Ep. 646 dissects how leftists like Sanders, Omar, and AOC—backed by Putin via Maduro’s Venezuela—undermine U.S. sanctions ($7B against PDVSA) while ignoring oil-driven refugee crises. The episode contrasts Trump’s shutdown strategy (35 days, 72K opioid deaths in 2018) with Ann Coulter’s impractical deportation demands, defending his compassionate pragmatism over mass removals. It ties biblical morality to Western law, mocking ACLU’s Les Wright and AOC’s rejection of divine rights while framing Medicare for All as economically disastrous. Gorka praises Trump’s border tactics, warning Democrats will face a wall post-February 15th if they refuse funding, all while Putin profits from leftist chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Several states are considering laws mandating public school classes in Bible literacy, though leftists say this violates the constitutional separation of church and the state of godless immorality.
President of the ACLU, Les Wright, in a speech to a golden statue of a goat, said, quote, As head of the American Civil Liberties Union, I strongly oppose America, civility, liberties, and union.
If the Bible is taught in schools, I fear it might poison the minds of innocent children with the idea that they are endowed by God with individual rights.
And that's not who we are, unquote.
Wendy Rage, the president of atheists seeking to stamp out holy authority and teaching, also known as Asshat, issued a statement saying, quote, what has the Bible given to America?
Absolutely nothing.
It's a fly in the ointment when the powers that be want to cast the first stone that will lead to a fall from grace as when the blind are leading the blind.
If we can't see eye to eye on this, I'm at my wit's end and wash my hands of the matter with a broken heart.
Instead of having words put in our mouths, can't we rise and shine and eat, drink, and be merry until we bite the dust?
Or is it a sign of the times that the writing's on the wall, and in the twinkling of an eye, will leave the straight and narrow and die by the sword, unquote.
When told that every phrase in her statement actually came from the Bible, as did most of her ideas and values, Ms. Rage said, quote, gee, I didn't know that.
They should have taught us the Bible in school, unquote.
Alexandria Casional-Cortex, Democrat congresswoman from the state of utter ignorance, also opposed Bible literacy, saying, quote, I don't have to know the Bible to say what morality is any more than I have to know anything to say anything, unquote.
God himself also issued a statement.
It's called the Bible.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Ship-Shaped Dipsy-Topsy00:03:15
How stupid is elite American political discourse?
Actually, we'd need a longer podcast to fully answer that question, but let me put it this way.
Led by a news media that is little more than the publicity arm of the Democrat Party, elite American political discourse is very, very stupid.
Very.
Consider that for the last two years, America's so-called journalists have been so obsessed with minor rushing diddling with Facebook ads that they have turned a blind eye to the FBI's complete subversion of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, with the approval of socialist knuckleheads like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ecasio-Cortex Cortez, along with Jew-80 knucklehead Ilhan Omar, the left is openly giving cover to murderous dictator Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, who has Putin's full support because Putin hopes the collapse of the state of Venezuela in our hemisphere will hike the oil prices that keep his gangster government in power and flood our borders with refugees because,
oh yeah, the left is preventing us from building a wall.
But thank heavens, Roger Stone is in chains.
All right, we'll talk more about this, but first, let us discuss man crates.
Man crates.
Why?
Because Valentine's Day is coming and it's easy.
I'm sorry, ladies, but it's easy to get something for your girlfriend or wife because girls like a lot of things.
Guys don't know what they like and don't know anything.
So it's very hard.
But with man crates, the problem is solved.
Man crates knows what guys like and they have hundreds of gift options.
So you know you will find the perfect surprise for him.
These gifts are totally unique.
Most gifts ship in a sealed wooden crate with a crowbar so that opening them just gets the juices flowing in and of itself.
Who cares what's in?
Actually, I really like them.
They have unique gifts like the personalized barware crate with personalized pint glasses and bottle openers, the pizza grilling crate with pizza stones and a two-sided dough roller.
I got the very nice whiskey appreciation kit and a puzzle one, which I really, really enjoy.
Get him a Mancrate Plus, one of their Meaty Valentine's gifts, and save just for Valentine's Day.
Get 14% off when you spend $100 or more at mancrates.com/slash Clavin.
That's 14% off when you spend $100 or more at mancrates.com/slash Clavin, mancrates.com/slash Clavin.
And get that puzzle one.
You can solve the puzzle of how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Also, tomorrow, men and women both, is Mailbag Day, and you know how to do that.
You go to dailywire.com, subscribe.
It's a lousy 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks you get the whole year, plus the leftist tears tumbler.
And what would you do with that 100 bucks otherwise?
