Ep. 666 frames Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the face of Democratic socialism, mocking her Green New Deal’s impracticality and her ties to Maduro’s Venezuela while exposing staff corruption. Zoe Lofgren critiques Republicans for cultural retreat, urging biblical-grounded resistance via A Solid Right Cross, while Andrew Klavan contrasts gaming’s creative freedom with mainstream storytelling. The episode blends satire, tactical conservative strategy, and media history under Breitbart’s legacy, ending with Matt Walsh’s leftist hypocrisy critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats are broadening the scope of their investigations into Donald Trump.
The investigations began, of course, with Democrats asserting that Trump and Natasha had stolen the election right out from under the noses of Rocket Jay Squirrel and his faithful sidekick Bullwinkle.
When that turned out to be just some cartoon someone saw once, Democrats turned their attention to other important matters, like Trump's blatant attempts to obstruct justice by refusing to testify against Boris Badenoff.
Flabby-faced McCarthy Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Oxymoronic House Intelligence Committee, has repeatedly asserted that he has personally seen evidence he can't describe that has convinced him of something he won't reveal that the American people need to know about, though he can't tell them.
In an interview with NBC's Chuck Credulous, Schiff explained why the investigations had to expand their scope, saying, quote, I have stretched these groundless accusations about Russia just about as far as I can, so it's time to move on to other things before reporters start to look silly for listening to a word I say.
America deserves to know whether Trump really did strangle a prostitute after she witnessed him giving an overdose of heroin to an Hispanic orphan, or whether that entire scenario is just something I made up as part of a sleazy political tactic I've been living off for years, unquote.
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler in a statement released to Adam Schiff said, quote, this president is so bad that I can't make up silly crap to investigate fast enough.
Money laundering, drug dealing, witness intimidation, these are just a few of the criminal activities I can name that have nothing to do with anything.
The American public wants to spend every last penny it has finding the answers to meaningless questions.
Or if it doesn't, no one told me, unquote.
The Democrats promise the investigations will continue until Congress thinks of something useful to do with all its sweet, sweet money and power.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is it easy.
It's a wonderful day, hurrah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Alexandria Occasional Cortex.
When Democrats say that conservatives are obsessed with Alexandria Occasional Cortex, what they mean is that Democrats are obsessed with Alexandria Occasional Cortex, and Republicans keep ruining the party by pointing out that she's stupid, mean, and possibly corrupt.
But whether you're a Democrat or Republican, there's no getting away from AO Cortex because she's not just a shapely ignoramus.
She's actually the avatar of Democrats' current ideas.
We talk here all the time about the wages of bad ideas.
You start, for instance, with the mistaken notion that you can make men and women equal by giving women the right to destroy their unborn children, and you end up slaughtering living babies like some sort of savage, cannibalistic serial killer.
We're like this Democrat here.
If we can kill all the babies, we can have sex, sex, sex for everyone all the time and use the bodies of our children to keep us alive forever, these people here all right I'll get back to him in a minute
But the point is the left has been pushing toward the bad idea of socialism bit by bit since the turn of the last century.
And A occasional C is simply what socialism looks like when it comes to life.
A self-confident fool, a self-righteous bully, and a self-serving destroyer of the great goods of freedom.
The Democrats should take a good long look at AOC because AOC is T-H-E-M.
And we're going to be talking about that.
But first, let's talk about something more pleasant, namely, Mike Rowe.
Mike Rowe is a good guy and a great broadcaster.
And he's got a podcast out.
It's actually, I hadn't been aware of it before, but it's been around for a long time.
So there's like 120 episodes you can listen to.
And the thing is, each episode is 10 minutes or less.
The show is called The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe.
It explores everything from pop culture to politics, actors to athletes, history to Hollywood.
His storytelling is kind of like Paul Harvey's the rest of the story.
I don't know how many people remember that, but still, Paul Harvey was one of the great broadcasters, and so is Mike.
The Way I Heard It is America's number one short-form podcast.
I listened to an episode recently called Oh Brother, which was it was really in 10 minutes.
It packed in a little mystery, kind of puzzle story, but also had something important to say, and it was dramatic, and it just kind of swept you away.
So it's really good stuff.
Go to microe.com.
That's Mike Rowe's one word, micro.com/slash podcast today to listen and subscribe to The Way I Heard It.
That's M-I-K-E-R-O-W-E dot com slash podcast.
Again, micro.com/slash podcast.
It's good stuff.
So, oh, the mailbag tomorrow.
I always forget to say this.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
Go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the little mailbag symbol, ask me anything you want.
You've got to be a subscriber.
So when you get to dailywire.com, subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month, $100 you get the whole year.
And the Leftist Tears Tumblr, which is made of uranium.
