who said he'd take a bullet for Donald Trump.
Apparently, he'd take a bullet for Donald Trump, but he ain't going to prison for him.
All these guys are like this.
These New York tough guys, you know, they're all these little like wheatly guys who sit around and talk like they're gangsters, but they're not gangsters.
Even gangsters, they talk tough, but the minute the feds have got them, they roll over.
They're all like this.
So anyway, he's rolling over and he's talking to Mueller.
And now he is talking, telling the story about that he's pleading guilty.
He pled guilty in court today to lying about a Trump Tower project that was going to be built in Moscow, but never got built.
They were just discussing it.
They were talking about it.
At one point, Trump signed a letter of intent, which is not binding, just saying that, yes, he was thinking of doing this, and they were negotiating with it.
And apparently, in closed-door session with Congress, Cohen told them that they had stopped talking about this long before the election began, but they hadn't.
He was talking about it into 2016, and he went and so he pleaded guilty to lying.
So here's another one of these witnesses that Mueller has got who is pleading guilty to lying.
And, you know, what they were doing, this is a basically doing business, thinking about doing business in Moscow.
And we even have, I mean, this is really damning, we have a video of the president encouraging businesses to do business with Moscow.
It's very suspicious business.
Here's the president encouraging American businesses to do business in Moscow.
Companies represented here today are moving forward with a series of major trade and investment deals that will create jobs for both Americans and Russians across many sectors, from aerospace to automotive engineering to the financial sector and high technology.
I am especially pleased that Boeing and Russian Technologies are moving forward with a $4 billion deal on 50 Boeing 737s.
This is a win for Russia, creating a long-term market for its raw materials and resulting in modern airplanes for Russia's travelers.
That really is damning the president of the...
Well, wait, wait, I'm sorry.
That was a different president.
Sorry about that.
It was a different president.
And this was 2010 when Obama was bringing, personally, bringing businesses over to Moscow.
So doing business with Moscow has only suddenly become this sinister thing.
And I have to play, well, let's play Trump's version of this first, because Cohen himself didn't make a statement to the press.
But here is Trump being asked about it.
And here's what he says about Michael Cohen saying that he lied about when this project was going forward.
So Michael Cohn has made many statements to the House, as I understand it, and the Senate.
He put out a statement talking about a project, which was essentially, I guess, more or less of an option that we were looking at in Moscow.
Everybody knew about it.
It was written about in newspapers.
It was a well-known project.
It was during the early part of 16, and I guess even before that, it lasted a short period of time.
I didn't do the project.
I decided not to do the project.
So I didn't do it.
So we're not talking about doing a project.
We're talking about not doing a project.
Michael Cohn, what he's doing is he was convicted, I guess.
You'll have to put it into legal terms.
But he was convicted with a fairly long-term sentence on things totally unrelated to the Trump organization, having to do with mortgages and having to do with cheating the IRS, perhaps, a lot of different things.
I don't know exactly, but he was convicted of various things unrelated to us.
He was given a fairly long jail sentence, and he's a weak person.
And by being weak, unlike other people that you watch, he's a weak person.
And what he's trying to do is get a reduced sentence.
So he's lying about a project that everybody knew about.
Well, it is true.
This project was not a secret.
I'm not sure whether Trump, I couldn't find anything of Trump saying that it had been turned off earlier than this, but it's another one of these examples.
Remember, they were talking earlier in the week, Mueller went before the court and he said that Paul Manafort was lying to him and therefore violating his plea agreement.
And he wanted him to get the full sentence instead of the sentence they had agreed to, the reduced sentence they had agreed to.
And the press played this like, oh, Manafort is lying, but the lies, it now turns out, according to sources talking to the Wall Street Journal, the lies were alleged misstatements about his personal business dealings and his contacts with a former associate in the Ukraine.
And they don't seem to have anything to do with this Trump-Russia collusion.
And just to flesh this out a little bit before talking about the way the press has covered this, we've got to go to our old friend Adam Schiff, this guy who, you know, I always make fun of the left for calling people Hitler and calling people McCarthy, but Adam Schiff is a genuine Joe McCarthy figure.
