Andrew Clavin mocks Congress’s contempt vote against William Barr as partisan theater, framing it as a distraction from Trump’s trade and foreign policy wins while accusing Democrats of weaponizing institutions like the Mueller report. Guest Saurabh Amari recounts fleeing Iran’s Sharia crackdown in 1998, evolving from atheist Marxism to Catholicism after witnessing liberal democracy’s resilience, then warns that suppressing truths—like Islam’s history or Jewish influence—fuels extremism by letting fringe narratives dominate unchecked. The episode ties institutional hypocrisy to cultural decay, arguing censorship only empowers radicals by hiding inconvenient facts. [Automatically generated summary]
A House committee has voted to find Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress, making Barr one of the 257 million Americans who now hold Congress in contempt.
The number of Americans who hold Congress in contempt is essentially the entire population of the country, minus children, four-legged animals dressed up as humans, Democrats attempting to vote when they're actually dead, and Americans who are too busy watching real mafia housewives to find out what the word Congress means.
Although many in that last category said if Congress turned out to be anything like those useless fat guys wandering around Washington, D.C., they guessed condempt would be a good word for how they felt about them.
One voter, in a statement shouted at an interviewer through a locked front door, said, quote, at first, I was unsure whether I held Congress in contempt or whether Congress was actually beneath my contempt.
But I finally decided if I could have contempt for that movie villain who had 23 different personalities and kidnapped teenage girls, then I guess I wasn't too high-minded to have contempt for Jerry Nadler too, unquote.
In a fact check of that statement, the Daily Wire found that the dictionary defines contempt as the feeling with which a person regards anything considered mean, vile, or worthless, making it almost impossible to distinguish between contempt and the emotion experienced by normal people in Nadler's presence.
As another voter explained to interviewers, quote, I once lived next to a guy a lot like Jerry Nadler, but I moved away from him, sacrificing my job, selling my house at a loss, divorcing my wife, and abandoning my children in order to put as much distance between me and this Jerry Nadler type person as humanly possible, unquote.
The vote to add Attorney General Barr to the vast number of Americans who hold Congress in contempt came after Barr refused to testify before Congress because he said he held them in contempt.
Executive Branch Abuses Power00:10:43
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I feel hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is ippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So I don't know if you've noticed, because, I mean, look at you, but this week, the Andrew Clavin Show has had a remarkable unity of structure and theme.
It's been like a tremendous cathedral of commentary art.
And today we will bring all those themes together.
Monday, we started out talking about the fact that the Democrats and the news media, but I repeat myself, are now in a position where they have to suppress the news because the news is that Trump is doing a good job and Obama abused the power of the federal government to try to secure the election for Hillary Clinton.
The next day, we talked about the fact that without real news, the Democrats and the news media, but I repeat myself, have turned into Seinfeld.
They're funny, but they're about nothing.
And then yesterday, we talked about the fact that the trouble with suppressing reality is that you ultimately go insane.
So you've got a picture of Democrats suppressing the truth, becoming empty, and going nuts, which I think is pretty accurate.
Today, all those themes come together in a grand pre-clavenless weekend finale in which we see that the news-hiding Seinfeld lunatic Democrats are now left with no alternative but to actually start pretending things are happening that aren't.
They're creating a reality to replace the one they've lost.
They're actually acting out a fictional drama to replace reality they can't stand.
It's the impeachment show, a dramatic, make-believe constitutional crisis and impeachment, except without the constitutional crisis and the impeachment, because that would probably cost them the 2020 election.
You've heard me talk a lot about the fact that the news media, the entertainment media, and the Democrat Party have all become one thing.
Well, now you see it in action.
The news has become entertainment as the Democrats try desperately to turn reality into a show that will win them back the narrative.
Too bad for them, they're up against a master of the reality TV art.
We're going to talk about that today to complete this beautiful masterpiece of commentary that I've been working on all week.
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It's only four letters, but Clavin, how do you spell Clavin?
It is K-L-A-V-A-N.
You know, the Clavinless weekend is coming upon us.
And like I said, we are going to complete this absolute masterpiece of commentary that actually has extended over four beautiful days as these themes have unfolded.
And the Democrats have helped out by just playing close to type.
Now, the House Judiciary Committee has voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt.
And this has to be confirmed by the rest of the House, but of course, they're in favor of it.
The House leadership has been in favor of this.
The vote was along party lines: 24 votes in favor of the contempt citation and 16 votes against.
This is because, well, I'll tell you why Mr. Barr refused to comply with a subpoena, seeking an unredacted Mueller report, okay, and the underlying evidence.
