Greg Hurwitz and Ben Shapiro dissect the 2018–2019 shutdown, where Pelosi blocked Trump’s $5.7B wall deal, framing it as a personality clash over policy. They mock Cuomo’s late-term abortion stance and revisit Covington Catholic, citing Caitlin Flanagan’s take on media bias. Hurwitz’s assassin-turned-hero protagonist mirrors Shapiro’s view that art fosters self-exploration while politics traps people in rigid ideologies—contrasting it with Peterson’s early "rules" and their shared critique of Democratic extremism. The episode ends with a plug for Another Kingdom and Hollywood’s abuse scandals, tying art’s depth to politics’ performative decay. [Automatically generated summary]
New York State has passed a law making it easier to abort babies right up to the very moment of birth.
Governor Andrew Cuomo celebrated the event by having the World Trade Center lit up pink in honor of women's rights and red in honor of the fires of hell where he'll be burning for all eternity.
Though religious leaders objected to the law on the grounds that it was tantamount to legalizing infanticide, Cuomo complained that they were being unscientific because everyone knows that babies don't become human until they pass through the magic vagina where vagina fairies sprinkle them with twinkly rainbow dust that gives them a soul.
Cuomo added that such late abortions would only be permitted in cases where the mother's health could be used as a meaningless excuse or until people got used to the idea of slaughtering inconvenient children whereupon all bets would be off and let the bloodbath begin.
In a speech to a crowd of dancing shadows lit by an eerie red glow, Governor Cuomo said, quote, this is a major step forward in the quest for women's freedom and absolute evil.
We plan to continue our celebrations by sacrificing a goat to the law's sponsor in return for a guarantee of worldly success, wealth, and long life, followed by endless torment in a flaming pit of night-black nothingness, unquote.
Cuomo's announcement was greeted with cheers from feminists and hideous demonic homunculi.
But I repeat myself.
On the bright side, though more helpless children will be legally murdered now, at least this is an opportune moment for me to plug the DVD of the movie Gosnell, the trial of America's biggest serial killer, to which I contributed the screenplay.
It releases on February 5th, but pre-orders have already made it a bestseller on Amazon.
It tells the true story of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted of murdering babies and is currently serving time in prison, after which he'll be appointed Surgeon General of the state of New York.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-doo.
Hooray for Untuck It!00:03:22
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
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Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So all the polls suggest that Donald Trump is losing the fight over border security that shut down part of the government.
A majority of the people consider the partial government shutdown a serious problem, and they hold Trump responsible, possibly because he said he would be responsible and he'd be proud to take the responsibility.
People support border security, but they're less sure about the wall and so on.
But there is another side to this that the polls might not be picking up.
With the government shut, Trump has been keeping a somewhat lower profile than usual and has thus been acting less Trumpy and more presidential.
He made a good Oval Office speech and has even offered a thoroughly reasonable compromise measure that in a sane world could kick off border negotiations that would reopen the government.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and the press, but I repeat myself, have been on full, crazy-ass, crazy leftist, crazy display.
They're calling the president's names, they refuse to compromise, they skew the news, they hate on children and religious people, they've been pulling tedious, childish stunts like like canceling the State of the Union address for completely dishonest reasons and basically acting just like Democrats.
All this might matter because the fact is American politics takes place in a kind of netherworld between policy and personality.
And it's never quite clear which of those two will determine the outcome.
So who is winning here?
We'll talk about that, but first we have to talk about our new sponsor, my love, Untuck It.
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You know, the Clavenless weekend is coming up and while you're uh, pre-ordering the Gosnell Um dvd, that may have been the sickest plug in human history.
But here is a less sick plug.
You can also pre-order Another Kingdom, please do.
It's got wonderful blurbs now from Dean Kuntz and Greg Hurwitz, who will be with us later on the show an excellent uh, thriller writer himself, and he's given Another Kingdom the book a Uh, A Great, a great blurb.
Please pre-order it if you can afford it, because it really helps the book sales to move up the ranks in Amazon.
Nancy Pelosi's Dilemma00:06:59
So it really is amazing how much of our political attention now is taken up not by policy but by personality, and we even confuse policy and personality by calling people names like racist and sexist, as if that was going to have an effect on us.
If their policies are not racist or not sexist is only the policies, after all, that really have an effect.
So it's just amazing to me how often we, how often we get sucked into deciding things on whether we like people or not.
I mean, the midterms were almost entirely decided.
Everything was going great, the economy was going great, we weren't getting into wars, Trump was doing a good job.