So it's radioactive.
But it's still a great tumbler.
But anyway, you can ask me anything, religion, personal questions, politics.
All my answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
And they will change your life sometimes for the better.
And that's just some of what you get for your $100.
The devil, the reason we put in the devil in the opening there, in my little commentary there, is because this is my 666th show, and it's the mark of the beast.
And so I just thought I would remind the good folks who run this place how they took their name off that video.
The video is called The Devil in Planned Parenthood.
You can still find it in YouTube.
They haven't censored it yet.
And I always tease them about this.
It was the first video I did for them, and they were so shocked they took their name off them.
Humor gets you in trouble more than anything else.
So the big news yesterday was that the Democrats have unleashed their full investigative powers.
They've subpoenaed like 80 people.
They're looking into everything.
And it's just a complete sham.
They aren't even pretending to investigate anything real anymore.
They started with that whole Russia nonsense, which it was nonsense.
But now, here's Jerry Nadler.
He's the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
They ask him, what's the purpose of all this investigation?
Listen to this.
Our goal is to hold the administration accountable for the obstruction of justice, the abuse of power, and the corruption.
Our goal is to vindicate the rule of law, to protect the rule of law in this country.
And that's our core function as the Judiciary Committee of the Congress.
And we have to find out what's been going on, and we have to lay out a case to the American people and reveal it.
Because we have not seen an administration in a long time prior to this in which there were so many attacks on the rule of law, attacks on the Justice Department, attacks on the press, attacks on the judiciary, attacks on the norms that we depend upon to maintain democratic government.
So when you say, but you say we have to lay out a case, is that what you're trying to do?
Well, to lay out what's been going on, I don't mean a case to establish anything in particular, but what's been going on?
What have they been doing?
And how can we fix it?
How do we protect the rule of law?
That's the real question.
Not a case for anything in particular.
We're just going to investigate until we stumble on something we can scream about.
And the things he's talking about are just things that Trump says, the things that he says.
That's what they're investigating.
I mean, when the right investigated Obama, it was because of the gun running of Fast and Furious, where a guy had gotten killed, a border agent had gotten killed by guns that the Obama administration allowed to be sold into the hands of drug dealers.
That's worth investigating.
It was because the IRS shut down conservative commentators so the Tea Party would be less powerful during the reelection campaign.
That stuff you investigate.
This is nonsense.
It's openly nonsense.
He can't even name something that Trump has done except talk that they're going to investigate.
They couldn't even name it before.
Even now, they had Michael Cohen come on and he kind of got rid of their whole reason for investigating, which was that steel dossier, this kind of OPO research that the Clinton campaign did with the help of the Russians.
Devin Nunes or Nunez or Numchuk or whatever his name is.
I love this guy, by the way.
I'm always kidding about his name, but he's now the ranking member on House Intelligence.
And he made the point that they've got Michael Cohen in closed-door sessions where Michael Cohen is in possession of exactly zero classified information.
And they're doing it to give an air of mystery to the proceedings, to make it so that the Democrats, the Republicans can't come out and talk about it.
And Nunez talks about the fact that Michael Cohen's testimony virtually destroyed the whole basis of the original investigation.
Cohen was great for Republicans.
It was great for Donald Trump because we now know that the dossier was total bunk.
There was no truth to it.
And we know that because that Cohen has testified now publicly that he wasn't in Prague and there was no truth to anything in the dossier.
And he said there was no collusion, by the way.
No collusion, no collusion, no conspiracy, no obstruction.
You know, these are all issues that were essentially made in that dossier that was the Democrat.
Remember, for the viewers out there, I think a lot of people forget, this was the Democratic campaign committee working with the Clinton campaign that produced this dirt, fed it into the FBI to start this investigation in the first place.
It was totally debunked this week and it'll be debunked again next week.
We should get him on, see if he'll come on the show.
I'll stop making fun of his name if he'll come on the show and talk to us.
No, that was a really concise way of talking about it.
And the thing is, for all this Trump, the talk about Trump's authoritarianism, this is the stuff that authoritarians do.
They criminalize politics.
They investigate things that are political.
Candidco's Greed Problem00:15:10
They go back in time to get any kind of dirt on them using the public's money.
Which brings me to Alexandria Occasional Cortex, because, you know, I pick on this woman.
We all pick on this woman, but I think it's important to pick on her because I think she is socialism.
And just to remind you, the woman is an idiot.
We need to occupy every airport.
We need to occupy every border.
We need to occupy every ICE office.
We look at these figures and we say, oh, unemployment is low.
Everything is fine, right?
Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.
Why aren't we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who die because they can't afford access to health care?
This like upper middle class is probably more moderate, but that upper middle class doesn't exist anymore.
