Andrew Clavin argues Trump’s 2016 victory exposed both parties’ failures—Republicans abandoned working-class voters while Democrats offered only divisive policies like the Green New Deal, which Mitch McConnell weaponized as a distraction. He dismisses Michael Cohen’s testimony as overhyped, framing Trump’s "Make America Great Again" as the only economic vision resonating with forgotten Americans, while mocking figures like AOC for peddling envy-driven policies. Clavin brands abortion a "psychopathic idea," comparing pro-choice senators to George Washington—morally conflicted but trapped by cultural narratives—and warns dating a pro-choice partner is irreconcilable. He blames Hollywood’s decline on artistic exhaustion, not left-wing bias, and demands legislation to curb social media censorship, like Facebook’s suppression of Tommy Robinson, calling it an assault on free speech. The episode ends with a call for Reaganite conservatism fused with tech-driven job solutions, positioning Trump as the last hope for a movement that’s lost its way. [Automatically generated summary]
Republicans are giving Democrats a chance to vote for their own principles and Democrats are furious.
The clever Republican stratagem began when cocaine smuggler and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to put the Democrats' Green New Deal up for a vote.
Democrat National Committee Chairman Tom Perez reacted strongly to the measure, saying, quote, it's the oldest trick in the Republican playbook to put a useless piece of crap legislation up for a vote just because it represents the Democrat Party's platform.
The Green New Deal is meant to be aspirational.
It represents our aspiration to completely destroy the American economy while hobbling individual freedom and giving dictatorial powers to the government in the name of a make-believe crisis we only designed in order to frighten the public into submission.
But that's only an aspiration until we can get our hands on the power to actually pull it off, unquote.
Republicans then put forward a bill not to kill babies, which every Democrat but three voted against.
As Senator Corey Booker told an assembly of men dressed as gladiators at some party he was at, quote, it's a cheap Republican trick to try to make us look like infanticidal socialists just because we want to kill babies and control everyone's money.
Nothing should get in the way of a woman's right to commit unimaginable atrocities so that her blackened soul can suffer the torments of hell for all eternity, just like any man who also happens to be an infanticidal psychopath, unquote.
Shapely but ignorant Congresswoman Alexandria Casional-Cortex immediately released a video to her followers and other blithering idiots in which she cut up vegetables for crude and talked nonsense, saying, quote, no one else is talking nonsense, but I'm at least trying to talk nonsense, so I'm the boss, which is nonsense, which proves my point, unquote.
Mitch McConnell immediately called for a vote on whether or not AOC is the boss.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
In their attempts to turn Donald Trump into a villain, the Democrats and the press, but I repeat myself, have again and again tried to portray lowlifes as truth-telling heroes.
Rogue FBI agents trying to subvert the Constitution, blackmailing strippers trying to squeeze out a couple of extra bucks, and sleazy McCarthyite lawyers and paws who will say anything to bring down the president.
Donald Trump Speaks00:15:04
All of them have been held up to us as saviors of the nation from Orange Man Bad.
Today, it's Michael Cohen's turn, and so as Trump's sleazy former fixer testifies before Congress, we'll be treated to another round of blockbuster walls closing in end of the Trump administration impeachment headlines, which tend to amount to little more than raging bitter leftists saying they're supposed to be quiet fantasies out loud.
But aside from obscuring what is so far the major scandal of this administration, namely the Department of Justice conspiracy to overturn the election, it also shows the left's failure, and indeed the right's failure, to ask what's probably the most important political question of our time.
Why did Trump win?
What's he got that both the Democrats and the Republicans have not got?
And what can the rest of us do to get some?
And I have a couple of ideas about that.
But first, let us talk about calm.
Stress.
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It is a part of life, but it can very easily affect your overall well-being.
It ain't good for you.
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You're stressing, how do you spell Clavin?
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease in Clavin.
Also, by the way, time is running out.
If you want to pre-order Another Kingdom, the first novel in the trilogy at AnotherKingdomBook.com, AnotherKingdomBook.com, you will get all this free stuff, including pictures for your phone, a map of the territory of Another Kingdom, and a prequel that I wrote myself.
Go to anotherKingdombook.com.
The book is published March 5th, I think, is its pub date.
So you want to do it now and pre-order the book.
It's also helpful to me.
If you're going to buy the book, I appreciate it.
It moves the needle up on Amazon, which I really do appreciate and it's helpful.
So thank you.
So, also we got the mailbag coming up.
I was ready for that.
Michael Cohen is testifying before Congress.
Breaking news.
Another bombshell out of the White House.
I believe this is the beginning of the end.
I do too.
It's really the beginning of the end.
The beginning of the end.
He may be feeling the walls closing in on him.
All the walls closing in on him.
The walls closing in on him.
Breaking news, a new bombshell.
One astrologer says this means the beginning of the end for President Donald Trump.
The beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.