You just wasted on yourself when you could be giving it to us.
So go on dailywire.com, subscribe, then hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast button.
When you get there, hit the little mailbag symbol.
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Personal questions, political questions, religious questions.
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So you get 100% correct answers and they'll change your life sometimes for the better.
All right.
Venezuela's Crisis00:15:08
So John Bolton yesterday, our national security advisor, as you know, he announced that there are new sanctions on Venezuela where the people are rising up to toss out this dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and the head of the National Assembly has been declared an interim president.
We'll get back to that.
But here's Bolton announcing the sanctions.
We're going to announce sanctions against Petróleas de Venezuela, Sociedad Anima, or Peda Vesa, as it's known by its Spanish acronym, the state-owned oil monopoly.
We have continued to expose the corruption of Maduro and his cronies, and today's action ensures they can no longer loot the assets of the Venezuelan people.
We expect, and Secretary Mnuchin will go into this in more detail, that today's measure totals $7 billion in assets blocked today, plus over $11 billion in lost export proceeds over the next year.
We also today call on the Venezuelan military and security forces to accept the peaceful, democratic, and constitutional transfer of power.
And to a certain extent, this has already begun.
And by the way, Bolton, I don't know if it was at this briefing, I think it was a State Department briefing.
He was carrying a yellow legal pad, and people could see that scribbled on it was a little note that said, send 5,000 troops to Colombia.
The idea being that this was one of the options that they would send American, 5,000 American troops to Colombia in case they were needed in Venezuela.
I love that.
I got the feeling he did that on purpose, but I don't know.
It was pretty funny.
I just thought the whole idea of walking around with a little notepad that I have notepads like that too.
Send 5,000 troops to Rodeo Drive.
Anyway, so here's Bernie Sanders, right?
This is the guy who honeymooned in the USSR because gulags are just so romantic.
He tweeted this.
The United States should support the rule of law.
All right, pay attention to this, okay?
The rule of law, fair elections, and self-determination for the Venezuelan people.
We must condemn the use of violence against unarmed protesters and the suppression of dissent.
However, we must learn the lessons of the past and not be in the business of regime change or supporting coups as we have in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic.
The United States has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.
We must not go down that road again.
I love hearing Bernie Sanders talk about learning the lessons of the past.
Here's a guy who supported the Soviet Union honeymoon in Moscow.
He's still a socialist.
Who is less appropriate to be talking to us about learning lessons of the past?
All right, here's what's happening, all right?
Obviously, socialism has destroyed from Hugo Chavez on to Nicolas Maduro.
Socialism has destroyed freedom, the economy, everything, the social network in Venezuela.
The people are starving.
All the food has gone from the shelves.
They're rioting because they're so sick of this prison of corruption and want and need that socialism creates wherever it is tried.
So they're rioting.
Maduro's election, he's propped up by Cuba and Putin.
He's propped up by the Russians and Cuba, or maybe we should say the Russians through Cuba.
And he stole this election at the hands of the military.
It's a completely illegal election.
So the National Assembly, using the Constitution, using a clause in the Constitution, declared his presidency illegitimate.
So this is not any kind of a illegal move.
And using that same clause in the Constitution, they elected their president, Juan Guedo, as president.
He's also a leftist, by the way.
It's not like they're electing Ronald Reagan.
This is one of their leftist guys, but he is now declared to president.
So everybody in the free world has basically supported this.
Now, here is Ilhan Omar.
This is the woman who hates the Jews, loves the idea of boycotting Israel.
This is the new congressman, the new Muslim congresswoman.
And she says, Trump's new sanctions on Venezuela are nothing more than economic sabotage designed to force regime change by starving the very people we claim to be helping.
We must lift these and other sanctions impacting Venezuela's poor and support dialogue between the opposition and government.
So Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar counseling Trump not to interfere in our own hemisphere with this regime change.
Here's Marco Rubio responding to this, by the way.
He was asked by Jake Tapper to respond, and this part isn't in the clip, but Jake Tapper asked him to respond to this Ilhan Omar tweet, but he referred to Guedo as the self-proclaimed president, which just isn't true, right?
They used a constitutional means to elect him president, and we have recognized that presidency.
So here's Marco Rubio responding to Omar.
This is not a U.S.-backed anything.
This is, I didn't see any Americans in the street in Venezuela when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Venezuelans took to the streets on the 23rd.
This is Juan Guaido and the National Assembly, which was lawfully elected under the Constitution of Venezuela.
By the way, a constitution put in place by Hugo Chavez, they followed the constitution that said the election in January was invalid.