He has been damning people without producing evidence since this whole thing began, and he does it again here.
Everything he says here is simply, it's just not true.
Well, if Mr. Cohen misled the Congress about the president's business dealings in Russia deep into the campaign, it also means that the president misled the country about his business dealings and that the Russians were apparently attempting to gain financial leverage over the potential president of the United States.
This just underscores how important it is for us to finish the investigation, to determine what financial links the Russians have to the president and the Trump organization, to determine whether they continue to hold leverage.
So clearly, we have a lot more work to be done.
And just as clearly, the president has misled the country about his financial dealings with the Russians.
Well, who says?
I mean, just because Michael Cohn lied about something, we don't even know exactly what the lies were, but just because he lied in closed-door sessions about this, why does that mean that Trump lied or that Trump did anything wrong?
He was doing business with Russia as a businessman, and he stopped.
And as he says, he didn't go through with it.
But the problem here for me, and it's a huge problem, is the absolutely supine credulousness with which the press has covered this because they want to destroy Donald Trump so badly.
Let's take it from the top.
The Russians, as far as we can tell, spent a couple of bucks on Facebook putting out trollish little stories that were kind of in keeping with the other stories that were going back and forth in America.
There's no evidence, as Rod Rosenstein himself has said in the Justice Department, there's no evidence that this had any effect on the elections.
There's all this idea that they were tampering with our elections, that they did something with the vote that they had in effect, the stuff Max Boot came on the show and talked about.
It's just not so.
Or if it's so, nobody has indicated it or shown it in any way, shape, or form.
So we're talking about something that didn't actually have any effect, just kind of this minor trolling that some Russians have been accused of and will never learn the truth of it because they'll never appear in court, so it'll never be proved.
That's the first thing.
Secondly, collusion is not a crime.
There's no such crime as collusion.
So the thing that we're talking about is not even illegal.
And yet, and yet, this is covered with this po-faced credulousness, this kind of blank stare that it's all fine.
Well, nobody is asking except on the right and mostly really good reporters like Kimberly Strassel, thank you, at the Wall Street Journal is doing a great job, and Molly Hemingway at the Federalist are really covering the fact that this is a disgusting display of machine politics by the Obama administration,
where they took this stuff, this misinformation that Hillary Clinton's people had collected from the Russians and gave to the intelligence people and the intelligence people made sure it got leaked to the press and the presses covered, you know, followed it.
All the stuff that Trump is angry about on this, he's right to be angry about it.
This is a setup and yet, and yet, what would it look like?
What would it look like if the press covered this honestly, if they covered it from both sides?
It would be a different story.
And it's just, and now Trump is playing them because they get hysterical every time he says anything that indicates that he thinks that the Mueller investigation is a sham.
So recently he told the New York Post, he said he hasn't taken a pardon for Paul Manafort off the table.
What he said was, he said, we've never discussed it, but we haven't taken it off the table.
Why would I take it off the table?
Now stop and think about that statement for a minute.
That's a non-statement.
That statement means nothing.
We haven't discussed it.
I haven't taken it off the table.
But why would I take it off the table?
That's a non-statement.
That doesn't mean anything.
So let's hear how cable news played this.
This is both CNN and MSNBC, how they played that statement and what they think this means.
It sounds like the president is dangling a pardon to Paul Manafort.
And at this point in time where Manafort is signed up on Team USA, that's really pretty close to witness tampering.
Joyce, you've already alluded to witness tampering.
Is there any cause here to wonder about A, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, which you've mentioned.
In an interview with the New York Post, President Trump dangled the possibility of a pardon for his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, saying, quote, it was never discussed, but I wouldn't take it off the table.
Why would I take it off the table?
And from a legal perspective, this is problematic for him.
Yes, the president has very broad pardon power.
He could pardon Manafort, but dangling a pardon is something different.
It is offering to use your presidential power in order to encourage or entice or influence somebody's behavior.
That is a separate act.
And that can also be evidence of obstruction.
Gibberish and crap.
It's all gibberish and crap.
