Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 717 satirizes Democratic media narratives as dystopian fantasies—mocking CNN’s framing of Trump’s policies while contrasting them with WWII hero Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart, a Tuskegee Airman who downed German FW-190s in 1943, only to face post-war racism denying him airline jobs. Stewart’s combat stories—including the lynching of captured pilots—highlight systemic prejudice, yet he urged perseverance over activism. Clavin’s episode pivots from absurd political caricatures to Stewart’s legacy, exposing how modern "oppression narratives" mirror historical hypocrisies while celebrating resilience over grievance. [Automatically generated summary]
In international news, a savage country mired in the Middle Ages has threatened to go to war against a savage country stuck in the Stone Age, causing annoyance among civilized people with better things to do.
The medieval foreigners, who wear funny clothes and speak in an incomprehensibly guttural language, have accused the primitive foreigners, who barely wear any clothes at all, of violating tribal agreements formed hundreds of years ago when the medieval foreigners were primitive and the primitive foreigners were practically mythological.
Democrats have suggested solving the problem by bringing millions of these unspeakable barbarians to our country where they can kill our citizens.
Then Democrats will demonstrate compassion by crying over the foreigners' children and speaking fondly about their quaint traditional practices as if they were something other than blood-drenched atrocities.
Presidential advisor John Bolton, conversely, has suggested we bomb the medievals into the Stone Age and bomb the Stone Agers into some pre-sentient state before they could stand upright and use rude tools.
President Trump, meanwhile, has threatened to levy tariffs on whatever natural resource represents the reason we're paying attention to these homunculi in the first place, while calling on Congress to sit down and pass a law about something, a suggestion that met with sustained laughter, followed by threats of impeachment, followed by a state of absolute inactivity, usually seen only in the far reaches of space or in Congress.
Commentators at CNN blame the crisis on Donald Trump's racism, while op-ed writers at the New York Times, a former newspaper, blame Donald Trump's refusal to celebrate transgenderism as represented by the foreigners' habit of mutilating their women until their bodies were indistinguishable from those of men.
The Washington Post, where democracy dies in unbearable boredom, excoriated Trump for his refusal to institute Barack Obama's plan to supply the medieval foreigners with nuclear weapons while providing the primitive foreigners with a big bag of rocks and spears.
So it's another normal day in international politics.
Now back to the urgent news about Miley Cyrus' opinions.
Trick or warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Absurdity always makes me laugh, which brings me to the subject of Democrats, which brings me to the subject of the American news and entertainment media, which is the same subject as Democrats, which is the same subject as absurdity.
And by absurdity, what I mean is that Democrats have used their near-monopolistic dominance of the news and entertainment media to create an elaborate fantasy about what is happening in America today.
It's a provable fantasy, which they try to maintain with talking points from Capitol Hill, continually amplified on NBC and CNN and in the New York Times, then made into comedy routines on late-night television, and finally into movies supposedly based on a true story that was a fantasy in the first place.
Trump is a Hitlerian tyrant.
The destruction of the Russian collusion narrative actually proved the case for impeachment.
Americans are systematically oppressed because of their skin color.
American women are living in the handmaid's tale.
Radicalism is justice.
Freedom is radicalism.
Speech is violence.
I mean, really, what the hell?
When Donald Trump gave his first inaugural address and spoke about the economic carnage brought upon the Midwest by globalization, he was assailed for being absurdly negative.
And maybe that was overstated, but at least he was describing something that actually exists.
The Democrats are just riffing on nonsense.
Big Token App Addiction00:02:45
It's not that our country has no problems.
It's not that there's never any bigotry or mistreatment of women.
We're not in paradise.
But really, in the immortal words of Tito the Chihuahua from the Disney non-classic Oliver and Company, if this is torture, chain me to the wall.
The oppressive America the Democrats have made up is total fiction, a fiction that they have talked themselves and their followers into believing.
