Andrew Clavin’s Trump Shows Good Character episode frames the president’s "flaws"—bullying, recklessness—as strengths against a "girly," progressive left, citing Dan Henninger’s WSJ defense of his blunt style. He dismisses media claims on illegal immigrant crime rates, citing 4,000 homicides in two years while mocking figures like Chris Cuomo for ignoring data. The show pivots to masculinity, attacking the APA’s "harmful" guidelines linking stoicism to health risks as anti-male propaganda, then teases Brad Meltzer’s The First Conspiracy, detailing George Washington’s 1776 discovery of a British-backed assassination plot by his own bodyguards—executed publicly after forming a secret counterintelligence committee. Clavin frames this as proof of Washington’s unmatched leadership, contrasting it with modern "woke" absurdities like reparations for "sleep debt." The episode ends by doubling down on Trump’s border policies as principled defiance, urging conservatives to embrace his chaos over establishment cowardice. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, we began this week with President Trump and the Democrats in intense negotiations over border security.
Trump was offering to compromise on DACA and wall spending, while the Democrats countered with an offer to slaughter his grandchildren, set the Oval Office on fire, and dig a hole in the White House lawn in the hope the president would fall into it and break his leg.
The Democrats say the president's intransigent refusal even to consider their response is why many government workers will remain idle and unpaid instead of being idle while receiving massive amounts of our tax dollars as usual.
But now the negotiations are getting ugly.
Yesterday, the president actually walked out of a meeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and the two sides had different versions of what caused the talks to break down.
According to Pelosi, she was in the midst of offering to personally stand at the border and hand out blankets and food to starving children when Trump seized her by the hair, smashed her face into the table, and shot her twice in the kneecap with a Glock 9.
According to Trump, he offered to allow the entire city of Tijuana to come into the country long enough to mow the lawn on Pelosi's immense Napa Valley estate, whereupon the House Speaker sprung huge leather batwings out of her back and flew around the situation room, screaming, I'll get you my pretty and your little dog too.
Schumer says he was sobbing too hard to see clearly what happened, but he could have sworn he heard the president threatening to melt the Statue of Liberty and pour the molten iron down from the top of his wall onto the heads of sad-faced Honduran children if he could find any sad-faced Honduran children outside of news stories on CNN.
The two sides say they are moving closer to a resolution, but it's sort of like the resolution to that Star Wars movie where the planet blows up and everyone dies.
More to come.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Calm and Focus Boost00:03:19
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is ippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
You know, for me, this has been one of the best weeks of Donald Trump's presidency.
And the reason is Trump's character.
I know, you know, if you watch the show enough, you will know that you have heard me again and again attacking Trump's character.
I don't like the way he bullies good people who disagree with him.
I don't like it when the shadow of his kind of reckless life falls on the institution of the presidency.
And I don't like the way he sometimes mangles the facts.
But character is a very complex thing, and sometimes a man's flaws and his strengths are two sides of the same coin.
This week, in standing up to an irrational left and its dishonest media, in facing down pressure to cave in when he's completely in the right, Trump has shown that his bullying is the B-side of his capacity for leadership.
His recklessness is the flip side of political courage, and his inexactness and hyperbole can disguise a fairly clear big picture view of a subject that the left has purposely obscured with moral grandstanding and lies.
A moral weather vane like Mitt Romney can attack the president all he wants, but right now, Trump is demonstrating something we need in the White House, namely a little bit of manhood.
More on this, but first we've got to talk about calm.
You know, I was a big student of Zen, and I found that focus and concentration and what they now call presence can improve your life immensely.
It can improve your performance at work.
It can improve your focus when talking to people.
And Calm is an app that will help you train your mind and focus your mind in a way that will make you more relaxed, make you sleep better, just as I say, make you more focused at work.
Calm is the number one app to help you meditate, sleep, and relax.
Practices like meditation and prioritizing sleep leave you feeling more rested and give you more energy.
So head to calm.com slash Clavin and you'll get 25% off a calm premium subscription that has guided meditations on issues like anxiety, stress, and focus.
And it has sleep stories, these bedtime stories for adults, which I actually, I listened to one of these with Stephen Fry, and it made me laugh because it was so calming and relaxing.
Then I fell asleep halfway through it.
So it works pretty well.
For a limited time, Andrew Clavin Show listeners get 25% off a calm premium subscription at calm.com.
That's C-A-L-M dot C-O-M slash Clavin.
C-A-L-M dot com slash Clavin.
Get unlimited access to all of Calm's content today at calm.com slash Clavin.
Give yourself the gift of calm this New Year's.
It might change your life and for the better.
And you'll learn to say to yourself as you drift off, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Oh, and by the way, we have Brad Meltzer on today, a really fine best-selling thriller writer, but he's written a new thriller about this plot in 1776.
I'll let him tell you about it, but you'll want to stay tuned and listen to that.
Illegal Immigrants and Crime00:16:03
You know, Trump has really won me over on this issue.
Immigration and the border are not something to keep me up at night, the way things like over-regulation and government overreach keep me up.
But I really like the way Trump has handled this.