The president has broad pardon powers.
He can basically pardon anybody he wants.
And he didn't say anything about pardoning anybody.
He said it wasn't discussed.
And we didn't take it off the table.
How could he take it off the table if it wasn't discussed?
It's absolute nonsense.
It goes back to what Sebastian Gorka was talking about earlier this week, that the president has a trick he pulls where he draws these people into speaking nonsense, blithering nonsense on TV, while what he's really doing, what he's really doing is something else.
What I think he's really doing is he is delegitimizing the Mueller investigation.
By the time Mueller releases whatever compilation of innuendo he puts out or compilation of facts he puts out, Trump has already undermined, dug out the ground from underneath him.
So he's going to look like, it's going to look like bias no matter what he comes up with, unless it's Donald Trump dancing with Putin under the moonlight.
It's going to be really hard for him to make any headway at all, certainly with Trump's base.
So it's just nonsense.
If they covered this story honestly, I think Obama and Hillary would look a lot worse than they do.
And I think that then maybe if they came up with something on Trump, maybe it would stick.
Let's go over to the Khashoggi affair, this guy who was murdered in Saudi Arabia.
Now, I talked about how I feel about the fact, the way Trump handled it.
I felt like he should have been more hypocritical, that ultimately we're not going to blow up a relation with the Saudis.
But yeah, you smack him around a little bit when they butcher somebody, even if he's not a good guy.
And Khashoggi, I don't think, was a good guy.
I think he was backing the Muslim Brotherhood and he was using his post at the Washington Post to do that.
It was a political post, not really a journalistic post, and the Post was letting him do that.
But still, and I said, you know, Trump should have been a little bit more hypocritical.
He should have virtue signaled a little bit more.
He should have squeezed some concessions out of Saudi Arabia.
And so now the Congress is angry at him.
Now, you have to remember.
So the Congress, let's get to the story first.
The Congress went in for a briefing, and the head of the CIA was not there to give him a briefing.
And there's this question.
Trump and his people are saying the CIA has not definitively said that the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia was guilty.
CIA people have leaked to the press that they do say this.
And of course, it's very hard to imagine a murder like this taking place without the Crown Prince's knowledge.
So I think that, you know, it's kind of hard to say it.
So anyway, Lindsey Graham and others, they went in and they voted to push forward a bill that would take away our support from the Saudis in the civil war in Yemen.
Okay.
And I'll get back to that in just a minute.
And Lindsey Graham went in, and Lindsey Graham is a very tough guy when it comes to, you know, he's a very hawkish guy when it comes to the international scene.
And he came out of this meeting and he was genuinely ticked off because Nina Haspel from the CIA wasn't there, Gina Haspel.
And this is what he said.
I am not going to be denied the ability to be briefed by the CIA that we have oversight of about whether or not their assessment supports my belief that this could not have happened without MBS knowing.
And if the briefing reinforces the conclusion that I already have tentatively formed, then there will be no more business as usual with Saudi Arabia.
You're talking about the spending bill being what you would say.
I'm talking about any key vote.
Anything that you need me for to get out of town.
I ain't doing it until we hear from the CIA.
Okay.
So I understand what Lindsey Graham is saying.
But you have to remember this, okay?
The Senate is not in charge of foreign policy.
The president is the leader on foreign policy.
It is the president who is trying to negotiate, and the president's men who are trying to negotiate their way out of this war in Yemen.
Let's just talk about this war in Yemen for a minute.
War In Yemen00:15:00
It's a civil war, and it's vicious, and it is a human rights disaster, and it is just tearing the country apart.
And you've got to remember, people live in these countries.
They're not just the government.
They're the people who live in these countries.
And people are being slaughtered, and kids are starving, and it's awful.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, repeatedly refers to this as Saudi Arabia's war.
Repeatedly, they do it on the captions of their pictures.
They do it on little information inserts that they put in their stories.
They do it on videos.
Saudi Arabia, how Saudi Arabia is running this war.
This is Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen.
