Ep. 705 frames Democrats as the "Dragon Queen"—like Daenerys Targaryen—using satire to mock liberal abortion policies (e.g., New York’s 240-month limit) and figures like Emily Radojkowski’s nude protest, while contrasting Robert Smith’s $40M debt relief with AOC’s "charity is theft" rhetoric. It critiques Buttigieg’s calls to rename streets after slaveholders and Australia’s conservative win over Labor’s climate-focused agenda, arguing voters reject utopian leftism for economic pragmatism. The episode ties cultural shifts—from Game of Thrones’ power struggles to progressive eugenics narratives—to a global backlash against ideological extremism, framing tradition and material stability as enduring conservative strengths. [Automatically generated summary]
In liberal states such as New York and Hell, abortion is allowed up to the 240th month in cases where the mother is endangered or just really annoyed and tired of doing so much laundry.
The procedure must be performed by a licensed physician or a hitman, whichever is cheapest.
In more conservative states like Alabama, Ohio, reality, and Utah, abortion is considered the immoral destruction of an innocent human life because it immorally destroys a human who is alive and innocent.
Pro-abortion activists, who prefer to be called pro-choice rather than baby-killing savages, say they have been frustrated in their attempts to convince pro-life activists to change their minds.
Pro-choicer Jack Ripper, in a statement scrawled in blood on an alley wall, told reporters, quote, We've tried everything to get the pro-lifers to come over to our side.
We've punched them, threatened to rape their children, torn down their signs, and screamed in their faces, but we somehow can't get them to see reason.
It's obvious they're racist because many aborted children would have grown up to be black and experience prejudice.
So it's much better to stick a needle in their hearts and then tear them limb from limb, as anyone can plainly see if they enjoy doing that sort of thing, unquote.
Hollywood actresses have added their logical minds to the debate.
The beautiful Emily Radojkowski posed nude to punish the 25 old white men who voted for the Alabama bill and presumably reward the seven old white men who voted for Roe v. Wade.
And of course, Alyssa Milano is continuing her sex strike, which should have a major impact as soon as America's men realize they are no longer having sex with Alyssa Milano.
Pro-life activists, meanwhile, continue to rattle on about their silly God who made us in his image and endowed us with rights and stuff.
No clue what that's about.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Yes, we are going to talk about Game of Thrones.
I will try to keep the spoilers for my review at the end of the podcast.
But if you didn't see the penultimate episode last week, the one last week, you might want to skip this part too.
One of my frustrations with conservatives over the years is their inability to fully engage with the process and importance of storytelling, which is a major part of how culture is created.
At first, I thought this was entirely because conservative storytellers like myself get blacklisted from the major storytelling venues, and we do, but there's also, I think, something congenital about it.
Conservatives tend to be more yang-minded.
They engage with life in terms of facts and figures and feel that facts don't care about your feelings, as someone I think once said.
Leftists tend to be more yin-minded and engage with life in terms of stories and the feelings they produce.
If a news outlet can show them pictures of babies crying, they feel something must be done about whatever issue that is.
If they're moved, they think that's where the truth is.
Men tend to be more yangy and women more yinny.
And as anyone who's married to a member of the opposite sex will tell you, it's hard to reconcile these two ways of experiencing the world.
On the one hand, the yangs are right.
It doesn't matter what your feelings are if the facts don't support them.
But on the other hand, the yins are right.
Everything that's most important in life is, if not a feeling exactly, it's at least a subjective reality.
Love, faith, joy, and sorrow aren't real like tables and chairs are real, but they're just as real as tables and chairs are.
And if your facts don't care about those, your facts don't matter very much in the end.
As a yang guy in a yin profession, I've always been able to flash back and forth between the points of view, which makes it cheap for me to take myself out on a date.
But it also means I appreciate stories more than a lot of conservatives seem to.
So let me tell you this.
I've been listening to conservatives kvetch about the ending of Game of Thrones all night long, and I think they are foolish.
The show is one of the biggest wins for our point of view in American cultural history, an enormously popular story that tells about a powerless woman who is mistreated as only a woman can be, who rises to power with the intense desire to free people from the sort of oppression she experienced, who acquires power in pursuit of her cause and ultimately loses touch with the contradiction of exercising power in pursuit of freedom.
She becomes a tyrant who feels her commitment to liberalization justifies flagrant atrocity because she knows what the good is and the rest of us therefore don't get to choose.
In other words, she forgets Thomas Sowell's greatest law.
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
And of course, the only possible right answer to that question is the human individual in his home and his community.
In other words, America has just been treated to an eight season long history of leftism in which a queen allows past grievances, female identity, and the intoxicating lie of power to override the good she thinks she set out to do.
It ends with a reminder that the great human stories of the future will not be made in the capital by those who sit in thrones.
They will be made by adventurous individuals who live free beyond the borders of the north or who sail west beyond the places where the maps end.