Trump will resign.
Trump is going to resign.
Is this the tipping point?
I know we've said it over and over.
You think this is a tipping point?
And over and over.
This is a tipping point.
And over and over.
Breaking news, President Trump off the rails.
There's a beginning of the end today.
The beginning of the end.
It reminds me a lot of the last days of Nixon.
Breaking news tonight, new bombshell.
This is the beginning of the end.
The beginning of the end.
The walls are closing in.
The walls closing in.
The walls closing in.
Breaking overnight bombshells.
This is a very dramatic day, and I think it might be near a tipping point.
Do you think this is a tipping point?
This is unbelievable.
This is remarkable.
Have you ever seen anything like this?
His presidency is crippled.
Oh, sorry.
I guess something important was happening.
But let's go into the chamber and hear what Michael Cohen is saying about Donald Trump.
Now, I want to tell you about the real Donald Trump.
He's really, he's a unifier.
The words the media should be using to describe Mr. Trump are generous.
He's going to do everything that he promised he's going to bring success and he's going to make America great.
Compassionate, principled.
Donald Trump speaks from the heart.
Empathetic, kind.
He's going to stay true to who he is.
He's going to be an amazing president.
Humble, honest, and genuine.
Mr. Trump's memory is fantastic.
And I've never come across a situation where Mr. Trump has said something that's not accurate.
All Donald Trump wants to do is make this country great again.
That's the RNC ad, which ends with the phrase, have fun in prison.
They're not being all that nice to Michael Cohen, but the media is loving this.
The New York Times on their website is broadcasting the testimony live with its reporters commenting in case you might actually watch it without having leftist tripe pumped into your head.
So they got Maggie Haberman out there telling you what's going on.
So look, we'll have to deal with more of this tomorrow, some of the fireworks that are going off as we speak.
But let's talk about his opening statement, what he basically has to say.
First of all, this is the guy who said he was going to take a bullet for Trump.
All these tough guy fixers, these guys who talk tough, man, they fold like a house of cards, every single one of them.
They fold like an old chair.
Let's listen to cut number 11 as he talks about why he how he feels about his old boss.
I am ashamed of my own failings and publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York.
I am ashamed of my weakness and my misplaced loyalty of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him.
I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump's illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience.
I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is.
He is a racist.
He is a con man.
And he is a cheat.
He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop on Democratic National Committee emails.
So, you know, I don't know.
You can get this on CNN any day.
Basically, you just watch Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo.
They'll be saying the same things.
But the point is here, there's almost nothing new.
He doesn't like Trump now.
He says he's a racist.
He says that he paid off Stormy Daniels, that he paid him back.
He paid Cohen back for paying off Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet, which is at worst, and he's bringing the check.
He's bringing the cancel check, which is at worst a campaign finance violation.
Normally goes along with a fine or something like that, a slap on the wrist.
All of this, you know, nothing to say about the fact that it's uncomfortable that the president of the United States has all this sleazy stuff going on like Bill Clinton did.
It's the same kind of thing.
And, you know, that's too bad.
I don't think it's illegal for him to have a Moscow deal going on.
It's certainly illegal to lie about it in front of Congress.
And here's what he says about this.
This is cut 12.
I lied to Congress when Mr. Trump stopped negotiating the Moscow Tower project in Russia.
I stated that we stopped negotiating in January of 2016.
That was false.
Our negotiations continued for months later during the campaign.
Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress.
That's not how he operates.
In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him.
He would look me in the eye and tell me there's no Russian business and then go on to lie to the American people by saying the same thing.
In his way, he was telling me to lie.
So the only crime here, first of all, this is all during the campaign.
If Trump lied about it to the people, then he's a politician lying to the people, which makes him a politician.
If he went before Congress and lied under oath, then he's committing the crime of perjury.
I don't know what other crime is involved here.
All he just said is he lied.
I mean, that's it.
And by the way, his point about this Trump Tower, the reason he went on with this project, is because he didn't think he was going to win.
Now, if that's true, if Donald Trump didn't think he was going to win, then certainly Vladimir Putin didn't think Donald Trump was going to win, which means everything he was doing was directed at Hillary Clinton, was directed at who he thought was going to be the next president of the United States, which is what I certainly believe.
The reason that Putin was supporting Trump is not because he thought Trump was going to win.
Nobody thought Trump was going to win.
He did it because he thought it would give more problems.
It would create more problems and more animosity toward President Hillary Clinton, who he thought was going to be the President of the United States.
So none of this stuff so far, we're just not hearing anything that really, you know, again, we know this stuff about Trump.
We know he's carrying a lot of baggage.
He's got a train load of baggage.
We knew this when we elected him president.
I don't know.
I don't see exactly what's going on here.
And look, if he were saying things that were really devastating, I would acknowledge that.
I'm not trying to protect Donald Trump from anything.
And I think just the fact that Trump hung out with a guy like this speaks ill of him.