Their heyday was in the 90s when like, you know, kids had like furbies and like parents, you had like soccer moms with like two vans.
That's not America anymore.
It's an utter clown.
And it's not just the right saying that, by the way, and I'll get to that in just a second.
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Patrick Moore, who left, he's an environmentalist, but he left Greenpeace 33 years ago because he said the movement was hijacked by eco-fascists.
He tweeted out Saturday, listening to AOC talk about the environment.
He said, AOC is a pompous little twit.
You don't have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels or get food into the cities.
Horses, if fossil fuels were banned, every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating.
You would bring about mass death.
You know, Kat Timph on Greg Gutfell's show went off about this yesterday.
Let's play just that clip because she actually said this.
Remember, AOC said that at least I have an idea.
Her Green New Deal is an idea.
You don't have an idea, so I'm the boss.
I just think AOC has completely lost her marbles.
I think she's living in banana land.
Earlier this week, she called herself the boss for coming up with the Green New Deal.
How are you the boss for coming up with a plan that doesn't work?
Like, are you sure that the Green New Deal is not like what you're putting in your pipe and smoking every day?
I don't understand.
I can come up with plenty of plans that don't work.
How about we fly around on unicorns instead of airplanes?
How about instead of gasoline?
We use fairy dots we get from Tinkerbell.
How about we get Harry Potter to come over and wizard away all the emissions from the cow farts she's so concerned about?
See, I just came up with three plans that don't work.
Does that make me the triple boss?
I mean, what does she does she want us?
Does she want us to just completely do away with all modern technology?
Like, I don't want to live like Laura Engels Wilder, Greg.
I don't want to do my laundry in a basin.
I don't want to eat only lettuce and carrots like some kind of funny.
To relive the daughter party in the modern day because I had to take a horse and buggy to see my grandparents instead of a plane.
I don't want to eat people, Greg, and I don't want people to eat me.
That's true, though.
I mean, it's funny because it's true, as they say.
Socialism is stupid.
That is what she is the avatar of.
She represents that.
Socialism is stupid because it never asks where the money will come from.
It takes no account of human nature and what humans can do, either in a good way when left alone or in a bad way when their incentives are removed.
You know, the great insight of Adam Smith, I think it was, when he said that people spend their entire lives trying to improve their condition.
That's what capitalism utilizes to get things built, right?
It utilizes everybody's desire to make his own life better.
And that lifts all ships.
That high tide lifts all ships.
Socialism destroys it.
And, you know, she was, her stupidity, when I say it's not just the right attacking her, her stupidity was on display when she and other activists helped chase Amazon out of New York, right?
Amazon was going to build its second headquarters in New York, in Queens, I think it was.
And she, you know, was railing against this deal because it included tax incentives.
Now, Bill de Blasio, who arranged this deal and who is also bills himself as a socialist, right?
He then blamed AOC and her ilk for chasing Amazon away.
But he was part of it too.
He was doing it too.
He said to Jeff Bezos, once you come in here, boy, we're going to really lean on you to unionize your shops, you know?
And Bezos doesn't want to do that.
Nobody wants to unionize their shops.
It's just death to the business.
So now, but now, because the left always ends up eating its own, now Chuck Todd has de Blasio on and plays a clip from AOC and listen to his reaction.
I'm going to play you something from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez because I'm curious to see if maybe if there's some factual divide, if you will, on how this deal worked.
Take a listen.
If we were willing to give Amazon three, if we're willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves if we wanted to.
We could hire out more teachers.
We can fix our subways.
We can put a lot of people to work for that money if we wanted to.
It seems a lot of people think that when you give a tax incentive that somehow that's, oh, that's money you had over here and it was going over there.
This is money that didn't exist, this $300, okay?
Do you feel as if this is a problem in trying to explain how this deal worked?
Yeah, look, this was a deal that was going to bring $27 billion in revenue to the state and city for things like public education, mass transit, affordable housing, and that $3 billion of go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the business.
There's not $3 billion and the money exists anywhere, correct?
Exactly.
So when you have Chuck Todd, de Blasio, and AOC talking economics, I mean, that's really, that's like, that's great.
That's like the three witches in Macbeth talking fate.
You know, people never, they never ask where the money comes from.
At least de Blasio, because he is running a city, at least he does have to wonder about this because the money goes away.
Bezos went away.
And that's cost them over 25,000 jobs that cost New York, probably more than that because of all the people who come in who service those jobs, all the restaurants that service them, all the laundries and all the businesses that service them.
That's how capitalism works.
If you stop on the golden goose, no golden eggs.
That's the way it goes.
The other thing is, of course, once you start looking at people as, you know, they don't look at people as people.
They don't say, look, here's a good plan because it utilizes people's tendency to make their lives better or their greed or their activism.