This is a proxy war in Yemen, and it is between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
And a lot of the people who are trying to undermine our relationship with Saudi Arabia because of this Khashoggi thing are people who are trying to restore Barack Obama's lunatic policy of supporting Iran, the worst country on earth, one of the worst terrorist sponsors on earth.
Now, that's not what Lindsey Graham is doing.
What Lindsey Graham is doing is joining up with those people temporarily to send a little zetz to the president to say, hey, you've got to be a little tougher on these people.
And that's okay.
That's good politics.
But remember, it's the president who's desperately trying to get to this peace.
And here's what Pompeo said about the bill that they were pushing forward in the Senate.
We are on the cusp of allowing the U.S. Envoy Martin Griffiths to, in December, gather the parties together and hopefully get a ceasefire.
In Yemen, something that we have diplomatically been striving for for months, and we think we're right on the cusp of that.
And so it is the view of the administration, Secretary Mattis and myself, that passing a resolution at this point undermines that.
It would encourage the Houthis.
It would encourage the Iranians.
It would undermine the fragile agreement for everyone to go to Sweden and have this discussion.
So it's all lots of fun for the Senate to virtue signal and say, and again, I said Trump should have been a little bit harsher, a lot harsher in his rhetoric against the Crown Prince.
He should have, you know, he should have opposed.
He should have said, no, we can't allow this and all this.
And he did say this.
He did release a statement condemning it.
But, you know, when he talks, he's such a blunderbuss that he just goes like, boom, you know, we're going to keep our relationship.
We need the money.
We need the allies and all this stuff.
But what they're really talking about is negotiating a peace which would not come about if America were not backing the Saudi Arabian side in this civil war.
When he was talking about the Houthis, that's the Iranian side in the civil war.
They're trying to broker this piece to save a lot of lives.
So all the stuff about Khashoggi is well and good.
And yes, we should definitely stand up for American values at all times and say the right words.
But they're talking about a lot of dead people, a lot of dead kids, a lot of dead women who are just being slaughtered, dead civilians who are being slaughtered in the Civil War.
And we're not going to hold that up to avenge Khashoggi.
And it's ridiculous.
And for the New York Times, I mean, shame on them, really.
For the New York Times to call this Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen is just a plain lie.
It is a plain lie.
And if they covered it honestly, at least we would be able to see the complexities that Trump and Pompeo and Mattis are dealing with that make it a little difficult to do the kind of virtue signaling that the people in Congress who are not responsible for it don't have, you know, they get to do that.
But Trump and his people cannot do it.
They have to deal on the ground.
And the final story I want to deal with in terms of the way the press has recovered it is not the way the press has covered it, because when I say the media, I don't just mean the news media.
I also mean social media.
It's what's happening on Twitter.
Really interesting, this story.
I just want to get back to the story because I covered it in the beginning of the week and I want to get back to a development that's taken place.
We were talking about the fact that people are being kicked off Twitter and one of the things they're being kicked off Twitter for is saying that men are men and women are women.
It's like saying, it's like kicking people off Twitter for saying rain is wet.
You know, it's like rain is wet.
You know, I'm sorry, that's a hateful thing to say.
How about what if you're dry rain?
What if you're, you know, that's what they're saying.
What if you're a man who's a woman?
What if you're a woman who's a man?
So it's nuts.
But the other thing that happened, of course, was this guy, Jesse Kelly, who is a right-wing talk show guy.
He's got a provocative sense of humor, sort of like me.
He's a Marine combat vet.
He was kicked off Twitter for no reason that was given to him.
His thing was just taken away from him.
Well, let's just play what he was saying to Tucker Carlson after he was taken off, because it was really true.
He was talking about the fact that InfoWars was shut down and nobody except for me and Tucker II, I believe, spoke up about that.
And we said, this is wrong.
This is taking the weakest guy, but they're coming after all of us.
And that's what Jesse Kelly said after he was pulled off.
They came for Alex Jones first because he's a nut job and they wanted to see how the right would react.
They got him and not knew they were coming for me.
They'll come for you two.
It's not a big deal that I got kicked off Twitter.
It hurts Twitter worse than it hurt me because they finally kicked off somebody that woke everybody on the right up.
