Ep. 688’s host mocks a fictional Congressional hearing where Rep. Owens—portrayed as a "highly attractive black woman"—accuses Democrats of harming Black communities more than "all 17 white nationalists," only to be silenced by Nadler’s "silence, black woman!" gavel strike while Swalwell falsely brands her an "act of white terrorism." The episode then pivots to "Newspeak," condemning Orwellian political language (e.g., "racial profiling" for policing) and praises "calling things by their proper name," contrasting it with Julian Assange’s indictment—dismissed as a spy for leaking classified docs that endangered lives—while defending Trump’s 2016 surveillance claims as exposed hypocrisy. Comedian Jamie Kilstein’s interview reveals his shift from "woke" liberalism to criticizing both sides’ performative outrage, advocating "principles over teams," and facing backlash for straying from progressive orthodoxy, ultimately framing today’s comedy as censored activism over raw truth-telling. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats have been in a panic hunting for white nationalists and they finally found the insidious leader, Candace Owens.
Yes, cleverly disguised as a black woman who, behind the mask, is okay, actually a black woman, the lovely and outspoken and lovely and did I mention highly attractive Owens crashed a recent Congressional Committee hearing on the flimsy pretext of having been invited and turned the very serious inquiry into a farce or vice versa by listing the ways in which Democrat policies have hurt black people more than all 17 white nationalists put together.
Furious committee chairman Gerald Nadler heroically interrupted Owens by pounding his gavel in her face and shouting, silence, black woman!
This is a very serious investigation into the overblown panic about white nationalism we're trying to spread so we can demonize President Trump and silence his supporters on social media.
If we had wanted to hear from a black woman, we wouldn't have put the word white in the title of the hearing, unquote.
After Owens described how Democrat policies have destroyed black families, left black children uneducated, and slaughtered millions of black babies through abortion, Eric Swalwell announced he was outraged to hear Owens demonizing the Democrats by insensitively listing things they had actually done.
Swalwell said, quote, this is in itself an act of white terrorism.
I know because I'm white and I'm terrified.
He added, quote, I see you, I hear you, I'm for you, I am you.
Before being carted away screaming, he was everyone by two hospital attendants.
Congressman Ted Liu wholly discredited Owens by playing a recording edited to make it sound like she was praising Hitler.
Liu said, quote, you are exactly the sort of person we champions of black women despise, unquote.
When Owens tried to protest that she would never praise Hitler as he hated minorities like herself, Nadler silenced her again, accusing her of making sense, which of course is not allowed in the United States Congress.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So here's a quote from Confucius, and yes, I checked.
It really is a quote from Confucius and not some guy on the internet pretending to be Confucius.
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully.
When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish.
When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out.
When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.
Of course, it isn't just Confucius who knew.
You have to call things by their proper name.
George Orwell knew it too.
That's why he invented Newspeak, the language of the Soviet-like oppressors in the novel 1984.
Newspeak replaces accurate words with ideologically loaded nonsense in order to render it impossible even to have rebellious thoughts against what Orwell called INGSOC, which is to say, English socialism.
To give one example, NewSpeak translates the prologue of the Declaration of Independence into one word, crime think.
Can anyone doubt that the American left has used Orwell not as a warning, but as a handbook?
NewSpeak Changes Workouts00:02:08
Ordinary police work is now racial profiling.
Ordinary male attraction is objectification of women.
Defense of Western civilization is white supremacy.
And anyone who calls a man a man after he declares himself a woman is out of a job.
Today, I'd like to take a look at how NewSpeak is also news speak.
That is, it affects the way we look at the news of the day.
But first, let us talk about getting fit.
I know you're looking at me, you're thinking, how do you look so fantastic?
And the reason is I work out constantly and OpenFit helps because you're just not always in a place where you can get to the gym.
You don't always have a lot of time.
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It's a brand new, super simple streaming service that allows you to work out from the comfort of your living room.
One of the workouts it has, which I just absolutely love, is called something like, what is it called?
600 minutes?
Yes.
No, 600 seconds, I think.
That's what it is.
Let me make sure I've got it right because I just love this one.
600 seconds.
So I hired someone to do the math, and 600 seconds turns out to be about 10 minutes.
And I did the workout, and it is a workout.
You will get a full workout in 10 minutes.
You can take this anywhere, anytime.
You can look at it on your computer, view it on enable TV, tablets, the whole bit.
OpenFit has changed the way I work out.
It'll change the way you work out.
And with your code Clavin, you can join on a fitness journey personalized just for you.
Again, use my code, Clavin, to start using OpenFit on your journey.
Right now, during the OpenFit 30-day challenge, my listeners get a special extended 30-day free trial membership to OpenFit, where you can lose up to 15 pounds in 30 days when you text Clavin to 303030.
You will get full access to OpenFit, everything they've got, totally free if you text Clavin to 303030.