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K-L-A-V-A-N.
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You're going to feel foolish looking it up.
Protect yourself with ExpressVPN so no one will make fun of you.
Interesting column by Holman Jenkins Jr. in the Wall Street Journal today.
He's a really good writer, not a big Trump fan, but a very smart writer.
And the column is called The Media Will Re-elect Trump.
And he's talking about all this hysteria, everything going on.
And this is what he says.
He says, it takes no heroism to oppose Trump.
His statements are easily mocked for not conforming to the expected hypocrisies.
He supplies his enemies more extracurricular targets than Bill Clinton did.
He is universally reviled by elite institutions, including the media.
Except for his knack for turning their hatred into lemonade, his only asset is his rapport with an unrich, unconnected voter segment that falls far short of a majority.
Indeed, it is hard to explain how Mr. Trump can simultaneously be such a menace and such a pushover that every Democratic office holder in the country is thinking, if only I can stumble into the nomination, I'm sure to be the next president.
The answer, of course, is pundit vanity.
Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy because writers opposing him are then very important people.
If he's a threat, then the writers who oppose him are very important people.
Our wonderful English language gives us a perfectly good word for major media interpretations of the Trump phenomenon.
That word is fatuous.
When historians weigh his well-advertised nature versus the fantastic overreaction to his election, their first question will be, how did he become president?
Voters must have had something in mind when they pulled the lever for somebody so seemingly unsuitable.
That to me, I mean, is so obvious.
And I feel the right especially has not acknowledged the failure of conservatism that let Donald Trump rise to the top.
That there were things conservatism was not, there were people conservatism was not talking to whom it should have been talking.
And, you know, Ronald Reagan talked to them.
I think this is the thing that we lost.
The think tanks lost them.
The people lost them.
All those people who had been forgotten about in the middle of the country who should be natural conservative voters, we left them behind.
You know, yesterday I played this cut by Bill Maher that shocked even me.
I mean, you know, and I have respect for Bill Maher because he's for free speech.
He speaks honestly when he talks about the threat from Islam.
But the thing he said which shocked me about it was not that he said it and not that he thinks it, because I know they all think it.
It shocked me that he couldn't hear himself, you know, that he couldn't hear what he was saying to half the country.
The snobbery, the disdain.
And this is part of the reason.
Let's play it again, because it's just, to me, it's just such an amazing clip.
Let's play that again.
The blue parts of America are having a big prosperity party while that big sea of red feels like their invitation got lost in the mail.
And they still use the mail.
They turn on the TV and all the shows take place in a few hip cities.
There's no Real Housewives of Toledo or CSI Lubbock.
There are no red carpets in Wyoming, and no one ever asks you, who are you wearing?
Because the answer is always Target.
There are two Americas and it seems like one is where all the cool jobs are, where people drive Teslas and eat artisanal ice cream.
We have orchestras and theater districts and world-class shopping.
We have chef Wolfgang Puck.
They have chef Boyard.
I mean, just the dripping disdain for his fellow Americans, for ordinary people who go about living, who should be part of his audience, you know, who should be the people he's talking to, but he's not.
And he represents Hollywood.
He represents the press.
He represents the New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC.
Crisis Of Loss Of Meaning00:14:17
All of those people are represented by what he said.
He's speaking for all of them.
You cannot, you can't make that mistake.
Where do the people get a voice?
Where do they get a voice if not from somebody like Donald Trump?
Now, this is the first part of this.
I mean, I've said this before, so I don't want to go on about it forever, but it is important.
The silencing of people, the silencing of people, the intimidation of people, the idea that if you say men and women are different, you lose your job, or you lose your Twitter platform, or you get thrown off Facebook.
The idea that if you say, you know, I have problems with Islam, you're suddenly banned from Facebook.
The race, the race intimidation.
I mean, this is a big deal because this is one way in which I feel that Trump and I are in the same camp is that we do not feel that black people are special.
We feel that they're just like ordinary everybody else people, you know, and that's a radical opinion now.
That's a radical opinion.
You have people who think, who don't like black people.
You do have some bigots left.
But you also have these people who think there's some special thing that must be done for blacks.
And I don't agree.
I don't agree.
I think when you treat people specially because of their race, you harm them.
I think that the Native Americans are the perfect example when you see what is going on on their reservations.
You think, why do they have reservations?
Why not just make them American citizens and let them suffer with the rest of us?
Give them ordinary, ordinary problems.
All that intimidation, all that silence, what Trump is meant to break through.
But it's more than that.
And this is the major failure on the right.
It is a question of meaning.
We are suffering a meaning crisis in this country.
We are suffering a crisis of loss of meaning.
That's why people are taking opioids.
It's not because it's not for painkilling.
It's because of a crisis of meaning.
And, you know, it may well be, it may well be that the meaning that there's more of a feeling that things are going well in the cities, like Bill Maher says, but why is that?