Whatever it does, it utilizes human beings as human beings as they really are.
When you don't do that, you start to look at human beings as chess pieces that you are moving around.
And that makes you the only human being in the room.
That makes you more important than them.
And that's where you get the hypocrisy of socialism, that you're going to ban planes and jets and all that, but you get to fly around on the jet.
All these guys, these environmentalists who say, oh my gosh, the jets are going to destroy us.
They are flying around to Davos and to all these people to discuss the very important business they have to do, moving the chess pieces, us around on the board.
And that's how you start to get the hypocrisy.
For instance, Blanca Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria's mother, has left New York.
She went to Florida because she was no longer able to afford the high taxes, right?
This is socialism at work.
You get your dacha in the country, but everybody else is living in a little room with 15 cousins because there's simply no place to go.
There's no property around because nobody's building property because nobody's making a profit.
Once you start to do this, once you start to separate yourself from the people like that, you also become a tyrant.
And this is the other thing I have noticed about AOC is that she supports tyranny wherever she finds it.
I mean, this is amazing.
Her support of the Palestinians, remember when she told Margaret Hoover on Firing Line, she called it an occupation.
And Margaret Hoover said, well, what do you mean by that?
And she was like, Well, I don't really know very much about this.
She says that she supports a two-state solution, but then she tells other people, no, maybe not a two-state solution.
She's talking to the activists.
They always support the tyranny.
They support the tyranny, too, because it's always anti-Western tyranny.
It's kind of like that tender, loving feeling that the left has toward Islam, but they feel fine about questioning Catholics about whether they're qualified to serve on the courts while being Catholic.
They would never do that to a Muslim, but they have, because they know that a lot of Islam is anti-Western and they are anti-Western and they think they can make common cause.
Do we have a clip of her talking about Israel?
I mean, I don't think we do have that one.
But she no.
So she was defending Ilhan Omar, the other anti-Semitic congresswoman, who's also there because to a large degree because of political correctness and identity politics.
And she has made all Ilan Omar has made all these anti-Semitic remarks about how Jews have double loyalty and their money controls politics.
And one of the representatives, Juan Vargas, one of the congressmen, says it's disturbing that Representative Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community.
Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable.
And by the way, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are putting out statements condemning anti-Semitism while not taking Ilan Omar off any of her committees, including the Foreign Relations Committee.
And so they're not doing anything, basically, because these young people are coming up from the bottom and they're taking control of the party.
And Nancy Pelosi only has so much power to stop them.
So Akasio-Cortez reacts to the congressman saying this.
She says it's disturbing that representative, oh, no, that's what Juan Vargas says.
He's disturbed by that.
And he says, Israel has and remains a stalwart ally of the United States because of our country's shared interests and values.
I condemn her remarks and believe she should apologize for her offensive comments.
And Akasio-Cortez responded saying Vargas was calling out Omar's foreign policy stances, not her anti-Semitism.
She says, I'm curious if Representative Vargas will further explain his stance here that it is unacceptable to even question U.S. foreign policy, which, of course, he never said.
She is also dishonest and vicious in a fight.
Plenty of Democratic members have asserted that discussion and debate on this issue are fair and merited.
Is this stance a departure from that?
You know, this is a she then, oh, and then she went on to say that we should never have approved, nobody should have approved the use of force against the people who committed 9-11, right?
The AUMF, it was called, which authorizes the president to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons that he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on 9-11 or harbored such organizations or persons like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Okasio-Cortez says that should never have been approved.
That should never have been approved.
Socialism always ends up with tyranny because it doesn't accept humans as humans.
Because if it accepted humans as humans, it would also have to follow that logic to realize socialism doesn't work.
Socialism doesn't work because humans are humans.
She was asked, Okasio-Cortez was asked if she would condemn Maduro in Venezuela.
She is more afraid of Donald Trump than she is of Maduro, who's got his people roasting cats over trash fires.
What are your thoughts on the Venezuelan crisis that's happening right now?
And if you would denounce the Maduro regime, yeah, so I think that this is absolutely a complex issue.
I think it's important that we approach this very carefully.
One, I am, myself, just like anyone else, is absolutely concerned with the humanitarian crises that's happening.
And I think it's important that any solution that we have centers the Venezuelan people and centers the democracy of Venezuelan people first.
I am very concerned about U.S. interventionism in Venezuela, and I oppose it, especially when we talk about a figure like U.S. Special Envoy Elliot Abrams here.
I think he's pled guilty to several crimes related to Iran-Contra, and I don't think that we should be, you know, I am generally opposed to U.S. interventionism as a principle, but particularly under this administration and under his leadership, I think it's a profound mistake.
He should have gotten to ask her about Iran-Contra.
She doesn't know anything about it.