You get full access to OpenFit, all the workouts and nutrition information totally free.
Again, just text Clavin to 303030.
Morals Of Journalism00:15:00
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, how can I spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Hey, if you haven't seen this already, I'm not going to play the video because I actually don't want to romanticize the jerk who did it.
But Michael Knowles was attacked at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
We have a picture of the guy, the suspect, leaving the scene of the crime.
All right.
It looked a little like Shapiro.
I don't know if that's true or not.
But seriously, somebody came at him in a purple mask with one of those super squirters.
And it turned out it was liquid inside that was harmless, but it was meant to smell like bleach, which of course would burn.
He was arrested, taken away, and I hope they really lock him up and throw away the key.
There is an actual federal law that only Shapiro and I are allowed to attack Knowles.
But in all seriousness, lefties, you got to take a look at yourself in the mirror.
I mean, all of you, not just the people who do this stuff, but the people who support it or the people who turn a blind eye, like the people in the press who won't be reporting this the way we're reporting it.
You know, if you are wearing a mask, if you're wearing a mask and it's not Halloween, you're a thug.
You're a coward.
You're a coward and a thug.
And if you are attacking somebody physically for the words that are coming out of his mouth, you're the bad guy.
You're the fascist.
You've got to look at yourself.
I don't care if you call yourself an anti-fascist.
You're in a mask attacking somebody for using his First Amendment right to free speech.
You are the fascist thug.
And you've got to recognize that you're the bad guy in this situation.
Anybody hurts Knowles, I'm coming after him because I'm the only one who is allowed to break that guy's legs.
All right, so let's talk about calling things by their proper names, like calling anti-Fat types like that fascists.
Julian Assange was arrested, and he's charged with helping Bradley Manning hack into government computers and get a lot of information that revealed bad behavior by the Americans in the war on terror.
Chopper pilots chatting casually as they machine gunned people, two of whom turned out to be, I think, Reuters reporters, failure to properly police the way prisoners were taken care of.
And, you know, it's not about your opinion.
These are the things, how you feel about those things, but these are the things that he revealed.
I want to just start with this.
This is a minor point, but it is in keeping with the theme of what I'm talking about.
Almost every news report, except for one op-ed I read in the Wall Street Journal, referred to Bradley Manning as said that he was charged with helping Chelsea Manning.
Because Bradley Manning, of course, went to prison for hacking into a government computer and stealing all this information that he then recorded on a disc pretending it was some kind of entertainment, and then he passed the disc on to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange WikiLeaks.
But he was not.
Chelsea Manning at the time.
He got that sex change operation later, so it was Bradley Manning that was helping.
And of course, they keep using the she and all this stuff.
And, you know, the thing about this is, is that we all want to be polite.
I wrote an article for City Journal a while back called The Big White Lie.
You can check it out, in which I talk about the fact that leftism basically implants its news speak, its white lies, into our language by insisting that it's impolite and hurtful to call people by, to use any other kind of phrase, to use any other kind of phrase but the one that the left dictates.
So if we don't say that, hey, this Chelsea Manning was actually Bradley Manning at the time, and if we call him her and say she, we're being polite, we're not being hurtful.
Now, I'll call anybody anything where they want to be called.
I really will.
I'll call them the king of Romania.
I don't care.
But, you know, what they're basically doing is implanting the idea that this is now a woman.
And let me tell you something.
I have sympathy with people who have gender dysphoria.
I truly do.
I don't want to hurt them.
I don't want to exclude them from society and all this.
You can cut your body into 17 different pieces.
You still will not change your gender.
Every cell you have is of a specific gender.
You will never have the experience of being a little girl who grows into womanhood, who experiences all that thing, having your period, knowing that you can get pregnant, being an object of attraction, which of course is both the blessing and the curse of being female.
You're just not going to have those experiences.
And to implant it in the language, and especially in journalistic language, where you're supposed to be telling the complete truth, you know, it's not, I wouldn't have objected if people said he passed these, got these secrets from Bradley Manning, who then had a sex change operation.
But call things what they are.
And that brings me to the even bigger question, the more important question, about whether Wikileaks was doing journalism.
Because what he's accused of by the Americans, he's got all kinds of, he's been accused of rape, he's been accused of skipping bail in England.
I think he's going to prison for a year for that.
He was arrested in Ecuador when the Ecuadorians finally got sick and tired of having this guy around, never cleaned the bathroom, was always demanding care for his cat and all this stuff.
And they just got sick of him.
But he's at first, I think he's going to England to be in jail for skipping bail.
But the Americans have charged him with one thing.
The Trump administration has charged him with one thing, which is that he helped Manning bust into the computer.
He helped him get the password that he needed to get into the computer.
And so he's not being charged with the old espionage act that they tried to use.
I think it was on James Rose in the Obama administration, because that would set a precedent that doing journalism itself, which sometimes entails getting stolen goods, is illegal.