So here's Jerry Nadler announcing this terrible, terrible crisis that we're all in.
It's an attack on the ability of the American people to know what the executive branch is doing and to have responsible government.
It is an attack on the essence of our democracy, and we must oppose this with every fiber of our being.
And that's why we today referred a contempt citation to the House floor.
The House will have to vote that contempt citation to begin the court battle.
There can be no higher stakes than this attempt to arrogate all power to the executive branch away from Congress and, more important, away from the American people.
We've talked for a long time about approaching a constitutional crisis.
We are now in it.
We are now in a constitutional crisis.
He has to tell you because if he didn't tell you, you wouldn't know.
I mean, look out the window, things are going great.
But we're fighting for the essence of democracy with every fiber of our being, which makes the whole thing sound like either a cereal or a clothing store.
Dress warm, you got to store, you know, freeze-dried food and have a lot of water and bottles because this constitutional crisis is going to be a doozy.
It's a doozy.
It's all make-believe.
It is all make-believe.
They can't impeach the guy because they know the public will not stand for it.
They haven't accomplished anything.
This Congress has accomplished virtually nothing.
And what they're talking about is corrupt.
Okay, it is utter, utter nonsense.
They want the Mueller report unredacted.
Barr has given them the entire report unredacted, with one exception.
I'll get to that in a minute.
And not one Democrat has gone to look at it.
Not one, not one of them has gone to look at it.
He has given them almost the entire report.
The one thing he can't give them is he can't give them grand jury testimony.
It is not allowed.
It's against the law for him to give them grand jury testimony.
You testify in a grand jury under the conditions of secrecy.
And the reason, of course, is because if I go into a grand jury and say things about you and you're not indicted, then there's no reason for any stuff I said about you to become public.
That's protecting people's innocence.
So here is Sarah Sanders, the president's spokeswoman, talking back and talking just plain sense here.
This is cut to.
I think it's so absurd, this idea that Congress doesn't get to see the Mueller report.
In fact, there's a less redacted version of the Moeller report sitting there waiting on them to come and look at it.
Not a single, not a single Democrat has even taken the time to go and look at it.
They're asking for information they know they can't have.
The Attorney General is actually upholding the law.
Chairman Nadler, take a minute to let this sink in.
Chairman Nadler is asking the Attorney General of the United States to break the law and commit a crime by releasing information that he knows he has no legal authority to have.
It's truly outrageous and absurd what the chairman is doing, and he should be embarrassed that he's behaving this way.
He can't be embarrassed.
What they're embarrassed about is they're embarrassed about the real news, which just to repeat it myself a little bit, it's the real news is that Trump is doing great.
The economy is doing great.
He's in very interesting negotiations with China today on trade.
I know the stock market is upset, but let's see where that goes.
He's readjusted our relationships in the Middle East.
He's gotten out of this nonsense Iran deal where Barack Obama's theory, as far as I can make out, I mean, giving it the best reading I can, Barack Obama's theory was that if we include Iran in the community of nations, the Iranians would say, ah, I get it.
We'll get rid of our entire philosophy of life.
We'll throw away our religion.
We'll throw away our will to power and our will to conquest and the fact that we're the biggest state sponsor of terrorism on earth.
We'll throw that away because Barack will love us and he will take us in and he'll give us little planks full of money and everything will be great.
And that theory was stupid.
I mean, even now, the Iranians have not paid attention to anything in that deal.
Trump has kicked them out and Trump has reset our allies to be Israel, our pals in the Middle East.
Why?
Because they are freedom-loving people and they're a democracy and they represent our values.
So Trump has done all that.
And meanwhile, of course, the other part of the news is that Obama, the Messiah, the lightworker, who is so like a god, as we saw yesterday, Obama was a second-rate Chicago POL whose theories did not make sense, whose theories did not hold up in reality.
He suppressed the comeback from the financial crash of 2008.
He abused the IRS.
He abused the Department of Justice.
He abused the power of the State Department, all of them to lie.
He was a Chicago POL who turned our government into a Democrat machine.
And it's all coming out, and it's going to get even worse because all these years, all these years, remember, we've heard that J. Edgar Hoover, terrible, terrible guy, look good in a dress, but he was a terrible guy because he was always spying on people.
We use those words then, spy.
And so what a bad guy he was.
We make movies about what a terrible person he is and all this stuff.
But now we find out that Obama did worse.
He used the IRS worse than Nixon.
Nixon actually wanted to use the IRS against his enemies, but he wasn't that bad a guy, so he didn't do it.