Game of Thrones has its storytelling flaws, and I'll talk about them later.
But if conservatives had as much cultural sense as God gave a goose, we would be singing the praises of a great show that told the greatest conservative truth of all.
We will talk about that more throughout the show, but like I said, I'll try and save the spoilers for the end.
Meanwhile, let us talk about the fact that your internet connection is giving your stuff away.
When you leave your internet connection unencrypted, you might as well be writing your password and credit card numbers on a huge billboard for the rest of the world to see.
That is why I took Michael Knowles' advice in this one instance, this one time, and I got ExpressVPN.
It's so easy to put in there.
It works behind the scenes.
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And it costs about seven bucks a month, which is not that bad.
Protect your online activity today and find out how you can get three months free at expressvpn.com/slash clavin.
Twitter's Hypocrisy00:07:36
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Clavin for three months free with a one-year package.
Visit expressvpn.com slash clavin to learn more.
And you know, you're thinking, why did you spell express?
I know how to expel Express, but how on earth does anyone spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Democrats are the dragon queen.
They are the dragon queen.
You know, last week we saw, not just in my Stanford address where they tried to start trouble, where the administration tried to start trouble and kind of shut me down and get people upset, but we saw, we had my friend on, Michael Loftus, the comedian who told you how he couldn't get his stuff sold because he was a right-winger, his TV stuff sold, so they want to silence him.
We saw Jenna Ellis, now Mrs. Reeves, Jenna Ellis Reeves, was blocked on Facebook for supporting Matt Walsh in his anti-abortion fight.
We see all these people being thrown off.
We see people using power without thinking about the fact that power contradicts the very things they're trying to achieve.
And you know, I know they started out, or at least in their hearts, want to do good.
I know they want to reverse racist policies of the past, but the left has become truly, truly wicked in their racist ideas.
You know, this is something enormous.
This identity politics, which is racism with a smiley face, is simple evil.
And I mean, I see it all the time.
I see like segregated dorms on colleges.
In my profession, in storytelling, they now have a thing called own story, which is you can only tell your own story or the story of people like you.
We saw this with Elton John's movie is coming out, and people started to complain about the fact that the actor who plays the gay Elton John is not himself gay.
And Elton John, to his credit, came out and said, that's garbage.
That is BS because it's just a movie and he can play anybody he wants.
But if you think about it, the thought there is that there is something about it between a black person and a white person, between a gay person and a straight person, some barrier that keeps an artist whose job is to portray all of humanity, that keeps them apart.
So they've come back to the kind of racism, the left has come back to the kind of racism they practiced under Jim Crow.
They keep saying, well, that was different because now Nixon's southern strategy changed everything the same attitude.
It is the same thing.
So it's evil stuff.
They're pushing on people.
They start out trying to do good.
They wind up doing evil because they feel that they have got what's right and they're going to eliminate all choice, eliminate all voices on the other side.
And that is the journey of the dragon queen in Game of Thrones.
What we should have been doing instead of going on and saying, I didn't want this person to take the throne and I didn't do this and why didn't they say this on Twitter, which is what conservative Twitter looked like.
We should have been saying, oh, look, the Democrats, the Democrats are the dragon queen.
They have started out trying to do good.
Now they're so convinced that only their way is good that they are going to enforce that on everybody else.
And what the queen says is they don't get to decide.
Those people that she's liberating, she's going to liberate them and they don't get to decide what's good because she knows what's good.
She's a leftist.
She becomes a leftist.
All right.
So let's take a look at some of the stuff that they're talking about.
Pete Buttigig had a town hall on Fox News with Chris Wallace.
And let's start with abortion because abortion is still the big story going on and this is something going that everybody's talking about.
Wallace asked Pete Butig, Putigig, about abortion, and he could not, he would not say that babies should not be killed in the third trimester.
Do you believe at any point in pregnancy, whether it's six weeks or eight weeks or 24 weeks or whenever, that there should be any limit on a woman's right to have an abortion?
You know, I think the dialogue has got so caught up on where you draw the line that we've gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line.
And I trust women to draw the line when it's their own action.
Just to be clear, you're saying that you would be okay with a woman well into the third trimester deciding to abort her pregnancy.
Look, these hypotheticals are usually set up in order to provoke a stronger.
No, no, but it's not hypothetical.
There are 6,000 women a year who get abortions in the third.
That's right, representing less than 1% of cases.
I mean, let's say, let's take ourselves in.
And the bottom line is, as horrible as that choice is, that woman, that family may seek spiritual guidance.
They may seek medical guidance.
But that decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.
Now, it's really interesting that he gets this when it comes to this subject.
He gets that people should make their own decisions.
The problem here is there is another human being involved who has no vote.
That is the problem with this.
His basic principle is right.
People should make their own medical decisions, but there's a human being unprotected.
There's only one person in an abortion room who has no vote, has no voice.
Only one.
That's the baby.
So that is the problem there.
But remember what he said.