That would set a bad precedent.
But the question is, how do we feel about this?
Because I'm not a lawyer.
I'm talking about the morals of this.
How do we feel about this guy getting arrested and being prosecuted when his lawyers at least, here are his lawyers, saying all he was doing was acting as a journalist?
This sets a dangerous precedent for all media organizations and journalists in Europe and elsewhere around the world.
This precedent means that any journalist can be extradited for prosecution in the United States for having published truthful information about the United States.
This is journalism.
It's called conspiracy.
It's conspiracy to commit journalism.
So it matters what we call it.
It matters whether we call what Julian Assange did journalism because it matters whether we think he's guilty or not.
Hillary, of course, who had all her emails exposed and all that stuff come out from Podesta's hacked emails.
Well, not hacked emails.
He surrendered.
He was phished.
But all this stuff came out that probably hurt her in the election.
She, strangely enough, has no sympathy.
I think it is clear from the indictment that came out.
It's not about punishing journalism.
It's about assisting the hacking of the military computer to steal information from the United States government.
What kind of outfit is that?
It looks like she came from the dungeon in L.A. somewhere.
She may be a dominatrix in her spare time.
Anyway, so she says that.
And Trump, I love this.
Trump is like, WikiLeaks?
What WikiLeaks?
Do you still love WikiLeaks?
I know nothing about Wikileaks.
It's not my thing.
And I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange.
I've been seeing what's happened with Assange, and that will be a determination, I would imagine, mostly by the Attorney General, who's doing an excellent job.
So he'll be making a determination.
I know nothing really about him.
It's not my deal in life.
Well, look, look, you know, we love the Donald, but not quite, not quite, because when those things were coming out about Hillary Clinton, he loved that stuff.
And even Fashep Smith on Fox put out this montage.
This just came out.
This just came out.
Wikileaks.
I love WikiLeaks.
I'll tell you, this Wikileaks stuff is unbelievable.
It tells you the inner heart.
You got to read it.
The WikiLeaks documents show how the media conspires and collaborates with Clinton campaign.
Now, another one came in today.
This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove.
Another one came in today.
And you know, as I was getting off the plane, they were just announcing new WikiLeaks.
And I wanted to stay there, but I didn't want to keep you waiting.
Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks.
I should mention, but I just pause here for a moment to mention that I think, yes, today they are screening the Gosnell film.
I wrote the screenplay.
I was invited.
They're screening it at the White House.
I don't know if Trump himself is going to be there, but they're screening it at one of the White House viewing rooms.
And congratulations to everybody involved in the making of that film.
I really wish I could have been there.
I had just been away too long.
I had too much stuff to deal with here and couldn't go.
But I'm sorry I couldn't go.
And I'm really happy the film is getting some of the attention it deserves.
Now, what you saw there in all those clips is it's all about whose ox gets gored, right?
Or in the case of Hillary, whose gore gets oxed.
But like, it's all about, you know, nobody likes the journalist when the journalist comes after him.
Nobody likes the person who is, you know, hunting him down and investigating him.
If it's all the Democrats hate Fox News, all the Republicans hate all the other news outlets because they're all lefty mouthpieces.
So, you know, that's one thing about journalism.
It's all about whose ox gets gored.
And I have tremendous sympathy for exposing the truth.
As you know, I'm a First Amendment purist.
I never want free speech to be hampered in any way, shape, or form.
And I think it's a good thing.
I think that Trump, as Hillary appraising the Trump administration, I think it's a good thing that the Trump administration went after him on this one.
It's a one-charge indictment.
They went after him only on helping Manning break into the computer, right?
And that's an important thing.
That's, again, calling things what they are.
They're charging him with breaking in because that is not journalism.
A journalist can receive stolen papers, and he may deem that it is a good thing to release those stolen documents, but he can't help the guy break in to the office And steal the stolen documents.
Then he's a thief.
It's not his fault if somebody else commits that crime.
It's not even his fault if the journalist gives him incentive to commit that crime, but if he helps him commit the crime, that is not journalism, and you have stepped over the line and you have broken the law.
So I think it's a good thing what they charged him for.
But to go beyond that, the question is: how sympathetic are we to him, all right?
Forgetting about whether or not they've carved the law just right.
How sympathetic morally are we to this guy?
And here's my problem with him: I am not opposed to some of the things that he exposed, even though they were hurtful to causes I thought were just.
I thought it was just to go into Iraq and Afghanistan and showing the things that people, Americans were doing wrong, may have hurt that cause.
But that is journalism.
That is in fact journalism.
My problem with Assange is this.
What he did was he hacked information and then, without curating it in any journalistic way whatsoever, released it.
That put the lives of, for instance, Afghan helpers in danger in Afghanistan.
When I was there, there were plenty.
