Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 638 mocks 2020 Democratic candidates—from "50 Mexican field workers" to Rep. Steve King’s misrepresented white supremacy remarks—while framing Republicans as Lincoln’s true anti-racist heirs, condemning the left’s weaponized redefinition of racism against figures like Louis Farrakhan. Meanwhile, Larry Loftus recounts Odette Sansom’s WWII SOE mission: a housewife-turned-spy who outlasted Nazi torture to protect the French Resistance, her story a gripping blend of James Bond and real resilience. The episode pivots to de Blasio’s "socialist" wealth grabs and Gillette’s toxic-masculinity ad backlash, exposing how identity politics now demonizes both men and capitalism alike. [Automatically generated summary]
With President Trump's popularity poll sagging, Democrats are lining up to run for president in record numbers.
So far, Democrats who have announced their 2020 candidacy include the state of Massachusetts, the editorial board of the New York Times, six homeless guys from San Francisco who need to get into the White House to use the bathroom, and 50 of the Mexican field workers on Nancy Pelosi's Napa Valley estate who say being president might be a tough job, but it would sure beat working for this slave driver.
With so many candidates in the race, Democrats will be offering a wide range of political positions, from full-fledged communism, which will finally give the ordinary working guy a fighting chance to be dragged off in the middle of the night by the secret police, to a more moderate socialism, which will allow all of us to find out what cats taste like when you roast them over a trash fire.
Among the less well-known Democratic candidates are the attractive young Minnesota State Senator Mohamed Jihad Mohammed, who has been testing out the slogan, I don't want to say it's the Jews, but it's the Jews.
There's also black transgender candidate Letitia Angelica Dubois-Jones, formerly known as Jack Scarpetti, who says her experience of transitioning from an Italian teamster from a slum in Brooklyn to a black woman from an imaginary village in Africa has taught her everything she needs to know about delusional mental illness.
As for more traditional candidates, there's, of course, 77-year-old socialist Bernie Sanders, who says he has formed an exploratory committee to find out where he's been for the last couple of months.
He says if the committee finds widespread support for his candidacy, he'll either run or start to sell timeshares in the Everglades because if the country's that gullible, he could make a killing.
We'll continue to keep an eye on the Democrat field as it develops into a hellish, zombie-like mob bent on our destruction.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is ippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Why Taxfile Isn't About Supremacy00:10:04
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
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Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, yesterday I attacked the New York Times, a former newspaper, for becoming a corrupt instrument of government overreach, tailoring their news coverage to reflect the positions of the dishonest left and their out-of-control allies in the deep state.
But today, I'd like to attack the New York Times, a former newspaper, for becoming a corrupt instrument of government overreach, tailoring their news coverage to reflect the positions of the dishonest left and their out-of-control allies in the deep state.
What can I tell you?
They wouldn't take the hint the first time.
Congressman Steve King has been stripped of his committee assignments for comments he made in the Times that seemed to support white supremacy.
If he said what the Times says he said, he deserves that punishment, and also a couple of smacks upside the head plus a sharp kick in the ass.
But a dishonest left and the Times, but I repeat myself, have been trying to expand the definition of racism to mean anything they disagree with.
And with the king kerfuffle, they're at it again.
We'll take a look at it in a minute.
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All right.
So Steve King, Republican congressman, big, big anti-immigration guy.
He has been fighting the immigration fight for a long time.
So he's quoted in the New York Times.
Here's this article from the Times.
Mr. King, in the interview, said he was not a racist.
He pointed to his Twitter timeline showing him greeting Iowans of all races and religions in his Washington office.
And then the writer adds, snarkily, the same office that once displayed a Confederate flag on his desk.
That is true.
He did have a Confederate flag on his desk.
And I don't think he's from the South.
So that may be a little suspect.
At the same time, he said he supports immigrants who enter the country legally and fully assimilate because what matters more than race is the culture of America.
Based on values, and this is not in quotes, this is the Times writing, based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
And this is the quote that got King in trouble.
White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization, how did that language become offensive?
Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?
Obviously, this is a pretty stupid thing to say if that's what he said.
And all the Republicans, his fellow Republicans, immediately jumped on it.
This is King's clarification.
This is what he said in response to the article coming out.
He said, I want to make one thing abundantly clear.
I reject those labels talking about white supremacy.
I reject the evil ideology that they define.
Further, I condemn anyone that supports this evil and bigoted ideology, which saw in its ultimate expression the systematic murder of 6 million innocent Jewish lives.