So all this stuff is coming out.
And then there's this other fact.
There's another thing.
Oh, and by the way, before we start talking about that, we should talk about Eric Holder, right?
Last attorney general, the first attorney general to be held in contempt, who was held in contempt by a bipartisan vote, by the way, not a party line vote like this one, holding Barr in contempt.
But he did not refuse to give any information about the Fast and Furious scandal.
This was the Fast and Furious scandal in which a law officer, a border agent, was killed by guns that were allowed to get into bad guys' hands by our government.
And so Eric Holder stonewalled Congress, didn't give them anything.
We The People Holsters Promo00:02:29
And then when they said you have to give it to them, Obama said, oh, I declare executive privilege.
No one is bringing this up because Obama had no cause to declare those papers executive privilege, where Trump does have a reason to say that some of the information in the Mueller report is executive privilege because it was communications between the executive branch and the executive branch.
It was just protecting Holder and the Department of Justice from their incompetence, corruption, and malfeasance.
That's all he was doing.
Whereas Barr has given them everything.
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So, Sarah Sanders gave the other reason why Trump is now declaring executive privilege.
They've just had enough.
And if the American people haven't had enough, the American people are being conned.
But you know, you can con some of the people some of the time and all of the people, you can call some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't con them all all the time.
And that is what the Democrats are doing.
And Sanders just tells them the White House has had enough.
The way that we see this is that this is over.
Breaking Up Social Media Monopoly00:13:57
And just because the Democrats didn't like the results doesn't mean they get to redo this process.
We've spent two years, millions of taxpayer dollars, submitted millions of pages in documents, been fully cooperative, hundreds of hours of testimony.
And Bob Mueller came back and said there was no collusion.
If Bob Mueller couldn't find it, I am 100% sure that Jerry Nadler is not going to find anything that Bob Mueller couldn't.
He can't even handle asking the attorney general questions.
Do we really think he could handle something like this?
I think the answer is no.
They've just had enough.
And it really is true that they couldn't even ask Barr questions.
They set up a situation in which Barr was bound to say, I'm not coming in because it wasn't the usual questioning by elected representatives.
They wanted him questioned for 30 minutes straight by counsel.
That's never been done before, as far as I know.
I don't think it has ever been done before.
And he said, no, you know, I'll come in and talk to elected officials.
I'm not going to come in and have your counsel badger me for 30 minutes.
Look, this is a really, really interesting piece of show art.
That is what we're watching.
We're watching a reality TV star, Donald Trump, right, up against people who have controlled our perception of reality by controlling the entertainment and the news media, the left.
The left is the entertainment and the news media, and it's the Democrat Party.
They are all one thing.
So they think they have the power to do this.
But for the first time, they are up against somebody who knows exactly how this game is played.
That's why they hate him so much.
It's really not his policies.
He's a pretty standard middle-of-the-road to the right Republican.
I mean, he hasn't done anything that's so incredibly untoward that no Republican would have done it.
I think virtually any Republican would have done it.
No other Republican would have won.
Why?
Because no other Republican understands that the fight is in the narrative.
That is the thing Trump knows.
It's the thing Ted Cruz, whom I love, I love him on policy, but he doesn't understand that the narrative is everything.
The fight is always against the media.
And that's the fight we're seeing.
We're seeing these guys who are so used, the Democrats are so used to having the press give them cover.
They're so used to having the press give them cover that they feel free to invent reality.
They are inventing a crisis.
They're inventing an impeachment that's not going on at all.
And Donald Trump gets it.
And what he is doing is he's saying, bring it, bring it, bring impeachment.
Go ahead.
Bring your crisis.
Let's see how you do.
Let's see how that affects people.
Nancy Pelosi knows it.
She was the one who was complaining, whining about, oh, he's impeaching himself.
He's going as well.
Here she is.
She's still talking about it now.
She was talking about it yesterday saying he's goading us.
And here she is still talking about it.
And I have said the president is goading us into, wants to goad us into impeachment because he knows, as do I, that that's not a good thing for the Congress.
Well, maybe he knows that, but he knows that I think that.
Let's put it that way.
He knows that I think that.
But the point is, is that every single day, whether it's obstruction, obstruction, obstruction, obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, ignoring subpoenas and the rest, every single day, the president is making a case.
He's becoming self-impeachable.
She didn't know what to do.
She has never run into this before because they own the media.
I mean, it's what I've been screaming about all these years, going to think tanks and saying you've got to get control of the narrative.
You've got to have movie theaters.