Look, my life was in the hands of Afghani Muslims who were holding guns and could have turned those guns on me anytime, but instead they were protecting me to help the troops, you know, put those guys' lives in danger by exposing them what they do, by putting out hundreds of thousands of documents that he couldn't possibly have vetted as a journalist would vet them.
That's not actually journalism.
That is not actually journalism.
And I think that we should say, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, we love him because he exposed Hillary.
Oh, we hate him because he exposed Americans, you know, and all this.
But I think when you just, a journalist does have to do something.
Listen, I hit the press every day.
I think our press needs to be reformed.
I don't think it can be reformed through the law.
I think just shame and self-assessment and maybe boycotts by the people watching them should make the press reformed.
It is ridiculous to have a paper with the power of the New York Times just being a hate Trump vehicle, a hate Republicans vehicle, a dishonest vehicle.
And by the way, they can still do good journalism, but doing good journalism in the purpose of just one side is actually not good journalism.
I hit them every day, but I still want them protected.
I want them protected by the First Amendment.
But it's not journalism when you just release secrets.
And by the way, on top of this, Assange has never gone after some of the bad actors in this place.
He's never gone after Russia.
He's never gone after China.
He's never gone after Venezuela, Cuba.
He goes after democracies all the time.
He goes after democracies.
And in this case, it is an open question whether he was helping, actually working with Russia to expose Hillary Clinton's emails, which is, again, spying that's operating for bad actors against good people, namely the United States of America.
So I do not have a lot of sympathy for Julian Assange.
I want our press protections protected, even though I think our press right now are a bunch of louts and biased liars.
I want them protected under the First Amendment.
I know it's complex, but that's what I want.
But Assange does not fall into the realm of my sympathy.
He endangered people's lives.
He exposed government secrets.
Government has a right to some secrets.
It needs to have some secrets.
And I think what Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, said about him, is true.
Listen to this.
Individuals such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden seek to use that information to make a name for themselves.
As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security.
Wikileaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service.
It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence.
It's time to call out Wikileaks for what it really is.
A non-state, hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.
So, you know, that is a fair, that's a fair cop, as they say in England.
That is a fair description of what he's doing.
He's saying, just like a terrorist can be a non-state, you know, a terrorist can be a non-state soldier, essentially, this guy is a non-state spy.
And Assange has basically, by not curating the stuff that he released, by just putting out any government secret he got his hands on, just by endangering people's lives, by endangering national security without thought of what that might mean, simply to expose secrets and simply to make himself maybe a hero, as Pompeo said.
I think he has transgressed the line between journalism and spying.
And I think that's calling it what it is.
And speaking of spying and speaking of spying, calling spying what it is, it was just hilarious to watch the absolute terror and panic race like a wildfire through the Democrat media complex after Attorney General Bill Barr said that there was spying on the Trump campaign.
Now, just to be clear about this, we played the clip before, I'm not going to play it again.
Attorney General Barr's Spying Claims00:15:39
He didn't say it was illegal spying, because there is such thing as illegal spying.
When you wiretap the mob, you're spying on the mob.
When you wiretap, you know, when you send people into foreign governments and look at what they're doing, that is spying.
But some of it is legal.
Some of it is stuff that we have a CIA.
The CIA is not an outlaw operation.
It is a spy operation.
So he didn't say it was illegal spying.
What he said is, I have to determine if there was a proper predicate.
I'm going to see if there was a proper predicate.
In other words, did they have a reason to spy on the Trump campaign?
Because as he said, spying on an opposition presidential campaign is a big, big deal.
But I have got to play you some of these weasels, some of these weasels who were responsible for this, suddenly being, this is the power of calling things what they are.
This is just the power, because again, he didn't say it was illegal spying.
He just said it was spying.
Listen to James Comey, Mr. Sanctimoni, reacting to this.
It's concerning because the FBI and the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance.
I have never thought of that as spying.
How dare you call secretly surveilling people spying, sir?
I call you out, sir, that you call you, how dare you call spying spying?
Of course it's spying, but remember, Barr didn't say it was illegal spying.
He didn't say that they did it wrong.
He simply said it's a big, big deal.
And he pointed out, Barr has pointed out, you know, Comey never testified to this.
He never told Congress what he was doing.
And that's appalling.
That is amazing.
He never told either branch of Congress what he was doing.
Why do you think?
You know, do you think, is that the act of a man with a clean conscience?
Never notified the Trump campaign that there might be a danger that they were being infiltrated by Russia.
There might be a danger that Russia was doing stuff that was illegal.
Never told them that.
In fact, kind of lied about it, leaked information, set up a situation by informing Trump about the steel dossier with all the salacious gossip in it.
Told them about it, but never told them it was a Clinton, a Hillary Clinton-funded, DNC-funded document, never told him it was OPPO research, and that gave the press, it was a setup.
It gave the press the right to leak that.
It gave it a news hook to talk about it.
Here is John Brennan, unbelievable, right, former head of the CIA.
Listen to this guy.