I also have to say, these town halls are garbage.
These town halls are nonsense.
Why should there be an audience there applauding or booing anybody?
This is the Bill Maher system.
Not just Bill Maher.
It's all the talk show hosts, Stephen Colbert.
When people applaud something, that doesn't make it one bit more true.
That is when we talk about yin thinking, when we talk about storytelling, that is what that is.
It does not make, you can say two plus two is five, and everybody can say, oh boy, what a great, great guy.
And you're still wrong, okay?
So they shouldn't, why have them there?
You know, people can send in questions.
Chris Wallace can ask the questions that people send in.
But why have people cheering and booing for ideas?
It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
It is a misuse of democracy.
But this is something going on through the whole Democrat Party.
Amy Klobucher also won't say about abortion.
She won't come down and say that there comes a point when you shouldn't do it anymore.
All right.
So now let's go back, though, to Budajej now says that when Democrats talk about all the wonderful things they give you, they should also talk about how they're going to pay for it.
And this is cut number eight, is he describes, he does, to his credit, he describes how he's going to pay for it.
When candidates, Democrats, go out promising, as I think we should, that we're going to have major increases in investment in things like education, health, and infrastructure, we also got to be willing to say where the revenue is going to come from.
And it's why we really do need to entertain ideas like, I would say, a fairer, which means higher, marginal income tax rate on those earning the most, a reasonable wealth tax or something like that to make sure that people are giving back when they become enormously wealthy.
Perhaps a financial transactions tax that taxes these millisecond differences in computer trades that people become enormously wealthy off.
I'm not saying we ban them, but since it's not obvious how much real value they're adding to the economy, the least we could do is get some value for the American people.
And also closing the corporate tax loopholes and incentives for offshoring that have it to where pretty much everybody in this room probably paid more, personally, in federal income taxes than some of the most wealthy multinational corporations like Amazon that made billions in profits and paid zero last year.
First of all, it's not true there'd be zero because the people in the companies pay taxes and so the corporate tax to begin with is a double tax.
OpenFit Fitness Journey00:02:27
And second of all, what happened to if it's my decision whether I kill a child or not, if he can understand that the government shouldn't make that decision, which of course it should, the government should protect a child's life, why isn't my decision how I spend my money?
What is this giving back?
What did these billionaires take that they should be giving anything back?
They didn't take anything.
They created stuff.
They created wealth.
They created whatever it is that they did that gave wealth.
So why should I do not understand why in his absolute knowledge that he, the dragon queen, knows what's good, why he gets to decide how that money is spent?
I do not understand that.
You know, I have to pause here for just a second.
I'm going to get back to that in a moment because there's a really interesting story about that and a really interesting reaction to that story.
But first, let us talk about OpenFit, because I know it's distracting when I'm sitting here talking like this and I just look so great that you want to listen to what I'm saying, but you're thinking, how does he do it?
How does he look so great?
I exercise constantly.
And OpenFit takes all the complexity out of losing weight and getting fit.
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It's just too far away.
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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.
Not just by texting Clavin, you have to also do the workouts.
But you text Clavin to 3030-30, 303-030.
You'll get full access to OpenFit, all the workouts and nutrition information totally free.
Again, just text Clavin to 303030.
You will like it.
And you think, sure, I look great, but how do you spell it?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease in Clavin, but I sure make it look easy.
Democratic Party's Dilemma00:11:13
So a graduation from Morehouse College, talking about who gets to decide, who gets to decide.
Why are Democrats so committed that babies should be killed on your decision, but not that your money should be spent by your decision?
That's the only decision they're willing to let people make is what drugs to take, what recreational drugs to take, when to have sex, and when to kill their babies.
Why?
Because those are three things that will enslave you.
And then they get to make all the other decisions because they are the dragon queen.
Morehouse College, a traditionally black college, they say that because it's a black college, it's a black college.
And I think he's the richest black man in America, Robert Smith, said that he was going to donate $40 million and alleviate all the debt of the kids who are graduating from school.
So a big, big deal.
He's a private equity firm, right?
One of these kids, which are really interesting to me, he couldn't believe it.
So he went up to the guy after the speech.
Oh, when he got his degree, you go up and shake hands with the speaker.
And he said, did you really just say you're going to pay off my debt?
And the kid, and Smith said to him, go out into the world and do things.
Don't worry about your debts, okay?
Which is really interesting because I'm not a billionaire, but that is what I tell people too.
I said, don't worry about solving the past.
Don't worry about reparations.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do for people and for your society?
What are you going to contribute?
That is the thing that you should be asking yourself because that's where you get a happy life.
That's where you get a life of worth.
So the left reacted to this, a man giving of his personal wealth to pay off the debts of students.
They reacted to this as typical.
Here's Alexandria Occasional Cortex.
Like, hello, America.
Auntsie here again.
But this time from Washington, D.C., which is named after our country's first president, George Washington, D.C. Didn't you know that?