I think he is standing up to this onslaught.
And, you know, conservatives are, there's so many conservatives busy picking on him and picking on him for his character, but they do not understand this part of his character.
You know, I think I've told this story before, but you know, I've always worked for my money.
I write things and I sell them and I've made good good dough doing that.
But when I got into the political world, I made a lot of friends who had donors.
You know, they would have these billionaire friends who would just give them money.
Oh, you want to do a project?
Here's a couple of hundred thousand dollars to do your project.
One day I said to my wife, you know, how come no billionaires ever give me money?
And my wife gave me one of those wife looks, you know, where like you're the last guy to get the word.
And she said, have you ever heard the way you talk to billionaires?
Well, that is one of my best traits is that when I'm talking to you, you know exactly how I feel.
You know that the words coming out of my mouth are the things that I'm thinking.
But that's also one of my worst traits.
It's something that gets me into trouble, especially with billionaires.
It is something that sometimes is not a good thing to do to people who have less power than you.
It's something that I cherish about myself when I'm standing up to guys who have more power, but something I sometimes regret when I'm talking to people and words come out of my mouth that I'm sorry I said.
The same thing is true with Trump.
He really does have a lot of character flaws that you can pick on forever, but a lot of them are the flip side of things that he does well, like this.
Dan Henninger, who is, I always joke around about Dan Henninger that he's kind of the avatar of the establishment.
He wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal today, which I thought was one of the first times I had seen an establishment journalist hit this nail directly on the head.
He's talking about the fact that Donald Trump may not win the 2020 election.
He says, you know, his approval rating is stuck at below 45%.
His polls show that some 52% of voters say they prefer a Democratic candidate.
And people are thinking that he may not win in 2020.
And he then goes on to say, but even so, even so, they're not going to be able to beat him.
No Republican is going to be able to beat him in the primary.
And he tries to explain this.
And he talks about Mitt Romney's article.
You remember Mitt Romney attacked Trump for his character.
And he said, oh, I'm going to stand up to him and all this stuff.
And it really kind of backfired.
It made Romney just look like, you know, just a guy who was kind of trying to please the establishment.
So this is what Henninger says.
He says, one of the abiding mysteries of recent political history remains how the blunt and brutal character, Trump, standing on the GOPP primary stage in his fire engine red tie, beat the skilled politicians alongside him.
He says you can find the answer to how this happened in Mr. Romney's article.
Mr. Romney said, I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault, but I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest, or destructive to Democratic institutions.
And Henninger goes on and says, you could not make up a more explicit pander to the prevailing political zeitgeist or conventional wisdom on Donald Trump.
Racist, sexist, destructive to Democratic institutions.
This is a kitchen sink of anti-Trump buzzwords.
And the enduring reality two years after Mr. Trump won the presidency is that more U.S. voters than the conventional wisdom will admit they just don't care.
This is really important.
Who will come out and say this?
Who will come out and say this?
The wall on the border, not about racism, not about keeping out brown people.
That is just absolute garbage.
The hating on Alexandria occasional cortex, not about sexism or Rashida Tlaib.
These are incompetent, radical, ignorant women.
And that's why we attack them.
It has nothing to do with sexism.
When people worry about the state of marriage, it has nothing to do with homophobia.
These are issues with two sides, issues that are up for debate, that can be debated, and all they do is try to bully people into silence on the left.
They do it again and again, and you cannot bully half of America into silence, or you can if guys like Mitt Romney are in charge, because they will pick up those words and fling them against Donald Trump or anybody who they think is going to get attacked by the mainstream press.
So Henninger goes on.
He says, the problem that is inspiring the support of Donald Trump, he says, is the left's cultural triumphalism on matters of identity, race, gender, and assimilation, or the American idea.
If Donald Trump or any other political figure challenges these ideas, someone will call it a dog whistle.
Mitt Romney and virtually all Republican politicians entertaining runs for the presidency simply will not stand up to this dominant status quo.
They just won't do it.
Instead, they address these matters in a kind of tiptoeing, careful speak.
Meanwhile, any Democratic candidate, notably a so-called serious moderate such as Joe Biden, must pay obeisance to these ideas or get out of politics.
Henninger is writing about the stuff I talk about all the time, the bullying stranglehold the left has on the culture that is meant to silence conservative ideas.
History shows that the cultural left doesn't care about our better angels.
It will simply pocket genuflections to their power and then push its army forward.
Anyone thinking of challenging Mr. Trump in the New Hampshire primary will have to show they understand and would fight for voters who don't care about the man but care deeply about the nation's cultural direction.
That is the power of Donald Trump and this fight that he is in where the government is closed and the Democrats will not budge on giving him a wall and giving him border security.
This is a perfect example.
I'll talk about it in just a minute, but let me talk about Robin Hood.
You know, the market is a place you want to be, especially during this Trump economy, but you've got to learn how to do it.
And that is why I am now setting up, I'm now in the process of setting up my Robin Hood app.
The Katies, the girls who run this place, basically, they have been playing with my app up till now and they say it's really interesting.
It teaches you how to invest.