Elliot Abrams was convicted of two misdemeanors in that particular adventure, which was a scandal to the left, but not to anybody who actually cares about America or South America.
But anyway, the other thing that happens to socialism is it becomes corrupt.
Why does it become corrupt?
It becomes corrupt because once you separate yourself from the people, once you think that you are the good puppeteer who's moving the puppets around, moving the chess pieces around, then you're basically exempt from the laws of decency.
If you take a little on the side, that's fine.
You know, there is, it is believed, it is said, that the heads of the Soviet Union, these people who had slaughtered and been responsible for the slaughter and had supported the people and philosophies that caused the slaughter of tens of millions of their own people, that when Ronald Reagan called them evil, when he said they were an evil empire, they were shocked.
They were shocked.
They thought, oh no, we're the good guys.
We're the revolutionaries.
We brought the wonderful socialism that has everybody starving in our streets.
They were shocked when he called them evil.
It undermined their self-confidence.
And because it basically woke them up from the socialist dream that you're a good person if you're rearranging the pieces on the field so that everything is fair.
Corruption Of Power00:03:43
That's the dream.
And that's why they become corrupt, because they start to, their own corruption becomes invisible to them.
There is now a complaint to report that the brains behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Sykot Shock Rabarti, who serves as her chief of staff, allegedly funneled over a million dollars in political donations to his own private companies.
This is a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Shock Robarti's companies appear to have been set up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations were used, says the Washington Examiner.
The arrangement skirted reporting requirements and may have violated the $5,000 limit on contributions from federal PACs to candidates, according to the complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group.
That could send the guy to prison, and I really wonder, was AOC too stupid to know that was happening, or did she know it was happening and bears some responsibility as well.
Finally, of course, there's always the terror that socialists have to spread, the fear that they have to spread about the guy next to you, about what he has that you don't have, about the environment it's all going to come collapsing on your head.
And that is the other thing that Ekasio-Cortez has been doing with this climate change stuff.
You know that there is nowhere, nowhere, where it says that in 12 years we're all going to die, which is one of the things that AOC said.
One of the reports saying when the UN, their IPPC, was asked to say, well, what would happen if the temperature went up yay-high?
How would we do, what would the results be?
They said, well, we only have 12 years to stop that from happening, and there would be very serious results.
That's what it said.
But the idea that we're all going to die in 12 years, which she has put forward and has said, you know, this Green New Deal, which would destroy our economy, destroy our lives, destroy our freedom, destroy our country, that that is necessary to keep the sky from falling in, comes along with this death love that the Democrats have been fostering through abortion and now telling people not to have children anymore.
And that's becoming a movement.
You know, there's a woman in England, I can't remember, Blythe Peppino, her name is.
She is now saying that people who know about the environment should not have kids.
here she is.
Our planet is in a kind of collapse.
The natural world is collapsing around us and that's actually happening right now.
And I'm so disappointed by the response by our authorities to this crisis and so freaked out by it.
Everything that I've read that I've basically last year I came to the decision that I couldn't bring a child into that.
And I was asking around people that I know, put it a little bit out on Facebook and realized actually quite a lot of other people are making this decision.
Yeah, and so we realized it was really, really important to tell the public that there are people out there that are so scared about this that they feel that they can't actually have a family.
So there's hope.
I'm in favor of this.
I think anybody this gullible should not reproduce.
It's a kind of natural calling of the herd without force.
It's their own.
It's their own decision.
But I think that is absolutely excellent.
This is where this all goes.
AOC is socialism.
She is socialism.
Her stupidity, her viciousness, her love of tyrants, and ultimately, I suspect, her corruption.
I don't have that.
I'm alleging this, but I don't have that yet.
But ultimately, the corruption of some of the people around her.
It's all just socialism.
It is what socialism is.
So she should be.
We should be obsessed with her.
We should pay attention to her.
She is the future that the Democrats are trying to push on us.
Liberals And The Light00:11:23
All right.
I got the great Alfonso Rachel coming up, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe so you can be in tomorrow's mailbag.
I will answer all your questions.
It will change your life.
For some of you, for the better.
For the rest.
All right.
Come on over to dailywire.com.
Alfonso Rachel is one of the best.
He is a conservative evangelist, author, and actor.
He produces popular commentaries such as the Zo Loft and the Zo Nation videos that he did back with PJ Media, which is where we first met and came together.
And we'll talk about that.
He has got his latest book is A Solid Right Cross, Biblical Boxing and Conservative Counterpunching Against Liberal Loons and Godless Goons.
Don't mince words, Zoe, for crying out loud.
And I forgot to mention, you are also in Gosnell, and you did a great job in that film.
I didn't even know you could act.
Why, thank you, man.