Sorry, the swearing in in January was invalid because the election that put Maduro there was invalid.
When there's a vacancy in the presidency, the president of the National Assembly, which happens to be Juan Guaido, becomes the interim president, and in the next 30 to 45 days, he has to call for new elections.
That was all their law.
They followed that.
The U.S. simply supported the democratic institutions, along with, by the way, 16 countries in the region.
This is not the U.S., this is Honduras, this is Guatemala, this is Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, et cetera, et cetera.
So this is not a U.S.-sponsored anything.
This is us supporting the people of Venezuela who want their constitution and democracy followed.
That's a fact.
So it's more, Rubio said at 16, it probably was when he was speaking, but it's more than that now.
All the free nations are supporting this change in the regime.
Who's not supporting it along with Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar?
The people not supporting it, the people who don't support it, are Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Turkey, Nicaragua, and Hezbollah.
All the fascists everywhere are supporting Maduro, and that's the guy that Bernie Sanders wants us to keep our hands off of, because God forbid we should interfere anywhere.
I mean, we haven't interfered anywhere, actually.
We're just basically supporting the Venezuelan people and their government and their constitution.
Dick Durbin, a Democrat, obviously, went down there and he supports regime change.
And he was then attacked by RoCanna, another California Democrat, who wrote with respect to Senator Durbin, the U.S. should not anoint the leader of the opposition in Venezuela.
Again, we're not doing that.
They did it during an internal polarized conflict.
Let us support Uruguay, Mexico, and the Vatican's efforts for a negotiated settlement and end sanctions that are making the hyperinflation worse.
It has nothing to do with us.
This has to do with their stupid socialism.
Guess who retweeted that tweet?
Our old friend Alexandria Akasinal-Cortex.
She retweeted that.
So you've got all these people on the left, right?
And by the way, you know, I don't know whether military action is wise and how far we want to go into interfering with this.
John Bolton says he thinks the military are not backing Maduro, but I think that's pretty complicated because it's almost certain that under Maduro, the military has committed atrocities that they don't want to be held responsible for if there is a change in government.
So I'm not sure what side the military is going to be on.
They'll probably want some kind of immunity and that could lead to more corruption.
It's a complicated situation.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
All of the left, all these guys, these clowns who have been made stars by the American media, Bernie Sanders, AOC, all these people that the American media supports, they are basically saying hands off Maduro.
That is what they're saying.
There's no way around this.
Walter Russell Mead, who I've touted a couple times on this podcast, he is the new kind of foreign affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal.
I think he's like the new Charles Krauthammer.
I think that he's a brilliant, brilliant guy.
He writes a column today, which just opens with a great line.
It's called Maduro is Putin's Man in Caracas.
And he starts out by saying, during the Cold War, Moscow supported the Latin American left because it naively thought communism was the wave of the future.
These days, a more cynical Kremlin supports the Latin left because it knows it will fail.
So this is really important.
You know how Lenin called American supporters of the Soviet Union?
He called them useful idiots.
He was referring to Bernie Sanders.
I mean, that is basically who he meant.
Bernie Sanders is a useful idiot because Bernie Sanders is still living in the world where the socialist revolution is going to make everything great.
What he doesn't understand is everywhere that socialism makes even the pretense of working, it's because it is supported by the capitalism of the United States.
Everywhere the socialism seems to work, where there's socialized health care, where there's all kinds of socialized programs, it is because we have the military that defends them and they don't have to pay for that military and we pay those higher medical prices which make research and development possible.
And they don't get the research and development benefits that we get.
We get all those medicines because we pay so much for them because we have to make up for the fact that they're not paying for them.
So everywhere, everywhere there's socialized life in Europe and Scandinavia, it is supported and subsidized by the United States of America.
So it's all an illusion everywhere.
Everywhere the socialism seems to work, it's all an illusion.
But what Mead is saying is Putin knows this.
He knows it's going to fail.
He's seen socialism.
He has seen communism.
He's seen it fail.
He's a very cynical guy.
He's a gangster czar.
That is what he is.
He's the gangster czar of Russia.
I don't even know how to comment on that because maybe that's what Russia wants at this point.
They're a very broken society, destroyed by not just the Tsar, but destroyed by communism.
But here's the thing.
So why is he propping up Maduro?
Why is Putin propping him up?
Because he wants him to fail.
Because under Maduro, the Venezuelas, they have the largest oil reserve, larger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia.
But in December, they produced only 1.15 million barrels a day, a third of what they were pumping at their peak, right?
Because production always breaks down under socialism for a million reasons I won't go into right now, but it always breaks down.
That's great for Putin.