It's because Obama and everybody before Obama, including conservatives, abandoned those people saying, oh, well, you know, the economy is going to be so good.
Free trade, global trade is going to make the economy so good that, yeah, you will lose your job, but a child in Sumatra will be allowed to make my telephone for five cents an hour.
And so that's going to make everybody richer, and we'll give you some of it.
We'll give you a guaranteed income.
Go away and die of opioids.
You know, that's a meaning crisis.
That's a crisis of people saying, we're the future.
We in the cities, we're the future.
We in New York, we're the future.
You're the past, die.
You're the past, die.
You say that to 64 million people, you're going to hear from them.
You know, you're going to hear from them.
They're still there and they've got to vote.
And I think, I think there's so many people who are hungry for this meaning.
Conservatives tend to say, conservatives tend to say that your meaning should come from yourself.
It should come from your religion.
It should come from your family.
It should come from your community.
Absolutely true.
All of that is absolutely true.
But government also supplies meaning because people see meaning in their leadership.
They turn to leaders for meaning, and there's nothing you can do about that.
Clinton was right when he quoted proverbs, without vision, the people perish.
If the leaders don't have vision, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter that you think the president, that you as a conservative, a thoughtful conservative, you don't think the president should be important.
You think he should be Calvin Coolidge, a small guy.
Ultimately, in a world with television in it, in a world where we can all see the government every day and where they're going to be reporting on it every day, those people are going to be figureheads.
Figureheads represent the country.
That figurehead has to have meaning.
Trump has delivered that with his Make America Great again slogan.
It's an economic slogan.
It is a little bit backward looking, make America great again.
It is about having jobs, bringing jobs back, bringing back the economy that everybody loved because it let people rise.
It was the high tide that lifted all ships.
People say on the left, oh, that's bigotry because back then people were racist.
I don't think that's what Trump means.
I don't think that's what he's talking about.
I think he means bringing back that economy where we were the engine of the world.
That's a vision.
That's a vision.
I think we need more of a vision.
I really do think we need to be talking about what the future is going to be like, about what technology is going to be doing.
It is amazing to me.
It is amazing to me that when we talk about technology, we only talk about fear.
We never talk about hope.
We never talk about, hey, how do we get to Mars?
How are we going to build fortresses and cities on other planets?
Those are things that when you talk about them, people laugh at you.
You can't run on those things.
But that's the kind of vision that we're looking for.
That's the kind of meaning that people are looking for, and it ain't there.
And the Democrats' vision is small.
You know, I make fun of Alexandria occasional Cortex because she's such a moron.
She's such an ignoramus.
But she is also offering a vision.
She is offering a vision.
It's a stupid vision.
It's a small vision.
It's an envious vision.
But it is a vision.
And that, you know, let's play this clip.
This is just two cuts of her that we put together just to show you what's at the core of her vision.
Maybe we shouldn't be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Like, let's keep it real.
It really comes down to the question of, isn't $10 million enough?
Like, when does it stop?
Yeah, when it's too much.
Right?
Like, when, at what point is it immoral that we're building Jeff Bezos a helipad when we have the most amount of homeless people in New York City?
Some of those homeless people mightn't have gotten a job at Amazon if it weren't for people like her.
But listen to the smallness, the envy.
You shouldn't be eating a hamburger.
I'm here.
A congresswoman.
She's a minor congresswoman.
I'm here to tell you what you should be eating.
I'm here to tell you how much money she has.
Now listen, you should have.
Now listen to Ronald Reagan's farewell speech and listen to the vision he put forward.
Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government and with three little words.
We the people.
We the people tell the government what to do.
It doesn't tell us.
We the people are the driver.
The government is the car.
And we decide where it should go and by what route and how fast.
Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are.
Our Constitution is a document in which we, the people, tell the government what it is allowed to do.
We the people are free.
This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years.
So, you know, that too is a vision.
It's a vision that never dies.
It's a vision that is eternal, our freedom.
But also, it's something that in this new age, in this new age, we are going to have to adapt that vision to technology, to the robots that are coming, to all the things that are making it more difficult for people to have jobs.
It is not going to be enough to tell them, oh, we'll give you a guaranteed income, go take your opioids.
That ain't going to happen.
It's how are we going to mobilize these people?
This is what conservatives should be talking about and thinking about.
How are we going to give these people a purpose in life, in their work, because it's only work that does that?
And by the way, it's not about money.
It's not about money.
I think about this all the time when feminists say things like, oh, you know, if a homemaker was actually paid for the work she did, she'd make, you know, $100,000.
No, she wouldn't.
The actual physical labor, the actual physical labor that a homemaker does probably wouldn't cost you that much if you hired somebody to do it.
But what she does is priceless.
What she does has a value that money just simply cannot cover.
I mean, that is why people rise up.
You know, children rise up and call their mothers blessed.