I profoundly believe that America is the greatest tangible expression of these ideals the world has ever seen under any fair political definition.
I am simply a nationalist.
America's values are expressed in our founding documents.
They are attainable by everyone.
And we take pride that people of all races, religions, and creeds from around the globe aspire to achieve them.
I am dedicated to keeping America this way.
Well, of course, the Democrats are calling for his head.
They want him fired.
They want him thrown out.
He's lost all his committee appointments.
And Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, says if King doesn't understand why white supremacy is offensive, he should find another line of work.
So the Republicans came down hard on this.
Here's Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, one of only three black senators, I think.
The other two are Democrats.
Here's what Tim Scott had to say.
For me, it's not about the Republican Party.
Steve King's comments are antithetical to what is in fact the American dream.
The durability of the American dream is a strength of the American spirit.
And what he did was he struck against the American spirit.
So he weakened the spirit.
And when that happens, our nation is less competitive globally.
So what I'm focused on is how do we build a better country so that the kids in high school and college today have real expectations that their futures will be brighter and better because of our leadership in this generation.
That is our responsibility to do what our parents and our grandparents did for us.
So perfectly fair, perfectly fair thing to say.
Mitt Romney, the human weather vein, called for King to resign.
So the thing is, the left has made such hay out of racism as if it weren't the Democrats who formed the Ku Klux Klan, if it weren't the Democrats who instituted Jim Crow in the South.
It was the Democrats who were for segregation.
All along, the Republicans started with Abe Lincoln and have been that party.
Ever since, there has not been a shift in Republican feelings about this.
The philosophy of the Republicans has always been anti-racist.
But because the left has made such hay over racism, accusing every conservative, especially, they can find of racism, there has become a little bit of a reaction on the right to play it down, to say that racism is not racism, to shrug it off, to say that blacks were never as badly treated as indeed they were within my lifetime, within living memory.
Blacks were treated like garbage in parts of this country.
And it does have an effect, and it does linger, the bitterness of it lingers.
All of that is fair.
And you know, you've heard me say this a million times.
You cannot be a conservative, in my opinion, and be a racist.
It makes no sense.
What conservatives are trying to conserve is our founding philosophy.
We're trying to conserve the Constitution and the Declaration that says all men are created equal.
That doesn't mean, obviously, that they can all play basketball as well as LeBron James.
It simply means that they are all entitled.
They are all equal before God, equal before the law, all entitled to equal rights.
You can't believe that if you believe that some races are inherently depraved or morally inferior.
Why would they be entitled to equal rights if some of them were inferior to others?
So in order to be a conservative, in order to cling to the things that made this country what it is and what we love and what we're trying to save from the left, you cannot believe in a racist philosophy.
And I don't care what you think about genetics.
I have an English major.
I have a BA in English.
I don't know anything about genetics.
All I can tell you, though, is my philosophy is pretty simple.
Man was made in God's image.
God told us, if you love God, you have to love your neighbor.
That to me is the end of the story.
So you can't be, all the things that conservatives talk about, our founding religion, Christianity, our founding documents, all of them are anti-racist.
In order to make sense as a conservative, you cannot support things like white supremacy.
I don't care what they told you.
I don't care what somebody's whispering in your ear.
You cannot, cannot do it.
But here is the question.
What is racism?
When we condemn racism, what is it?
To me, racism is a philosophical belief that people can be judged morally by their race.
It is a disgusting belief because you are insulting the image of God, which is not going to work out well for you.
You know, he's bigger than you are.
Don't do it.
But the thing is, here are things that it's not.
It's not a refusal to accept all philosophies equally or all religions equally or all cultures are equally good.
That's nonsense.
If you have a religion that believes in human sacrifice, that's not as good as a religion that doesn't believe it.
If you have a civilization like Saudi Arabia that won't let women live, that won't let them show their faces in public, that's not as good as a world where people are free.
You can't, you know, the people who say that all cultures are the same, that multiculturalism is a viable opinion, they never answer the question, well, what was wrong with the South when they held slaves?
What was wrong with the American South?
That was their culture.
I mean, why didn't we just say, ah, well, you know, that's their culture.
Some people hold slaves, and that's okay.
And some people don't hold it.
No, you know, some cultures suck.
Some cultures are bad.
Some ideas are bad.
So it is not an acceptance of everything with no discrimination whatsoever.
That's Islam, not a race.
You can criticize Islam.
You can dislike it.