And if I can say really quick, man, I'm loving the beard.
Oh, yeah?
Do you like it?
You know, I let it grow and now I like it cut back like this, but thank you.
I appreciate it.
Five o'clock shadow action.
Yeah, it's good, man.
Right all.
Anything that makes me look like the disreputable character I am, I think is a good thing.
You're succeeding.
Yeah.
So let's just start about the, talk briefly about the beginning before we get to a solid right cross.
You and I are both kind of, in terms of being commentators, we were both kind of discovered and brought together by Andrew Breitbart.
Is that fair to say?
I think that's fair to say, yeah.
He contacted us, wanted us to be a part of this salvo that he wanted to make against the left and the cultural domination that they were having.
Yeah, yep.
And I remember just what would happen is he would bring us out of the shadows and then PJ TV would hire us because they paid money and Breitbart didn't.
And so that's how we both got to PJ TV.
So since then, you know, you continue to do incredible videos and almost really unique videos.
You're a unique voice.
But a solid right cross, it's an angry book.
I mean, is that a fair thing to say?
I mean, you start off, which really got to me.
You sort of ticked off at the Republicans, not at the Democrats.
Why?
You know, I think Andrew would call it righteous indignation.
Okay, yes, he would.
Yes, he would.
And I would say that rather than using the term anger, I think it's a fair rebuke.
And yes, in a way, I've catch myself being a little at odds with the Republican Party because I think a lot of Republican Party and conservatives have gone away from a standard.
And in doing so, where we are, as I've heard you mention and talking about Ocasio-Cortez and those of the like.
How did they get this far, man?
How is this lunacy caught up with us so much?
Man, we can't be sitting around here saying, who cares what these people think?
And I hear this so much, you know, on the right end of the spectrum.
Who cares what these people think?
You know what?
Lots of people do.
We can't underestimate these people.
And we can't just sit there shaking our fist at Washington with our back turning to the culture because that's where these people get their power from.
That's who they pander to, man.
It's a vicious circle that feeds each other and the infection is spreading.
So Republicans and conservatives have to change their tactics.
Okay.
Be more specific.
Why?
What did they do wrong that let this spread?
Part of it is, like I said, one, conservatives and Republicans, we're individualist, right?
Which is a good thing, but sometimes we're too individualistic to our own peril.
You know, it's like I say about liberals.
Liberals think that they're so smart that they could tell everybody else what to do.
Conservatives think they're so smart that you can't tell them anything.
You know, so, you know, so in doing so, you know, we have this kind of thing where this is, this is what's going to work, guys.
And for conservatives, they don't see the practicality in it.
And it's at the same time, it's like, well, these things that you think are not going to work, this is what liberals are doing.
And this is how they're influencing the culture.
And it turns into instituted policy that we're having to be governed by.
So unless, you know, once again, if we, unless we get away from this, this idea that we have to change everything politically and we're assuming that these politicians are going to adhere to what it is that we're saying, they're sadly wrong.
As the saying goes, their first order business is to get re-elected.
They're going to do what's popular according to the culture, which means that they're going to follow the Democrat model because Democrat, what is majority rule?
That means what's popular rules today.
And they're going to fall in step with what that is.
And unless we do something to change the culture to show that, hey, you know what, this isn't as popular as you think it is.
Our political stability and representation is going to be fragile if we don't have the cultural stability to uphold it.
Yeah.
Wow, that's absolutely brilliant and absolutely true.
What do we do?
I mean, what should we be speaking into the culture that we're not saying?
We should speak everything that we are speaking.
It's just in how we do it.
As I say, liberals have a horrible message, but they got a great delivery system.
Conservatives have a great message, but we just don't have the effective delivery system.
And as you mentioned in my book, A Solid Right Cross, where does it start?
Where does it start?
It starts in the Bible.
All this information, all this stuff that we're dealing with was already spoken of.
As the word of God says, man, there's nothing new under the sun.
All these things that you guys are dealing with, this isn't new for your generation.
This has been going on.
I've been warning about you, warning this about this, warning y'all about this since day one.
And the Lord himself told us, he says, look, man, I know that the children of the light are really naive.
You might want to pay some attention to the children of the age.
Who are the children of the age?
They are the people of the right now.
I want what I want right now.
And people who are like that are very, very creative.
They're very cunning.
And the Lord himself says, man, I need you to adopt that, not for their means, but for mine.
As the children of the light, you guys are really naive on how to be savvy and how to get people to fall, to gravitate to what it is that you're doing.
These are the things.
It's funny.
I just came upon that in my daily gospel reading.
About a week ago, I came upon that passage and it really, I had forgotten it.
And it really did kind of make me sit up straight and think, you know, yeah, the children of the light are not always as wise as the children of earth and their generations.