But you know it's fiction because it can only be maintained by silencing the honest voices that oppose it, deplatforming us and blacklisting us and calling us hateful and shouting us down.
In an empire of lies, no one is allowed to say that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, but I will show you how the whole machine works.
It was all happening yesterday and it's right there and we'll talk about it.
But first, let us talk about Big Token.
This thing is an addictive app.
Big Token is this app that lets you share data about yourself, your interests, your habits, and then you get paid for it.
I've been playing with it.
It's kind of hard to stop.
It's a lot of fun.
Right now, you're already sharing enormous amounts of information with tech companies and they make money off it.
So should you.
This is how Big Token works.
First, you download the app, you sign up for a free Big Token account, and next, you complete actions to earn points, like answering surveys or checking into locations, connecting your social accounts, and more.
Then you can redeem your points for rewards such as cash and gift cards or donate your earnings to charity.
You choose what data you share with Big Token and then you get paid for it.
And you can also get more points by referring friends and family.
Your data is always secure in Big Token.
And based on the data you choose to share, you'll be placed into specific ad groups and brands will buy access to those ad groups for use in personalized advertising.
But at least this time, you get paid.
It's different.
So if you want to start earning money for your data, go to the App Store or Google Play, search for Big Token.
That's B-I-G-T-O-K-E-N.
That's one word.
Download the app and sign up.
Make sure to use my referral code, Clavin.
Again, search Big Token in the App Store or Google Play.
Download the app and use my referral code Clavin to sign up, claim your data, and get paid and learn how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Mailbag tomorrow.
Ah, my God, please stop screaming at me.
Well, go on to dailywire.com, subscribe, because you have to subscribe to be in the mailbag where it's a little comfortable, but you get to ask questions.
Here's what you do: go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Claven podcast.
It's a little mailbag thing.
Press that.
You can ask me anything you want, religion, your personal life, political questions.
All my answers are guaranteed, certified, 100% correct, and will change your life sometimes for the better.
Tito the Chihuahua, my hero.
Mueller Report Revelations00:09:03
Hey, man, if this is torture, chain me to the wall.
Living in America, but I mean, it is just, it's just a nightmare in the imagination of the left.
You know, yesterday I played this clip of an abortion radical saying that having a baby is doing violence to the mother's body.
So we have to commit violence against it.
We have to kill it.
That's why abortion is justifiable.
Obviously, kind of a kook, but kind of a kook.
But it sums up the left's attitude, doesn't it?
That this terrible stuff is happening.
They're so oppressed, so they're justifying oppressing others.
They're justified in shouting you down on campus because your speech is violence.
It's all in their imagination, but it justifies the terrible things they're doing.
You know, we talked about that New York Times piece yesterday about silencing people on YouTube because they're radicalizing people.
And they found a guy who was so radicalized, he actually dated a religious woman.
That's how radicalized he was.
I mean, that was really what it was.
He never bought into the crazy theories about white supremacy, never went into any of that, but he dated an evangelical Christian.
And that was what made them radical.
And that's why we should knock all these people off YouTube and deplatform them.
It's all about the fact that they own the media.
They own the entertainment media and they own the news media.
And then the Democrats send out their talking points.
And those become, A, the news, and then history.
You know, there's a show on Netflix right now called When They See Us about something that I remember.
I was in New York when this happened, the Wilding incident, where a woman was just a Central Park jogger, was beaten and raped almost to the point of death.
Other people were beaten and beaten also.
It was about 30 rioters went through Central Park, and five guys were sent away for it.
And then later on, somebody, this guy in prison, a psychopath, said, no, it was I who did the raping, and they found out his DNA did match up.
And so these guys were theoretically exonerated.
The thing is, they weren't exonerated for all the things that they were charged with.
They were charged with riot and assault and all these things.
And they were not exonerated for that, but they were and they made a big killing off it.
And they reformed their lives, it looks like.
So they're doing this thing when they see us in which Linda Fairstein, who writes a piece about it in the Wall Street Journal today, very well-respected prosecutor, also a fairly good mystery novelist, she wrote a piece saying, look, these guys confessed.