Why?
Because he lives on oil prices.
He is atop of a petro-tyranny.
So he loves it that they're not producing oil.
The same reason he hates it that we're producing so much energy now, because that really threatens him.
The fact that Trump has unleashed the energy, the fracking, and all the ways we're producing enemies, Putin hates that.
So the important things and the important things, Trump is really undermining Putin while Putin is happy for Venezuela to fail.
Also, because he wants to take back land that has been lost by the Soviet Union, he wants us busy dealing with crisis in our hemisphere.
And he loves the fact that as socialism destroys Venezuela, refugees are going to pour out of that country.
And because we've got a left here that will not support border security, that's going to cause us so much problems that we won't be able to pay attention to what he's doing overseas.
So meanwhile, what are we talking about?
Oh my gosh, the Trump campaign contacted Roger Stone because Roger Stone, who's a braggart, bragged that he knew something about WikiLeaks.
So obviously Trump didn't know anything about WikiLeaks.
So why are they investigating him in the first place?
That's what we're talking about.
That is what we're talking about.
While Putin maneuvers with the expertise of an old chess player, he maneuvers our hemisphere into chaos through socialism, which he knows will fail.
Who doesn't know it will fail?
Our left.
Our left.
Kamala Harris has announced her run for the presidency, and she is bringing the full socialist agenda.
She wants Medicare for all, which is socialized health care.
I don't know why they even call it that.
It's ridiculous.
It's just socialized health care.
This thing, like I said, which we can't afford because there's no America to subsidize us.
There's no America to defend us when we can't afford a military.
There's no America to pay for the research and development.
And you don't even see that disastrous part of socialized health care because what happens is when you get old and, God forbid, you suddenly suffer from dementia and they have no medicine to deal with that, you won't know that they would have had that medicine if we had paid individual prices for health care.
But listen to the arrogance.
Jake Tapper has her on one of their town halls.
There's not a single right-winger in the place.
They're cheering every socialist word out of this fool's mouth.
And here's Kamala Harris talking about basically destroying the insurance industry.
To reiterate, you support the Medicare for All bill, I think initially co-sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders.
You're also a co-sponsor on it.
I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance.
So for people out there who like their insurance, they don't get to keep it.
Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care.
And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require.
Who of us has not had that situation where you got to wait for approval and the doctor says, well, I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this?
Let's eliminate all of that.
Let's move on.
Let's move on from that free market stuff.
Come on.
Why should you have to deal with your life?
We'll deal with your life for you.
You know, come on.
I mean, that is an amazing, amazing.
You know, conservatives debate among themselves whether we should attack socialism on the obvious fact that it doesn't work, which is kind of, it can be a weak attack because it can seem to work for about 70 years before the government collapses underneath it.
But we always debate whether we should just point out that it never works or we should point out that it's immoral, that it's inherently immoral to take people's money away and decide how to spend the money that they earn.
See, it's not that government has no legitimate functions.
Of course it does.
It protects us from foreign attacks.
It protects us from internal attacks, like being mugged.
We know we pay for the police force.
And it has certain things that it does that we won't all do together.
Like protecting the environment in some cases is an actual legit government task because each one of us may find benefit from fouling the environment, but all of us together know we want the environment to be clean.
So the government has a task to sometimes do things that the free market won't take care of.
But it has to be as limited as humanly possible.
Government's Role in Protection00:03:56
Why is this?
The thing is, the morality, the immorality of socialism, the inherent immorality of socialism, and the fact that socialism doesn't work are connected.
These two things are the same thing.
The fact that socialism is inherently immoral and the fact that it doesn't work are connected.
The reason is this.
The economy works best.
The great discovery of the 18th century, Adam Smith's great discovery of the 18th century, was that in a free exchange, in a free market exchange, both people benefit.
It would not take place if both people didn't think it would benefit.
If I didn't think that the iPhone that I'm giving you $100 for, whatever they now cost, $6 million, but the iPhone that I'm giving you $100 for was not worth giving you that $100, I wouldn't give it to you.
If you didn't think the $100 was worth having more than the iPhone because you're producing enough of them so you don't need this one, you wouldn't give it to me.
We both benefit, and when we both benefit, wealth is actually created.
The more people desire things and the more they want things, wealth is created.
We don't need the government making that decision.
So what the government is always thinking, because the government people are people who want power, that's how they got into government, they're always thinking, let the experts take care.
Life is too complicated for ordinary people to make these decisions.
Why is that wrong?
So first of all, it's inherently immoral to take away the freedom of you and me to make that deal.
We should be able to make that deal.