You've got to have more Fox News.
You've got to have stuff like the Daily Wire, except, you know, you've got to bring all this into the mainstream.
But always, always with conservatives is always, no, what we need is another policy.
You know, we need a really stern editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and that's going to carry the day.
And they do not understand that people making jokes, that people telling stories is everything.
The left gets it.
And that's why, I mean, you know, we make fun of Jim Acosta because he's an absurd imbecile.
And we make fun of CNN because nobody's watching them.
I just love that story about how there are now more prostitutes in America than people watching CNN, which actually speaks well of America because prostitutes do something for you.
But like, Jim Acosta, Jim, look at me.
I'm Jim Acosta, is a guy who is sitting there.
Nobody's watching him because reality has a voice and people are turning to reality instead of watching CNN.
But listen to him.
He's standing there like a newsman.
He looks like a newsman.
He's even got the hair kind of look.
I think he's now got it pasted in a windswept look.
So it looks like the wind is blowing it, but it's actually just rock hard on there.
He's sitting there creating a narrative.
He's not reporting the news.
He's simply reporting Jim Acosta.
Listen to this.
President Trump appears to be heading toward a constitutional crisis with House Democrats as he continues to hide the Mueller report as well as his tax returns from lawmakers.
The White House is defending the president's use of executive privilege today as it seems the art of the deal has turned into the art of the concealed.
Playing a game of hide and seek, President Trump is pulling out all the stops to keep the full Mueller report out of the hands of House Democrats.
Mr. President, if the Mueller report clears you, why not let Congress see all of it, sir?
In a retaliatory strike, the president is now asserting executive privilege to block the report's unreleased materials from House Democrats.
After Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler sought to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over what they want.
I mean, they've got everything.
They've got the whole report, and they haven't looked at it.
And the little bits that are still redacted, which is what they're living on.
They're like those pictures of Al Gore of the polar bears on the shrinking ice flow.
That's what they're like.
They started out with a big ice flow of Chinese, of Chinese, of Russian collusion.
They had that big ice flow, and then that kind of started to melt away and it was chipping off, you know, because now, well, they said, well, we've got obstruction of justice, right?
And now they're down to like, oh, 2% of the report is illegal to release.
And that's the ice flow they're sending.
So save the Democrats.
Keep that ice flow alive and send your money in now.
You know, it is amazing.
And even Erin Burnett, I think, she was talking to one of the, also, you haven't seen this because on CNN, unless you're a prostitute, you're not watching.
But she was talking to David Ciceline, who's also on the Nadler committee.
And she's saying, you know, if you're going to put on the impeachment show, why not do the real impeachment?
Because she understands that the narrative is slipping away.
The president and his minions cannot stonewall the American people, cannot prevent Congress from doing its work and finding the truth, whatever it is.
I understand the points that you're trying to make, but when you say that this is contempt, second time in history, all of these things, I guess the question at this point is, if it is so dire and you have the power to launch impeachment proceedings, which you do on your committee, what is stopping you if this is so serious?
Well, look, I think there's no question that in President Nixon's impeachment, the third article of impeachment was obstruction of Congress.
So there is no question that at some point, if the president's effort to stonewall and prevent us from getting information continues, that that may form an independent basis for obstruction in and of itself.
But what we have a responsibility to do first is collect all the evidence so we can make a fully informed judgment.
We got part of the story in the Mueller report.
That was the beginning of our work.
We're asking for the balance of the report as well as all the supporting materials.
You know, it's important to remember in the Ken Star investigation, when Ken Starr was done with that report, he delivered it to Congress with 18 boxes of documents.
And you know what they did after Ken Starr did that?
They made it harder to do that because they were so angry that Ken Starr released all that material that kept Clinton basically in their sights.
And also remember, of course, that the impeachment of Bill Clinton on far, far more likely and true grounds than they want to come after Trump on really won Clinton the support of the people because they felt he was being persecuted.
My favorite person in all this and all this kind of fake news, which is what it is.
It's not fake news.
It's like fake reality at this point, is Bob Woodward.
I actually have some respect for Bob Woodward.
He is a good old-fashioned reporter in a lot of ways.
But he does have a flaw, which he's always had, which is he lets the people who talk to him tell the story.
So if you talk to Woodward, you get a voice.
But he doesn't go out and say, oh, this guy talked to me, but he's lying.
He doesn't do that.
So he's always, so he's always basically swept into the story that he gets told.
So he wrote this book about Donald Trump called Fear.
You know, it's Fear.