Like, I want to tell you about my plan to single-handedly save the planet.
I call it the Green New Deal.
I picked green because I'm still wearing my colors.
I came up with my plan after we were watching like the most important documentary on climate change.
It's called Ice H2, the Meltdown.
That's not me saying it.
That's science.
My Green New Deal will cost like $93 trillion.
Do you know how much that is?
Me neither.
Because it's totally worth it.
If sea levels keep rising, we won't be able to drive to Hawaii anymore.
And I just got this electric car.
It's eco-friendly.
Everyone has to drive one under my deal.
Under my deal, because she's the boss, right?
She's the boss.
I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself playing that.
But, you know, AOC said of this billionaire giving this money, she said, you know, people shouldn't have to depend on charity to alleviate their debts.
But of course, that's exactly what they should have to depend on, is charity to alleviate their debts, because the only other option is theft, right?
The only other option is AOC gets to decide that my money pays off that kid's debt instead of this billionaire who made his money, earned his money, doesn't have to owe anybody anything, and he is alleviating their debts because he's a good guy.
That means that they have to be grateful to him.
That means that they have to be responsible to what he did so that they do something with their lives.
That means that he is ennobled by giving $40 million away instead of AOC just getting power and gathering the Dothrakis around her and saying, you know, now I am the boss.
I have the power because I know it's good and you don't get to choose.
That entire attitude is embedded in the Democrat Party.
And just to go back for a minute to the idea of yin and yang, about storytelling versus facts.
You know, these guys are radicals.
Pete Budejez is a radical.
He is talking about radical abortion.
He's talking about radical increases in taxes.
He's talking about eliminating Jefferson, stopped honoring Jefferson.
Let's play that cut.
I love that.
They kind of overplayed this.
They said he wanted to eliminate Jefferson from history.
But he said he was talking about Andrew Jackson.
He said Andrew Jackson should be utterly abandoned because of the genocide.
I guess he was talking about the fact that Jackson won the Indian Wars, making expansion possible.
But then he goes on about Jefferson.
You said the other day you seemed to indicate that you had some troubles with the racial history of Thomas Jefferson and you suggested that some of the things honoring him, for instance, the traditional Jefferson-Jackson Democratic dinners, that they should be renamed.
How far would you carry this?
Would you rename streets?
Would you rename Jefferson's High School?
You know, my campaign office is actually on Jefferson Boulevard.
Look.
So are you going to change the name?
I'm not planning that.
No, but I think there's a reason why Democratic parties, when we're thinking about for the future, our events, especially think about how burning of an issue something like racial equity is, we're thinking twice about naming our events after Jefferson and Jackson.
So he goes on to say that he doesn't like Jefferson because Jefferson knew slavery was wrong, but he didn't do anything about it, which is like saying that Isaac Newton knew how science worked, but he didn't invent the electric light bulb.
You know, when you're born into a system, it takes a long time to overcome the fact that there you are and your economy depends on it and your life is always, and you're used to it and all this stuff.
Even a man as great as George Washington took a lifetime to really figure out slavery because he was immersed in it.
And I think that George Washington is a considerably greater man in every possible way than Pete Buttigieg.
But my point is that these guys, this is a radical rejection of America.
It's a radical transformation of America.
That's what they're talking about.
But because Pete Buttige is personable and because he's intelligent and he is, and because he presents as a decent individual, they're going to sell you, sell him to you as mainstream.
Here's Joe Scarborough, who has become kind of the mascot of the mainstream media.
You can always depend on just a mainstream media point of view coming out of his mouth.
Here he is talking about this town hall.
I've seen the future of the Democratic Party and it's Mayor Pete.
It may not be in 2020.
Perhaps it's in 2024 or beyond, but this guy is going to play an important role in the mainstreaming, the mainstreaming of the Democratic Party for many years to come.
And believe you me, that is exactly what he does.
Regardless of ideology, Mayor Pete mainstreams a Democratic Party.
So think about that.
Regardless of ideology, he mainstreams the party.
What could he possibly mean by that?
It is the ideology of the left, the dragon queen ideology of the left, that is the problem.
That's the problem.
I don't care about anything else.
I don't care what they look like.
I don't care what they talk like.
None of that bothers me.
It's the ideology.
So what could it possibly mean that Pete Buttigieg mainstreams the party, right?
I mean, maybe there's some virtue signaling in there where he's telling you how woke he is about gay people.
I don't know.
Maybe that's part of it.
But basically, it means he looks good.
He presents well.
I agree.
He looks good.
He presents well.
He is a radical left-wing ideologue.
And so the ideology is the problem.
And see how they're selling you that story because it works for them, because they're yin people, and they don't understand why the yang people are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
The fact is, the fact is he's a left-wing ideologue that doesn't mainstream anything.
I mean, you have to give it to Bernie.
I mean, Bernie and Pete Buttigieg are not that far apart on what they believe in, but Bernie looks like an old commie, which is what he is.