One of the reasons socialism lasts as long as it does is because it has a black market where that freedom still takes place.
It's inherently immoral to take your human freedom away to make that deal.
But why does it also destroy things?
It destroys things because the experts think, oh, it's so complicated.
We'll deal with it.
We can deal with this.
But the exact opposite is true.
It's so complicated.
It's so complicated that no expert can deal with it.
Think of the smallest thing you own.
I mean, the classic example that's been used a million times is a pencil.
Okay, a pencil has wood.
It has whatever the graphite is inside.
It has that little metal thing at the top.
It has the rubber that makes the eraser or whatever goes into it.
Each one of those are made all over in different places by different people who know, they don't know about a pencil.
They know how to do the thing that they do.
They know how to mine the stuff that comes, that makes the graphite.
They know how to be lumberjacks and cut down wood.
Each one of them, in each one of those deals, is making decisions that's best for him with somebody who's making a decision that is best for that person.
And each one of them is bringing to you a pencil that is the cheapest and best pencil that you can get.
When Barack Obama and his experts, or Kamala Harris and her experts, or whoever think it is that they can run the health care system or the pencil making business better, they don't know anything.
There is no expert who could know everything it takes to make one pencil.
And if it means one pencil, what about a healthcare system that is way, way, way out of control?
So the immorality of taking people's free choice away is connected to the fact that socialism doesn't work because it puts people in charge who do not have as much information as the people on the ground.
Each patient knows what it's worth to him to get the medical care that he needs.
Each doctor knows what it costs.
Each technician knows what it costs.
All down the line, the freedom deals with the complexity of the market in the way experts can't.
Experts are arrogant and they're stupid.
You always wonder how anybody could be as stupid as intellectuals are.
It's because they think they have a handle on something that is so complex that it needs to be dispersed through individual freedom.
And that's why these guys like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Casional Cortex and all these people who are defending Maduro are not just immoral, they're also bringing down hell on our heads.
If you think, I mean, who was it, P.G. O'Rourke who said, if you think medical care is expensive now, just wait until it's free.
Emergency Powers Debate00:15:18
That is absolutely right.
You know, we have the great and powerful Sebastian Gorka is coming on in just a minute, but we got a break from YouTube and where else are we?
Facebook.
Come over.
I don't even know where we are anymore.
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If you subscribe, you can not only be in the mailbag tomorrow, which is of infinite worth.
It is of infinite worth because I'll solve all your problems.
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Come on over and stay tuned.
Sebastian Gorka coming up.
All right.
You all know Dr. Sebastian Gorka, but you may not know.
He is now the host of America First on the Salem Radio Network.
I have been there.
It is a terrific show.
As I always tell him, he has the voice of a James Bond villain.
More importantly, he has the heart of a James Bond villain.
He is a military guy.
You should just show up with a cat, I think.
It's good to see you.
How are you?
Very well, Drew.
Very well.
Good to see you.
Thank you for having me on.
The show is great, by the way.
Your show is terrific, I have to tell you.
Getting paid to talk, it's crazy.
That's right.
So let us, there's so much to talk about that, you know, we invited you on because we thought the state of the union was going to be today, but there's so much to talk about anyway.
Let's start since I've been drawing about Venezuela.
How far do you think Trump and the administration are willing to go in supporting Guedo and attacking Maduro?
I don't know.
It depends.
Have you snuck a look at John Bolton's yellow tag?
I think we have to give John the troll of the year award for that one.
Look, I'll tell you what the president is.
The president is instinctually a non-interventionist in terms of military intervention.
He's always driven by the idea of bringing our boys, bringing our girls home from wherever they're stuck on some kind of military mission.
But at the end of the day, this is about a broader message.
It's a broader message about the cost of socialism, human rights abuses, and basically what Maduro represents in terms of an ideology that, thank you, Francis Fukuyama, did not die in 1989, November the 9th.
So, you know, I'll repeat what John said at that press conference yesterday.
He said, look, nothing's off the table, but I'm not going to get into details.
That's how you do it, Drew.
You telegraph zero except a commitment, and you let the bad guys, you know, wallow in lack of information.
But $7 billion worth of sanctions immediately, another $11 billion over the next 12 months.
That's more than enough to make Maduro's government collapse overnight.
It's amazing to me that all these people are talking about whether Donald Trump called Roger Stone about WikiLeaks.
Well, meanwhile, Trump is giving Putin hell in Venezuela.
I mean, all Putin wants is for that state to collapse and for Maduro to stay in power.
He loves this stuff.
Yeah, it's the whole, let's just stop on Roger Stone for a second.