But he was Trump and people don't like him, especially women don't like him.
Rich fancy, even Republicans in suburbs don't like Donald trump.
He embarrasses them, and so that was a completely, in a lot of ways, a completely personality driven election, which is crazy, but it gives the media a lot of power, because the media has a lot of power to portray personality as they see fit.
So right now we've got this incredibly weird Back and forth going on about the State of the Union.
It started out with Nancy Pelosi said, oh, while the government is shut down, we can't have the State of the Union in the House where it usually is because we can't protect you.
And then the Secret Service said, we can protect him.
She said, well, I don't care because it's about politics.
If the government's shut down, you can't come.
Then Trump said, he said, well, I'll move the State of the Union somewhere else because he could give it anywhere.
And there were people all over the country inviting him to give it in their state senates and things like that.
Yesterday, he said in what I assume for Trump was a final decision, he said that he was not going to make the State of the Union until the government opened.
And here's a comment he made right before he made that decision.
I will say that the American people want to hear the truth.
They have to hear the truth.
And the truth is all about, and said, I think, and I hope well, we were planning on doing a really very important speech in front of the House and the Senate, the Supreme Court, and everybody else that's there.
It's called the State of the Union.
It's in the Constitution.
We're supposed to be doing it.
And now, Nancy Pelosi, or Nancy, as I call her, she doesn't want to hear the truth.
And she doesn't want to hear, more importantly, the American people hear the truth.
So we just found out that she's canceled it.
And I think that's a great blotch on the incredible country that we all love.
It's a great, great, horrible mark.
I don't believe it's ever happened before.
And it's always good to be part of history, but this is a very negative part of history.
This is where people are afraid to open up and say what's going on.
So the press, some of the press is playing this as if Trump caved in to Nancy Pelosi and oh, how strong she is against House.
This is all about personality.
It's like, who's going to win here?
And you really do feel, I really do feel at this point that Nancy Pelosi is in a bind because first of all, she's trying to keep the left wing of her party, which is in ascendancy, in line.
But at the same time, there are a lot of people on the right wing or the moderate wing, if there is such a thing in the Democrat Party, who are saying, you know, Trump has made a good offer here.
He's made a good offer.
He'll give the DACA, the DREAMers, three years' grace.
He'll give other people some grace who are here illegally.
But he wants his wall money.
And Nancy Pelosi is saying, I'll give him a dollar.
That's what I'll give him.
I'll give him a dollar.
You know, a dollar.
And she's beginning to look bad.
See, I think, I don't think he's caving in.
I don't think Trump really caves in.
I don't think that's really in his repertoire.
But I think that what Trump is doing is he's trying to be reasonable.
He's coming across as reasonable.
He understands that at some point, or he believes at some point, people are going to say, well, he's giving in.
He's giving some stuff.
And Nancy Pelosi is giving nothing.
At some point, people just want the government to work.
And the fact that these people are, it's like Nancy and Donald are fighting.
The fact that they're having a personality clash is not all that interesting to people who want the government to work, who want to get their checks, who want to, the government services that they use and all these things.
There are some people, the intellectuals, I heard Jonah Goldberg say this on TV last night.
You know, I'm a big fan of Jonah's, but like he said, he said he doesn't care whether the State of the Union takes place.
Why intellectuals hate the State of the Union is because it seems monarchical.
It doesn't seem like good Republican government with a small R, that it's, you know, the president is just supposed to be another guy.
He's like another citizen.
He's not the lead of the government.
The lead of the government is supposed to be the legislature.
And it just seems like he's a king going out and addressing the people.
And so people don't like the state of the union.
And by the way, I'm sympathetic to that argument.
As Jonah pointed out, it was Woodrow Wilson, the worst president in American history, besides Jimmy Carter maybe, who actually started the tradition of addressing the public personally instead of just handing in a written state of the union.
But that is a little too intellectual for me because to me it not only matters what happens, it matters how things happen.
If President Ted Cruz said the State of the Union is too monarchical, I'm a Republic guy, and so I'm going to cancel my State of the Union, just hand in a piece of paper, that would be fine with me.
That it should end because we're no longer practicing politics, which is negotiation and compromise.
That's what Democratic politics is, right?
It's negotiation and compromise.
Everybody loses a little, everybody wins a little.
When we're not doing that, it all just becomes a personality contest.
And that, that we should lose the State of the Union over that seems to me absurd.
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Black Hebrew Israelites Interaction00:15:04
It's like a vampire.