That's why husbands adore their wives and respect their wives, because they know they bring things into their life that you can't pay for.
And that's meaning too.
It's not about just the money.
It's not about the jobs.
It's about the meaning that that gives people.
And even if you're sweeping the streets, even if you have a menial job, that can have meaning if you feel you're part of something bigger, part of a country that's moving forward, that's moving into the 21st century with a vision.
That vision is lacking.
On the left, the vision is small, mean, backward, retrograde, and controlling.
On the right, I feel that it has abandoned so many of those people to whom Trump speaks, and we need them.
We need to bring them with us.
They are a major, major part of America.
And that's why Trump has won.
And I don't think the right or the left is really thinking about it in the way they should.
All right, we've got the mailbag coming up.
I got to say goodbye.
Stop.
I can't take.
So we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
Lousy, 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks, you get the whole year plus the leftist tears tumbler, and you get to ask questions in the mailbag.
And also, once again, let me ask you, please go to Amazon or to AnotherKingdomBook.com and pre-order Another Kingdom.
you pre-order it on Amazon, you can take the receipt over to anotherkingdombook.com and get all the free stuff.
All right, the mailbag.
Woo!
Yeah!
From Spencer.
Pardon me.
Oh, Clavin of the not-so-sorrowful countenance.
Don Quixote referenced.
What path do you see the Republican Party taking after Donald Trump leaves the political stage?
I actually just answered this.
Will the party return to the traditional Buckley-Reaganite form of conservatism that it embraced for so many years, or will Trump's amorphous brand of populism continue to define Republican politics after he's gone?
I really, I really did just answer this.
Last night, I saw Oren Cass at a Manhattan Institute dinner.
He was talking about jobs.
I asked him the question, when you start to think about protecting jobs, how do you avoid Ludditeism?
How do you avoid attacking the technology that makes life better for everybody, even if it puts certain people out of work?
I wasn't satisfied with Oren's answer.
He's a really smart guy.
His vision is important.
His book, The Once in Future Worker, which I haven't read yet, but I've read an article based on his article based on it.
and I will read it.
It seems like an important shift in the way conservatives are thinking.
We do have to start thinking about jobs and technology in the future.
We have to, while we're conserving things, we really have to start talking about what the world is going to be like.
And I really feel strongly that while conserving Reagan's vision of limited government and the people generating the energy and the fute and generating the future, I do feel that we have to talk about how we are going to keep people in step.
This whole learn to code meme just simply is not going to work.
You cannot say to a factory worker, learn to code or become a yoga instructor or whatever the hell it is.
You have to find ways for people to make stuff.
I've been saying this.
It's really interesting.
I've been saying this for a long, long time, that an economy that's just based on consuming and service is ultimately not an economy at all.
Somewhere along the line, you've got to make stuff.
And I think it's important that we train people to make things in the future.
And I think it's going to take a revision of our entire educational system, which the left has ruined anyway.
From Michael, first off, I enjoy watching your show each day.
I came to the Daily Wire for Shapiro and stayed for your creative introductions.
I have a quandary.
I am extremely conservative, and I have been dating a woman who is liberal for almost two years.
On most issues, we can respect each other's point of view, but we clash when it comes to abortion.
She cares more about animals, even fish, than unborn children.
I do not know if I will ever be able to convince her to become pro-life.
Her stance on abortion has me starting to question being with her.
Should I break it off with her or try to work through this?
If we cannot come eye to eye on this issue, will it lead to the ruin of our relationship?
I am sure I'm not the only viewer in this same situation.
I appreciate any insight you can provide.
Okay.
First of all, you can disagree on things.
Certainly my wife and I don't see the same on every political issue.
One of the things we do is we agree not to give our, since all our money is our money, we agree not to give money to things that the other person totally disagrees with.
I don't put bumper stickers on my car for that reason.
I don't want to use our cars for things like that.
Obviously, I speak my mind quite loudly and publicly whether she agrees with me or not.
So you can certainly disagree.
Abortion is something that might come into your own life.
God forbid, but it might.
I assume if you're planning to get married, at some point, you'll sleep together.
When you sleep together, sometimes babies come.
This is something the left doesn't realize.
They think the babies are like a punishment, but they actually come from having sex.
You know, again, God forbid, but you might have a baby who is not well.
You might have a baby by accident that your wife or girlfriend doesn't want.
What is going to happen then?
And that is something you have to discuss now, because this is not a question of giving money.
This is not a question of supporting things.
This is a question of a true difference in values.
You cannot bridge that gap.
You cannot bridge that gap.
If she says to you, look, you know, I'm going to abort any kid that I don't want because I care more about my fish, you know, that's a real possibility.
And you don't want that possibility coming up.
You do not.
You do not want that to be a thing in your life because there's no way.
Then there's no way past it.
So yeah, in that case, I think you really, you know, you're probably right.