There's no commission fees.
The other brokerages will charge you like 10 bucks for every trade, but Robinhood doesn't charge commission fees.
You can trade stocks, keep all of your profits.
It's got this great design that is easy to use.
It'll ask you a couple of questions about what you're trying to achieve, who you are, what your economics are like.
And then you just go ahead and you can learn by doing.
You can learn how to invest as you build your portfolios, discover new stocks, and track favorite companies with a personalized news feed.
Robinhood is giving listeners a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help build your portfolio if you sign up at clavin.robinhood.com.
That's clavin.robinhood.com.
I will get back to you and tell you after I've set the app up how I do on it.
But meanwhile, you can get a free stock at clavin.robinhood.com and learn a lot of things like how to spell clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease.
No ease in Clavin.
I just make it look easy.
So yesterday, good example of what I'm talking about, Trump's stalwartness, his virility in standing up for himself.
He goes into a meeting in the situation room with Chuck and Nancy.
He comes in trying to make things light, giving out candy and all this stuff.
But the left won't move.
And I want you to hear, there were two different versions of what happened, but I want you to hear Chuck Schumer's version because he tries to make it sound like the fact that they would give Trump nothing is a character flaw of Trump's.
Here's his description of what happened in the meeting.
Speaker Pelosi, will you agree to my wall?
She said no.
And he just got up and said, then we have nothing to discuss, and he just walked out.
Again, we saw a temper tantrum because he couldn't get his way and he just walked out of the meeting.
I asked him to open up the government, that tomorrow so many people will have trouble paying their mortgages, paying their bills, dealing with situations when they don't get paid.
And I said, just why won't you do that?
We'll continue to discuss.
We're willing to discuss anything.
And he said, if I open up the government, you won't do what I want.
That's cruel.
That's callous.
And that's using millions of innocent people as sort of pawns.
And it was wrong.
And then a few minutes later, he sort of slammed the table.
And when Leader Pelosi said she didn't agree with the wall, he just walked out and said, we have nothing to discuss.
So they'll give him nothing, but it's his fault for walking out.
And Trump just said the meeting was a waste of time.
She said, I said, are you going to approve this as tweet?
Are you going to approve border security, which includes a wall or steel barrier?
Nancy said, no.
I said, bye-bye.
So, of course, now the media is saying they're trying, you could see what Schumer is trying to do.
He's trying to shift attention from the problems at the border to the 800,000, I believe it is, federal workers who won't get a paycheck tomorrow.
You know, boo-hoo.
But really, this is the fight they're in.
And so the media, as always, the toadying media, they pick up the narrative from the left and they say to Trump, well, shouldn't you open the government and then negotiate?
So John Carl from ABC pulls this on Trump and Trump rips him to pieces.
So why not sign the other bills, though, so some of these workers can get paid the government anyway?
They think I should do that.
No, do you think I should do that, John?
I mean, it's not for me to do that.
And I watch your one-sided reporting.
Do you think I should do that?
Hey, John.
No, seriously, John, do you think I should just sign?
Well, the argument.
Tell me, tell me.
Do you think I should just sign?
I'm saying that if you sign that, these workers can start getting paid.
The government can start.
You would do that if you were in my position.
You'd do that.
I'm not in your position.
I'm asking you if you've got something else.
I'm asking you, would you do that if you were in my position?
Because if you would do that, you should never be in this position.
Because he's right.
You'd never get anything done.
Goodbye, everybody.
Because you're right.
He's right.
They just told him.
Nancy Pelosi just told him, will she compromise if he opens the government?
And she said no.
So why is Carl even asking the question?
Trump is absolutely right.
So now the media brings out its big guns.
They want to tell you that everything that they did this fact-checking, I talked about this yesterday, this fact-checking that was not fact-checking.
It was simply checking Trump's facts with the press's opinion.
And one of the big things is Trump has talked about the crime that comes over in the person of illegal immigrants.
So let's just find out for a moment.
If the press is unified in their opinions on this, this is a montage from Newsbuster as they sell the narrative that this is nonsense, that illegal immigrants do not commit more crimes than citizens.
Even illegal immigrants that get across the border commit crimes at a lower rate.
That's a few of them.
You know, as well as I know, people commit fewer crimes than citizens commit.
You know that.
That makes people safer.
They're not going to be able to do that.
Not more dangerous.
According to the statistics.
The president's been focused on so-called migrant caravans heading towards the southern border.
He says those folks are a threat to public safety.
But we know that nationally, as immigration has gone up, violent crime has gone down.
And according to the Cato Institute, not exactly a liberal organization, undocumented immigrants in Texas, for example, were responsible for less crime per capita than their native-born counterparts.
That's true in key areas from theft to, yes, murder.
You would think that undocumented immigrants are bringing higher rates of violent crime to the United States.
Well, guess what?
They are not.
Statistics, facts, show that they're actually less likely to commit violent crimes than U.S. citizens are.
Trump's assertions that immigrants bring crime and disease with them across the southern border.
That would be a rational argument, maybe, if it weren't false.
Okay, so they're all agreed.