And he's talking about what they're all talking about, really.
I mean, let's just play this one Bernie clip before I move on to my final point about this.
Cut two.
It goes without saying that we have got to defeat Donald Trump, who in my view is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.
He's a pathological liar.
He's a sexist and a racist, et cetera, et cetera.
Beating Trump is not good enough.
You've got to beat the fossil fuel industry.
You have to take on all of those forces of the status quo who do not want to move this country to energy efficiency and sustainable energies.
We're going to try to transform the United States of America, deal with this massive level of income and wealth inequality, deal with Wall Street, deal with the greed of the drug companies and the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry.
Our campaign has a different goal.
It's to transform this country, and we're taking on the entire establishment when we do that, including Ed Rundell.
So at least Bernie is being honest, right?
But the whole thing is the guy who runs against that, who presents as mainstream, is going to be the guy.
And that's why Biden, who is now far away in the polls from everybody else, that's why he's presenting himself as mainstream and talking about unity.
Listen.
I know some of the really smart folks say Democrats don't want to hear about unity.
They say Democrats are so angry that the angrier a candidate can be, the better chance he or she has to win the Democratic nomination.
Well, I don't believe it.
I really don't.
If Democrats, I believe Democrats want to unify this nation.
That's what our party has always been about.
That's what it's always been about, unity.
If the American people want a president to add to our division, lead with a clenched fist, a closed hand, a hard heart, to demonize your opponents, to spew hatred, they don't need me.
They've got President Donald Trump.
I'm running off our country.
Democrats, Republicans, and independence, a different path.
Not back to a path that never was, but to a future that fulfills our true potential as a country.
So obviously, America wasn't great and all this stuff.
And he doesn't want to divide people.
That's what Donald Trump does.
I'm not sure how that doesn't divide people, but all right.
Obviously, unity is impossible when we disagree.
We don't want to be unified.
Unity is slavery.
But what he's talking about, when he says unity, what exactly does he mean by that?
How does he want us unified, right?
Well, I think the one who was really honest about this was this congresswoman, Pamila Jayapal, who's talking about what it takes to be a Democrat.
I think the party's response is going to be strong, and hopefully you've seen that it's strong across the board.
I, you know, personally, I do think that there should be a set of core democratic ideals that we all agree to.
And that you can't say you're a Democrat if you're against immigrants, if you're against abortion, if you're against gay marriage and LGBTQ rights.
I'm not sure what it means to be a Democrat if all of those things are true.
Revolution Between Elites and People00:14:32
Those are pretty interesting.
I mean, obviously, nobody in America, there's not anybody in America who's against immigration.
We're against illegal immigration and we're against unfettered immigration.
Everybody is against that, I think.
You know, gay rights, that became a core democratic ideal in a big hurry.
I'm in favor of those, but I don't see how that's a core Democratic right.
The point is they're going to purify the party, and then they're going to purify the country because they know what's right, and you don't get to choose.
You don't get to choose.
Game of Thrones, it is all Game of Thrones, and the way they play it is just like the Dragon Queen in that show.
No question about it.
Michael Knowles, who you may have heard of, I don't know who he is, but they told me he was kind of interesting.
But we're going to talk about Australia together.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
You get to be in the mailbag.
You get to see all our shows right here.
You don't have to be hurled off into the exterior darkness where there is great weeping and gnashing of teeth, as you will now experience, as I say goodbye.
All right.
Knowles.
Hey there.
Nice jacket.
Oh, this whole thing?
I try to put on my Sunday best for this hit on the show.
My Monday morning best.
That looks good.
So let's talk about what happened in Australia because I've been laughing ever since.
I don't know if you read the New York Times article about it.
Oh, yes.
Oh, you mean the New York Times article, which described this conservative victory as the Conservative Party there is the Liberal National Coalition.
But let's set it up.
Let's tell people what happened in Australia.
Okay, all right.
Then we'll get to this.
New York Times turned up all the way to 11.
It was like eating cake.
A specter is haunting Australia.
The specter of conservatism.
So shock, shock election results.
All the experts were wrong.
All the pundits were wrong.
They knew he was going to lose.
They knew that the conservative, Scott Morrison.
That's never happened in the polls before.
It's so strange.
I thought the polls were right.
But it turns out sometimes the polls are very wrong.
A shock.
I can't think of when that's ever happened.
It's a shock to everybody except for the real people who voted for him.
But it's a shock to the...
Okay, so he was going to be thrown out because...
So, he's supposed to lose.
This conservative guy is supposed to lose to the left-wing Labor Party because the big issue in the campaign was going to be global warming.
Global warming.
This was the climate change referendum versus this nincumpoop, this retrograde Scott Morrison, an evangelical Christian, by the way, who this fool decided to run on the economy.
So you've got the economy versus the sun monster, and guess what happened?
The economy won.
I love the Times headline was, it was supposed to be the global warming election.