I was very disappointed in what Attorney General Barr said today about spying when he was referring to the investigation that was predicated, certainly, and that the FBI was trying to understand exactly what the Russians were doing.
U.S. intelligence agencies spy against foreign adversaries so that we can understand the threat to our national security.
But for the Attorney General to imply or to say that there was spying domestically, he knows the language very well, and he knows the terminology, and he knows what it connotes, which is an extra-legal activity taking place when, in fact, the FBI and CIA and others were trying to understand just what the Russians were doing.
And we know now it is incontrovertible that the Russians were trying to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
That's a nonsense.
That's just babbling.
This guy's been babbling a long time.
The fact that he's still on TV is ridiculous.
You know, first of all, he was head of the CIA.
You know, they're spies, and he was involved in this.
He was involved in making sure and putting pressure on the FBI to say that they should go after Trump.
Look, this was a hit against Trump, this whole thing.
And don't forget that they were depending on Hillary to win.
They were absolutely certain that Hillary was going to win.
And so that there was never going to be an investigation into what happened.
And they panicked when Trump won.
And that's why they started going after him.
Jeff Sessions made a mistake in recusing himself.
They forced him.
They pressured him into recusing himself.
And then they fell to pressure.
They succumbed to pressure to appoint a special counsel.
Because now, once there's a special counsel, a lot of the information that's in play can't be talked about, right?
Once Mueller was there, they were protected.
So for two years, they have kept silence.
For two years, they've kept the silence about what was being done.
And now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Barr is investigating what they did, and they are running in panic.
Listen to Nancy Pelosi.
She goes after Barr, who, as far as I know, there's no reason to go after him.
He is just saying, look, I'm going to look into this.
If I were an innocent Democrat, I would say, go ahead, look into it.
Let's see.
Let's make sure that nothing wrong was done.
Pelosi goes after Barr personally.
Let me just say how very, very dismaying and disappointing that the chief law enforcement officer of our country is going off the rails yesterday and today.
He is the Attorney General of the United States of America, not the Attorney General of Donald Trump.
So again, as was said by our other colleagues in terms of Mr. Jeffries, our Mr. Chairman, said earlier, the way people are leaving and the rest, it's very dismaying.
They're leaving in disgrace or with dismay, but it's all damaging to our country.
It's not damaging to our country at all.
It's cleaning out the top brass who needed to be cleaned out.
And to go after Barr personally is just, it really is shameful because remember, Eric Holder said he was Obama's wingman.
He was going to be there to protect his boy.
That's what Eric Holder said.
Barr has never said that.
He has said the opposite.
He has said he would play it straight.
And as far as I can see, he has.
He's just said he's looking into this.
But this is the power of calling things what they are.
And this is why the left has set up political correctness, which is just new speak for new speak.
Political correctness is just newspeak for newspeak because all they're trying to do is make it impossible to think or say anything that goes against what we will now call a mare soak, American socialism.
That's what they're trying to do.
That is the power.
Just all the barheads do is use the simple word spying for surveilling people, and they are running in terror.
And this, as far as I'm concerned, you know, Trump has his, obviously is defending himself, but this gives Trump a real credibility when he says things like he said yesterday.
There was no collusion and there was no obstruction.
And we never did anything wrong.
The people that did something wrong were the other side.
The dirty cops and a lot of the problems that were caused.
It's a disgrace what happened.
And again, it should never happen to a president again.
You're just lucky I happen to be the president because a lot of other presidents would have reacted much differently than I reacted.
You're very lucky I was the president during this scam, during the Russian hoax, as I call it.
So no, I'm not concerned at all.
The bottom line, the result is no collusion, no obstruction.
And that's the way it is.
And I know a lot of people were very disappointed, but they knew the real answer.
You know, when the Democrats go behind the scenes and they go into a room backstage and they sit and they talk, they laugh because they know it's all a big scam, a big hoax.
And it's called politics, but this is dirty politics and this is actually treason.
It's a very bad thing that people have done.
And I just hope that law enforcement takes it up because if they don't take it up, they're doing a great disservice to our country.
I think the left has managed to make what Trump said sound very, very plausible.
That is the power of calling things by their name, and we shouldn't stop doing it out of fear of being deplatformed or any other reason, and certainly not just to be polite.
Hey, I've got comedian Jamie Kilstein coming on in a minute.
I'm not going to break from YouTube or Facebook.
I'm going to stay on so you can watch the whole show.
But that is all the more reason for you to feel incredibly guilty and subscribe.
Go to dailywire.com, shell out, what is it, 10 lousy bucks a month, 100 lousy bucks for the entire year.
You get the wonderful leftist tears tumbler, which right now I think is coming in plenty handy.
You can be in the mailbag and ask questions.
We had a good mailbag on Wednesday, solved everybody's problems, and now they're all happier and healthier.
You could be too for a lousy hundred bucks a month.