Not only are they all agreed, but when Steve Cortez tried to tell Chris Cuomo and Ana Navarro on CNN, Cuomo got in his face and just insisted that there couldn't possibly be any doubt about this.
And Ana Navarro, a genuinely arrogant fool, started polishing her nails to show how bored she was by the idea that illegal immigrants were killing people.
What you just cited about criminality between native-born and immigrants.
First of all, that's not true.
There's a lot of conflicting studies.
But even though you have illegal entry as criminality, do you get the numbers where you want them?
No, that's not true.
Yes, that's not true.
John Lott did an extensive study of Arizona.
There are conflicting studies.
But listen, even if I were to grant you that point, yes, there are.
But even if I, that's fake news.
Not to say there are not.
It's fake news.
It's fake news for you to inject BS and say that it's equal to the real data.
It's not BS.
But even if I were to grant you that, okay, the point is the illegal alien crime rate should be zero.
It should be, you can do your nails.
You know who can't do their nails?
Are people who have been killed, Anna, by dangerous, known illegal aliens who've been allowed to stay in this country because of the leftist policies that people like you promote in so-called sanctuary cities?
I'm so tired.
You don't bother to hide in plain sight.
Just because you want to compromise.
Listen, I don't care.
Go back to filing your nails.
That's what you call me to.
Well, you sure seem to care.
You know, Ana Navarro should file her nails with the blood of people who've been killed by illegal immigrants.
It gives you a really nice red sheen on your nails.
Here's the thing.
They're all telling it to you.
They're shouting it at you.
Illegal immigrants commit less crime than citizens.
They are all in the wrong.
They are all wrong.
We don't know the guy, Steve Cortez, when he said there are conflicting studies.
This is absolutely right.
But common sense tells you that what they are saying is not true.
The federal government does not have data or doesn't release data that isolates illegal immigrants who commit crimes.
They only look at citizens versus non-citizens.
Well, what's the problem with that?
The problem with that is a lot of people who are here illegally are overstaying their visas.
That is not the same thing as the guys coming in across the border.
If you had a visa, you've been through a background check.
If you had a visa, they know that you're not a criminal.
Whereas if you creep in, they don't know that if you just come in across the border.
So that means that the statistics are skewed.
The statistics are not telling you the truth about whether or not illegal, they don't know, they don't have the statistics about whether or not illegals commit crimes.
What we do know, well, you know what?
Why don't we just ask somebody whose job it was to patrol the border?
That's what Tucker Carlson did.
He brought on, what was his name, Morgan, former Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan, who was under Obama.
He's the border chief under Obama.
And he asked, Tucker Carlson just asked him straight out, what's it like at the border?
And the guy said, it's a problem.
Here it is.
I was briefed every single day about the men and women who are risking their lives every day and they're apprehending murderers, rapists, pedophiles, other violent offenders, and gang members.
That's not manufactured.
That is real, and that's a fact, and it's still happening today.
And I would also say one last point is 127 Border Patrol agents have died.
They didn't die playing Monopoly.
They died defending, being the frontline defenders of our borders, trying to apprehend that 17,000 people, the bad people that Secretary Nielsen mentioned.
I wonder if you asked their families if this is a manufactured crisis.
Yeah, yeah.
Listen, there have been 4,000 murders committed by illegals in the last two years.
Masculinity And Its Impact00:04:20
That is about four times, a little less than four times as many as have been killed in mass shootings.
Now compare the reaction of the media to mass shootings because they want to take your guns away.
Compare them to polishing their nails, they're polishing their fingernails when you bring out the 4,000 homicides in the last two years committed by illegal aliens.
All those people from Chris Cuomo to all the rest of them telling you that it's not true, they're all wrong.
And the fact that Trump is standing up to them, the fact that he's not letting this, he may not only lose this fight, he may lose the election.
He may lose the popularity.
That's what leadership looks like.
That's what virility looks like.
It is his strength that sometimes gets him in trouble, that sometimes makes him reckless, that sometimes makes him say stupid things and bully people.
That same strength is now coming to the fore on this issue.
And like I said, this is not the biggest issue for me, but it is a big issue for me to see the president standing up to this barrage of lies, this moral posturing, and to just see him standing solidly, even if it means losing the election.
That's something I'd like to see in a conservative president.
You know, I just think the point that I've been trying to make all week, basically, is conservatives sometimes have to put their misgivings in their pocket and support the only player we have on the board, the only instrument we have to put forward our policies against people who are genuinely, have genuinely lost the plot of America.
I've been impressed with Trump this week.
He really has gotten to me and it is a matter of character.
As much as I sometimes attack his character, I have to praise it here.
Speaking of manhood, I got to bring up this one study.
It's been bucking me all week.
The American Psychological Association is now releasing guidelines to help psychologists work with men and boys.
And one of the things they say is that in their research, the APA, they say traditional masculinity, marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression, is on the whole harmful, they say.
They don't say harmful to whom, but they say men socialist in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.
A 2011 study led by Kristen Springer of Rutgers University found that men with the strongest beliefs about masculinity were only half as likely as men with more moderate masculine beliefs to get preventive health care.