They made a statement.
They have parts in this Netflix show about Linda Fairstein as a bigot, which he never was, as kind of planning how to set these guys up, which he never did, leaving them in their cells, not allowing them to go to the bathroom, which, as she says, if that had really happened in any good pretrial hearing, they would have brought that up in order to get their statements thrown out of court.
But in fact, they said there were confessions, there were bloodstains, there was corroborating testimony, there was dirt on their clothes.
One of them testified, made the statement that he had simulated sex on this poor woman's body, and in fact, they found semen in his underwear, which would like corroborate that.
But they have this powerful fantasy-making machine.
So now, as someone once said, that this is all people will remember.
People will watch this and they will think this is reality, especially the left that just eats this stuff.
They read the New York Times every day, and they think that's the news instead of hate speech about Donald Trump.
So it's all theater with these guys.
Yesterday in the House Judiciary Committee, which is the one run by Jerry Nadler, right, and they had this hearing with a title.
It even has a title, so I guess it makes it easier to turn it into a Netflix movie, Lessons from the Mueller Report.
But they don't have any lessons from the Mueller Report.
Mueller exonerated Trump on charges of Russian collusion, after which anything he may have screamed, fire that man, who will rid me of this turbulent priest, whatever he said, doesn't mean anything, right?
Because he never did anything to stop the investigation.
He cooperated with the investigation.
They gave him millions of documents.
Everybody, Don McGahn, went and testified.
So they got nothing, but they're trying to keep this narrative alive rather than say, oops, never mind, which is what they should say.
So who do they bring to testify?
John Dean.
Now, for those of you who don't remember John Dean, all right, John Dean was the architect of the cover-up in Watergate, right?
Not a hero.
He's not a hero.
He was the architect.
He was the mastermind.
The FBI called him the master manipulator of the cover-up.
To save his keester, he testified, and it was a big deal that Nixon's attorney went and testified, right?
And because of that, he was convicted of only one felony.
He dealt down to one felony.
He was given a sentence of one to four years in prison.
But in the end, he served that time by hanging out with the Democrats, basically, and testifying.
And then that was his time served.
So he was like four months, time served, and he was let go.
So he made a deal.
Since then, he has been making a career out of accusing Republicans of being worse than Nixon.
He wrote a whole book about George W. Bush worse than Nixon.
I don't remember the title, but it was something like that, right?
So they bring him on to testify about this case about which he knows nothing, right?
A complete dog and pony show.
Matt Gates just took him apart.
Let's play that clip.
Here we sit today in this hearing with the ghost of Christmas past because the chairman of the committee has gone to the speaker of the house and sought permission to open an impeachment inquiry.
But she has said no.
And so instead of opening the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, which is what the chairman wants to do and what I presume a majority of Democrats want to do, we're here reopening the impeachment inquiry potentially into Richard Nixon, sort of playing out our own version of that 70s show.
And what I really regret is striking, Mr. Gates.
You are functionally here as a prop because they can't impeach President Trump because 70% of Democrats want something that 60% of Americans don't.
So they're in this no-win situation and you sit before us here with no knowledge of a single fact on the Mueller report on a hearing entitled Lessons from the Mueller Report, Mr. Gates.
Can I answer your question?
It's not your time, Mr. Dean.
It's my time.
So here's the deal, right?
We have a false accusation against the President of the United States that he was an agent of Russia.
My colleagues on the Democratic side made that accusation.
And so where do we go from here?
I mean, that is devastating stuff.
And then Steve Cohen, the Democrat congressman, he says this is why it had to be done.
Let's cut two.
Well, it's not just a show, but for the part of it that it is a show, it's okay.
The American public needs to be shown what was in the Mueller report.
I think it's been said only 2% of the people read it, and I can understand that.
It's not the most, it's not page turner material.