You can't dislike Muslim people because some of them are perfectly decent people.
But you can attack the ideas in Islam in the same way the New York Times, for instance, persecutes that poor cake baker who doesn't want to decorate a cake for a gay wedding.
You know, you can criticize ideas.
All ideas are fair, are fair game.
The other thing that racism isn't.
It is not the little human glitches that we all have that come from our innate tribalism.
Things that we react to, that we like, our people who look like us more than people who don't look like us.
These are just little glitches in the human system that all of us can overcome with a little bit of work.
Racism And Tribalism00:14:02
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So all these things, it is all these things that racism is not.
It is not an occasional insensitive or stupid remark.
We all make mistakes.
It's none of these things.
But this is the problem with the leftist approach to racism.
They think they have got us on the rope.
It is one of the worst things you can call an American to call him a racist.
It can destroy your career.
It can destroy your reputation.
And so they use it all the time.
Here's an example.
Here's Kirsten Gillibrand basically tarring the entire Republican Party and especially Trump with Steve King's remarks.
Trump was asked about King's remarks and he shrugged it off.
He said, I'm not following this story.
And here's Kirsten Gillibrand on CNN.
Here's Kirsten Powers.
Sorry.
All those Kirstens look alike to me.
It's Kirsten Powers reacting to that.
Whenever he's given an opportunity to condemn racism, he chooses not to.
Or he does the both sides, find people on both sides.
Or he, during the campaign, when the alt-right was saying all sorts of things and being a huge supporter of his, he just declined to condemn them.
And he doesn't condemn them because I think one of the questions that we should all be asking when we're talking about Steve King is really what's the difference between him and Donald Trump?
There's not that much difference.
I think that Steve King has been like this for a long time.
You could ask the Republican Party why they're now deciding that he's a problem.
Have they evolved or are they just under pressure?
Because he's been talking about, you know, undocumented immigrants like their animals.
He talked about putting electrified fence on the border saying that this is how we control livestock.
So comparing them to livestock.
So, you know, this is a much bigger problem for the Republican Party than just a few comments.
See, this is what they always do.
And the Times does this too, by the way.
They are selling Steve King as the prototype for Trump's border comments.
Trump's been saying the same thing about the border for as long as I can remember.
So there's nothing new about it.
I'm sure he didn't get it from Steve King.
I'm sure it's his own opinion.
And it's a problem.
We have a problem at the border.
Everybody knows it.
People are flooding in.
They can flood in.
The Democrats want nothing.
Even the stuff that they're suggesting would not keep people out.
I don't know if a wall would help, but it sure seems to help.
It sure seemed to help in Israel.
It sure seems to help outside Nancy Pelosi's huge Napa Valley estate.
So, I mean, walls tend to work, but that's not the point.
The point is there obviously is a problem at the border.
It is not inherently racist to say so.
And Kirsten Powers is doing what Bill Clinton used to do, what Joe Biden did.
She's tarring the entire Republican Party and all conservatives with the idea of racism.
It's just extending that idea to touch anything they disagree with, basically.
Steve Scalise had a really good point about this.
He was challenged by George Stephanopoulos about this, and he had a perfectly valid point saying that the racism goes both ways.
Well, you've seen all of our House leaders from Kevin McCarthy, myself, Liz Cheney, rejecting what Steve King said, pushing back and calling on him to come back and denounce it.
I would recommend that Steve King go and read the op-ed by our colleague Senator Tim Scott, which was very poignant.
I will say, George, as they talk about Steve King on the Democrat side, we've pushed back against his comments.
There have been many Democrats who have said not only highly offensive things, align themselves with anti-Semites, have hauled on physical violence.
They haven't pushed back on any of that language.
We've got to raise the bar on civility, George.
We need to call it out on the Republican side and the Democrat side.
I've been willing to call it out on both.
It's time those Democrat leaders you just mentioned call it out when it happens on their side as well.
I mean, what he's talking about there is the black caucus, the Democrat Black Caucus, which has been very, I mean, it's been like this with Louis Farakan, who is a raging Jew hater, and they never have to apologize for it.
They never have to say anything about it.
And they dither and they say, oh, well, it's a black thing.
You wouldn't understand.
You know, this is a little bit off the subject, but it is really worth looking at because it's just a great piece of video.
Tamika Mallory was on the View.
Tamika Mallory is one of the co-founders of the Women's March.
And the Women's March is coming apart at the seams because there is so much anti-Semitism at the top.