I'm no fan of Roger Stone.
Roger Stone is a self-aggrandizing weirdo.
That's what he is.
But the idea that how can you have Russian collusion if you need Roger Stone to email WikiLeaks about what they have in terms of email?
I mean, if you have Russian collusion, then Donald Trump calls up Vlad and says, Vlad, have you given me today's dump of stolen emails?
I mean, this is the absurdity, the Alice in Wonderland world we live in.
How many administrations in the last hundred years has the president green lit the targeting and the killing of 200 Russian mercenaries?
I'll tell you, Drew, none.
Not even when we went into Afghanistan secretly in the 1980s, did we have hundreds of Russians targeted by our intelligence operators?
This, after Reagan, is perhaps one of the toughest regimes we have ever seen on Moscow.
But if you watch CNN or read the New York Times, you get exactly the opposite.
It really is Alice in Wonderland.
I mean, I'm convinced now that this massive investigation into Trump is an absurdity.
But the fact that in the meantime, not only are CNN following this breathlessly, but they're basically giving Maduro a pass and supporting the kinds of people who support him.
So let's talk about the wall.
Now, I always feel I have to preface this.
You are a staunch defender of Donald Trump.
I don't think I've ever heard you say a cruel word about him, but you always say it very clearly and intelligently, and you have your point of view.
So I always like to hear it.
There has to be some way that you were disappointed, maybe, maybe not.
Were you disappointed in the fact that he stood down on this government shutdown?
I mean, it did seem like Pelosi, out of that shutdown at least, got what she wanted.
What did they call us?
What did that commentator call us, the 10-2 MAGA heading, where the atavistic deplorable in me was disappointed, but the guy who's read the art of the deal was not disappointed.
Just think about two issues.
The FAA and the TSA had made the president's position untenable.
When you start shutting down LaGuardia Airport, that's a kind of pressure point that's just going to snowball in a matter of hours.
But what did the president do?
He gave a speech in which he said, I give you until February 15th, and then I will use everything in my power, which means national emergency, to build the wall.
And the master stroke, Drew is, and this is what happened yesterday in the afternoon.
He gets the state of the union.
Now, think about that.
The window, the three weeks, although it's not going to be today, it's going to be February the 5th.
He's going to be in the chamber of the House for two hours, and he's not going to be talking about the Lather curve and your tax refunds.
He's going to be talking about the wall for two hours.
The platform that gives him to drive home his message and prepare him to demonstrate.
What has he demonstrated in the last 35 days during the shutdown?
That he has done everything a reasonable adult could be expected to do.
And now he's punted the ball back into the Democrats.
And what are they going to, we know what they're going to do, Drew?
They're going to say no.
They're going to refuse.
There is no argument come February 16th that you can paint Donald Trump as the man who didn't try everything in his power to do things the way it should be done.
And now he has to resort to national emergency.
So, you know, it really is.
I hate people when they say he's playing eight-dimensional, you know, Vulcan chess.
But in this case, it was a pretty slick move.
He does seem to be strategizing because he has been very untrumpy of late.
He's been very reasonable.
He's been giving, he's given them anything they could ask for.
Even the Washington Post is urging them to negotiate with him.
So he must be being fairly reasonable.
Do you think, what do you think of the wall, the immigration hardliners like Ann Coulter, who's constantly ripping into Trump?
But she does represent a section of the party that feels that any kind of concession is the wrong concession, that the whole point of Donald Trump is that he's going to crack down.
Do you feel that this is a helpful spur to Trump, or is she just annoying?
At this point, she's off her rocker.
The statements that Ann Coulter has made, it must be to sell a new book.
It's just absolutely absurd.
But I get this a lot, especially from hardcore Trump supporters here in Virginia.
And I say to them, even friends, I say, look, hang on a second.
I get your point.
I'm an immigrant.
I got in line.
I had to pay my money.
I had to get my green card.
I had to take an exam on whether I knew my Civics 101.
But as a Judeo-Christian nation, we do not punish the children for the sins of the parents.
So nobody gets to jump the line.
I would say nobody who came here illegally, whether they were a minor or not, gets American citizenship.
But if you're a minor, you get to the back of the line and you get some kind of work permit.
I don't see the deplorable argument that a six-month-old illegally carried across the border should be deported.
That's not who we are, but it doesn't mean they get citizenship either.
Yeah, it does seem there is some kind of reasonable way forward.
You know, even when Trump was primary, I would say people who think he's going to deport 11 million people are just dreaming.
The American people will not stand for it.
But he won't either.
Yeah.
He won't either.
That's not who he is.
Right.