You're never going to convince her to change her mind.
But this is something that could come up.
And that's what you have to discuss.
What you have to discuss is what would happen if.
And if you can't get an answer there, I think you got to move on, pal.
I think it's like that's something that would just be too tragic to deal with at the time.
Another question about this subject.
Regarding the Senate vote about protecting infants born after an abortion attempt, do you think the senators who voted against it are evil or are they just brainwashed?
I've talked about this too.
I mean, as I've said about George Washington, George Washington was a great man and a good man.
He not only held slaves, he hunted them down.
He had them hunted down when they escaped.
This is the icon of liberty.
understand why they'd want to be free when he treated them so well.
Ideas can be evil, ideas can be wrong and lead you down psychopathic paths.
I think that's happened in this country.
I think abortion is a psychopathic idea and that very good people believe in.
You know, it's a the climate of opinion, the atmosphere that you're in is so, so powerful.
Artistic Shifts in Cinema00:08:09
My entire life, my entire life is a story.
If you read my memoir, The Great Good Thing, it's a story of someone traveling out of a climate of opinion into what I believe to be the truth, the truth of Christianity.
That's a long journey.
I'm a smart guy, but it took me, you know, 50 years, basically, to do it.
It's very, very hard to do.
You are born into a climate of opinion.
You're surrounded by a climate of opinion.
You don't even know you're breathing the air.
So no, they're not evil.
Some of them are good people.
They are doing an evil thing in the grip of a psychopathic idea.
And I think you have to look at it that way because if you don't, you look back at history and you think everybody was evil, and that's just not the case.
From Daryl to the old crank at the Daily Wire, that is one of my titles, yes.
A while back on your show, I thank Vanity Fair for that.
A while back on your show, you mentioned that you were not happy with how One Missed Call ended up compared with your original draft.
How much was changed and why?
Side note, I bought the DVD from my brother a few years ago and immediately rushed to check if it was really you who wrote the screenplay.
Love the show, God bless.
You know, what's interesting about the screenplay is it wasn't changed all that much.
It was just the vision and the way it was shot.
The problem for me with One Missed Call, which did very well, by the way, it was actually a hit and made a lot of money, but it got such terrible, terrible reviews.
As I say, I think it's got a 0% still on Rotten Tomatoes, which I feel is underrating it a little bit.
But what happened was everybody made a different movie.
So I wrote this kind of snarky, witty, scream-like horror movie because I knew we were at the end of Japanese horror.
It was J-horror.
And I knew we were at the end of that cycle.
And this was kind of going to be the last really real one of them.
So I was kind of making fun of it a little bit.
And the guy who directed it, lovely guy, but a French guy who wanted to make horror art.
And so he took it very seriously, you know, very seriously.
And he brought in these kind of indie actors, these festival actors, and they took everything very seriously.
So if you watch the film closely, you will see lines that are meant to be delivered for a laugh, delivered with incredible intense seriousness.
At one point, I was only there during the filming for the first week of rehearsal, and at one point, I would never get between a director and his actors, but I couldn't help myself because I could see the director didn't understand the English well enough to know where the jokes were.
And I remember sidling up to one of the actresses and saying, you know, that line is supposed to be funny.
And she was like, oh, oh, you know.
So they just didn't make the movie as it was written and didn't understand the movie.
And then the producers, quite rightly, wanted to recoup their investment, and they cut the film to appeal to like 15-year-old kids.
And so that was a different cut.
And so it was all these people kind of going off in different directions.
The producers did get a success out of it, and that was good for it.
But I think they were kind of embarrassed by the film when it got hit so badly.
I was a little embarrassed myself.
It was not, I didn't think it was a good movie, though I did clean up on it.
So I guess that was a good thing.
Yeah, and that's the thing about movies.
They're a collaboration, and everybody can be, nobody can, you can be in a situation like that where nobody's wrong, and yet everybody's going off in a different direction, and they tear the thing apart.
And that's what I think happened to it.
From Jacob, my grandfather passed away nearly 10 years ago, but I have fond memories of listening to him recite poems from memory.
I want to continue that tradition.
What are the best poems, in your opinion?
Where should I start?
Does the beard make you wise?
P.S. Does the Beard Make You Wiser?
Yes, it does.
You know, you can get an anthology of the 100 greatest poems in English, because I think it's very hard to translate poetry.
It's one of the things that doesn't really translate very well.
Get an older copy so you don't get a lot of politically correct crap in there.
But, you know, there are poems like Tennyson is always great.
His poem Ulysses is a wonderful poem.
The Romantics are my favorites.
Ode to a Nightingale.
Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is beautiful.
Ernest Dowson wrote two terrific poems.
He gave his poems Latin names for some reason, but one of them is called Vita Summa Brevis, which means life is short, I think.
And that's the one where they are not long, The Days of Wine and Roses.
Poe is great.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, is the first poem I ever memorized.