Found that more men found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to consider as normal risky health behaviors such as heavy drinking, using tobacco, and avoiding vegetables and engage in these risky behaviors themselves.
I have to tell you something.
I know a lot about psychology.
My wife is a psychotherapist.
Pardon me, my life was saved by psychiatry, so I have a lot of respect for the form.
It is a girly practice, okay?
It is a girly practice.
And so, what you have here is a hammer, a hammer that can only see nails.
Therapy works by sitting and talking and emoting and relating.
Why am I good at that?
I'm an artist.
That's why.
That's why artists have some of those feminine traits.
The poet Yates, W.B. Yates, said, if there were no women, there'd be no one for poets to talk to because only women could understand what poets are saying.
I think that is true.
I think psychiatry worked for me so well because, well, first of all, because the guy doing it was a genius, but also because, I mean him, not me, but also because I was comfortable with that kind of research into my emotions.
Most men are not.
You know, these things, stoicism, competitiveness, aggression, things that I do share with other men, these things build the world.
Everything you have, every comfort you have, every city you live in, every machine you drive, every machine you work, every computer, they were all built by that kind of masculine energy.
When you see somebody wearing a t-shirt that says the future is female, let me tell you, the t-shirt is wrong.
When you see women rising to the top of a profession every single time, it is because that profession has reached its peak and is on the wane.
That is not a hit against women.
I'm just saying when you hear, oh, she's the first woman to do anything, that's different than the first person to do something who's almost always a man.
That is always, almost always a man.
You see women rising to the top of TV news?
George Washington's Close Call00:15:19
Why?
Because TV news is over.
You see women rising to the top of leadership in Europe.
Why?
Because Europe is over.
When you look at where men are, where boys are, whether it's playing video games or building little computers in their garage, that's where you see the future.
We do not need, we do not need the American Psychological Association curing manhood.
We need them coming up with new methods to treat men so that their manhood and energy, their masculine energy is put into good avenues instead of bad ones.
All right, let me bring on Brad Melzer.
Are we going to stay on, guys?
Yes, we're going to stay on, but that's no reason, that's even more reason to feel guilty and subscribe to dailywire.com.
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You get the entire year, plus the wonderful Leftist Tears Tumblr.
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Brad Meltzer is a terrific thriller writer, a number one New York Times best-selling author with books such as The Inner Circle and The Escape Artist.
He's got nine other best-selling thrillers.
He's also authored nonfiction books that have been bestsellers like History Decoded.
His new book is a true thriller story that takes place in 1776.
It's called The First Conspiracy, The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington.
Brad, it's good to see you.
How are you?
I'm good to see you too.
I think I saw you once at one of the Edgars or somewhere.
I think it was the international thriller writers we talked about.
Oh, maybe it was ITW.
Yeah, they got it.
The thing is, you know that whenever writers get together at these events, it's like group therapy.
It is.
I think that's why they do it, right?
It's like the only time.
Go, of course, and to be complimented.
The two things we love most.
Groups and therapy.
And compliments.
And conflicts.
Exactly.
So you're a big time writer of fictional thrillers.
What made you turn to a true story?
You know, I just had never found the story that held my attention long enough that I felt like it could be, and you know, a full book.
A full book takes something that's far more meatier.
And I found nearly a decade ago this story in the place where the best stories always hide in the footnotes.
And I found this story, and it said it was a secret plot to kill George Washington.
And I was like, a plot to kill George Washington?
Is this real?
Is this fake?
Is this internet nonsense?
What is it?
And it was true.
In 1776, there was a loyalist British plot to kill George Washington.
And when George Washington found out about it, he rounded up those responsible.
He built a gallows and he hanged the man in front of 20,000 people, the largest public execution at that point in North American history.
George Washington brought the hammer down, was like, don't mess with me.
I'm George Washington.
I'm going to be on the money one day.
And that's what happened.
And it really led to my first nonfiction book.
Here it is.
It's called The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington.
So what's happening when this plot is going on?
This is basically during the Siege of New York.
Is that right?
Yeah, it's right before New York.
It's right before the British come.
It's in June of 1776 is where it really peaks, although it starts nearly a year before.
And what happens is, you can see, just to talk about who's responsible, because you got to ask who wants to kill George Washington?
Beyond, you know, of course, the British want to kill him, but who really wants to come after him is the governor of New York and the mayor of New York at the time, who were kicked out of their positions.
They were under the crown, realize they've lost their power.
And they start looking who's closest to Washington.
Now, here's the key point that I found that just blew me away: George Washington, this is all real, in 1776.
He had his own personal bodyguards.
And these bodyguards, he wanted, he asked all of his regiments, he said, give me your four best men.
He wanted what they call drilled men, the best of the best.
And what he wanted was he took from those four from each regiment, he narrowed it down personally to his 50 or so best.
And from there, they made what they called the general's guards, the commander's guards.
But the name that stuck was this name, the lifeguards, because they were in charge of guarding George Washington's life.
That's what the term is.