And it comes from some of the black leaders and it comes from some of the Muslim leaders and it has just spread throughout.
And a lot of the women are saying, you know, this was supposed to be arguing for rights for women.
What is all this anti-Semitism doing here?
So Tamika Mallory is questioned on The View about the fact that she tweeted a picture of her with her arm around Louis Farrakhan and she called him a goat, which means the greatest of all time.
And she's questioned about this and she makes an excuse for it and Megan McCain unloads on her.
It is a beautiful thing to watch.
Without Megan McCain, the View would be unwatchable.
It's kind of unwatchable anyway, but this is a great moment.
And listen to where the applause come.
I didn't call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric.
I called him the greatest of all time because of what he's done in black communities.
And I think that, you know.
Let me just interject really quickly.
I would never be comfortable supporting someone who called, I'm not anti-Semite and I'm anti-termite.
It's the wicked Jews, the false Jews that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality.
I actually spoke with the journalists from Tablet Magazine who released an investigation report on your organization.
And in part, they alleged that there is a lot of anti-Semitism surrounding this march, specifically the report alleged that you, Tamika, and co-founder Carmen Perez asserted that, quote, Jewish people had a history of exploiting black people and were proven to be leaders of the American slave trade.
Now, a lot of people, a lot of people, I include me in this, think that you're using your organization as anti-Semitism, masked in activism, and that you're using identity politics to shield yourself from critiques.
You're talking about all women being invited to that march.
I'm pro-life.
We were not invited.
We were not allowed at that march right there.
I'm a conservative woman.
I also represent, if you're talking about women, you should be talking about all women, including Jewish women, as well and conservative women.
What I love about these shows is that people will applaud for anything that is spoken with passion.
You know, they applauded for Tamika Mallory when she defended Louis Farrakhan, and then Megan McCain just turned her to ashes and dust.
And they applauded for that.
You could go on TV, Bill Maher Show, The View, you could go and just say, we need to build gas chambers in this country.
Everybody would be, yeah, This is what I hate about Alexandria Occasional Cortex is that she just thinks that if she says these things with passion and with a kind of idealistic gleam in her eye, everybody will follow her.
And unfortunately, she may be right.
All right, I have to get to the New York Times because this is what, this is the crux of the matter.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, runs a story this morning called A History of Steve King's racist remarks.
I want to make this clear first.
I'm not defending Steve King.
I believe Steve King has crossed a line in his own thinking.
Not about, I don't know what he said to the Times.
I don't know if he was misquoted.
I don't know if he was misquoted out of context.
I'm talking about my impression of Steve King.
I think he started out as a devoted, you know, devoted to the cause of securing the border.
And I think he has moved into Steve Bannon territory with this idea of, you know, cultures invading us and foreign cultures invading us.
And I think he's made a mistake.
And I will get to what I think that mistake is later.
So I'm not defending Steve King.
I just want to just read portions of this.
This is a history of Steve King's racist remarks in the New York Times.
And some of them that I'm not going to read, some of them did strike me as kind of suspect.
But here are the ones I want to highlight.
Mr. King in the Iowa State Senate files a bill requiring schools teach that the United States is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world and that it has derived its strength from Christianity, free enterprise capitalism, and Western civilization.
Aside from the greatest nation in the world, which obviously is an opinion, all of that is true.
That's not a racist statement.
Mr. King is the chief sponsor of a law making English the official language of Iowa.
Most countries have a central language.
We have a problem because all those countries, all those countries come, all those languages come from countries that they're named after.
English is called English because it comes from England.
French is called French because it comes from France.
We are an English-speaking country that is not a racist.
I don't particularly care whether this is an English-speaking country.
I think we could have multi-languages.
But it's not a racist comment.
Mr. King defends a tweet that we're watching as Western civilization is shrinking in the face of the massive epic migration that is pouring into Europe.
King has been a big supporter of guys like Geert Wilderss who attack the Muslim, the Muslim, massive Muslim immigration into Europe, which has caused massive problems.
Geert Wilders, remember, is not an American.
He is not responsible to American values.
He's trying to protect, he's Dutch.
He's trying to protect his country from what he thinks is destroying its culture.
King has supported him.
Again, Islam is not a race.
Islam is a philosophy.
You can criticize it.
You can attack it.
You can dislike it.
Not the people, but you can dislike the philosophy.
But here's the one that really gets to me, where he says, King said to the Washington Post, this is a report recorded by the Times, as a racist statement.