Jamie Kilstein is a writer, podcast host, and stand-up comedian who describes himself on Twitter as an alt-right liberal cuck.
His podcast, the Jamie Kilstein podcast, is available now on iTunes and Stitchers.
So subscribe to it today.
Hey, Jimmy, it's really nice to meet you.
I've wanted to meet you before.
It is great to see you.
It's nice to meet you too.
I forgot I updated my Twitter bio to that.
I think there was one day where people were just calling me.
I was getting called probably a variation of both of those things.
And I was just like, all right, I guess we do this.
And then I officially changed my Twitter there.
And before we came on, you were saying that you were hanging out with Greg Hurwitz.
So you've really sunk to a terrible level.
Very low.
It's degradation.
It's been a dark time for me.
He says hello as well.
Nice to hear.
So you started out.
I watched some of your stuff.
You started out as a very, very woke comedian.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I say that with such regret.
Yeah, I mean, I still believe a lot of my liberal, I still have a lot of my liberal views.
You know, when I started comedy, before I really started like reading up on politics, the reason that I was drawn to sort of more liberal ideals was kind of from comedians who would probably be getting in trouble nowadays.
Comedians like Bill Hicks and George Carlin, who always ranted about political correctness, right?
I mean, the left goes after Bill Maher, and the right thinks he's as left as you can go.
And he's probably getting yelled at more by my old friends than he is by conservatives.
What I really loved about that was I loved the idea of one person with a microphone going after these powerful establishments.
That was a very romantic ideal, you know, when I was like a 17-year-old high school dropout.
And it looked really, I still think it's really brave.
And what I love about comedy in general is it's a way to take really scary issues and make them digestible or make someone laugh even if they disagree with you.
You know, I used to do a lot of interviews where people would be like, so were you like the class clown?
It's like, no, the class clown beat the crap out of me, which is why I became a comedian.
I was sad and scared and just like writing in my notebook, like in the back corner.
And so I felt that way with politics.
It's like, if I could use comedy to laugh at the tragedy in my life when I was growing up, we can do that with politics.
The problem and what's happening right now is it went from trying to challenge the establishment to policing comedians.
And if you don't say things exactly the right way, then you're in trouble.
I think the left right now, even though I agree still with a lot of the core values, you know, I'm definitely more moderate now.
The fact that we've abandoned a lot of those, we're not talking about income inequality as much as we're talking about, you know, this celebrity said this thing on Twitter 10 years ago and trying to get them in trouble.
Well, when talking about speaking, comedians speaking truth to power, no matter who's in the White House, in the culture, the power is all on the left.
I mean, they control the culture.
So if you're actually in the culture, if you're a comedian and you're attacking the right, you're actually kind of playing along with the power in your culture.
Yeah, I mean, right now, I wouldn't make, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump, but I wouldn't make Trump jokes just because everyone's doing it.
I don't think that's what's challenging about comedy.
My point of view, my theory in general, whether you're on the left or the right, is I think that one of the things we need to do now is we need to have principles instead of teams, right?
So if I was mad about George Bush's foreign policy, then I should have been just as mad and I was when Barack Obama would do a lot of the same things, right?
With whistleblowers, with drones, with all that stuff.
I got in a lot of trouble because when I went on Conan, I talked about drone strikes and it was under Obama.
So, and same deal.
Like, if you think Clinton was a womanizer, it's like, all right, well, you got to kind of fess up with Trump, right?
I think right now we look to just demonize the other team instead of like, what are my core values?
Sometimes I'm going to agree with this guy on the left.
Sometimes I'm going to agree with this girl on the right.
And stick to your principles instead of just these got you moments.
You know, my pal Bruce Fierstein, who wrote a lot of comic books, said, comedy should take no prisoners.
So what happened?
How did you go from being woke to actually waking up?
Oh, my God.
Well, I mean, one, I was kind of ousted.
It took like a 16-hour Joe Rogan appearance to talk about all of it.
It was a lot.
But I'll say that, I mean, essentially, just so it doesn't seem like I'm skirting anything, I had a marriage that was kind of falling apart.
And because I was this outspoken feminist guy, I, you know, we tried an open relationship and I had like some one-night stands and that got sort of turned into, it was pre-Me Too.
I was sort of the hipster of Me Too.
And because of who I was, even though nothing was unconsensual, nothing was creepy, it was just like normal one-night stand stuff.
That got turned into this like, haha, look at the feminist throwing his marriage apart.
And I got divorced and stuff like that.
Now, with that said, beforehand, I was starting to get really bummed out about it because I remember one time I called a Republican an idiot.
Like I think I called Chris Christie an idiot.
And we got an email the next day that said the word idiot is ableist.
And I should apologize for that.
And I remember one time I got an email from someone who was trying to lose weight.
And he said if he didn't lose weight, that his doctor said like he wouldn't make it seeing his kids graduate high school.
It was like a really sad email.