So they're voting.
They're going to vote in the Senate on two different proposals that might open the government.
One, which is Trump's proposal, would approve the $5.7 billion to build the wall along the border with Mexico.
And there would be temporary protections for some immigrants, limits on asylum and other immigration changes.
The second proposal, which is the Democrat proposal, would open the government.
That's what they're trying to say.
This is all about opening the government.
We can't negotiate.
They keep using the phrase hostages.
They're taking hostages.
We can't negotiate while the government is closed, which is nonsense.
But you know what?
Actually, I shouldn't say that.
It's not nonsense.
Nobody likes to negotiate with a gun to his head.
Nobody wants to negotiate under pressure.
Trump also has a point of view in that they should compromise a little bit on the wall.
They just seem ridiculous.
And like I said, it's all about personality.
And that, by the way, is making our politics, the politics on the left, is growing increasingly strange.
You can say anything you want about Trump.
I've said a lot about his personality.
I've said a lot about the ways it might be bad for us, for conservatives.
It might be bad for America.
But what's happening on the left with personality politics is truly, truly weird.
I mean, you've got like Beto O'Rourke going around the country kind of, you know, keeping his like drifty little dreamy diary that he's talking about.
He's sending out on Instagram.
He's sending out his dental work.
You know, he's having his teeth cleaned in public.
And you say like, what the hell has this got to do with the traditions and laws and policies of America?
They're all doing it.
I mean, Foca Hantas, Elizabeth Warren, she's having a beer.
She's drinking a Michelobe, you know, and that's, and you think like, yeah, but you're still kind of a socialist.
I mean, what's that got to do with anything?
Kamala Harris, I mean, this one really gets me.
Kamala Harris, she's got some real trouble in her past.
And she's the one, she did her mood mix.
It was a mood mix, you know.
But, you know, Kamala Harris had an affair with Willie Brown, who was mayor of San Francisco.
He was Speaker of the California Assembly.
He was a big Democrat fixer.
That's what he was.
He was a big Democrat fixer.
He was 60 and married.
She was 30 and they had an affair.
And, you know, that's none of my business.
It's none of our business.
But he started to give her jobs.
According to contemporary news accounts, Brown gave his then-girlfriend, Kamala, two government jobs with ample salaries while she was just getting her start as an assistant DA.
The San Francisco Weekly reported, this is from the Washington Examiner.
The San Francisco Weekly reported in 2003, aside from handing her an expensive BMW, Brown appointed Kamala Harris to two patronage positions in state government that paid handsomely more than $400,000 over five years.
This is in 1994, so that was a lot more money.
She took a six-month leave of absence from her Alameda County job to join the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.
And Brown then appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, where she served until 1998, attending two meetings a month for a $99,000 annual salary, which again was a lot, is a lot more today.
So she's putting out her mood mix.
Kirsten Gillibrand, an Albany hack who has changed her positions on everything.
She's going on Stephen Colbert and he's holding her hand.
You know, I mean, how stupid are Democrats?
It's a good question.
How stupid do Democrats think their voters are that you're going to fall for this and not sit and think like, well, wait a minute, what do you believe?
What laws are you going to pass?
What effect will those laws have?
That is why Alexandria Occasional Cortex is such an amazing phenomenon because she is kind of cute and she is appealing and she is adorable and she's an ignoramus.
And when I say that, I don't mean she's stupid.
What I mean is she knows nothing.
You know, I played at the opening of the week, I played part of her interview, her discussion with Tana Hesi Coates, the author, and how ridiculous her philosophy was.
I left out this, which is the epitome of personality politics.
She's talking, it's Martin Luther King Day, and she's talking about the fact, I mean, one of the problems millennials have is that things are great.
This is one of the problems they have.
Things are great.
So what can they do that will give them a mission in life and a meaning in life, especially if they don't know enough to believe in God?
So if they don't know enough to do that, they're stuck with this, with a lack of heroism that does descend on free countries, a lack of opportunities for heroism.
Here is Alexandria Occasional Cortex trying to give them a sense of the heroic where there is none.
I think that the part of it that is generational is that millennials and people and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.
And your biggest issue is your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it?
And like, this is the war.
This is our World War II.
And I think for younger people, we're looking at this and we're like, how are we saying let's take it easy when 3,000 Americans died last year?
How are we saying let's take it easy when the nth person has just died from our cruel and unjust criminal justice system?
How are we saying take it easy when the America that we're living in today is so dystopian with people sleeping in their cars that they can work a second job without health care and we're told to settle down.