Memorizing poems, which I'm very bad at.
I have a very bad memory, but it is great.
It is wonderful to have them in your head.
It's like having company, and it's great.
Tennyson, again, always good for stuff, very dramatic poetry.
Keats, Shelley, Byron, a little bit less, but still.
All right, from Michael.
During the recent backstage, a question came to mind that unfortunately didn't get answered.
Why is there not much creativity anymore in Hollywood?
It seems that most movies are remakes and sometimes remakes of remakes.
It makes it hard to get excited to go see movies.
Any thoughts on this you have will most likely be enlightening.
I think I did answer this in the backstage, but really, you know, it's fun to blame the left because the left has taken over Hollywood and they just make such garbage and they don't care about the people.
They feel the way Bill Maher feels about them.
They're not trying to entertain them anymore and that's part of it.
Hollywood was never wonderfully original.
I mean, so many of the films, the great films, are based on books or are based on other movies.
A movie like The Maltese Falcon, one of the greatest crime movies ever made, is the third version of it.
I think there was a silence one.
There's one called Satan Was a Lady that, you know, the Dash Al Hamett novel, and it was based on a Dash Alhammed novel.
So they've always needed material and they brought in material from elsewhere.
Arts have their day.
Arts have their day, and then all the tricks are gone through.
You know, when an art form, when people are dealing with an art form, it's not just the stories you tell, it's using the techniques that an art form produces.
So when Hitchcock says, you know what, you don't have to show, when a guy gets in a cab, you don't have to show him traveling to a location and then show him getting out of the cab at that location.
He can just get in the cab and then you cut to the location and people will understand.
In fact, you can just go to the place and people will understand.
That was some of the stuff that Hitchcock saw.
He saw that movie, he knew because he started in silence that movies were not primarily a vehicle for language.
They were primarily a vehicle for images.
You were telling a story with images.
Vertigo has something like 20, 30 minutes without a word in it.
It's an amazing, amazing sequence.
As you kind of go through all those permutations, the art gets tired.
And as it gets tired, intellectuals come in and start to say, oh, well, here's the serious art, and this is just the silly art.
And that actually happens.
An art form divides into empty, popular entertainment and serious but complex and ultimately over-intellectualized entertainment.
And some of those pictures are good.
You get a picture like Logan, which is a good movie, but entertains people.
And you get pictures that are kind of weird and offbeat, but are actually pretty good if you happen to be an intellectual who likes film.
You know, that's the audience for them.
But that moment when we were talking about it backstage, like 1939, when every movie nominated for an Oscar is a classic and a box office hit, that is when an art is at its prime.
It usually happens pretty early on in its technique.
I think it's happening to TV.
It's kind of trailing off in TV.
And it'll happen again.
It happened in video games for a while when they were just kind of exploding as people were experimenting with the art form and learning how to tell stories with it and telling stories that people love before the intellectuals arrive.
Art is always like running away from the intellectuals.
The intellectuals, once they catch up to it, they kill it.
They think it to death and they kill it and people start to appeal to them.
But also, they just die naturally.
And that's what I think has happened to the movies.
There'll still be good movies.
There's still good plays.
The theater has been dead for centuries, but there's still good plays made, still classic plays.
Tom Stoppard is one of the greatest writers of my lifetime.
He's a playwright.
So there'll still be great movies, but basically the art form is over for now.
It may be reinvented by another culture or another permutation of our culture, but for now, the movies are a more abundant art form.
Desires As Flowers00:02:40
Hey, Clavin, what kind of an address is that to the emperor of the multiverse?
I am mailing you because I'm seeking religious advice.
I am a high school senior and I came to Christ in seventh grade.
My life is so great, being I have my dream job in marketing that I am feeling myself not being dependent on God.
I see things are going so well that you feel separated from God.
I've just recently turned 18 and I want to go into adulthood an even better Christian.
I feel that what I want and what is right in God's eyes are not lining up.
Could you offer any advice to anyone who wants to become a better Christian and live their life for God?
Love your show and your book, The Great Good Thing.
Thank you for all you do.
You know, you shouldn't feel bad about doing, you know, you are God's path to him.
You yourself are God's path to him.
Your desires, rightly understood, your desires are the salience of your personality.
They're where your personalities stick out into the world, the things you want.
Now, obviously, our self, our souls are broken, our desires are broken.
So you have to understand your desires as they're supposed to be, not always as you feel them, right?
You may think, you may want to really succeed, and that may translate into envy of other people who are successful.
You may want to tear them down.
That's not the way your desire was meant to be.
Your desire is meant to be kind of like a flower going up toward the sun, the sun being God.
You should not feel bad that things go well.
You should feel grateful.
When you feel grateful, that will connect you.
That is a way to connect to God too.
Too many people think of God as this kind of stern, you know, guy threatening you.
If you go off the path, man, I am going to—I don't think that's the way.