So the American public took what Barr gave them in his three and a half page synopsis, claiming there was no collusion and collusion is not even a legal term and was not in there.
It's like, my dad owns a House committee.
Let's put on a show.
You know, he's saying it's worth doing it because nobody read the Mueller report.
If people had read the Mueller report, they would have said, wow, this president, boy, he really yells a lot and he says dopey things, but he doesn't do that much as bad.
They can see that.
They can see that with their own eyes.
They don't need to read the Mueller report.
He was let off the hook for being a Russian spy, which is what they accused him of, treason.
They said this on CNN again and again.
They said it on NBC.
You know, he committed treason.
He was a Russian asset, as they like to put it.
It didn't happen.
And so they're just running this show with this, as Gates said, it's a prop.
Ring.
Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer.
These are really cool.
I mean, I use them, I have them, but I like to use them from the other side.
When I visit my pal, Jonathan Hay, and I press the button and I say, hey, it's me.
And he can see me on his phone and talk to me and say, oh my God, nobody's home.
There's nobody in here.
It really works well.
You might know about their smart video doorbells and cameras that protect millions of people.
They also have an excellent motion-sensitive floodlight that goes on.
Ring helps you stay connected to your home anywhere in the world.
So if there's a package delivery, a surprise visitor, you'll get an alert and be able to see, hear, and speak to the people there from wherever you are on your phone.
That is thanks to the HD video and two-way audio features on Ring devices.
As a listener, you have a special offer on a Ring starter kit that's available right now with a video doorbell and the motion-activated floodlight cam.
The starter kit has everything you need to start building a ring of security around your home.
Just go to ring.com/slash clavin.
That's ring.com/slash clavin.
Anyone comes to your home, you just press the button, look at them, and say, How do you spell Clavin?
And if they know, do not let them in because they've been listening to the show and you never know what that is going to do to the human mind.
Jim Acosta On Hitler And Impeachment00:07:07
So why is all this allowed?
Why is all this even covered?
Why is all this not just laughed off of television?
It's because Donald Trump is such a threat, a Hitlerian threat to the nation.
Here is Hillary Clinton giving the case.
So when I read a book like Madeline's and you want to just jump up and yell at points like, why didn't more people speak out?
You know, where were the leaders?
Where were the business leaders and the academic leaders and the press leaders?
And for a million different reasons in a lot of these settings, people were either not paying attention or they had the unfortunately foolish idea that a Mussolini or a Hitler could be controlled.
And so the demagoguery, the appeal to the crowd, the very clever use of symbols, the intimidation, verbal and physical intimidation, was overlooked.
And this is a classic pattern.
There is nothing new about it.
It's just different means of messages being delivered.
And I think given the rapidity with which information can be conveyed today because of the internet, it is an even more dangerous set of circumstances.
Now, the absurdity is strong in this one.
You know, he's comparing Trump to Hitler and Mussolini.
She's comparing him to Hitler and saying, well, the appeal to the crowds, the clever use of symbols, the intimidation.
Adolf Hitler came to power, I think it was 1933.
He manipulated the parliamentary system in Germany, got himself in power legally, but with a lot of shenanigans, but legally.
Within a year, within a year, Adolf Hitler had eliminated any other party except the Nazi Party.
There were no more parties in Germany.
He had gotten rid of trade unions.
He had banned Jews from kinds of work and basically made them non-citizens, some of whom couldn't even get food in the towns in which they lived in.
Where is any of that happening, right?
He had the Knight of the Long Knives within at least maybe a little over a year, the Knight of the Long Knives where 1,000 people were arrested and slaughtered because they were not what exactly, the guys who brought Hitler to power, the SA, were not the guys who wanted to consolidate his power, the SS.
So he just wiped them out and wiped out anybody who had opposed them.
Where the hell is that happening?
Donald Trump holds rallies.
Hitler holds rallies.
So Donald Trump is like Hitler.
It would be nonsensical if it weren't for the fact that they are backed up by the press.