And these were the men who turned on George Washington.
And I don't care how strong you are.
I don't care that you become the president one day.
At this moment in time, at the beginning of the war, this is devastating to George Washington.
So it's his actual bodyguards turned on him, like a kind of a mafia thing?
It's truly, I mean, you can almost hear the coppola score that comes in at the moment.
You know, if you're a Jedi fan, Order 66, you know, it starts being, you know, the 666 comes.
But the reality, that's what happens.
And the plan is, is when the British are about to invade, when they're coming, that all these men who are on the actual British side, but are in our army, in our military, are going to switch sides.
They're going to steal some cannons.
They're going to blow up some bridges.
And some said to kidnap George Washington, some said to kill him right there.
Either way, the result's the same.
Because at George Washington's level, you didn't make trades with military men, which used to do back then at his level, you hang them.
So he's going down.
And the amazing part is, is what George Washington does when he gets wind of it.
Because one of the things that he realizes is he needs to figure out information.
He has, and he's putting together this great offense, right?
We have the army there.
But what he needs, he realizes, is a great defense because people are going to come at him from all sides.
So he puts together a secret committee.
They call it, and as you know, all thriller writers know you've got to have a good name for your secret committee.
They originally call it the Committee on Intestine Enemies.
It's the worst name of all time.
And they change that name and they instead call it the Committee on Conspiracies.
And with a good name, they put John Jay in charge of it.
Of course, becomes the first Supreme Court justice.
And John Jay, three of them, it's John Jay, Philip Livingston, and Governor Morris are the only three they trust.
It narrows down to them.
They start truly kicking indoors, interrogating people, and getting information.
And what they're doing in the process and what you see in the book, when you read the first conspiracy, I love that you get to see the plot to kill George Washington.
What I love more, it's the launch of America's first counterintelligence agency.
And what they do, we all think that the CIA today, that the precursor to the CIA, is the OSS, but it's not.
It's actually this moment in time, the first conspiracy, because what John Jay is doing is building that first agency.
In fact, right now in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia today, there is actually a room that is dedicated to John Jay, who they call the father of counterintelligence.
Really?
No, kid, I did not know that.
And is that based on this?
Based on, no, because he goes on from here and he launches an entire career of counterintelligence movement.
And the whole book is about not just the plot, but the rise of counterintelligence, how this is all built secretly within our own government at the time.
And of course, what it also does, and I think, you know, what would interest you probably the most, is also it deals with the character of George Washington.
That's what I was going to ask you about next, actually.
I wanted to know in researching, what did you find?
How did you find Washington?
You know, and it's interesting.
You know, Washington is not like Jefferson or Adams, who are writing these like, you know, lovingly, all their emotions letters to their wives, telling them every feeling they're having.
Washington plays everything close to the best.
And Washington, we think, you know, we're divided today as a country, but Washington's time was no different.
At the time in 1776, in New York City, there were nearly as many loyalists on the British side as there were patriots on the American side.
And it was no different in our own military.
Our own military, you know, we weren't one union.
We had the regiments from Massachusetts, hated the regiments from Virginia, hated the regiments from, you know, we were all different uniforms.
We didn't even wear the same uniform.
Not like today, there's no common uniform.
Everyone wore what they wore.
Some guys just showed up in work shirts.
And there's an amazing scene in the book where George Washington comes in and he sees the Massachusetts regiment at Harvard Yard is meeting the Virginia regiment.
And the Virginia regiment is wearing this kind of frilly uniform.
They make fun of him.
Fight breaks out.
These guys start going at it.
And George Washington gets off his horse, races in, grabs the two guys by the throat, shaking them.
And he's basically like, stop fighting with each other.
We're on the same team.
And man, if ever there were a metaphor for where we are today, that's it.
George Washington, there was no United States back then.
We have leaders right now.
Again, forget about politics.
I mean, so often they take flags and wrap themselves in it.
There was no flag back then.
There was no United States back then.
George Washington helped build it by putting his arms around it and willing it to be.
And to me, I think, you know, what I love is, yes, you see the counterintelligence part.
Yes, you see the plot to kill him.
But you get the depth of George Washington's character.
It is an amazing thing that for all the kind of revisionist history, he's the one guy they don't seem to be able to lay a glove on.
He actually was what everybody saw at the time.
He was basically the heart of the country.
And he without him, there would be no country.
That's right.
I mean, one of the things that my favorite moments in the book is this moment after the Battle of Brooklyn is taking place.
And we're in the middle of the Battle of Brooklyn.
And we all think, again, we held hands.
This is how we teach it to our kids.
And we dreamed a good dream.
And we all came together and we took down the British.
And then the end, and everyone lived happily ever after.
But it was not like that at all.
We got our rear ends kicked.
The British wiped the floor with us in Brooklyn.
George Washington got out generaled.
He didn't have the experience of the British generals.
Where did he have?
We didn't have gunpowder.
We barely had shoes.
And in that moment, George Washington could have beat his chest and said, you know, we're going to go out in a blaze of glory.
We're going to take all of them with us.
We're the machuest and the best around.