It's a fundamental separation between that fierce urgency of now the why we can't wait that King spoke of.
She really isn't.
There's a lot of room for furniture in that head, I gotta tell you.
You know, the world's going to end in 12 years and America is a dystopia.
You wonder if she's ever been anywhere.
You wonder if she's ever been anywhere.
I mean, I remember traveling in Kenya, going through Nairobi and looking at the slums there and thinking, oh, I get it.
There are no poor people in America.
We don't do poverty.
This is poverty.
She's a person who has no experience, no knowledge.
But it's all personality.
And that is why charges like racism and sexism and homophobia.
You know, I was talking yesterday about what the Christian philosophy, this traditional Christian philosophy toward homosexuality is.
You can debate that endlessly.
I have debated it here on that show with people who disagreed with me.
But they don't debate it.
They just call you a name because it's all about personality.
If they can depict you as hateful, if they can depict you as awful, then somehow that makes you unable to serve.
And you have people saying these things.
You know, yeah, well, Trump's personality, it really is too far over the top.
You know, to me, he's doing a good job.
And his personality is annoying.
And sometimes his personality does affect the way he does the job.
This racism thing, I want to go back one more time to this Covington story because my sister, Caitlin Flanagan, who is just a wonderful writer who is over at the Atlantic, she's kind of the last voice of common sense at the Atlantic.
She did a piece about what happened at Covington that had an angle on it that people hadn't shown before about the racism there.
She was talking about these black Hebrew Israelites.
And by the way, you know, I've had run-ins with the black Hebrew Israelites when I was a younger man.
They used to camp out in Times Square, which was then a kind of hellhole.
And I would get into arguments with them every now and again.
And they have this, they're nuts.
You know, they have this nutty philosophy that all the Jews in the Bible were black and that King James was black and he was responsible for the translation of the Bible.
And this is what Caitlin writes in The Atlantic.
She says, it seems that this is what happened at the Covington clash.
It seems that the black Hebrew Israelites had come to the Lincoln Memorial with the express intention of verbally confronting the Native Americans, some of whom had already begun to gather as the video begins, many of them in native dress.
The black Hebrew Israelites leader began shouting at them to the Native Americans, before you started worshiping totem poles, you was worshiping the true and living God.
This is a quote, before you became an idol worshiper, you was worshiping the true and living God.
This is the reason why this land was taken away from you, because you worship everything except the Most High.
You worship every creation except the Creator, and that's what we are here to tell you to do.
So this was heating up, says Caitlin, to be an intersectional showdown for the ages with the black Hebrew Israelites going head to head with the Native Americans.
But when the Native woman talks about the importance of peace, the preacher finally locates a unifying theme.
He tells her there won't be any food stamps coming to reservations of the projects because of the shutdown, and then gestures to the left where the Covington kids are and says, it's because of these so-and-so's over there wearing Make America Great Again hats.
And then both sides turn on these children.
I mean, that's an amazing, amazing thing.
And if you want to see, you know, now the New York Times is running pieces about the black Hebrew Israelites.
You know, they called them, they called them a group.
What was it?
It was one TV show station said they were there to talk about the Bible and oppression.
And the New York Times is writing about them saying, oh, you know, they're not so bad.
They've actually been in rap songs and things like this.
Let me just show you a quick scene from the movie Barry.
Remember Barry?
I sent poor Knowles to see it.
It is a hagiography or a hagiography.
It's a hardy, right?
A hagiography of Barack Obama.
And here's the scene where they're trying to show you he's street, but he's cool with white people.
You know, he's in with the blacks on the street.
It's an embarrassing movie.
It's just awful.
He's in with the blacks on the street, but he has a heart for the white people.
And the way they show you has a heart for white people is he gets in an interchange with the black Hebrew Israelites.
Here is the depiction in Barry of the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Can we, the lost tribe of Israel, reclaim what is rightfully ours from the cave-dwelling white devils that raped our ancestors, stole our land, and dispersed the true children of God across the globe?
Hey!
I ain't.
No devil.
This is not the words of Jesus Christ.
Shut your mouth, Cain.
Yes, you are a Cain.
Do you know what Jesus Christ called the white woman in the Bible?
The female gong.
And what is a female gong?
Don't be afraid to say it, brother.
That's right.
A b ⁇ .
That's what Jesus Christ called you in the Bible.
How come you're using the King James Bible?
What?
Why that addition?
I thought King James was a white devil.