People are now starting to realize what Twitter has become.
Twitter's nothing but a platform.
It's a blank piece of paper that somehow one day woke up and decided that they were the artists, that they were in control of what gets put on that piece of paper.
And that's not where their power lies.
So if they continue along this path, it's going to be nothing but two feminists screaming at each other because one of them accidentally found a boyfriend.
Great lie.
That's very funny.
So anyway, there was a reaction to this.
It was not the Alex Jones situation.
Instapundent Glenn Reynolds, he pulled his account.
And the Federalists reported that Jack Dorsey had lied under oath to Congress when he said this is the public square.
We don't censor people according to their political views.
And that was very dangerous for Dorsey.
And in response to that, the Federalist story, a top aide for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees and regulates telecommunication companies and social media publishers like Twitter, told the Federalist that the committee is now looking into whether Dorsey lied.
And hours after that, incoming Missouri Senator Josh Hawley called for a congressional investigation into Twitter's practices because Twitter is violating the rules under which it operates, which make it a platform, not a publisher.
We've talked about this before.
If it's a publisher, it can be sued anytime anybody lies.
Suddenly, Kelly's account without any explanation comes back online.
And that should tell us a lot.
That should tell us they are doing whatever they can get away with, that if they can be stopped, they should be stopped.
And I hope they will be stopped.
I hope Donald Trump pays attention to this.
I hope the president actually takes us under advisement.
This is a powerful communication method.
They are using it for political purposes.
But the lie here, the big lie, well, the big lie is, of course, that they're not doing it.
But the other lie, the other lie, is that when you censor people from saying that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you are essentially demanding that they conform to your version of reality.
I've talked, I hope, with compassion about people who feel that they are the wrong gender or the wrong sex or however you want to say it.
I don't mean to be uncompassionate about it, but you do not become a woman simply because you cut bits of yourself off.
You do not become a woman simply because you wear a dress.
You don't become a woman because you feel like a woman.
And if you can't say that, then you cannot put forward your idea of reality and you have ceased to be a platform because that's what a platform does.
It allows people to express their opinion.
There is nothing hateful about telling the truth.
There is nothing hateful about telling the truth.
It is often the most loving thing that you can do.
All right, listen, coming up on Monday, December 3rd, our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage, the holiday edition.
Our version of Santa Claus, we just call him the God-King, the Daily Wire God-King, Jeremy Boring.
I hate when they write on this, the God-King.
It's the Daily Wire God King.
We don't want to give him too big a purview, but he will come down the chimney with Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and me, and we'll be talking holidays, politics, culture, and how the left ruins all of them.
So be sure to tune in.
And as always, the lovely and talented Alicia Kraus will be classing up the place and taking your questions as they roll in.
Only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.
You'll get Another Kingdom.
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All right, we got Grover Norquist coming right up.
And we're going to stay online to let you hear that, but that's no reason not to subscribe.
In fact, it's even a better reason.
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All right, have we got Grover?
Grover Norquist is the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform that works to limit the size and cost of government and opposes higher taxes at the federal, state, and local levels and supports tax reform that moves towards taxing consumed income one time at one rate.
It's nice to see you.
I've never met you before and it's nice of you to be here.
Thanks for coming on.
Good to be with you.
So let's start at the beginning before we get to the election and the results of the election.
Your position is they're basically taxes should never go up.
Is that a fair way to say it?
Correct.
Taxes are too high.
Spending is too high.
Taxes should certainly not go up and we need to bring spending down.
And so is this a way of what they call starving the beast?
If you think if you keep taxes low that ultimately the government will have to find a way to spend less?
Not entirely.
What it does do is if Congress, enough members of Congress, and we have 90% of Republicans in the House and Senate made a commitment in writing to the American people, I will never support a vote for a tax increase.
If you take tax increases off the table, then and only then is there a conversation about reforming government to cost less.
As long as taxes are an option, the Democrats never cease to be willing to talk about another tax.
Let's tax beer or wine or cigarettes or this, that, or the other thing, or rich people or people who live in other states.