And he talked to all these people who don't like Donald Trump in the administration because Trump is a hard guy to work with.
He's obstreperous and he's got a big temper and he obviously bullies people and all this stuff.
So he's got this picture of absolute chaos.
So they ask Woodward on CNN, which unless you're a prostitute, you're not watching.
But of course, you're in my audience, so maybe you are a prostitute.
So they've got Woodward and they ask him, is it a constitutional crisis?
He says, no, That's not the crisis.
That's going to go into the courts.
Nobody cares about it.
It's going to take years to resolve.
And if you're a farmer in the Midwest, you could care less about Jerry Nadler.
Here's the crisis.
I think we're also in a situation where there are all these balls in the air, and they are being juggled by perhaps the most unsteady hands we've had in the American presidency ever.
Really?
Do you think that's the situation?
Yes, I think we have a governing crisis.
You look at all of the issues.
Are you saying this just from the White House or Congress as well in terms of Trump's performance as president?
We've got a confrontation with Iran, which could spiral out of control.
Things with North Korea are not settled.
We've got this trade war and all kinds of things going on with China.
This is a dire situation.
Now, let me ask you something.
You're reading the newspaper.
You think this is a dire situation?
I mean, you know, when have we not had trouble with North Korea?
Why shouldn't we have trade, tough trade talks with China, who's been ripping off our lunch for the last 10 years?
Why shouldn't we be having that?
That's a typical normal thing.
Iran is a terrorist state that Obama cozied up to, and so Trump is extricating us from that.
And of course, it causes tension.
Of course, it does.
But is this really, I mean, is this really a country in crisis?
I mean, our economy is booming.
Look, there can always be a crisis.
A crisis can happen at any moment.
But this is in the imagination of the press.
It is in the imagination of the press.
And now they're acting it out as a kind of kabuki show for us.
Let me show you what the news really looks like.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
Bring in a wig, boy.
That's right.
It's the Trump happiness montage.
That's what they don't want to face.
That's what they don't want to see.
It has driven them crazy.
It has turned them into Seinfeld Democrats.
It has caused them to suppress the news.
And now it's causing them to create an alternative reality for all of our interests.
I just want to end up by talking about this one thing that was in the New York Times on Knucklehead Rose, an op-ed by Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook, saying that Mark Zuckerberg, the government, should break Facebook up.
He says Mark Zuckerberg's influence is staggering.
It's far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.
He controls three core communication platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Billions of people use these every day.
Facebook's board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer because Mark controls around 60% of voting shares.
He can decide alone how to configure Facebook's algorithms to determine what people see in their news feeds, their privacy settings, and even which messages get delivered.
He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive.
You know, I think this is an important thing.
I think the breaking up of social media, the reconfiguring of social media to keep it from becoming a monopoly has got to take place under a Republican administration because it's Republicans who are being silenced.
It's conservatives who are being silenced.
And you know, if it happens under the Democrats, they will simply enshrine that.
They will enshrine that in law that Republicans can be silenced.
He is the op-ed editor of the New York Post, and he's also a contributing editor to the Catholic Herald, but he is also the author of From Fire by Water, really good writer, by the way.
He's the author of From Fire by Water, My Journey to the Catholic Faith, which chronicles his journey from an atheist living under a fundamentalist government in Iran to Catholicism.
From Fire by Water00:13:46
Nearly two decades later, it is a really, really interesting story.
As you know, I've taken a journey myself, not quite as dramatic, but certainly a dramatic journey to Christianity.
Saurabh, thanks so much for coming on.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Let's begin with your childhood or your teenage years.
I mean, that is an extraordinary way to grow up.
Can you give us some sense of what it was like, what you were living under?
Yeah, I was living in a doublethink world in the sense that my parents were children of 1968.
They were bohemian liberal hippie types, which existed in Iran as much as they did in Paris or San Francisco.
But meanwhile, we found ourselves in a newly re-Islamizing Iran because I was born six years to the day the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his exile to herald the new Islamic Republic.
And so I lived in this world where the inner world, the interior world, I was surrounded by Western books and movies and ideas and parents who told me the only thing that mattered was that I'd just be, quote unquote, be myself.
And an outside world outside our closed doors, that was, you know, Sharia norms were being reintroduced violently.
You know, men and women couldn't hold hands, you couldn't drink, and so on and so forth.
So that interior clash led me to conclude when I was 12 or 13 that there's no God, that religion is all a bunch of public hypocrisy.
Was that what your parents believed?
Were your parents atheists?
I don't know what my parents were.
I think they were just kind of ecumenical liberals.