What happened?
And I thought they realized that was crap.
And they can't take responsibility for it.
So what the New York Times does, they write, he and his liberal national coalition won, thanks not just to their base of older suburban economic concerns.
I hate those guys.
They're the worst.
But also to a surge of support in Queensland, the rural, coal-producing, sparsely populated state, sometimes compared to the American South.
Oh, man.
What?
Deplorable.
They're deplorable.
They're deplorable.
sometimes compared to the American South by the New York Times.
They're not making a...
It just happened. You can tell.
So they were certain this was going to be the Green New Deal election.
I mean, this is why this matters for the United States is foreign politics don't always line up with ours.
This election really did.
You had conservatives running on a great economy.
Australia has had a growing economy now for something like 29 years.
That's the longest boom in history.
Ever in the history of the world.
And the left decided to run on the Green New Deal because they couldn't run on anything else.
So they ran on this fantasy of the world ending in 12 years and they lost.
And this isn't just happening on Australia.
You're seeing this sort of conservative revolution, I suppose, in Britain.
And you've seen it in the United States.
It's a revolution not just between the left and the right.
It's a revolution between the people and this kind of like crust of administrative elites.
And I think it's, I mean, you could draw any number of dichotomies.
think it's a revolution from reality versus fantasy.
And I think some of it is...
Well, reality does do that.
And reality does reassert itself over time.
This is the great conservative consolation as reality does reassert itself.
But also, it's a revolution from those people who kind of like where they are.
They kind of like their neighbors.
They like themselves.
They like their country.
They don't want it all to be washed away.
And between these other people who want to get rid of all of history, all of these local affections, in favor of some universal utopian scheme.
You know, for saying that, anywhere else but this show, you would be called a racist, a bigot.
A bigot and all this stuff.
But one of the things that gets me about the left, and I was just playing like Bernie and all these people, and Pete Buttigieg, they never talk about where the money comes from.
So Pete Buttigieg says, we need to say where the money is going to come from.
We're going to tax this guy and tax that guy.
But that's not the answer to where the money comes from, because the money comes from that guy and this guy and that guy.
When you take away his incentives, he's not going to create that money.
He's not going to create that wealth or he's not going to hang around and wait for you to take it away from him.
They never asked this.
There was a cut of Bernie Sanders saying a nation can pay its baseball players a million dollars.
Why can't we have health care?
The nation doesn't pay our baseball players.
I pay him, I guess, about 40 bucks every time I go to the stadium.
But they never think about this.
They never think about where the money comes from, where everything comes from.
It comes from Thomas Jefferson.
He had his flaws, you know, like we don't, but he did, you know.
No, but I mean, they never think about the fact that when you say people like where they are and they like their country and they like their neighbors and all this stuff, that came from somewhere.
Right.
And it wasn't pretty all the time.
People made mistakes, but it comes from somewhere.
We should have a loyalty to that.
And it's tangible.
It's real versus this beautiful utopian scheme.
Pete Buttigieg, he's so much better than Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jeff, he says we need to take Jefferson's name off of these Jefferson dinners because Jefferson held slaves and he's not nearly as good a person as Pete Budig.
Who doesn't hold slaves?
Who D doesn't hold slaves.
And the reality that we live in in our particular places is never as good as the utopian scheme that these guys are selling us.
And so you see this in the UK elections as well.
Right now, you've got the Tories in the UK and you've got Labour.
You've got Theresa May running the Conservatives and you've got Jeremy Corbyn running the leftists, the Labour Party.
And then you have Nigel Farage, whose entire political career is saying that Britain needs to leave the European Union.
He had the UK Independence Party.
Now he has the Brexit Party.
And again, the experts are shocked because the Brexit Party is surging in the European elections.
They are surging.
This could cause Theresa May to be ousted.
Right now, the Brexit Party says they have 1,300 would-be candidates who are pledging to stand in the next general election in the UK, which will happen in 2022.
Why is this?
Because there is a campaign right now in the United Kingdom to undo Brexit.
They voted on Brexit three years ago.
And there is a Soros-funded campaign to have another referendum because the people deserve a say.
Because, I mean, England, if England is like the size of Oregon, that's how big England is.
And it has dominated the world.
Its culture still dominates the world.
Its culture travels through us into the world.
Why shouldn't they be building on their successes?
Why should they be beating themselves up all the time?
Exactly.
And so there is some worry now that this Brexit party is going to upset the Conservatives and it's going to give the left a victory.
There's no evidence of that.
The bookies are giving three to one odds that the Tory Boris Johnson will be the next prime minister after Theresa May.
He's not that solid on Brexit.
Well, it's unclear.
I mean, he voted against this awful Brexit deal that Theresa May had twice.
It was awful, though.
Then he voted for it one time.
He's a little squishy.
He's a little bit of a politician.
I think Nigel Farage right now is trying to leverage Brexit to make him a little firmer on the issue.