I think what God is, is offering you this tremendous blessing of knowing him, this tremendous blessing of himself.
It's always, always a positive message, I think.
And I think that that is kind of one of the things that Jesus translates out of the Old Testament.
It's not so much thou shalt not, thou shalt not.
It's this way.
Follow me.
This is the way.
And you will find a joy, even in your troubles, even when you're facing the cross.
And so I think that the joys of your life are God-given as well as the sufferings.
And I think that you should be joyful and follow your ambitions and try to succeed at the things you're doing because those are the things that God wants from you.
It's great to give to charity.
It's great to work with the poor and do volunteer work.
I think all those things are really important.
But you have a mission.
You were made with a purpose and you should follow that purpose out.
And when things go well with that purpose, you should rejoice.
And when they don't go well, you're going to feel bad, but you ask yourself what God wants from you.
I mean, and that's how you'll find joy even in times of trouble.
Anyway, you should not feel guilty about that, if I'm reading your letter correctly.
I got to stop, unfortunately.
I want to end with, you know, I want to end with a final reflection about censorship.
Silencing Purpose00:04:29
Our friends at Newsbusters have done a great study.
Because the left has no message, because their message is secretly small, secretly power-hungry, secretly greedy for control of your life and your thoughts and how many hamburgers you eat and how much money you make.
They have to censor people who are speaking out on the other side.
Our friends at Newsbuzzers did a great study showing that there have been at least 111 different cases of conservative pro-Trump or anti-establishment figures on Twitter being punished for expressing their views.
And then yesterday from Facebook, they silenced Tommy Robinson, who is an anti-Muslim Islamist campaigner.
He's not anti-Muslim because he has Muslim friends and he believes in their freedom, but he is an anti-Islamist campaigner.
He's kind of a rough guy, kind of a working class guy who talks tough.
And he's been arrested, I think, twice in England.
And they've banned him.
They've taken down his site from Facebook.
He says, Tommy Robinson says this was done, quote, in response to my expose documentary called Panadrana Drama, which exposed the establishment and why they're working with the tech giants to remove us completely.
I just want to play you a video, though, that was put up on the internet.
It's two different confrontations in England between the police and a preacher.
The first is a confrontation between a babi, an officer, and a Muslim preacher, and the second by a Christian preacher who was arrested for disturbing the peace.
I thought today, you're the one that said.
You're coming up to me now.
Come on, come on.
Come on.
No!
What are you doing here?
I am preaching.
You are preaching.
I'm going to require you to go away.
You can never.
Okay, then I will arrest you for a breach of peace.
Plain and simple.
What?
Breach of peace is what you're doing at the moment.
You're causing problems.
You're disturbing people's days, and you're breaching their peace.
Okay, so to me for that, to be dealt with, if we won't go away voluntarily, you will have to arrest.
I'll tell you, this young man has the right to assembly.
He can stand here, he can shout, he can alarm, and so on and so forth.
He can shock the defendant.
He has what we need.
He's action.
He's only the office, and he commits a public order effect.
Oh, leave me alone.
Then he will be arrested.
You will miss him.
Dead movement.
No, Don't take my five of the whipfarts.
Don't take my five of you, breeze.
Don't take my Bible away.
It's heartbreaking stuff.
This is not tolerance.
This is anti-Western prejudice.
When you shut down Tommy Robinson, Tommy Robinson is talking about ideas.
You know, he says it's because he was showing that they're censoring him and they censored him for censoring him.
But they say it's because he's anti-Muslim.
He is.
He is.
But Islam is a series of ideas.
If you can't, you know, we have people in the Senate attacking Catholicism.
You can attack Islam and not be a bad person.
I mean, these are ideas that they have to defend.
It's not up to you to love everything they say or anything they say.
You know, I mean, there are religions, religions are belief systems, and you can attack it.
The whole thing about silencing the right is just about silencing the right.
That's all it's about.
It's about silencing the right to make it seem wrong, to defend yourself, to implement, to make it seem wrong, to implement Ronald Reagan's vision of a world run by the people.
Why?
Because they feel about the people the way Bill Maher feels about the people.
And if they have a country run by we the people, it's people who eat chef by RD and buy their clothes at Target, and they cannot, cannot abide that.
I really think Facebook has to be legislated.
I think Twitter has to be legislated to stop them from doing this.
It's not right.
It goes against their brief.
It goes against their briefest platforms.
They're acting as publishers.
And if they're going to be publishers, then I think all of us should be able to sue them for the things that are said about us on their platforms.
I think really, this is something Congress has to deal with.
It should not be allowed.
All right.
We'll be back for the last day of the Clavin week before the Clavenless weekend.
You want to be there to suck up all that Clavin-A goodness as you go into the Clavenless weekend.
Facebook And Twitter Legislation00:00:50
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.
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Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
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.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, we delve into Michael Cohen's testimony before Congress.