This is King James right here.
Take a good look.
He looks like Billy D. Williams, if you ask me.
If you say so, brother.
Oh, that Barack.
He's so wise, so educated, so knowledgeable, and he has a heart.
You know, it's like he's just, he hasn't gone on all sides.
But the point is, when they wanted to make Barack look good, they put him up against the black Hebrew Israelites.
Now, when they want to make the white kids look bad, suddenly the black Hebrew Israelites are a civil rights group talking about the Bible and oppression.
Because the thing about personalities is very hard to define.
And once you give that power to the media, they will play it any way they can.
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So let me just end this.
I mean, I'd like to go on and show you some of the stuff, the racist stuff that they were saying about these kids.
But the point is, even the charge of racism is just a charge about personality.
The question is, what are your policies?
What are you doing?
You know, I don't know what's in Donald Trump's heart.
I don't know about what's in anybody's heart.
I just know that Donald Trump has virtually eliminated black unemployment.
I know he talks rough.
I know he says things.
Listen, you've heard me complain about it.
I know he says and sometimes does things that I can't condone, but he's doing a good job.
The country is actually in pretty good shape.
And if we could shut down the rest of the government, things would be great.
All right.
Thriller writer, Greg Hurwitz, is coming up, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
So come over to dailywire.com.
And while you're there, you know what to do.
You know in your heart that you should be doing this.
You've got to subscribe.
It's allows you 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks for the year.
With 100 bucks, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
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I think for 200 bucks, you don't get Knowles, I think is the way it goes.
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Everybody can beat Walsh, you can be in our mailbag, ask your questions, we solve all your problems.
It's a great deal for a lousy hundred bucks a year.
Greg Hurwitz coming up in just a moment.
Talk a lot about the fact that when art forms age, they divide into intellectual art forms, intellectual products that nobody likes but the critics, and popular products that really kind of empty calories.
I mean, I think that I talked about this in the movies, that nobody goes to see the serious movies anymore, but everybody goes and watches the superhero movies, which are really not very good.
In the old days, the popular movies were also the great movies, things like The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Those were Oscar-nominated, popular, top-of-the-box office films, but they were also great films.
One of the reasons I talk to thriller writers is I feel that in the novel, which has become virtually a dead art form, the thriller, crime stories, and science fiction and fantasy are the forms that are still alive and are attracting some of the best writers.
My friend, Greg Hurwitz, I don't know if you're a best writer, but no.
Jordan's Funny Take on Morals00:14:50
It's great to see what you're going to say.
I know through my friends.
I was waiting for that one, Drew.
You are terrific.
Your new book is out of the dark, and we will put it on the screen so I don't have to hold it up the whole time.
It's great to see you.
It's good to see you, too.
So these books are bestsellers.
This is a really interesting character.
His name is Evan Smoke.
Describe the character.
Well, he was taken out of a foster home at the age of 12 and raised in an assassin program off the books.
That happened to me.
It is, yeah.
That explains some of the aggression, Drew.
And basically, he was brought up in what's called the orphan program to conduct operations where the United States is not allowed to be and to do things that the U.S. cannot do.
And at a certain point, after operating and being trained up to be this person, the moral ambiguities of the program got to be too much.
He left the program, went on the run, reestablished himself in Los Angeles, and is essentially a pro bono assassin.
Now he's only available to people in desperate need who have nowhere else to turn.
And he's using all of those skills and doing it to help people who are up against impossible odds.
You know, it really is.
It reminded me, it's really funny.
I was thinking to myself, you know, it would be a good idea to do The Equalizer as a modern guy.
And then I started, I thought, damn it, Greg got there first.
Because it really is more in keeping with The Equalizer than the Equalizer movies are.
I mean, it really has that spirit of a guy who was trained for bad things, but he's bringing it to the people.
Well, yeah, and it's like every mission that he does now, he gets back a tiny piece of his soul.
And so he's trying to sort of rebuild this moral center.
But one of the things that's so funny is, I don't know if you have this experience, whenever I'm writing a book, I feel like if I'm doing my job correctly, I'm not starting with the archetypal or the thematic or the psychological.
I'm just writing the story.
And then when I'm done with it, I look back on it and realize what the story meant to me.
So it's sort of weird because if you start with the thematics and fill them in, then it becomes a little paint by numbers.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
I mean, so, and, and, and so it's this funny thing where, like, one of the things that I realized is, you know, he's given these the Ten Commandments, operational commandments to live by by his handler and father figure.