The idea of multiculturalism, that every culture is equal, that's not objectively true.
We've been fed that information for the past 25 years, and we're not going to become a greater nation if we continue to do that.
That is the literal truth.
Multiculturalism is an implausible, implausible philosophy.
It cannot be.
It cannot be that cultures that enslave people, that cultures that treat women like trash, that those cultures are equal to cultures that do not.
That cannot be.
To conflate ideas and cultures is to strip us of our power to think, to strip us of our power, to criticize what is wrong and decide good from bad.
I mean, that's what it is.
Here is where King has gone wrong, and here is where the New York Times and the rest of the left is lying, okay?
Christianity has a massive hand in shaping Western culture.
There is no way around that, and it had a massive hand of shaping the minds of the men who wrote the Declaration and the Constitution.
Massive power.
There's no way that after thousands of years of Christianity, even if you became a deist, that you would not be shaped by Christianity.
This culture, everything about us is shaped by Christianity.
And those men who wrote those wonderful documents, who wrote the Constitution, who wrote the Declaration, were white men.
What's great about what they wrote is that you don't have to be a white man to benefit from the things they created, right?
Christianity, remember, in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek.
There's no white or black.
There's not even male or female.
In Christ, everybody is equal.
And again, if all men are created equal, that includes everybody.
What these white Christian men created was a philosophy that could include everybody.
That's why I'm always saying we should thank Christian white men.
We shouldn't be picking on them.
We should say, hey, thank you very much for creating this wonderful thing that we all can share in.
What you can't say, though, what you cannot say is that that philosophy, that inclusive philosophy, that magnificent philosophy is destroyed by letting other people in.
That's why it's there.
That's where King has gone wrong.
That's where I think Steve Bannon makes a mistake.
That's where I think Geert Wilders may have crossed the line.
I heard Geert Wilders speak.
He has a lot of interesting things to say about Islam, but he wants to shut down mosques.
And when you say that in America, it just doesn't fly because we allow all religions to be free.
That, too, is in the Constitution written by these Christian white men.
This is where King goes wrong, but it's also where the Times is lying when they tell us that every culture is the same or you're a racist, that every idea is the same or you're a racist, that every religion has to be treated equally or you're a racist.
They are essentially what they are doing.
And when they take the white men, the white men who oppressed black people, and include them in those founding ideas, it's the ideas that matter.
It's not what the people did.
It's not that George Washington had slaves.
He was born into that society.
It took him a lifetime to figure out that he had to let those people go.
He did figure it out because he was such a great man, one of the true, one of the greatest of the founders.
But it takes a long time to think your way out of your time.
And what the Times gets wrong and what the left gets wrong is they conflate the flaws of human beings with the brilliant ideas those human beings left us with and those are the ideas that we as conservatives are trying to conserve.
This Friday, Ben Shapiro will be taking a show on the road to the March for Life in DC at 10 a.m. Eastern.
Ben will be live streaming at the National Mall and 12th Street.
So if you're planning to be at the march, head over and see him in person.
Also, I would like to ask you once again to go on and pre-order Another Kingdom.
German Spy Hunter's Tale00:12:27
The book is available for pre-order now.
If you pre-order it on Amazon and save the receipt, there'll be all kinds of gifts that you can get in a week or two.
Now we have to take breaks from YouTube and Facebook, but come over to dailywire.com.
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All right, I got to say to an interview with Larry Loftus, his new book, Code Name Lise, coming up.
Stay tuned for that on DailyWire.com.
Larry Loftus is the best-selling author of the non-fiction spy thriller Into the Lion's Mouth, the true story of Dusko Popoff, World War II spy, patriot, and the real-life inspiration for James Bond.
He's got a new book out, which is just an amazing, amazing story.
It's called Codename Lise, the True Story of the Spy Who Became World War II's Most Highly Decorated Woman.
Yes, Larry Loftus, thank you for coming on.
How you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me on.
By the way, not just the most highly decorated woman, but the most highly decorated spy, male or female.
No kidding.
It's an amazing story considering where she came from and how she began.
But before we talk about that, how did you find the story?
After I wrote Into the Lion's Mouth, I started searching for another book.
And I was a little bit depressed because I thought I'll never find somebody that's as perfect as this guy.
I mean, he was the greatest spy.
He did all these things.
The inspiration for James Bond.
Was he really the inspiration for James Bond?
He really was.
Read the book.
Read the book.