And so I wrote him this long thing where I found him at Jiu-Jitsu gym in Baltimore and like, I was like vegan at the time, because of course I was.
And I sent him all these like recipes and stuff like that.
So he writes in a year later and goes, hey, man, I don't know if you remember this email that I sent you, but my doctor said he's never seen such a quick turnaround.
My kids are really proud of me.
I'm entering my first like white belt jiu-jitsu.
So you saved his life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I read it on the air.
I'm like almost in tears because I'm like, I'm doing this show.
I don't really stand behind anymore.
I'm like, my marriage is falling apart, but I'm like, I'm doing something good.
And then the next day, we got like 10 emails saying that by reading his email, we were fat shaming them.
Right.
Now, we didn't say if you don't do jiu-jitsu, you're fat.
We don't say like, you know, you should feel ashamed if you eat.
We were just like, this is this kid's story.
And that was the point where I'm like, if we are more self-pitying that we would put this kid's life in danger because we feel guilty about our life choices, that was kind of the first moment I was like, are Republicans right?
Like that was my like pull yourself up by your bootstraps moment where I was like, that's, that's not okay.
Well, you know, the comedian, is it Bill Burr?
Have I got his name right?
Yeah.
He has this hilarious line where he says, nobody's supposed to be ashamed.
If you have no shame, you're a psychopath.
That has no shame.
He's so good.
Yeah.
I mean, there is a backlash because of all the political correctness in comedy.
I feel like that's why guys like Rogan and Bill Burr are getting even bigger and bigger and bigger.
And those guys are still really liberal.
Shameless Comedy00:08:22
The problem on the left is anytime, you know, I'll be called alt-right for just coming on this show.
And I could say that I'm still, you know, pro-gay rights, pro-this, pro-that.
And just by association out.
So am I.
Yeah, I'm sure.
Well, I was watching a bunch of your clips and I was like, Jesus, we like agree on more.
And that's the sad thing.
You know, I talked about that when I went on Michael Knoll's show.
You can never do that.
That's right.
No, no.
Just talk about destroying your reputation.
Just bring bleach to the office and toss it around.
Yeah, where I was just like, oh, we would be friends.
You know, like it has been so, the right has been so demonized that like I walked in here and I was like, you guys have a coffee maker too.
Like you're, I remember like Michael's producer was like this great Latina woman who like I'm still friends with.
And part of me was like, is she blinking like a code so I can like get her out of here?
And like, and everyone was just really wonderful.
And that doesn't mean that, look, if when I left, if when I like stopped being part of that extreme left, I wrote a book that was like, why I left the left and the right is right.
I would be much richer than I am right now because I have had to struggle, especially living in Los Angeles, coming back and starting this podcast and getting comedy gigs.
I mean, it's been really tough, you know, explaining to like, like, I have fallen madly in love and found the girl I'm going to marry.
And like her parents look at my Wikipedia and like, it's like, it's brutal and it's heartbreaking.
And, but with that said, so, but I didn't sell out.
I didn't turn into something I'm not for money, right?
Like, I didn't do that.
But I will say that one of the best things I've done is just made friends with more conservatives and more moderates because it's, it's a lot nicer walking around a world where you don't think half the population is evil.
And you can start to make sense anyway, right?
No.
And like, even if I disagree with you, at least knowing why you feel a certain way, knowing that like we're all trying to protect our kids and family and live a good life instead of just being like, they're all Nazis.
Let me ask you about what's happening to comedy.
What do you make of like the nanette phenomenon?
I mean, I think that, look, there are always in any form of entertainment, like if you take music, you have jazz and you have classical and you have rock and you have metal and you have all this stuff.
There's always going to be different genres.
I think the problem is when genres start, and I did this too.
I mean, when I was super political, I'm like, if you're not speaking out against George Bush, you're part of the problem, right?
And sometimes with art, especially now with Trump and with the divisiveness, it's like, you know what?
I don't know if people even want to hear it.
Like even on the left, I think it's becoming white noise.
I think people are becoming sick of it.
So I think Hannah Gatsby, who did Nanette, and Joe Rogan, who does what Joe Rogan does, I think that there's space for both of them.
The problem is when the media, especially on the left, starts hailing only the woke comedy as, you know, the acceptable kind of comedy and starts going after the club comedy, which, you know, we've been doing this for decades.
I mean, they're going after Ricky.
I was watching Ricky Gervais's humanity.
I was in stitches and I'm a religious guy.
I was sitting there thinking, I wish religious people were this funny.
I know.
But he is being attacked for everything.
How can you do comedy if everything you say is outlawed?
Yeah, I mean, this is the problem is I think about Ricky and Bill Maher.
Anytime they stray from kind of liberal orthodoxy, they get lambashed.
You know, Jim Jeffries, who's a really brilliant comedian, he blew up in America because he had this very anti-gun routine that went viral.