And you never get to reforming government to cost less.
Once taxes are off the table and the only thing to look at is spending, then we've actually had some success, even in Obama's presidency, in actual reduction of spending as a percentage of the economy.
So can you put into plain English what it means to tax consumed income one time at one rate?
What exactly does that mean in real words?
Sure.
You want to do one rate.
I'm originally from Massachusetts prior to emigrating to the United States.
I grew up in Massachusetts.
And there we have by constitution a flat rate, single rate income tax.
And five times the left has put on the ballot, let's go to a graduate income tax.
Five times Deep Blue, Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, Massachusetts has voted that down.
Once you have a flat tax, people do not want to go to a graduate tax because they have a very sophisticated conversation on talk radio.
Yeah, year one, they raised Ted Kennedy's taxes.
Then they come for me and the Kennedy kids don't care.
And they'll just raise our taxes altogether.
So you want a single rate.
When I say consumed income, we want to tax income one time.
If you save it, you don't tax the part that's saved.
You tax it when it's consumed later.
So you want tax income one time, consumption one time.
Right now we tax you when you earn it.
When you save it, when you invest it, we tax it again.
If it goes into a company and it earns money, it gets taxed again.
If you're stupid enough to die, they tax it again.
So we want to say, look, pick a time.
Beginning, end, middle, whatever.
Steal some.
Go away.
All right, fair enough.
And were you happy with the tax reform bill that was passed under Trump?
It was a very, very good start.
Very important to take our corporate tax from 35%, highest in the world.
This is difficult for Americans who think that we're the free marketplace, right?
China, socialist China, 25% corporate tax.
We had a 35% corporate tax.
Germany, 25%.
We were the highest in the world, the worst taxers of corporate income, and companies were leaving the United States because of that policy.
We went from 35 down to 21.
President wanted 15.
I like 15 too.
It's a lower number than 21.
But it was a huge step forward.
That's really where we got the strong growth that started up as soon as the tax bill passed.
So now a Democrat majority is coming in to the House.
Nancy Pelosi, who has again and again promised to go after this bill.
She's just got, it seems, the support that she needs to become Speaker of the House, though the real vote is in January.
What do you see coming up?
It'll be a very interesting question.
Will they actually pass a bill to increase income taxes?
We cut individual income taxes.
We cut corporate income taxes.
And we cut taxes on smaller businesses passed through corporations, subchapter S corporations.
These are the sort of mom and pop, you know, 5, 10, 50 employees, one employee.
All three, big companies, small companies, individuals, all got cut.
Will the Democrats actually vote to bring those taxes up?
Because it won't pass the Senate.
The president won't sign it.
But they would sort of signal where they want to go.
My guess is they hide and they don't do that.
But the counter argument is they're running around talking about a carbon tax.
And if you really want to show your hand on an energy tax, which is a gasoline tax, plus a tax on your home heating, on your air conditioning, on everything that you buy as an energy component to the cost of it, they just introduced a bill, a guy named Deutsch, out of Florida.
It puts in a carbon tax that increases every year without end.
And it doesn't take another vote from Congress.
They're willing to put that forward.
No Republican has decided to touch it yet.
The two who flirted with it, but they refused to show up at the press conference.
So they may have decided better than to support an energy tax, a carbon tax.
I would like the Democrats to be clear about their plans to raise taxes.
If they do, they will lose the majority in two years.
If they don't, and CBS agrees not to see them not do it, then they might be able to get re-elected.
Yeah, well, that is one.
I mean, it is interesting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the Laffer curve has been in effect and this latest tax reform did increase the takings of the government, which never gets reported, that as they cut taxes, actually the revenue goes up and therefore the taxes go up, which indicates the problem on the spending end.
Buying Republican Votes00:03:30
It is.
We had a significant tax cut rate reduction, and total revenue went up because the economy grew.
That's exactly what the Laffer curve says.
It's what happened under Coolidge in the 20s.
It's what happened.
They had 11% growth one year with Coolidge's tax cuts.
It's what happened with John F. Kennedy's across the board tax cut, 25%, the Reagan tax cuts across the board.