And the press loves it because it makes them feel like heroes.
You know, Jim Acosta, Jim, Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta, has a new book out.
I believe it's called Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta, by Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta.
And I think the case he's making is that we should look at him because he's Jim Acosta.
Now, Jim Acosta is a clown.
He sits there and he shouts things at the president.
He tells the president what he thinks is if that's news.
Nothing that Jim Acosta thinks is news, literally nothing that he thinks is news.
But CNN, where Jim Acosta works, has his book, Look at Me, I'm Jim Acosta, and has him on the Brian Stelter Show to talk about the terrible oppression of the press under Adolf Trump.
Do I have any regrets?
You know, I wish at times that the press had been a bit more in solidarity with one another and standing up to this White House and saying, listen, you know, the president can't call us the enemy of the people.
We're not going to go along with that.
And I think we've missed some opportunities here and there to challenge that.
I will say, one of the things that I'm most grateful for during this experience is how just about every news organization in Washington and here in New York stood behind us here at CNN when they took away my press pass.
That was a very important First Amendment case, and I talk about it in the book.
Had the Trump administration won that case, Brian, it would have sent shockwaves through our industry.
It would have put a real chilling effect on the First Amendment in this country.
And people might say, oh, you're just puffing yourself up.
You're high on your own fumes.
No, the Trump administration's own lawyers went into the courtroom and said that the President of the United States can throw out whoever he wants out of the White House.
This is a guy who manhandled a female aide because she was trying to take the mic away from him long after he had had his question.
And they threw him out for rudeness, which I think they would have been able to do had they actually followed the case up and appealed, but they didn't want to make a big fuss out of it.
Nobody wants to take on people who buy their ink by the barrel, as somebody once said.
So this is the oppression.
Now, if they were oppressed, right?
I mean, he does not even making any sense because he's saying we wish we were in solidarity, but they stood behind him when he was thrown out.
They don't want to stand behind him because he's a clown.
Let's just take a look at this oppressed press that cannot speak because they're so afraid of the physical and mental intimidation wrought on them by Donald Trump.
Here they are.
Recently, Nancy Pelosi, basically trying to appease her base in Congress, was quoted as saying, I would like to see Donald Trump in jail.
I'd like to see him in jail.
And that was, she was just showing how tough she was so she doesn't actually have to go through with impeachment, which would probably cost them the 2020 election.
So here, here is cut number five, the press amplifying that.
Do you want to see the president in prison instead of impeaching him?
So what was your reaction when you heard Speaker Pelosi reportedly saying that she wants to see President Trump in prison?
But here's the question.
Would you like to see President Trump in prison?
Do you think President Trump committed crimes that could be prosecuted?
He did.
When Nancy Pelosi says she wants to see the President of the United States imprisoned, is that at all realistic?
You know, I think it could be realistic.
No one is above the law, and that includes President Trump.
If it determines that we lead to impeachment or if he ends up in jail, so be it.
Now, Bob Mueller almost said that he should be in jail.
If you become president in 2020, would you want your Justice Department to pursue charges against President Trump?
Do you want to see President Trump in prison?
Well, let me press you, Congressman.
Do you want to see the President of the United States in jail?
More than anything else, Wolf.
Look, the lizard brain that I have says, I hope bad things happen to this man.
Hey, man, if this is torture, chain me to the wall.
Really?
I mean, if these guys are oppressed, how is it they're calling for the imprisonment of the president?
I mean, how is it they call for impeachment every day?
How is it if they're oppressed that they can just rattle off all these charges against Donald Trump and nothing ever happens?
It is just an amazing.
We're living under racial tyranny on Netflix, but not in real life.
We have Watergate going on in Congress, but not in real life.
We have oppression of the press in the press, but not in real life.
They are using their domination of the media to create a fantasy world of oppression that simply does not exist.
Why We Left Google00:15:45
No one has time to go to the post office, especially if you live here in LA where no one has time to go anywhere because the traffic is just so bad.