Jeremy Corbyn, though, the leftist, he's fallen way down in the odds here.
And what it gets to, there is this great article by Roger Kimball in American Great.
Great article.
This article, it describes, because I think we're struggling in our vocabulary to describe what's going on.
What the left wants to do is portray the forces of progress and tolerance against the awful neo-Nazi white nationalists.
They're taking us back to racism, segregation, abortion.
Like they want progress to where we can kill babies in the third trim.
Eugenics.
That's not progress.
Exactly.
You've got that view of it.
And then I think the right-wing view of it is they're trying to force this moment into a traditional paradigm.
This is the regular normal conservatives versus the regular normal liberals.
It isn't quite that.
Roger Kimball makes this great argument.
He says, what we're looking at now is a great realignment in politics, and it's based on two different views of liberty.
So he writes that there is one view, quote, the parochial view that affirms tradition, local affection, and the subordination of politics to the ordinary business of life, versus the other view, the abstract view, that seeks nothing less than to boost us all up to that plane of enlightenment from which all self-interested actions look petty, if not criminal, and through which mankind as a whole, but alas, not individual men, may hope for whatever salvation secularism leavened by utilitarianism may provide.
Wow, wow.
I think that sums it up.
You know, yesterday in church, in my church, they have the greatest liturgy and the sermons, not so much.
A little weak.
And the guy gave a sermon about Peter having a dream where he realized that no meal was restricted, no food was restricted.
So the kosher laws were basically being set aside in the new Christian world, right?
And the priest gave this sermon saying, ah, how wonderful that Peter had broken out of the legalistic Jewish thought to come to basically where we are, where we can eat whatever we please and enjoy.
And I thought, that's not what happened.
That's not what happened.
What happened was God re-entered the world through the Jews.
They were the only way that happened, and God now is spreading that gift to the rest of the world.
It wasn't that Peter was catching up with us.
He was creating us.
And this is the thing, like this, to look back on the world and say, ah, how foolish they were that they didn't do the things that we do.
No, they were creating us, and everything we have comes from them.
And to just abandon these affections, this idea of life that they gave us is insane.
Well, we've talked about this a lot on the backstage show, what the graceless society looks like, a society where you don't like anybody and you don't give anybody the benefit of the doubt or a little forgiveness or a little bit of grace.
And there's this view, I think, on the left, and even some of the rationalists on the right, who say there's a law for everything.
There's a government reform for everything.
That's how we'll move into the future.
And I think politics is much more basic than that.
I think it gets down to love, affection, gratitude, veneration, and sin, the sense of sin.
Listen, maybe I'll be a little reluctant to condemn Thomas Jefferson, a far greater man than I am, because maybe I'm not so great.
Maybe Pete Buttigieg isn't so great.
And I think so much of the left's agenda, especially in the institutions, especially in education, is to get us to stop liking our country, to stop liking our history, to stop learning our history.
And what you're seeing now is in a very early way, that affection reasserting itself.
These voters in Australia saying, I kind of like this economy.
I kind of like having a job.
I kind of, I like the way that we look.
I like the way that the country looks.
I don't want to totally redo every house, every building.
Yeah, and I don't even think it's racist to say that we are Australians.
I mean, I think in America we have a tradition of being multicultural.
When I lived in England, I would hear them say, well, a multicultural country.
And I think, since when?
Well, right.
Yeah, I guess literally in that way, the way that we look in Australia or in the United Kingdom.
That's right.
Here, it's a little different.
I mean, because it's not a racial thing.
But even here, you have to ascribe to the ideas.
Like, the idea of the left is like, you don't even have to ascribe to that.
How dare you insult a Muslim person who wants to have Sharia law?
And being American looks a certain way here, too.
It's not a racial look, but it's the difference between an Hispanic guy waving an American flag or an Hispanic guy at a La Raza meeting waving a Mexican flag.
That's a good point.
What are you talking about on the show?
Today we're going to be talking about whether Joe Biden has just ended the 2020 race already.
He's up 30 points in the polls.
He's up 10 points over Trump in Battle Grand Stance.
But I think he's weak.
Yeah, I do too.
I think he's done.
All right, great to talk to you.
Good to see you.
Thank you very much.
Let me have my final reflection.
I want to give you my review of Game of Thrones.
What I really loved about the ending, and I'll give you my criticisms, was how realistic it was.
War starts with great ideas and big talk and high ideas, and it ends in ruins with bureaucrats getting back to fixing the sewer system, which I thought was really captured well.
But the thing about Game of Thrones, I mean, that was amazing, it was amazing, was these characters.
These characters who were so realistic, who acted in accordance with their character, who changed but never changed at their essential selves.
And it just wrapped us up in who we wanted to win throughout the entire, throughout the entire show.
We really cared about who was going to win, but they didn't win according to what we liked.
They won according to who won or lost according to who they were.
Daenerys, the Dragon Queen, may be one of the best female characters in fiction, in all of fiction, certainly in television fiction, which she wouldn't have been had she become a feminist icon.