I mean, I know the left will never believe it, but Donald Trump I know from working during the campaign and working with him in the White House is a truly compassionate man.
You go back to the Parkland shooting.
He didn't need to invite any of those survivors to the White House, but he wanted to invite those kids to the White House.
This is a man, the stories you know now that have come out over the last 50 years of what he has done privately to help people who are in dire straits, which he never advertised.
That famous story where he was buttonholed once.
A car was broken down at the side of the road.
He stopped to help them out.
Turns out these people were in desperate straits.
And the report assessed him five years later, is it true that you silently paid off that couple's mortgage?
And he was caught like this and he said sheepishly, yeah, I did.
That's Donald Trump.
He doesn't bang a drum about it.
He doesn't, you know, on Facebook, get out a bottle of beer and talk about it.
You know, Donald Trump is a compassionate, for all the braggadocio, he is a compassionate man.
And he's not going to, he's not going to, he's not going to deport people who were children when they came here.
Honestly, really.
It's like Selena Zito, Selena Zito's line.
We had her on the show yesterday.
The Trump supporters take him seriously, not literally.
The people who'd never get Trump take him literally and never took him seriously.
No, it's absolutely true.
It is true that, and he has said this from the beginning that he wasn't going to do that.
And I just think anybody who thinks the American people will turn on their TVs and watch people deported en masse is out of their mind, does not know what this country is doing.
The left would do that to people they disagree with.
Drew, when I was in the White House, there were people on Capitol Hill who called for me to be deported.
That's the tolerance of the left.
That's how tolerant they are of immigrants.
Yeah, yeah.
So go back for a minute to this emergency powers thing.
There is an argument from both the left and the right that I'm kind of sympathetic with, that using emergency powers opens the door to the left, who will be in power again sometime, to use emergency powers for things that their little obsessions.
So for instance, the one that everybody worries about is guns.
You know, there's a shooting, there'll be some mass shooting, we can bet on it.
And the left suddenly says, oh, well, we declare an emergency situation and we are collecting guns.
Do you have any sympathy with that argument?
Do you see any dangers, moral dangers up ahead with the idea of declaring an emergency?
Well, look, there's always kind of moral hazard issues with these kinds of measures, but I think it's a straw man argument.
People need to do a little bit of research.
Ken Kuklowski, a constitutional lawyer who writes a lot for Breitbart, we had him on the show and he was very clear.
We already have, people need to check this out.
We already have 31 national emergency statutes in place that are active now.
There's one dating back to 1979 and the Iranian Revolution that is still in place.
The idea that this is some dangerous button that if you press it is irreversible.
There's already more than 30 that are in place right now.
And the other thing is, let's look at the facts.
72,000 people died of overdoses last year, 90% of whom were as a result of opioids that have been smuggled across the southern border.
How is that just prima facie, not a national emergency?
I mean, we had how many people died in Vietnam?
50.
And now we have 70, 2,000?
That by itself, let alone the human trafficking, the rapes, the assaults of the women that are trafficked across the border, MS-13, what's going on in Mexico by itself, if that isn't a national emergency, I don't know what qualifies as a national emergency.
Here's a larger question that I really want to ask you, because you and I, a long time ago, we had a conversation about whether or not the original Trump team had been replaced with basically straight line Republican establishment figures who were guiding the Trump administration away from a Trump revolution into something more acceptable.
Where do you think Trump stands?
I mean, with guys like Steve Bannon gone, you were gone from the administration.
Is the Trump revolution still a revolution, or is he now basically a kind of conservative Republican president?
I'll use a Andrew Clavin line on you.
Judge him by his action.
Look at the last two years.
Is he less MAGA today than he was when he was campaigning?
I think he's just as mad.
I think the shutdown shows you just how MAGA he is.
He didn't want to cave, but he had to give a window to demonstrate just how radical the Dems are.
The flip side of that is, I can tell you right now, I won't give you the names, but there's less than five people in the White House who are hardcore MAGA people who came in with the president.
And it is remarkable that despite the number of, I won't say swamp creatures, but establishment GOP who are around the president, that he is still every day achieving as much as he is achieving.
But look, as long as John Bolton is there, as long as Mike Pompeo is there, as long as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as long as Bill Schein are there, you have people who are committed to the president's vision and are helping the president realize what we elected him to do.
Will he get the wall and will he get it without an emergency declaration?
I think right now, look, the Democrats aren't going to give him anything by February 15th.
I think he declares national emergency February 16th, and he's going to start building the wall in earnest.
The West's Philosophical Foundation00:04:58
All right.
Sebastian Gorga, his new show is America First on the Salem Radio Network.