But I was frustrated because I thought I'll never find somebody this good.
And so for months and months and months, I researched and came up empty.
And then eventually I came across because all of the same books, a lot of these books that are behind me, these World War II books, I found a German spy catcher named Hugo Bleitser.
And I read his memoir, Colonel Henry's Story is the name of it.
And it was fascinating because he detailed how he broke into Allied in France, Allied spy networks.
He busted one called Inner Ally, which was a huge network, about 100 agents.
And then he mentions this woman named Lise, the next spy network that he's going after.
Well, he doesn't know that's her code name.
Her real name was Odette Sansom.
But it was fascinating.
And I thought, this woman.
And so I started chasing that trail.
And so I ordered everything I could find on this woman and went to the archives, the British archives.
I read all of her files, Bleitser's files, and Churchill's her supervising officer, commanding officer.
And it was almost too good to be true.
And ironically, it's nonfiction, but as all the reviews have said, it's a thriller.
And it's even more of a thriller than Into the Lion's Mouth was, as Kirkus Reviews, who's not afraid to hammer some people sometimes.
They even said every chapter ends in a cliffhanger.
Well, I love thrillers and great thrillers don't even, you know, 50% of them typically.
So when I realized what was there in terms of all the things that she did, the things that happened to her, I just thought I have to write this book.
You know, one of the things that really got me is where she starts out.
I mean, she's basically a housewife in England.
Is that fair to say?
And mother of three.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so how do you?
Who thinks of a housewife and mother of three as a potential spy?
But she was, and it was, they found her by accident, British intelligence.
The British Royal Navy put a message out to everyone saying, look, if you've ever been to France, we'd like to get photos.
We want photos.
Well, they're thinking of D-Day.
They're thinking of Normandy and the coastline.
And they said, if you have any photos, please send them in.
So she goes, she grew up in France.
She was French.
So she went through her scrapbook and sent in photos, but she sent them to the wrong address.
She didn't send them to the Admiral.
She sent them to the war office.
And they end up in Section F, which was the SOE's section for France.
And so they start looking through this and they see her.
And they're like, hmm, this woman, she looks about the right age.
She speaks French.
Because they had a problem.
They needed spies, particularly women who could go in who did not have an accent.
Well, what are the odds of that?
I mean, if you're looking in England to find someone that speaks French without an accent, good luck.
Well, she was a diamond in the rough.
And they immediately called her in, and she thought she was just going to get her photos back.
Well, they recruited her.
Wow.
And this history.
And initially, she was like, no, no, I don't have any military experience.
She'd never fired a gun.
She'd never done anything.
But they trained her.
You know, they trained her like they did everyone else in the SOE.
So they send her, where do they send her?
To France.
To France.
So that's her homeland.
She lands at Cassis, basically in the French Riviera.
And her first station was in Caen, you know, all around that area around Caen.
And it was there that she met her commanding officer, Peter Churchill, no relation to the prime minister, but he was a fantastic circuit leader, had already made two tours of France, had done amazing things himself.
And that was her commanding officer.
And she was supposed to go move on to Auxerre and then to Paris, but she hit it off so well with Churchill.
And he knew, man, this lady is a fireball.
She gets after it.
He wanted her.
And he sent a cable to London and said, hey, can I keep her?
I want this woman.
And they said, well, no, we're sending her.
And he said, no, no, no, I need her.
And then they said, okay, you can have her.
So what kinds of things were they doing behind enemy lines?
Well, SOE in particular, they were spies only because they were out of uniform.
You're in occupied France.
But the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was designed, as Churchill said, to set Europe ablaze.
And so what they wanted to do was blow up the German bridges and supply lines and ammo dumps to harass the Germans, but also to equip with arms and material and ammunition the French resistance, the Machis.
So they would secretly meet up with the French resistance people and say, look, meet us next Friday.
We've got a plane coming in that's going to drop all of, you know, drop weapons, drop rifles and ammunition.
And so that was their job, really, to arm the French resistance and to help them sabotage German supplies.
So one of the things that I found fascinating is this guy who started, I didn't realize that this is how you found the story, but this German spy hunter is like something out of that movie In Glorious Bastards.
He's like this master Javier kind of guy hunting down anybody.
And he goes after her, right?
Yeah, he's an amazing character.
And I tell people he's part Sherlock Holmes, but he's part Sam Gerard and the fugitive.
If you remember Tommy Lee Jones, who's just relentless, doing his just relentless.