They're going to remember us for the ages.
But he doesn't.
What he does instead is he does the best thing that George Washington always does.
He adapts.
And in that moment, he plans a daring escape.
In the middle of the night, he's pinned, right?
He's pinned against the East River.
The only thing in front of him is the British.
The only thing behind him is the East River.
In the middle of the night, at a time when they're supposed to surrender, his friends are going to come the next morning.
He commandeers every boat that they can find on the East River, and he slowly starts putting his men aboard.
But the key thing, here's the key moment.
He won't get on board any of the ships until George Washington, George Washington, won't get on any of the ships until all of his men are aboard first.
He will risk his life for those men.
And that's that moment where we come together as a country and you see what we're made of.
We've lost the word united in the United States, but it's there.
It's there, man.
We've got to get it back.
But Washington is the one who led us there.
You know, I want to get back to that in a minute, especially when it comes to the business of thriller writing.
But before that, I just want to get your reaction to the Wall Street Journal review today that sort of suggested that maybe this whole idea that they were actually going to assassinate Washington was propaganda.
Do you think they had any validity?
Yeah, no, the Wall Street Journal gave us a really, you know, it was a nice review to this.
It was nice for you, yeah.
A nice review, really nice review.
But the one thing he took issue with is like, you know, how do you really know whether it was a plot to kidnap him, whether to kill him, or was just propaganda to kind of gin up the war?
And we deal with it in the book.
Listen, you have to ask that question, right?
The one thing he left out, and the one thing I do take issue with, and this is where why we knitted out the place we knit it out, is he's right in the sense that if you just listen to the American side, it could be propaganda.
It could have been something that they made up to just excite everyone about the book.
But here's the key piece he was missing.
And at the end of the war, when the war was over, the mayor of New York City, a guy named David Matthews, goes back.
He wants to get his pension from the British.
He's a guy who fought.
The war is over.
They lost, but he still wants his money for what he fought for.
And he goes in front of the British and we found the transcript of what he asked for and what he demanded from the British.
And they basically said, well, what did you do during the war?
And he alone, the war is over.
He's got no more reason to lie.
He can say, I fought, I lost, I won, I spied, I did whatever.
And he's the one who said we plotted to go after George Washington.
Yeah, they did not mention that in the review.
That's actually unfair.
That was the part that I was like, come on, man.
You're leaving out the I didn't want to say it on air because it kind of ruins a big part of the book, but it's the moment, man.
Yeah.
When your own guy confesses, that's where you go, oh, crap.
And the other part I think that is vital is: you know, I always say anyone who tells you, you know, there's many history books written about Bennett Daconal did this or George Washington thought that and they thought this and they thought, no one knows what they thought.
Anyone who tells you what they thought is a big fat liar.
As a fiction writer, I know I'm under more scrutiny than the average history person, right?
Because they're chomping at the bit to say, did he make it up?
What did he do?
Is this fiction?
We got 500 plus footnotes, 35 pages of footnotes in this book to back this one up.
And last night, one of the guys who also wrote another book came to one of our signings and asked the exact same question that the Wall Street Journal.
And we gave the same answer.
And he said it in front of everyone.
You'll see it on C-SPAN because they're going to show it.
And he said, you know, that's a really good point.
And I wish I thought of it.
And when you really look at the evidence, we say in it, you can't definitively know anything because the plot was foiled.
And once they foiled the plot, we don't know what they were going to actually really do.
But I think it's pretty clear that George Washington's life, no matter what they were going to kidnap him or whether you're going to kill him immediately, his life was most certainly in danger.
I have to ask you this before I let you go.
You've written a book that is essentially patriotic.
I mean, the things that you're saying about George Washington, which I think are absolutely true, are against the kind of revisionist history we get from some quarters.
You've come on the show, which I can tell you will ruin your reputation for the rest of your life.
You know, do you find, and you are also very highly involved with the, you know, the structures of the business with the international thriller writers and the mystery writers.
Do you find that political correctness, that the same kind of move towards censorship, the same kind of move toward leftist ideas that has really harmed a lot of literature and a lot of Hollywood?
Do you find that coming into the thriller field or do you think there's enough resistance to keep the field free for all different kinds of voices?
You know, I think that here's the one thing that is the most powerful thing in the world is an idea.
There's nothing more powerful than an idea.
And as a result, what's a story?
It's a collection of ideas.
To me, the thing that I don't like and that drives me crazy is I hate the shorthand labeling we do.
I actually hate saying a leftist idea as much as I hate saying a right-side idea.
You know, I was with my friend, President George H.W. Bush, and I read this book to him right before he passed.
And I know the Bushes a long time.
They're dear friends.
And one of the things that I know that drove them crazy and it drives me crazy.
I'll speak for myself rather than speak for him.
Is when we were reading those George Washington parts, we were talking about this key moment, and President Bush is about to fall asleep on me.
And they said, he's, listen, he's sick.
He'll be awake about 10 minutes.
That's going to be the end of the story.
And I said, that's okay.
I'll read him for 10 minutes, former president.
And I'm in Kennedbungport, Maine, to honor Barbara Bush.