That was their religion.
They even liked bits of Islam that were humanistic.
They liked the ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, which is a kind of ancient Persian proto-religion.
We had an Armenian nanny, so we went to her Orthodox church.
So they didn't, you know, in the way that liberal ecumenical type people can be, all of those views were kind of welcome, but none of them was taken too seriously.
So were you seeing, were you witnessing the return of Sharia?
Was this something that you could go out onto the street and see?
Or was the world around you still a fairly liberal world?
I think my parents tried to shield me as much as possible, but you couldn't escape it in the sense that, you know, at school, when we had the Shiite mourning, because Iran, as you know, is majority Shiite, the various Shiite saints who were being mourned, for example, you would do the ceremonies at school, at public school.
We were very much aware that alcohol was prohibited.
And so that meant was that my parents and their friends liked to drink, but there was always an element of risk that actually was part of the fun, was you could get caught by the morality police.
And the fact was, what was most interesting about it is most people think, you know, in Iran, if you're caught with alcohol, you'll get flogged.
You know, chances are that you won't.
You know, you can bribe the morality police to overlook your iniquities.
On the other hand, you could face someone who's a true believer, the agent, and then you end up with your back looking like halabred for the rest of your life.
Wow, wow.
You know, I mean, the idea, I like the idea of a morality police that can be bribed.
You can't make that stuff up.
So when and how do you get out of there?
So at age 13, when I'm about to turn 14, actually, my mother and I left because I had an uncle who'd settled in the U.S. right at the time of the revolution.
So when we left in 1998, we got what's called the family preference visa program, just a green card.
So we came over and I had this idea that America was the Manhattan of the movies, you know, that it'd be very individualistic, very secular, and almost hedonistic in a way that I wanted or sought after.
So imagine my surprise.
You know, we got on a plane from Tehran to Amsterdam.
Then from Amsterdam, we flew over and as we reached the continental United States, we didn't stop in Manhattan.
We landed in this place called Minneapolis.
And then we didn't even stop there.
We then took another flight to a city called Salt Lake City, which is where my uncle had settled.
He was actually north of Salt Lake City in a small town.
So I was totally shocked.
Obviously, this is not the promised land I'd been promised.
So now you're 14, you said?
Yeah.
And so you're growing up in the Midwest?
In Utah, in the mountain west, which is surrounded by Mormon culture in a town of 600 people called Eden, Utah.
And what that meant was I almost immediately picked up the revolution that I have launched against all traditional morality, against God, against authority in the old country, and applied it to this new society and its kind of foundations.
So almost seamlessly rebellious.
And all right, so you're still an atheist and atheism makes perfect sense because all you see is repressive religion both there and here.
So where do you go when you leave home?
What's the next step?
So I went to the University of Washington.
I started at Utah State just because they gave us a scholarship, but then I transferred out.
And I transferred out because by then I had become a Marxist.
I took very seriously.
I read Nietzsche first in high school and then I read Marx.
You know, if there is no God, then man, in a sense, is abolished.
And we could create a society that's based on totally new values, all values being the product of history and power dynamics.
There's nothing inherently good or evil.
So I became a Marxist in a very serious sense.
And so I transferred to that school because the headquarters of the Trotsky group of which I was a member was in Seattle, which was then and is now a hotbed of sort of American hard leftism.
So yeah, that was my first trip out of Utah, I guess.
It's very hard to get over Nietzsche.
He's like a very powerful writer and a very insightful.
I think he's very insightful and honest about his conclusions.
I mean, he doesn't shy away from his own conclusions.
He's tough to get around.
He is, and he's very powerful to read, especially if you're young and you haven't read what comes before.
That's sort of all the sort of Judeo-Christian tradition and Athens and Jerusalem, if you will.
If you don't have a grounding in that, then Nietzsche can totally overpower you and convince you values.
And not least, Judeo-Christian values are the product of a slave-like people.
Because they themselves weren't virile, they treated virility as something sinful.
Because they themselves didn't have a dominating urge, they thought that strength was a bad thing, and so on and so forth.
And that made sense as a, I guess, in my early, you know, late teens, early 20s.
So, so now, I mean, you have become a prominent journalist, obviously.
You come into a world, when you come into the world of sophisticated writers, sophisticated thinkers, atheism is kind of, I mean, I found, you're younger than I was, but I've found that atheism was kind of the default position.
Did you find that as well?
Yes.
I mean, even though, you know, I'm lucky I work at my whole professional career has been mostly in News Corp, conservative editorial page, first the Wall Street Journal and now the New York Post.