But, you know, the first 20 minutes of his special is like Cosby jokes and rape jokes.
And like, so the left is kind of like, we don't know what to do.
What's great about comedy, like I was saying before, when I knew I was a comedian, when something really tragic would happen with my family at a rough upbringing and all my brothers would gather around and would be upstairs and the first person that could make a joke, it was just like the most cathartic feeling and the ice was broken.
And then we could be like, all right, what do we do?
And that's when comedy was great.
I mean, Richard Pryor, who we still idolize, would not be around right now.
Oh, he talked about domestic abuse.
He talked about lighting like his wife's car on fire, about crack addiction, all that.
Have you ever heard his prison play thing of ages ago?
That thing is the funniest routine I think I've ever heard.
And you could never do it.
No way.
All right, by the way.
I'm running out of time.
Let me just ask you, who's great?
Who do you love as a right now?
I love what Burr's doing.
I love what Rogan's doing.
I love, I mean, the comedy store in LA in general.
I saw Whitney Cummings, who's still very liberal, kind of attack both sides a little bit in new materials she's working out.
It was really, really great.
I mean, anyone who's still willing to like take chances, Chappelle will always be like, king to me.
And again, the left's turning on him pretty hard, like after his last special, where it's if you, it's crazy to me because I grew up getting banned from clubs talking about George Bush and now seeing the left do the same thing.
It's a bummer.
Principles instead of teams is a great line and it's really true.
Jamie Kilstein, the Jamie Kilstein podcast is available on iTunes and Stitcher.
Subscribe to it today.
Jamie, thanks so much.
I hope you come back.
Thank you, man.
I would love to thank you.
It's great.
So let me have a final reflection.
A lady wrote me yesterday, Wednesday in the mailbag.
A lady wrote me and asked me about street preaching, people coming up to you and street preaching.
She wrote me, I gave an answer where I said I've never really liked it.
She wrote me a very sweet letter trying, basically saying I should give it more of a chance.
I just remember when I was not a believer, people coming up to me on the street and saying, have you heard, you know, there's a Jewish carpenter who was born of a virgin and rose from the dead?
And I was like, whoa, a Jewish carpenter?
Are you kidding me?
You know, I just, I thought, back up, back up, white man.
I don't believe in that.
But it never affected me.
I feel the same way about Christian movies.
You know, I know people like them and they're fine with me.
They're not bad, but they're a little bit like pornography.
Like pornography.
You look at pornography.
Sex is a beautiful thing.
I mean, if I had to make a list of my one favorite thing, sex would be on the list.
But pornography is better, right?
Because in pornography, the woman can look like anything you want.
She'll do anything you want.
You know, you say to her, well, you know what?
My thing is like I like to butcher women and eat their body parts.
She's like, okay, you know, that's, and she'll never show up with a baby either, which is great.
It's a lot less expensive.
Pornography is better than sex because it's not human, right?
And I feel the same way about Christian movies.
I mean, God is the most beautiful thing.
To know God is a joy.
It gives you a sense of reality that you wouldn't have either.
But Christian movies are better.
They're better than God.
In Christian movies, a guy converts, he accepts Jesus, he gets hit by a car.
He's lying dead in the street.
His body is lying there, and everybody's happy because he's going to heaven because he found Jesus.
I'm like, excuse me, excuse me.
He's dead.
The guy is dead.
You know, his children are orphans.
His wife's a widow.
You know what I mean?
He's dead.
But they're going, hallelujah, he found Jesus.
So I just think, you know, it's a lot more powerful.
It's a lot more powerful when you talk about real life, when you talk about the pain that people have, when you talk about the fact that life is tragic and there's lots of evil in the world and there's lots of things we don't understand and why a good God would let these things happen.
You know, I know no more than all the great philosophers who have wrestled with these problems through time.
I just think you want to do what's effective.
You want to sell the joy of God, which is a joy that lasts through grief, which lasts through evil.
It lasts through all the things that actually happen in life.
God is God of the real world.
He's God of the world of evil and suffering and death.
And that is real Christianity.
And that's what Christianity is about.
Remember, it ends with a crucifixion and a man shouting, oh my God, why have you forsaken me?
I think that that God is more convincing because he speaks into the tragic mess of life.
So that's all I'm saying.
I'm not against Christian movies.
I'm not against people preaching on the street.
I'm simply talking about the effectiveness of that over time as people see what real life is like.
The Clavenless weekend is upon us.
You're doomed.
It's finished.
It's finished.
Hide under the bed.
Selling Joy Through Grief00:01:02
Maybe you'll make it through Monday.
If you do, we will gather here together on Monday.
And then I'm going on a trip with Knowles, which now sounds like a really, really bad idea, but at least he's small enough I can hold him up in front of me.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
you on Monday if you survive.
The Andrew Clavin 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.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Elhan Omars Defenders castigates speech as incitement.
Michael Knowles is attacked at a speech and we check the mailbag.