You know, it's a really smart observation.
Let me ask you this, though, because I struggle with this too.
I mean, you and one of my fond memories was a night we went to a party.
I think it was a PJ TV party.
And for some reason, just you and I sat at a table and you started talking gospel.
I remember people just gathering around the table, listening to what you were saying, because it's really a fresh take.
But this is something I struggle with too.
If people don't believe the Bible, which obviously a lot of people don't, and if we have a government that is, we want it to be a secular government so it can include everybody.
When we use the Bible to discuss what we're saying, are we cutting people out?
Are we narrowing our message in some way?
Yes.
And that's not exactly a bad thing.
At the same time, I know it doesn't sound very pleasant.
And that's where we're warned about not being ear ticklers.
We're not going to be able to say all the things that people like.
Jesus certainly couldn't.
And Jesus is perfect, right?
He got hung for telling it on a pole, on a cross, man, for telling the truth.
But the thing is, even the Lord himself says, look, man, I don't come to bring peace.
I come to bring the sword.
I will drive the sword between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, in-laws, your friends, your family.
It doesn't matter.
If they are the people who are going to bring decay into your society, and more importantly, if there are people who are going to divide you from me, the one who actually can give you the perfect place that you want, I went away to make a place for you.
That place that you want is within your grasp.
And anybody who tries to cut you off from it, I will cut you off from them.
So yeah, man, we're going to be divisive.
But are we saying this out of hatred?
Heck no, man.
This is true love, man.
I'm not here to love anybody to hell.
I'm here to tell the truth.
You know, and of course, we want to be able to do that as salt and light.
We want to make it in a way where it's tasty, man.
We want to make it in a way where it preserves our society long enough for the Lord to do what he's going to do.
But unfortunately, man, that salt that makes things tasty, sometimes it's salt in people's eyes and it stings because they can't handle the truth.
You know, and that's really what it comes down to.
Some people, bro, do not receive truth.
This is not a new thing.
Man, this has been going on since the flipping angels.
There were even angels who stood in the light of God and said, you know what?
I don't accept your truth.
I want my truth.
You know, when I was researching Gosnell, I talked to a preacher in the neighborhood of the abortion mill that he was running, a pastor.
And he was a black guy with a black congregation.
And I said, well, were you preaching against abortion?
He said, no, no, no, we can't do that.
I said, why not?
He said, because when Obama was caught at Jeremiah Wright's church, they gave him so much trouble that we're now worried that if somebody comes out of our church and hears that we've been preaching stuff that people don't like, you know, that'll be bad for them.
So in other words, like basically saying we can't preach the gospel because we want to please the politicians, we want to please the news media.
It seems to me that that voice, that voice of God has been gutted on the street.
I mean, it seems like there's a lot of people who are afraid to say what God said because they'll get in trouble politically.
Man, this has been going on.
This has been going on since the garden, man.
If the devil can get into the garden of God, he's going to get into your church too.
But that's why the Lord says, amen, the sheep hear my voice.
They know the difference between the lies and the truth.
But unfortunately, you will have those who are more important about filling the pews rather than filling the kingdom.
You know what I'm saying?
There's a difference, you know, and it's like you just want the people to come in and you want that collection plate to make its rounds or and maybe in their good intentions, man, they think that they're saving some souls, you know.
And I don't trip on these people too much because you know what?
Sometimes, you know, even these people who I'm at odds, at odds with biblically, just sometimes if people can just hear the name of Jesus and they just might say, you know what?
Let me look into this Bible a little bit further.
You know, and those are the people that, you know, that the Lord will hopefully catch in his net, you know, as opposed to people who just, you know, figure, hey, I'm going to create an idol named Jesus.
And Jesus really hates that, by the way.
It's like, don't, don't use my name, you know, in the practice of your idolatry.
But some, you know, that sometimes that seed falls on good soil.
Sometimes that net does, you know, catch a good crop of fish, you know, and that's what it's all about.
But still, we have to, iron sharpens iron, as the saying goes.
And we do have to call out those who are not squaring with the word of God.
Super Mario's Impact00:04:43
So the book is A Solid Right Cross by Alfonso Rachel.
Where can people see?
I mean, your videos are still kind of startling.
And, you know, every time I watch one of your videos, I think like, wow, that's nobody else is doing that.
Where can people find your vids?
My website is Bronze Serpent Media.
Just think John 3, 14 through 16.
And just, yeah, that's it.
And that has all my contact on my Facebook and the Twitter, all the people who are trying to keep me silent.
Those are all my social media contacts.
If folks want to gravitate on there and they can catch my new commentaries, the Zoloft, my online anti-fuddy daddy Bible study, the Zopium Den, and my music project 20 Pound Sledge.