You know, never take it personal, you know, never make it personal, assume nothing.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
And when the series opens, it's him sort of reinventing himself away from those firm parameters and sort of breaking all of these commandments in his reconstruction of him being a new and different person.
And it's so funny because I started writing these books when I was 40.
And I realized in hindsight looking back at it, that part of what I was doing and dealing with in my own life was looking at all the rules that I lived by, which were pretty good and mostly adaptive with a lot of flaws and problems to get me through the first half of life.
But upon turning 40, I was sort of figuring out, you know, what parts of myself I have to let go of and reinvent to make sense for the back part of my life.
And here I am with no awareness of this till my fourth book's on the verge of coming out.
And I was sitting down thinking about it.
It was like, oh, of course, that's what I'm writing about.
You know, this is why I really believe that politics makes you stupid because you get caught in this box of beliefs and it's very hard to get out and it becomes about personality.
I hate Trump and I hate Obama, you know, and this sort of thing.
But art makes you smarter because it actually explains yourself to you.
When you write a book, I write, I find about two-thirds of the way through, I start to think like, oh, I get what I'm writing about.
Now I understand what I'm writing about.
And then it all sort of falls into place.
But that's really interesting.
It is about reinventing yourself.
And it is, in thriller terms, it is, in fact, a sort of rite of passage into adulthood.
Yeah, well, and what's funny is you and I, I mean, we are big proponents of the First Amendment.
And what's funny is a lot of the time, and Jordan makes this point.
Jordan Pearson makes this point a lot.
Well, I want to talk about Jordan Peterson.
But we figure out what we think by talking, however, imperfectly and stumbling and making missteps.
And part of it, I mean, you and I have been friends now 15, 17, a long time.
There's not a ton that we agree on politically.
But there's never, I never have a feeling if I'm with you discussing something that if I stumble or make a point that there's some version where you're going to like judge my moral character as a result of it.
Like we can kind of combat and discuss things.
And it's so funny because with writing too, I feel like if I'm taking a frame of saying I'm going to write about my, you know, grappling with existential issues at 40, the book would be lacking.
It would be flat.
It would be Jonathan Frankson.
Everybody would praise it.
No one would read it.
But, you know, so it's interesting because there's a similar thing that if you go on the exploration as a writer with fiction and let it take you where it will, it's a similar thing to having a conversation take you where you will.
That's right.
And the more that you want to armor and go, oh, well, you just said a buzz phrase that I don't like.
You know, one of the examples I give a lot is when I was growing up, my background, you know, liberal family.
And when I was in, you know, let's call it junior high school.
If anyone ever said family values, I'd have like this knee-jerk reaction against it.
And then, you know, I grow up, I have two kids, I'm married.
I'm like, hey, maybe I should have family values, right?
I mean, so there's these phrases that we, but like to explore, and it's funny because it's one of the reasons I think that you and I get along so well is if there's a basis in fiction and narrative writing and we're trying to be real, we're trying to write real things.
It's an exploratory process, the way that a conversation has to be.
And you know it's funny because I, I was I I, you know, I I do some um help with with Democrats trying to kind of wrangle things, and I I come back a lot.
I quote you a lot for a line that we had, you and I were out at dinner and you said something about 10 years ago uh, and you said, every time I turn on the tv if it's the Oscars or something else, i'm told how stupid I am as a conservative.
Yeah, and it really stuck with me and it's one of these frames that really change how I view entertainment, How I view the things that Democrats are saying.
And it's like this amazing thing because if I sit down and go to dinner with people who only agree with me, you know, it's like there's not as much that I can learn.
Right.
And one of the things about writing novels is you have to invent characters that you may disagree with or may hate, but you have to get into their minds.
And that really gives you a little bit of understanding and compassion for them and it spreads you out.
I want to go back.
You know, one of the things I brag about here is I have a lot of people on the show who then later become famous.
I can spot people.
And one of the people I brag about is Jordan Peterson.
And then I suddenly realized, oh, no, wait, I didn't actually spot him.
You told me to look at his YouTube.
Now, the minute I saw it, I had him on the show way, way back.
He had like 600 hits on YouTube or something.
But you knew him quite well.
Yeah, Jordan was my thesis advisor when I was an undergrad.
I took a young seminar from him, personality psychology, and then he was my thesis advisor.
And then he and I stayed very close.
He officiated my wedding, which was kind of great.
I always joke that it was the only wedding with like, you know, references to Kanan, Abel, and Kierkegaard.
We just rewatched it recently.