I love the post office.
I use it a lot, but I cannot get in my car and drive the half a mile because it's 40 minutes to get there.
So you use stamps.com.
It's one of the most popular time-saving tools for small businesses.
Stamps.com eliminates trips to the post office and saves you money with discounts that you can't even get at the post office.
Stamps.com brings all the amazing services of the U.S. Post Office right to your computer, whether you're a small office sending invoices and online sellers shipping out products or even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day or just a guy who wants to send a letter, stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
Once your mail is ready, just hand it to your mail carrier, drop it in the mailbox box.
It's that simple.
It's a no-brainer, saving you time and money.
Right now, my listeners get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Klavin at stamps.com, enter Klavin, stamp a letter, send it out to find out how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease, no ease in Clavin.
So yesterday I did an interview.
I'm going to stay on and not cut you off if you're watching on Facebook or YouTube.
But come over to DailyWire.com and subscribe so you can be in the mailbag tomorrow.
I have met some of the most famous stars in Hollywood, certainly.
I've met one president.
I've met a lot of famous people.
I never get overawed.
I'm not never really that impressed by who I meet.
Not that some of them aren't great people.
Not that some of them aren't actual heroes.
Yesterday I was overawed.
Yesterday I met a guy who actually overawed me.
When I was learning to fly a plane, I like to learn to do different things.
It helps me in my work and it keeps my mind sharp and all this.
And I got a pilot's license a few years back.
And while I was getting my pilot's license, I got really involved in aviation and the history of aviation.
And I would study these heroes.
And they were heroes like the Wright brothers, these very quirky little brothers who beat out the government in building, inventing the airplane.
There was Charles Lindbergh, who as a politician was not that great a guy, but as an aviator was a genuine, genuine innovator and hero.
John Glenn was one of my favorites.
But there was just nobody that really struck me like the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African-American military pilots who fought in World War II despite the bigotry that tried to prevent them that surrounded them.
And yesterday I got to meet Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart, who was one of them.
I have to tell you, I never get nervous doing interviews with anybody.
I was actually nervous and overawed.
They tried to stop them from doing what they do.
Eleanor Roosevelt famously went out and flew with one of them, and that really made a difference.
Colonel Stewart has a new book out called Soaring to Glory, a Tuskegee Airman's Firsthand Account of World War II.
It's co-authored by Philip Handelman.
It tells his experience flying over Europe while helping to defend freedom, even though he wasn't afforded that same freedom in his own country.
If I ever had sat down and talked to a giant, it was yesterday.
I think you'll really enjoy the interview.
Take a look.
Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart, it's an honor to meet you and an honor to have you here.
I'm so glad you could come on.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Let's start at the beginning.
How did you get into flying in the first place?
Well, I guess it was a desire ever since I was a child.
I was born in Newport, News, Virginia, not too far from Langley Field.
And my parents tell me that while in the crib, I used to watch these planes from Langley Field flying over and used to Google at them.
And at two, the family moved to New York and moved about a mile and a half from the airport there.
It was named North Beach Airport at the time, but in 1939 it changed its name to LaGuardia Airport.
But as a teenager, I used to go out and just watch the planes take off and fantasize about being up in the cockpit and flying a plane myself.
And so did you start flying before the war, before the movie?
Never was in a plane before going into the Cadet Corps, and that was my first plane ride.
So now, how did you find out that there was, did you find out first that there was going to be an Air Corps for black people, or did you just volunteer?
Well, I always felt as though I wanted to be a pilot, and I didn't really know about the restrictions at that time, that the prejudice involved there, that no blacks were flying in the airlines, nor would they accept any at the time I'm talking about before the war.
But as the war clouds started gathering in 1938, 39 and 40, a draft took place.
And any able-bodied citizen, anywhere from 18 to 38, had to register for the draft and were subject to a lottery recall as far as going into the service was concerned.
I knew I would probably be going in at 18 because of the draft there.