So he's brilliant, but he's relentless, but he's also charming.
He knows when to turn on the charm.
He speaks perfect French.
He speaks some Spanish.
He speaks some English.
And he was just great at his job.
So when he was a German secret policeman sent to be just a policeman in occupied France, but he was so good at catching spies.
They had brought him in initially in Cherbourg to do an interrogation in French of someone that they had captured.
And Hugo was so good and so perfect for the job, the Aboir, which was German military intelligence, said, look, we need to borrow you.
We're going to take you into our.
And so they brought him into the Aboire and basically turned him loose and said, we'll give you whatever you need.
We'll give you resources.
We'll give you people.
Do what you do.
Go capture the British and French spies.
Go get them.
And he did.
And he was probably the best spy catcher in history.
Wow.
Wow.
And he was coming after her.
And she, meanwhile, I mean, this is kind of amazing, too.
This is kind of a love story.
I mean, she and this guy Churchill really fell for each other.
And it's this confluence of different things happening at the same time.
On the one hand, Odette and Peter Churchill are tasked to do their job, to get the equipment and so forth out, to land planes and all that.
But at the same time, they're developing not just a friendship, they're developing a love relationship between them.
And over here on the other side that they can't see, Hugo Bleicher has infiltrated their network and he's chasing them.
So it almost becomes like catch me if you can, you know, where Tom Hanks is chasing Leonard DiCaprio because they're moving.
You know, they have to keep on the run because they know the Gestapo's three steps behind him.
So they're always on the run, and he tracks them down, just incredible, tracks them down and surprises them.
I hate to ask this, but as a moralist, I have to.
What happened to the family?
She's got a husband and three kids she left behind, and she's falling in love, having this spy love affair.
What happened to them?
Yeah, that's a whole nother thing.
I want to be careful not to have any spoilers, but that husband had been called off to war.
So we'll leave it there, probably.
All right.
I'll let people find out.
The book is codenamed Lee's, the true story of the spy who became World War II's most highly decorated woman.
What do you think when you tell these stories?
Is there anything you're trying to communicate to people beside the story, beyond the story itself?
There is.
There's actually two things.
I mean, when you're writing in fiction, the story is the story.
Whatever happened, happened, it's part of history.
Whether I, and Into the Lion's Mouth, code named Lisa, I'm dealing with archives.
I'm dealing with the for the last book for codenamed Lisa, I'm dealing with the British archives and primary sources.
So I have to tell what actually happened.
But in doing that, I want the story not to be a boring biography, not to be a boring history book.
I want it to be exciting and fun.
And so I wrote it as a thriller, just as I did my other book.
I wrote it as a thriller because if you find the right story, as they sometimes, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.
And this is just one of those stories.
And so I want it to be fun and entertaining, but retain the message that is there.
And that is her incredible survival.
And Peter's too, their incredible determination to do their job, to survive, and then once they're captured, not to give the Germans anything.
They were both brutalized.
They were both tortured.
They were both condemned to death.
And they both survived.
But neither one talked.
In fact, no one in SEC talked.
The operatives in the SOE were so well trained and so well, I guess, selected that none of them talked.
And Odette, even though she was brutally tortured, she said not a word and would never give them anything and really had an indignation about them.
And her patent answer was, I have nothing to say.
The Germans knew that she knew the locations of two key people that the Germans wanted: the radio operator for their circuit and another gentleman that had just come in who was going to run another circuit.
She knew the locations of both, and they knew that she knew.
So they thought it's just a matter of torture.
We'll get it out of her.
And she refused.
And her patent answer was, I have nothing to say.
That's great.
They started torturing her, and they say, Do you want to talk now?
I have nothing to say.
That's an amazing story.
Larry Loft, the book is codenamed Lee's, the true story of the spy who became World War II's most highly decorated woman.
Gillette's New Ad Campaign00:07:30
It is out today, so you can get it right away.
Larry, thanks so much for coming on.
It's a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you, Drew.
I appreciate it.
Really, that's a great story.
I got to talk about a couple of things about selling leftism.
This is one of the things I, you know, the mayor of New York, de Blasio, made his state of the city speech the other day, and he delivered, he is now going full socialist.
The subways in New York have deteriorated to the point where riding in them is like being trapped in like Dante's inferno.
And what he's talking about is basically there's going to be free health care for everybody, whether they're legal or not.
And here is his comment, some of his comments from the state of the city speech, which is just the social, it's pure socialism.