Then she would have been a political construct instead of a human being doing what human beings do.
And as I say, she illustrated basically the progress that the left makes from wanting to do good to feeling that only they can do good and therefore it is worth any atrocity and any oppression to get their good done.
I thought Jon Snow was a masterpiece of characterization and people were very frustrated with him that he didn't have agency at the end, that he didn't make decisions.
But that was who he was.
He was a lone wolf.
Characters Defy Civilization00:05:07
And this is something I know a little bit about.
A lone wolf is a kind of person that people follow because they like the direction that he's going, but he's not the kind of person who leads them, who wants the power to lead them.
He wants to be left alone.
And so he winds up in the wild, which I guess you're supposed to assume he'll one day become kind of the king of the wild free people out there.
And of course, Tyrion the dwarf was just an amazing, amazing character.
He was cynical and he thought that equaled wisdom.
He found that he was a failure in so many ways.
People kept saying he keeps giving bad advice.
But the show actually addressed that in the end.
And I think in that knowledge that his wisdom was not wisdom, it was only cynicism, he really did become somebody that we could root for in the future.
I loved the fact that power was a character.
Power was a character.
Everything that happened in it was people not taking into account or taking into account the brute fact of power.
I mean, the people who did not want power for power's sake did not get power.
And that was amazing.
And people got killed because of that, and people became oppressors because of that.
Here are some of my criticisms.
TV storytelling of this length has a flaw.
It is virtually impossible to tell a story over eight years without being corrupted by people's opinions, tell it publicly over eight years, without being corrupted by people's opinions and people's reactions.
If you are writing the story and you've got it whole and then you just present it over eight years, that's very different.
But you can't, you know, you present these stories, you can't go back and correct things, people make mistakes, people get into a mood where they don't want to do anything, they don't go back and edit it.
There's going to be like a lot of problems in any long TV story.
My biggest objection was the way in which the deeper mythologies of the show kind of dissipated.
And again, I thought that that did create this sense of reality.
It was like war where you have these big ideas and everybody rushes off to the trenches.
And then after getting shot at for a bunch of years, you start to think like, can we just go home and like build our lives again?
And it did have that kind of feeling to it, which I really liked.
But I thought the dead, you know, the armies of the dead, which was such a cool device when the show began, the way it kind of slowly, slowly crept in on you.
I didn't really know who the Night King was.
I didn't really know what they wanted, what their urge was.
I didn't know where they had come from, why they had come up at this particular point.
And God, I mean, the theology of it was really strange, was muddled.
There was a God, he brought people back to life, not just Jon Snow, but other people came back to life.
But believing in him was somehow stupid.
And Jon Snow said, well, I've never seen life after death, but he has seen life beyond, he has seen life after life.
He has seen that life can be restored, and therefore it must be somewhere in between.
It must not go entirely away.
At the end, Tyrion made this, I thought, really bad speech, which was, I believe, heavily influenced by Yuval Harari and his ideas of how stories unite us.
If you want to see me take that idea apart, or at least Yuval Harari's idea about stories, read my piece in City Journal called Can We Believe.
But I thought that that was just kind of lame and not, they never really resolved the fact that there was some force of magic, some force of holiness in this world that they just didn't want to confront because I think the author of the books is an atheist and he didn't want to confront it.
I found the ending sad but weirdly satisfying.
I like the fact that the characters we were most invested in kind of went off into the wild and didn't want to become part of the civilization that was reconstituting itself.
I liked the idea of Tyrion the dwarf becoming this kind of caught up into this world of politics that he actually loves so much and that world of politics being shown to be a very small world.
But more important than anything else, more important than anything else.
You can complain about this and complain about that.
And that's kind of the fun of stories is complaining about.
A story, though, is not there to do what you tell it to do.
It is there to fulfill its own nature, which I thought the story essentially did.
I was so wrapped up in this show that at one point I realized that it was more important to me who got the Iron Throne than who won the next election.
And I think if you can do that with a story, you have swept people into a world where they can get all kinds of things that you didn't mean to put there.
And I thought it was terrific.
Here's my prediction.
His dark materials, which a lot of people like, but I just found to be a vicious, angry, atheist screen.
The first book is pretty good.
It's a trilogy of books.
The first book is pretty good.
And then it just gets this angry attack on religious people.
HBO is going to do that.
My prediction is count the days until somebody says it's the new Game of Thrones.
It won't be because I don't think it has the spirit that this story had.
I don't think they can make it into the new Game of Thrones.
But just watch for that because I'm telling you, it's coming down the pike.
Anyway, a great cultural experience.
I think conservatives should be over the moon about Daenerys and her journey.
I think it shows exactly what we're talking about and warning about when we tell people it matters who has the power to decide more than what they decide.
Tomorrow, I'll be back.
Hbo's Game of Thrones Spin?00:00:55
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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.
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