And one way to beat going into the service and just being assigned anywhere is to choose a branch of the service and volunteer.
So that's what I did.
I volunteered.
And when I went to volunteer, I found out that they did not at the time accept African Americans for training as air crew members or pilots there.
It was a little while after that in high school that I happened to read someplace that the Air Corps relented and decided that yes, we will go ahead and accept African Americans for training as pilots and air crew members, but it must be on a segregated basis.
Well, what I did, you know, I forgot about the word segregated basis.
I just saw the one that, yes, we will accept them.
I sped right down to the recruiting center and volunteered.
I took the test that they had at the time.
They gave you a mental and physical test, and I was accepted.
And then I was called to service in April of 1943.
Okay.
And so you've never flown before?
Never had flown before.
And it was, you know, quite an experience because I had fantasized about flying.
I'd see the planes flying in the air and I'd imagine myself at the controls and I imagine what the controls would be like.
And as a kid, I used to have one of these what we call pushos, but they're go-karts.
And the pedals on the go-kart, you push the right pedal to go left and you push the left pedal to go right because it was a pivot in the front there.
And the first time I got in the plane and the instructor says, well, you've got the controls there.
He says, try a left turn, you know, and I push my right foot in on the radar to make a left turn.
So I had to get over that negative transfer.
And of course, a view, the perspective from the cockpit was entirely new to me.
They had the section lines, as you're familiar with, and the different identification areas on the ground.
So it was becoming used to that.
But it came to cut fast.
Now, when you actually got into the service, did you encounter prejudice within the service?
There are stories about white commanders who came to the Tuskegee Airmen who were not sympathetic.
Did you encounter that?
I did not encounter that.
This is not to say it didn't occur, but when it occurred was prior to my going into the service there.
Actually, the African Americans who were taking flight training, this occurred in early 1941, and I didn't go in until 1943.
or a lot of that era of transition and accommodation for the African-Americans had already taken place to a certain extent.
So your question to answer it briefly is that no, I did not run into a lot of the...
In fact, I had a great deal of respect for the instructors that I had who were all white at the time there.
I mean, they taught me to fly and they taught me to fly well.
And except for maybe an incident or two or something like that, everything went quite smoothly.
And you went into combat.
You did go into combat.
I did go into combat.
And after the training, I went overseas to Italy and I was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group.
And our job was to escort B-17s or B-24s, Liberators, to their targets in Central Europe there.
And of course, the job being to protect those bombers from interception by foreign enemy aircraft.
And it was our job to ward them off.
And of course, we saw the responsibility there because each one of those bombers, there were 10 crew members, you know, because the pilot co-pilot navigate a bombardier and the gunners there.
And any one of them that was shot down, you're going to potentially lose 10 men there.
So it was a responsibility.
And we recognized that responsibility, and we tried our best to...
I have to ask you this, because I've flown planes.
One of the things that when you fly a plane, you start to think about flying a plane while being shot at.
I mean, flying a plane is hard.
It's hard to fly over.
Of course, when people start shooting at you.
So the first time you got into a plane and you took off, were you overwhelmed or did you think, no, I can do this?
I had the confidence in myself at the time.
You know, what had happened was I guess I had about seven hours in instruction in the PT-19, which was a 75 or 90 horsepower aircraft.
But anyway, the instructor, I knew that it was coming because he said, taxi over by the wind tee and a taxi by the wind tee, and he was sitting in front there and he started unbuckling and I said, this is it, you know.
He stepped back on the wing there, got out to step back on the wing, and he says, well, go out, do what you've been doing with me all the time, and everything will be fine, and just come back to the T here when you land.
And I says, oh boy, this is it.
So I remember breaking ground.
I remember going down the grass strip there and pulling back on the stick and breaking ground.
And then that was that feeling of exhilaration.
I says, it's mine.
I'm doing it, you know, and this is it.
So I came back around and landed, taxied up to the T and he says, take it around again.
So he did this three times.
And that was it.