That's our effort to rock the gospel and all that sort of stuff.
Bronze Serpent Media.
Sir.
Zoe, it's great to see you.
And next time you're around, let's have a drink.
You got it, man.
Thank you.
It's always great talking to you.
Thanks a lot.
Man, oh man, he is an original.
He is an original guy.
And he was great to work with, but his stuff is still really good.
Bronze Serpent Media and a Solid Right Cross is his book.
So this week I'm talking about video games.
I'm ending the show with a final reflection on video games because they have taught me a lot about the problems of storytelling and technology and some of the issues, deepest issues of storytelling.
Yesterday I was talking about how I would stumble every now and again on a new video game and become addicted to it and then get out of it.
And that was kind of a pattern that I followed for quite a long time because I was very busy.
I was building a career.
I was going nuts.
I was doing all kinds of kinds of things.
And so I would only come in, swim into video games every now and again.
But games have always fascinated me and stories have always fascinated me.
And this kind of caught up with me as a way of gaming.
So I heard myself playing Space Invaders.
And so for a while, I didn't do anything.
But then video games started kind of swimming into the culture.
So they would just swim into my ken.
When I got married, which I got married after, right after I had been a reporter, that's when I found Space Invaders.
Somebody gave me an Atari.
This was the first time.
And to have something in your home where you could play a game on your TV, it's hard to convey to people who were born after that period that how wild that was, that suddenly it was affordable to bring something into your building.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who was rich and he had a pinball machine in his basement.
And that was like, oh my Lord, he has a base so rich.
He has a pinball machine in his basement.
And now suddenly you could have a video game on your TV for very, very little money.
And so that became really central.
Again, and then, of course, computers became, you know, I think I've told this story before, but when I first, when somebody first taught me, I was a radio newswriter and somebody taught me how to use a computer to write with, which I had to do.
Like I said, no, just give me a typewriter.
And they said, no, no, you have to learn how to do this.
I went home and I spent every dime my wife and I had, which was $1,200.
I spent every dime to buy a computer.
My wife came home and said, what's that?
And I said, hi, honey, it's a computer.
I just spent every dime we had on it, but it's going to pay us back.
And she said, okay, because that's the kind of great wife she is, you know, and it did pay us back.
It paid us back almost instantly.
But then on that computer, you could start to have games that were word games.
There was a game called Zork.
Does anybody remember Zork?
And all it was was words.
It was just text.
I think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I remember somebody gave me a pornography game that you could play, which I just looked at for fun and then threw it away.
But it was just text.
And it would say, you walk down a street and you say, okay, turn right.
And then it would tell you what was there.
And then you had to solve all these puzzles.
And as I played that, I thought, you know, interesting, new, different kind of like Dungeons and Dragons, but on computer, but not really all that exciting.
And then came another watershed, which was the Nintendo system.
And the Nintendo system came out and I played Super Mario.
And Super Mario, the thing that got me about Super Mario, and nobody else mentioned this, nobody talked about it, not at the time anyway, was I was playing this thing and it was so much fun.
But I remember turning to my wife and said, saying, who thinks of an Italian plumber fighting evil mushrooms?
Where on earth does that idea come from?
And on what form of storytelling could you come up with that idea?
Because the wonderful thing about Super Mario is it was about a dragon king who kidnaps a princess.
So it was the oldest story on earth.
The hero has to rescue the princess from the bad guy.
That story is as old as time.
And when they tell you, when Disney tells you in Marvel, oh, we'll never have a woman in jeopardy again, just somebody else will do it and make the money because that is the oldest story of all time, a man protecting a woman from the evil one.
Where Does That Idea Come From?00:01:55
But that it was an Italian plumber and that his enemies were turtles and mushrooms.
Suddenly I thought, well, wait a minute, that takes all the rules off.
That takes all the boundaries off.
It's almost like these guys were on drugs.
I don't think they actually were, but it's almost like these guys are on drugs and having a hallucination and then bringing those hallucinatory visions into a story.
And that was the first time, that was the first time I ever started to think, oh, wait, you know, there is something really interesting going on here that could affect the way I tell stories and the way everyone tells stories.
I'll talk about it more.
Tomorrow, it's the mailbag tomorrow.
Be there, all your problems solved, all your questions answered.
Come on, for a lousy 10 bucks a month, that's a pretty good deal.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam 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.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today.
Does it really matter that environmental activists are often complete hypocrites who don't take their own doomsday proclamations seriously?
The fact that they don't take it seriously, does that mean that we shouldn't?
I think so, and I'll explain why.
Also, there's a new word for narcissism that we've come up with, and it is autosexual.
We'll talk about that.
And finally, we will discuss how the left's theory of gender fluidity continues to undermine so many of their other positions.