And I have lots of colleagues who are people of faith, mainly Catholics and Jews.
But on the whole, the wider journalistic ecosystem is atheistic.
Or at most, it wants to relegate faith to a narrow private sphere.
Say, okay, you believe this crazy stuff, your subjective views.
It can't have an objective say in the public square, surely.
And I think that's the attitude that not my immediate colleagues, but the wider profession shares.
I think maybe that you agree out enough.
So let me, how did you make the transition?
Obviously, if you're working for News Corp, you probably made a transition away from Marxism.
How do you make the transition away from Marxist atheism to Catholicism?
And is the political journey and the religious journey linked?
They are.
In fact, I initially just became a secular conservative.
I mean, I had a series of experiences, the most important of which was after college, I didn't have anything to do.
So I joined this organization, Teach for America, which places recent college graduates in needy classrooms.
And that turned my worldview upside down in the sense that as a Marxist, I was just told and had concluded that the reason inequalities persist in the achievement gap between poor students and their affluent peers is merely because of redistributive justice.
That there isn't a if you could just have more money in poor schools, you know, children of the poor would do just as well.
But then when I actually went to become a teacher, I saw that no, that there is this even in the most dire classrooms, good teachers can make a huge difference.
And the old moralistic notions that I used to sneer at about hard work and discipline could go a long way.
And so, you know, Marxist materialism says people are who they are and believe what they believe because of their economic circumstances.
And my experience in Teach Firmica turned that right upside down: that your values, your character, virtue can determine the order of material things.
So that made me a kind of secular.
It didn't make me a believer.
Then I read, I mean, then I read proper history, having not read it in college, but I've then read it on my own.
A history of the 20th century, Arthur Kessler's Darkness at Noon, Natan Sharansky's Fear No Evil, all these books that convinced me that, no, the God of the Bible is a liberator.
The God of the Bible is not an oppressive God.
Fact, he's a bulwark against totalitarianism because of the human dignity that he imbues in the human person.
That all the things that I appreciated now in this new society that I found myself in, once I got over my sort of adolescent sneering at it, I realized the very best things about it have Judeo-Christian roots.
So then that didn't necessarily make me a believer yet, but it was pushing me along to say, well, what, you know, how is it that a society rooted in the idea that God made man in his own image is a democracy.
And I no longer, I used to brag about my atheism, but by the time I was 23, 24, I would say, look, I'm not fortunate enough to be a person of faith, but I appreciate that other people are.
Okay.
So now, what, I mean, this thing, especially in a world of science, especially in a world where virtually every science book I read has an advertisement for atheism in it for some reason.
And how do you get around that to actual faith?
Well, my coming to faith was through the proof for the existence of God through the conscience, which is also the one that C.S. Lewis uses, I guess, in near Christianity.
I read Lewis much later, but I had trouble accounting for the presence of this inner voice inside me that already knew what was wrong, in a sense, and what was right.
In other words, there is an objective morality that is sort of deeply embedded in the human person.
So that even when two school children have an argument over, you know, one of them takes the other one's orange, the one who's orange has been taken away says, hey, that's not fair.
And they both understand that, which means they both have an objective sense of what fairness is.
This ideal is in their souls.
So that was helpful to me thinking about my own conscience, what it was telling me.
And then I read Pope Benedict's books, especially Jesus of Nazareth, which he wrote after.
It's a great book.
And, you know, I mean, first of all, if you think you're kind of an intellectual and you're too smart for God, then you come face to face with a thinker like Benedict, and you're like, okay, you can be intelligent and believe.
And that there are a set of questions that are posed by the fear of death, questions that are posed by the fear of God, by issues of right and wrong, to which no amount of technological modernity is the answer.
I mean, gives the answer.
Scientific advancement, technological advancements can answer the how questions.
You know, okay, you know, we have a conscience because as evolutionary beings, blah, we develop, or so on and so forth, but it can't answer the why questions.
And so, and I found the most cogent answers to those why questions in the Bible itself, in sacred scripture, and ultimately in the teaching of the Catholic Church.
You know, I'm out of time.
I wish I could talk to you for a lot longer because I just find this a fascinating journey.
Let me ask you if you can tell me quickly, since being baptized, since becoming a Catholic, what are the changes you've noticed in your actual life?
I had a lot more guilt.
That's always a positive.
Why Truth Matters00:06:11
It's good, guilt.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so easier.
You see the world more honestly.
But also, more seriously, as a journalist, Christianity is about grace, but it's also about moral order.