I highly, highly recommend it.
It's always good to see you.
It was really interesting.
Thanks a lot, Seb.
Looking forward to the new book.
Thanks, Drew.
Thanks.
I should mention, too, we should plug his book, Why We Fight, which is really different than you think it would be, a very, very interesting take on kind of the geopolitical situation and where the real dangers are, why we fight.
You know, I want to end by talking about the Bible literacy question that I was joking about in the opening.
You know, it really does appall me, the level of stupidity of people who think the Bible is inherently dangerous to our Constitution as opposed to a necessary piece of learning for every young person in the West.
Every young person in the West, no matter what he thinks, no matter what he believes, whether he believes in God, whether he's an atheist or not, is shaped by the Bible because we are all shaped by the Bible.
It is the most important book ever written.
There are no Muslims without the Bible.
There are no Jews without the Bible.
And of course, there are no Christians without the Bible.
And that shaped thousands of years of Western civilization.
And you don't just walk away from that.
You know, I mean, when you read, even the people like Nietzsche who said God is dead and the people who oppose the Bible, even they are encapsulated within a value system that was created by belief in the Bible.
That's why I don't engage in conversations about whether Thomas Jefferson was a deist or a Christian, because his ideas were entirely shaped by the Bible, even with his disbelief in Jesus Christ himself and everything we think about this.
But the thing is, you know, the most important thing to me that comes from the Bible is the very, you know, all the founders said that the Constitution was for a religious people, and you can take that to mean a lot of different things.
But the one important thing that I think it really does mean is that the idea of what a human being is, the idea that a human being is inherently dignified in his individuality, is endowed with rights that are unalienable, are all deductions that came from the Bible.
That idea of what a human being is was invented in the West, and I shouldn't say invented, it came to be, it evolved in the West through thinking about the Bible.
You know, all these people who think, oh, you know, everybody got it wrong.
There are no men and women.
Everybody got it wrong.
Socialism is the way to go.
They don't understand that everything they have comes from this source.
And yesterday, there's a writer named Marcello Perra who wrote a book called Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians.
He's an Italian politician and philosopher.
And he said he's not a believer.
He's an atheist.
And yet he said we should call ourselves Christians because only with the idea that our rights are pre-political, that they are upheld by God, can we defend the West?
Can we defend the things that we have in the West?
Now, I don't think that makes very much sense.
I don't think you can pretend to be a Christian.
I don't think you can say, well, I accept the results of being a Christian without accepting the foundation on which those results are built.
But it does really matter.
Yesterday we were talking about those other levels of meaning, the things that happen here, which are just physical, and whether they have a moral meaning that exists on a higher plane.
This has been the great argument of the West, even before Christianity.
This was the idea of forms in the mind of God that Plato had.
Plato said that, you know, you can say, well, here is a chair and here's another chair, but the reason we know that they're both chairs, even though they look different, is that there is a form of chair in the mind of God.
And Aristotle had a sort of different idea.
Basically, Plato thought that was the real reality, that these ideas were the real reality and the actual chair was just a shadow of it.
Aristotle said, no, the form exists, but it only has reality once you make the chair and that embodies these ideas.
But whether or not, whether or not either of those is true, the idea that these things have a substance, a reality in the mind of God is important whether you're talking about chairs, whether you're talking about two and two plus equals four, or whether you're talking about the fact that you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And that's what the Bible ensures.
More than anything, it ensures that we are thinking on the level of morality and meaning and not just in physicality.
You heard Kamala Harris say, isn't it a pain that you have to go to the business, you have to go to get your insurance?
I'm going to take care of all that for you.
Because she's thinking always, as the left always thinks on a completely material level, it's when you think on the level of morality and meaning that you say, well, wait a minute, don't I have a responsibility for myself?
Don't I have a freedom to choose for myself?
Why are you making those decisions for me?
Why are you taking that away from me?
And she's saying, look, stuff, stuff, I'm giving you stuff.
And if you have some idea of another level of morality and meaning, you're saying, wait, wait, wait.
Bible Ensures Moral Thinking00:01:42
Stuff is nice, but freedom is more important.
And that's the level we want to live on.
And that's why everybody should know what's in the Bible and what it has meant to this civilization, whether you believe in it or not.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
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Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about Donald Trump and his endorsement of the idea of Bible literacy classes.
The left doesn't like this idea, which of course you would expect, but I think it's great because you can't have a real education without the Bible, and I want to talk about why.
And also, CNBC is claiming that you shouldn't have kids because it's going to make you go broke, and having kids costs thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a year, which is just absurd propaganda.