And now with the Trump tax cuts, every time you've got growth, which brought in more revenue, and the government got a smaller percentage of the entire economy, but it had more money to spend on.
I mean, there are a few things the government is supposed to do, keep the Canadians on their side of the border, that sort of thing.
But beyond that, it ought not to become an increasingly large part of our lives.
When we went to war with Britain, the average individual in the 13 colonies paid between 1 and 2 percent of their total income in taxes.
The Brits were talking about 3, and we started shooting at them.
Yeah, no, it is amazing.
If they came back today, they would be absolutely appalled.
There's something else I want to ask you about.
Now, you've been in the forefront of fighting against earmarks.
Is that fair to say?
Well, certainly a strong supporter of getting rid of earmarks.
There have been some real heroes in the House and Senate.
Boehner never took one, the former Republican leader, and he really drove them out of the House.
That was very helpful.
There's a theory that goes around here at the Daily Wire, which I have heard and don't know what to make of, that the reason Congress is so deadlocked and so at such a stalemate on issues like immigration, for instance, where they keep talking about it, but they don't do anything about it, is because there are no earmarks to trade.
That the stagnation that has come over our lawmakers basically originates with the end of earmarks and that earmarks were an ugly but important way of making the sausage.
What do you think of that?
Okay, earmarks are the currency of corruption.
If you want a congressman or senator to vote for a bill that is bad for his or her district, that is against their principles, you say, here's some money to give to your favorite university in your school.
Here's some cash to hand out to the Chamber of Commerce or to a company.
We will buy your vote with other people's money.
And now you will now cast a vote that you know is wrong and that you would not do without the bribe.
The challenge is, at the end of the day, I wouldn't mind earmarks for Democrats.
I think the problem is you buy Republican votes for spending bills that are too large, but they say, but what if we gave you some extra and then you could vote for it?
So that's how you buy Republican votes for legislation, spending bills that are too high.
It is bad for their souls.
I don't mind earmarks for Democrats because they don't have souls.
So it's not the same problem.
To buy a Democrat vote for tax cuts with earmarks, I'd be okay with that.
But you have to have it for one or the either.
And the chances are that the big government people will use spending to buy votes for bigger spending.
The left hates that we haven't been doing the growing government with the same speed that we used to do because earmarks don't buy Republican votes for tax hikes and spending increases.
The First Lady's Rise00:06:48
That is a good thing.
Gridlock is always better than stupid.
Grover Norquist, very interesting.
I'm glad you came on.
I hope you'll come on again.
It was nice to meet you and interesting conversation.
Thanks a lot.
Good to see you.
All right, stuff I like.
That was great.
Who is that?
Dave Ali?
I like that one.
All right.
You know, I got a couple of things I want to talk about today.
Two things, literally a couple of things.
One is this film, The Favorite.
If you haven't seen it, it's in theaters now.
It is, you know, they used to say of Deadwood that it was Shakespeare with, and then a filthy word.
So it was Shakespeare with dirty words.
This is Masterpiece Theater with Dirty Words.
It takes place during the reign of Queen Anne in England in the early 18th century.
And it is about two women fighting for her favorite.
It is just filled with good, great acting and wonderful writing.
Olivia Coleman is the queen.
You've seen her.
She was in a cop show on Netflix, but she's a really good actress.
Emma Stone is wonderful.
I actually did not recognize her.
I didn't know she was in it, and I didn't recognize her through most of the movie.
She does a spectacular British accent, and Rachel Weiss was always excellent.
And basically, Emma Stone and Rachel Weiss are fighting for the ear of the queen, and it is just dynamite.
You know, there's nothing more fun in the movies than watching great actresses go full, basically.
I mean, just basically play the worst kind of women in the world.
And that's what this is like.
It is just really entertaining.
There is one scene, a dance scene, where I won't even tell you.
It is laugh out loud, funny, if you understand the scene.
It's a very subtle joke, but it is laugh out loud, funny.
And Olivia Coleman, she's just kind of risen up after this movie.
I think it's called Broadchurch.
Is that what it is?
I'll look it up.