My wife had a great line because we were re-watching the wedding and she's sitting there and there's one point where Jordan gets very Jordan-in.
She goes, This was the point where I wasn't sure if I was getting married or being traded for a herd of goats.
But Jordan's been a big part of a good moral touchstone for me.
And then when he was playing around with his book, it was actually on Quora.
He was listing these rules for a while.
He praises you in the book as an editor numerous times.
Yeah, he makes fun of me too, though.
Everybody makes fun of me, of course.
Usually behind your back, he did it in print.
He stood behind it, girl, unlike you.
But what's funny is I love this Quora thing.
And so I put those rules in Orphan X.
So this is now two years before 12 Rules for Life came out.
Or as I say, this is when he was lowercase Jordan Peterson, not capital Jordan Peterson.
And that was the template.
I talked about those Ten Commandments, the assassin rules that are kind of more rigid.
And I wanted a counterpoint with Orphan X.
So now he's assimilated into society to some extent.
He lives undercover identity.
There's a single mom downstairs with a boy who he relates to a lot.
And she's trying to raise this boy more properly or in a more like robust moral fashion.
And so she has these post-it notes up that are Jordan Peterson's rules for life when no one had heard of it.
That's funny.
And now you're just stealing from Jordan Peterson.
Right.
So now all of a sudden, you know, so we're all kind of tangled up in that.
So his book came out and obviously is an enormous success.
And I'd been writing about it.
Then he's thanking me.
I was helping him, you know, work and shape up that book for before it was a book.
So it's funny how we've tangled up in each other's work.
So you, I think it's fair to say, I'm not sure I would call you a leftist, but you're a liberal.
You're a Democratist.
I'm certainly not a leftist.
Yeah, I'm a liberal.
But you're a liberal and Democrat.
What do you think of the way he's been treated?
I mean, I don't want to just talk about Jordan because I want to get back to what you were saying about Democrats.
But just briefly, what do you think of the fact that he's being called like a sexist and a white supremacist, and he gets called all this crazy stuff?
I mean, I think it's reprehensible.
I mean, I've been, Jordan and I have been in conversation about this before he came out with his position on Bill C, on Bill C-16.
Right.
So, I mean, and a lot of this has been, you know, I was one of the first people to go on record and defend him when there weren't a lot of people willing to put their name, you know, in an interview behind it.
I mean, I think it's reprehensible.
I think it's stupid.
I think it's wildly inaccurate.
If you want to bother going on and looking, he has hour-long, you know, podcasts or lectures about what's wrong with the alt-right and how they need to get out of their parents' basements.
I mean, one of the other things, the charges of anti-Semitism I love so much because I always say, you know, given that Jordan officiated my wedding 15 years ago, he's the most incompetent anti-Semite I've ever met.
I know, there's a lot of people.
What an idiot.
When you listen to the left, there are a lot of incompetent racists and anti-Semitic.
So you actually go and talk to Democrats about like, you're kind of like the conservative whisperer.
You're trying to tell them to stop.
I mean, it really is uncivil to continually call people racist when you disagree with them.
Well, yeah.
And what I'm also trying to do is to figure out ways to get, there's so many voices in the Democratic Party that you would agree with, that we would sit down with and be able to have very civil discourse and talk about their positions that are aspirational, that are pro-business, that understand high conscientious approaches to seemingly liberal values that share a lot of those same things and also come from a position of like, look, you,
if you and I disagree on healthcare or on a tax scheme, I come from a position of saying, I know that you care deeply about people who are left off the dominance hierarchy.
I know that you do.
You have some different concerns with ways that we might get there that might take away people's personal accountability and won't be as positive.
But if you can leave this sort of moral judgment aside and start to have conversations, there might be some differences on where people fall.
And so I've had this interesting realization lately that when I talk about moderate or centrist Democrats, I'm not even just talking about policy because I don't actually mind if some people are in a deeper blue district and want to experiment with things.
The part that bugs me is I can look into your eyes and judge your moral character and find it lacking.
I can judge your lower empathy approach as being like, if I could just educate you more, then you'd understand.
And there's actually a lot of them, but the problem is, and we deal with this on both sides of the party, the voices that get the attention are the furthest left and they're amplified.
And so part of it is, you know, with with Alexandra Ocastio-Cortez, she's plastered all over.
And it's not just that this is Fox and Drudge and Breitbart sort of weaponizing this to strategic aim.
She's all over the Washington Post and the New York Times too because it's clickbait and readership.