And as I'm reading to him, I get to the part where we get to the Declaration of Independence.
And I read those words, right?
We hold those truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
And I get to that word, and he just bolts awake.
His eyes go wide, and he wakes up.
And I say, you want to read another chapter?
Awake for 10 Minutes00:05:55
Another?
And we do a full hour.
They tell me 10 minutes, full hour.
It's like he's recharged.
And I tell you that story because when he passed away, the word that got mentioned over and over was this word, decency.
And yes, it was because he was a decent man.
But I think when we label, it's my long-winded answer to you.
When we label the left did this and the right did this, and this is if you're right, you think this.
I mean, right before you came on, you were saying like, you know, I have issues with Trump on this moral level.
That should not be a left-side thinking idea, right?
We should all be able to say there is good parts, there's bad parts.
And so what we do is we want to divide everything into black and white.
You're left, you're right.
That's how we decide.
We've made our decision on you.
And in this book, you'll see one of the things we write about that the great thing is that equality.
We have to see ourselves as equal and assume we're all equal.
And if you do that, then criticize all you want, but show respect, show decency.
That's what's lost.
And when we lose that, we lose those voices.
That's what kills voices.
Now, is there a conspiracy by the left side to keep right side readers out?
I think if you have a good voice and you have a good story, nothing can stop it.
There's nothing more powerful than that good story and a good idea.
And you see it all the time.
You see those that, no matter what you want to say, something's controlled by this side or that side.
You can bring the most liberal author in the whole world and break them through sometimes on a conservative show.
And you're like, wow, that's just a good idea.
And the same is the other thing.
And that's what I believe.
And I believe in a good idea.
Brad, speaking of good stories, the story about Bush is a great story.
Your book is The First Conspiracy, The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington.
It's really good to see you.
I hope I see you again soon.
And thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, sir.
So I have to end with what has to be my favorite story of the week, our producer, Rob Sterling, who's now, we now have to call you the king of producers or something, producer, something, His Majesty, the producer.
He found a story on vice.
And I went to look it up when he told me about it.
And it had been disappeared somehow.
But it is now back on another website.
It's a review of an art installation called Black Power Naps by Janine Francois.
And the headline is, Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest.
Just as sleep deprivation was used as a means to control slaves, the modern-day sleep gap weighs down many black people today.
Black Americans are five times more likely than white Americans to get less than six hours of sleep per night.
I must have, you know, I must be partly black.
They're more likely than white Americans to feel sleepy during the day and on an average get an hour less sleep per night than white Americans.
There's no scientific consensus on what specifically causes the sleep gap.
As reported by The Atlantic in 2015, however, leading theories point to both experiences of discrimination and structural inequality, aspects of one's environment that make one feel unsafe and insecure as root causes.
Just as sleep deprivation was used as a means to control slaves, the modern-day sleep gap continues to weigh down many black people like me today.
I can feel it in me.
It breaks my spirit as I exist in between half-conscious states, never fully awake or asleep, never able to distinguish between the two.
This may be the true power of racism.
Its force encompasses everything, seeping into our dreams at night and deflating our capacity to envision a better future.
Let me tell you, she's describing my life.
I don't think this has anything.
Anyway, she goes into this art installation where you're supposed to, black people are supposed to take a nap.
And she says, black power naps complicate the idea, the installation complicates the idea of reparations for black people, reminding us that reparations are not solely about money, but also time.
Time is an asset in capitalism.
It is in itself a kind of privilege that has translated into financial wealth for white people.
If we reframe centuries of unpaid black labor as sick leave, annual leave, or overtime, then we, the descendants of the enslaved, are heavily owed.
They're owed a lot of vacation time.
We also have reason to be restless, angry, and ready to explode.
This sentiment is shared by the artists who believe a call to action means front lines existing in our bedrooms as well as in the streets.
This is what black people need, more sleep.
They need, you know, we need to give them our, we need to give them our sleep.
You know, somebody has got to teach people on the left in general, but really on both sides, has got to teach people that words can take you anywhere.
They can take you into all kinds of nonsense and make it sound realistic.
Think for a minute.
I mean, think for a minute about reparations.
If you just use your imagination, can you imagine reparations making anyone's life any better?
Can you imagine being paid for nothing that happened to you by people who did nothing to you?
Can you imagine that making your life better?
But can you imagine also the idea that you are somehow owed vacation days because of slavery?
That you are owed vacation days because of things that happened to dead people that were done by dead people?
I mean, it's nuts.
It is nuts.
And it's just the wonder, the absolute glory of language that it can take you into these crazy places and make you sound sane.
But I just love the idea that we owe black people sleep.
Listen, if anybody is owed sleep, it's me.
Damn it.
And I would like, in fact, in fact, I'm demanding right now that you send your sleep to me because I'm so far behind.
If I could have the hours I lie awake back, I would be 27.
All right, that said, the Clavenlands Weekend is upon you.
I'm sorry to tell you.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring00:00:48
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Trump plays chicken with Pelosi and Schumer, heads to the border, and considers declaring a national emergency.