And as a journalist, I now have a sense of what order and disorder are in a way that is not haphazard, but systematic.
And so I go out into the world as a journalist with a confidence that I didn't have, I suppose.
Saurabh Amari, author of From Fire by Water, My Journey to the Catholic Faith.
Thanks.
I hope you'll come back and talk about some secular matters like Iran and other things that you've been writing about.
I would love to talk to you again.
Happily.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thanks very much.
It's a pleasure.
All right, before the clavenless weekend begins and plunges you into, you know, despair and chaos, I just want to end with a final reflection about a piece I read in the Washingtonian, which I believe is a very left-wing journal.
But anyway, it's by Anonymous, and it's called What Happened After My 13-Year-old Son Joined the Alt-Right.
And the part that I want to talk about is that she's a liberal.
She has this son, Sam.
He's 13 years old.
He's in the eighth grade.
He was part of the kind of edgy, left-wing, sensitive group, that there was a gay guy and people talking about being trans and all this stuff.
Anyway, one morning he's sitting around with a pal and both of them guys and they make a kind of double entendre joke.
One of them makes a double entendre joke and Sam laughs.
And a girl at the table overhears their private conversation, misconstrues it, and reports it as sexual harassment.
Sam's guiding counselor pulls him out of his class, accuses him of breaking the law.
He is sent from empty room to empty room, kept away from anybody who can advise him, told that the things he said were illegal and that he has to write a statement of guilt.
No one called his parents.
He's basically just tormented.
Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students.
When he came home and his mom asked him why his eyes were swollen, he said that he would probably be suspended, but he might also be expelled and arrested.
It was a Kafka experience, and they had to move to another school, another community, where he found online pals, right, on Reddit and 4chan.
And you know where I'm going.
They're alt-right Nazis, and they tell him that all girls lie about rape, and they have also other things they want to tell him.
They tell him that Islam is an inherently violent religion.
Jews run the global financial networks.
He himself is Jewish, by the way.
And she says, we're Jewish.
I didn't run anything.
The wage gap is a fallacy.
Feminazis are destroying families.
And people need guns to protect themselves.
All the things this woman hates.
And he ultimately becomes alt-right.
What struck me about this story, and I do think it's horrific.
I think the alt-right is an alternative to conservatism in the worst possible sense of those words.
But how much of what they said is true?
So much of it, what they said is true, and the truth sets you free, right?
Islam may not be an inherently religion, but the question of inherently violent religion, but the question of whether it's inherently violent is important.
It's certainly not a religion of peace.
It's a religion that's cancerous with violence.
And whether that's inherent to their beliefs is something for experts to debate and discuss.
But when you say, oh, no, it's a religion of peace, this guy's a lone wolf.
This guy's a lone wolf.
You know, every Islamic terrorist is a lone wolf, but every right-wing terrorist is, of course, indicative of the evil of the right-wing.
If you tell people to believe all women and you find out that women, being human beings, lie like everybody else, if you tell people that if you let feminazis be the voice of your movement and then say, oh, well, they're not real feminists.
You know, that's not feminism.
Feminism is about choice when all you hear is no, you don't have a choice.
Feminazis are the most powerful voice in feminism.
And even when you talk about not looking at culture, you know, if you say, well, you can't talk about the fact that Jews are an incredibly successful minority, they are.
And that means that they're going to be bad guys at successful levels, like Bernie Madoff, and they're going to be good guys at successful levels, like all the Jewish doctors who have healed so many diseases and who heal so many people.
You know, that they're going to be people like that.
If you put the truth in the hands of haters, this is basically what I want to say.
If you put the truth in the hands of haters, then haters have the power of truth at their command.
That's why I feel like when you talk about feminazis, when you talk about the fact that some women lie, that not all, that men are not rapists per se, when you talk about these things and they shut you down and they kick you off Twitter and they kick you off Facebook, they just give the haters the power of the truth.
And even worse, they make the truth a secret.
And the people who hold that secret have all the power.
And that is why the truth matters.
And that is why censorship is almost always, always wrong.
And that is why free speech matters so incredibly, incredibly much.
And that is why the people who think that they are saving humanity by silencing the Alex Joneses of the world are in fact giving tremendous power, putting tremendous power into Alex Jones's hands.
And that is why we're going to keep telling the truth right here on the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
I will see you on Monday.
If you survive the Clavenless weekend, I'll give you about a 50-50 chance.
See you then.
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.
False Accusation of Assault00:00:37
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
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Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Walsh Show today, we're going to talk about this horrific, disturbing college course, which seems to basically be training pedophiles.
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