And for me, it's like, look, she has a particular voice and approach from a deep blue district.
And that should be taken on the facts and the merits, you know, positive or negative.
But there's a whole host of amazing candidates in the middle who are not going to make a headline because saying so-and-so has a very reasonable bipartisan take on tax code or how taxes should be approached doesn't get attention.
But given that, do you not think the Democrat Party is moving to the left?
I actually don't.
I mean, I worked with a number of candidates, all of whom have what you and I would deem to be centrist, moderate, certainly approach in having regard and respect for people who think differently than them, can speak to libertarians, Republicans, independents who had to to win in the districts where they won.
So not only in the approach, but even in terms of the value scheme of recognizing that innovation and accountability are essential and differentiation of outcome.
So it's sort of like if we can start from a way, and we're going to have different proclivities based on ways that we're set up, you know, like big five personality traits or, you know, like I happen to have fairly high empathy, but I'm also pretty high conscientiousness.
I can really understand.
Zero empathy.
You are.
Yeah, true.
Yeah.
You have nothing.
You got nothing.
Thank God you found Christ.
Because before that, you were just, you would have been American psycho.
That's right.
And the only, because I fear hell, that's right.
Yeah, that's it.
But, you know, like, there's so much, there's so much, if we can get rid of and dodge the kind of aspect of judgment and actually have conversations.
And it's a lot of what I've been doing.
I actually went back and sat down with Chris Halverson, who was the evangelical chaplain to the Senate.
And I sat down with an evangelical group when I was there in order to say, look, I don't care about merely winning points and doing all this other stuff.
What I want to do is have people of good will and good intentions on either side.
I don't care if there's policy points that we disagree on.
And we have disagreements about, as I do with you, about abortion, about death penalty.
We have different positions that we have.
But more to the point is to say, look, if there's somebody who's a Democrat who is a person of faith and they're trying to figure out something like, let's say, rural medicine that is not a prevailing, a predominant concern for most Democrats and wants to get something done to help people in her district, can we forge a cross-the-aisle alliance to get a bill written that actually is going to help people?
Because that's an example where, like, you know, we're talking all the time about the cost of healthcare, but guess what?
If you can't get to a hospital, it doesn't matter how much it costs.
So is there a way that we can raise the frame above who we hate, who we want in power, and actually look at it and go, the job of everybody is despite our disagreements, where can we set those aside at times and find common ground to actually help citizens and working people who are trying to figure out what they want to do?
Yeah, yeah.
Greg Hurwitz, you can tell he's not as stupid as I keep telling him he is.
His new book, Out of the Dark, part of the Orphan X series.
Hollywood's Ad Dependence00:02:02
And why?
What's with the two Gs in here?
I mean, come on.
It's just pretty much.
My parents basically wanted to name me to ensure that my name would be misspelled for the rest of the world.
And I would have to keep like wonkishly correcting everybody.
Greg, it's great to see you.
Good luck with the book.
And I'll talk to you soon.
You know, usually I end, I have often ended with stuff I like.
Today I want to talk about something I hate, which is this news story about Brian Singer, the director of Bohemian Rhapsody.
The Atlantic Monthly has released a very well-researched, very well-documented story where he is accused, Singer is accused repeatedly of molesting young actors and taking advantage of their ambitions and things like this.
I have heard these stories about Brian Singer myself for years and years.
And more than that, I have heard that this is a deep practice in Hollywood.
And the thing that bothers me is that in Hollywood, the newspapers, all the news agencies depend on the ads from the movie companies, do not want to cross them.
I don't know how deeply the police depend on that as well, but I just know that these stories have been around for years and nobody does a damn thing about them.
You know, I was talking to Sebastian Gorka on his show about some of the things I feel conservatives need.
And among those are less opinions and more fact-gatherers, more fact-gathering journalists who will not deliver conservative news, but who will not be scared off by liberal megaliths like the movie industry.
This is something that I think goes deep into Hollywood, and I think we really should deal with it.
There's no reason why a young man wants to be an actor or a young woman.
He should be molested as a matter of course.
All right, the Clavenless weekend is upon us, but you can suck up some more Clavenly goodness by going on Amazon and pre-ordering Another Kingdom.
Please do.
It is very helpful.
For the rest of you, there's nothing I can promise you but three days of chaos and misery and darkness.
That is what a Clavenless weekend looks like.
It's your choice.
It is your choice.
But if you choose to go into the darkness, survivors will gather here on Monday.
Clavenless Weekend00:00:50
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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