Millions of people in this city, tens of millions across the country, are boxed into lives that just aren't working for them.
You haven't been paid what you deserve for all the hard work.
You haven't been given the time you deserve.
You're not living the life you deserve.
And here is the cold, hard truth.
It's no accident.
It's an agenda.
An agenda that's dominated our politics from Reaganomics to the Trump tax giveaway to the wealthy and corporations.
Here's the truth.
Brothers and sisters, there's plenty of money in the world.
There's plenty of money in this city.
It's just in the wrong hands.
There's plenty of money in the world.
It's just in the wrong hands, namely in the hands of the people who made the money.
And we know what the right hands are.
The right hands are de Blasio's hands.
He wants his hands on your money.
He's talking about a millionaire tax.
He's talking about spreading the wealth, spreading the wealth, the old socialist routine.
And of course, you know, as the philosopher, what was his name?
Bastiat, Frederick Bastiat, the great economist, Ronald Reagan's favorite economist.
He said, if it's wrong for one man to steal money from another, it is wrong for many men under the guise of being the government to steal money from someone.
Why is this money in the wrong hands if these are the people who made it?
And why are de Blasios?
Where on earth does he get the moral right?
So because they cannot sell their actual philosophy, because if anybody questions them on the morality of socialism, on the fact that socialism destroys every society that it touches, if they ever get questioned on it, they fall apart.
Instead, they're always selling how lovable they are.
You remember Elizabeth Warren with her, I'm cracking open a beer as I declare that I'm running for president.
Well, here's another one from Kamala Harris, also likely to run for president, also a socialist, basically.
She puts out her mood mix.
Here's just a sample.
Hey, it's Kamala Harris, and this is my Mood Mix, a song that has always made me dance.
Check the rhyme, a tribe call quest.
You know I'm talking about fights.
So buy my socialism.
If you love my mood mix, you'll love my socialism.
So that's how they're selling, that's how they're selling themselves.
Meanwhile, Gillette has decided to sell their razors by telling men they stink.
This is their new Me Too ad.
Remember the Gillette razors, their slogan was always the best a man can get.
Well, now it's like you're not the best because you're toxic.
Here is just a sample of Gillette's new ad.
Bullying.
Is this the best a man can get?
Is it?
We can't hide from it.
It's been going on far too long.
We can't laugh it off.
Who's the daddy?
What I actually think she's trying to say.
Making the same old excuses.
Boys will be boys.
But something finally changed.
Allegations regarding sexual assault and sexual harassment.
And there will be no going back.
Because we believe in the best in men.
Men need to hold other men accountable.
To say the right thing.
To act the right way.
Bro, not cool.
So if you can't see it, if you're just listening, all the bad guys are white, all the nice men are black.
It's the whole woke deal.
You know, we haven't had an ad for Dollar Shave Club for a while, but this is a perfect ad for Dollar Shave Club.
Another great reason to join Dollar Shave Club, so not to buy the razors from people who think you're toxic.
You know, my friend DC McAllister, a wonderful columnist for the Federalist and for Ricochet, Denise McAllister, she wrote, she sent out a tweet saying what would it be like if a tampon company sold their tampons by saying, women, once a month, you just become intolerable.
So you can do better.
You can do better.
I mean, it's a great idea.
How is it that no one thought before that you could sell a product by telling your customers that they stink?
I mean, it's going to be really interesting to see if men are so debilitated, so emasculated, so down on themselves, so self-hating that they actually buy into this.
I hope it costs Gillette a fortune.
All right, remember, they're not going to do a show tomorrow because I'm flying, but I will have a show on Friday, and that's when we'll do the mailbag.
So get your questions in now.
Go to thedailywire.com.
Hit the podcast button.
Hit the Andrew Clavin podcast.
Hit the little mailbag.
Send in the questions.
I will answer all of your questions and my answers are guaranteed correct, which is all you need.
And also go out and pre-order Another Kingdom.
It is extremely helpful for the book's life.
And you know that Michael Knowles did the audio book.
You can pre-order that too.
And there will be lots of free gifts.
All right.
I will see you then on Thursday.
And there will be a Friday show as well.
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.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about that stupid Gillette ad, which lectures men, sermonizes to men, and in the process degrades and insults them, which by the way, that's their customer base, not a smart move.
We're going to discuss that.
Also, a Hollywood director, speaking of insulting, insulted his own small children on Twitter.
And then a bunch of other parents came along to applaud him for it, but I'm not applauding.