But let's say Broadchurch, yeah, she's one of the cops in Broadchurch.
And she plays the Queen.
And here's a scene where she comes out to meet the Russian ambassador.
And Rachel Weiss is the woman who is her favorite of the title.
And she is honest with her.
And one of the really interesting things in it is the difference between the character Weiss plays and the character Emma Stone plays.
And it kind of comes as a shock in the movie, the actual differences between them.
Very high intellectual movie, but really entertaining.
Here's the scene where Rachel Weiss shows that she will be honest with the Queen.
I'm ready for the Russian ambassador.
Who did your makeup?
We want something dramatic.
Do you like it?
You look like a badger.
Oh.
Are you going to cry?
Really?
Well, what do you think you look like?
Do you really think you can meet the Russian delegation looking like that?
No.
I will manage it.
Go back to your rooms.
thank you did you just look at me Did you?
Look at me.
Look at me.
How dare you?
Close your eyes!
This is this wonderful world where the men are completely emasculated, and that has bad ramifications in the running of the government, but the women are just absolutely at the top of their game, and it is just very entertaining.
And there's nothing better than watching wonderful actresses try to act each other off the screen.
It really is terrific.
The other thing I want to talk about, the other stuff I like, is Melania Trump, our first lady.
I just have to talk about this for a minute.
She decorated the White House for Christmas, and there was some red tree.
I don't know.
I am no way of judging this myself.
It looks festive and Christmassy to me.
It's certainly not an important thing.
And of course, the press just went after her whole hog.
They called it kooky and jarring, a touch of menace.
Vice said Melania was planning another Christmas from hell.
You know, just the hate, the babbling, bubbling hate that comes out of the press for the first lady.
And it expresses itself more than anything, of course, in the fact that this beautiful, graceful woman is not on any of the magazine covers.
She never gets the kind of coverage that most first ladies get, even Laura Bush got, and even some other Republican First Ladies, but especially, of course, Michelle Obama and any Democrat First Lady is always going to get the kind of elevation that they get and just the fact that they represent us.
And I have to say, you know, Melania Trump has a past that I made fun of and that I will probably continue to make fun of.
There was every reason to think that she was going to do a bad job as First Lady.
I would have said so.
I'm not very big on attacking First Ladies, but I would have said so if I thought she was doing a bad job.
I think she has been excellent.
She's been gracious.
She's been lovely.
She's fighting this opiate thing, which, you know, the news came out today that the life expectancy in America has fallen yet again, which is a sin.
And the only reason it didn't fall more is because we're making headway in the fight against cancer.
But all of this is suicide.
It's all despair.
It's all spiritual.
And she's doing that fight.
And this is what the press is talking about.
Here's the thing that I just want to say, though.
If they had put her on the magazine covers, if they had put her on TV, if they had treated her with the respect that she deserves just from her position and the respect also that she has earned by her graciousness and her loveliness and her ability to represent us as First Lady, she would have just been a first lady.
But as it is, they have turned her by excluding her, by degrading her, by attacking her, by disrespecting her.
They have turned her into an icon.
And it is rather wonderful.
They've turned her into the representative of ourselves.
And I just want to say that we get it, folks.
We get it, mainstream media, and we get it, Hollywood.
We get it.
You hate us.
We understand.
We got the message.
You don't want us to partake in your glamour.
You don't want us to appear to be sophisticated.
You don't want us to seem that we have a sense of humor and can make jokes as well.
So you've banned us from late-night TV.
You've banned us from the magazine covers.
You've banned us from Hollywood.
We get it.
You hate us and back at you.
And I think that she has become the icon of that.
She has become the receptacle of that hatred.
And it makes her more beautiful.
It makes her really an important figure, a more important figure than she would be if she were just a first lady and were being treated with the respect that the first lady of the United States of America deserves.
All right.
We are going into the Clavinless weekend.
Andrew Klavan Show Produced00:01:18
I'm sorry to leave you here, but I must, I must.
Those of you who survive gather here again on Monday.
We will be here.
The backstage will be here, and we'll all be talking together.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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.
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