Yeah, that's great.
So now you're flying a plane, but you're in combat.
How do you control a plane while under attack?
Well, you learn to do these things, you know, and I guess what they call mental and physical coordination, all of them come into play because of your training there.
But I guess, you know, the two things I remember in combat there was the first time I went on a mission, and the second time was when I got into a dogfight with a number of enemy planes.
And I ran into a horde of FW-190s, which was a premium German fighter plane, and it was up in Austria.
And we were on what was known as a fighter sweep at the time there.
And there were seven of us that had voluntarily separated from the rest of the squadron that we were flying with and the bomber formation.
And this horde of German fighters attacked us.
Three of us were shot down.
The first made it back to friendly territory, Yugoslavia, and landed there.
The second pilot, he was shot down and killed instantly.
The third pilot, a fellow by the name of Walter Manning from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his plane was disabled and he had to bail out.
And he bailed out over a town.
It was Linz, Austria.
And when he landed, a mob of the local citizenry picked him up and took him to the local jailhouse and put him in jail.
But two nights later, that same mob broke into the jail and took Walter out, beat him up pretty badly, and then lynched him from a land.
So these things that happened during the war.
And it wasn't, you know, I mentioned it wasn't just unique as far as the African-American pilots were concerned.
This happened to a lot of the white pilots that went down, especially the bomber crews.
And anyway, incidentally to that, just a little over a year ago in April, April 1st, the government of Austria invited me back over because they made a memorial to Walter and they were recanted about the populists murdering Walter at the time there.
So they wanted to give a memorial to him and represent it as the Austrian government.
So I was invited over to that memorial, which was very, very, very moving.
On top of knowing the responsibility of guarding the bombers, you guys were pioneers, racial pioneers in a country still in the throes of segregation, of all kinds of bigotry.
Were you aware, did that weigh on you?
My eye was on the prize.
And as I tried to mention before, as the prize was my getting my wings, becoming a pilot.
This is something before the war I wanted to do.
And I wasn't going to let anything get in the way and certainly not defeat myself and the objective that I had there by caving in to the discrimination that was at hand at the time.
So in keeping my eye on the prize, I just steadily went after the wings there.
I graduated in June of 1944.
I got my second lieutenant's bars and I got my wings here.
And I didn't even know how to drive a car yet.
But I flew a plane before you drove a car.
But in New York, I didn't need, you know, the family didn't need a car, you know, with the transportation system that they have there.
When you came back from the war, one of the things that always shocked me about the Tuskegee Airmen is they were not recognized after the war as much as you would have thought.
I mean, it's shocking to me that your book is only coming out now, Soaring to Glory.
I mean, it's one of the great stories of World War II.
Did you feel that when you came back?
Tuskegee Airmen Recognition00:08:14
Did you want a little bit more credit?
Yeah, I just sort of dismissed it at the time as far as getting credit and the accolades and that type of thing.
And, well, you know, I mean, as I said, I think there's something like a million men that were under arms, you know.
And when you compare yourself to that, I'm sorry, 11 million.
When you compare yourself to that 11 million there, you're not even a drop in the bucket there.
So I really didn't consider what I had done as being, you know, that great.
You know, I did my part as 11 million other guys did who were in the service there.
When I got out of the service there, or when I got back home, it was the same old, same old as far as the social atmosphere was concerned.
And the jobs that were not available to African Americans at the time were still not available to African Americans.
But what I did is I didn't let that stop me from trying to pursue my ambition is to become a airline pilot.
And I did apply to a couple of airlines and I was rejected because of my color.
But happily to say is that within a few years the airlines recanted and they started accepting African Americans as air crew members and pilots until today where every major airline you have,
you have first pilots who are flying with the airlines and also some of the other airlines, not airlines, but carriers like UPS and FedEx that are heavily populated by African Americans there.
I was most gratified just a couple of years ago and I was taking a flight from Detroit.
I forget where I was going.
But in entering the plane, I looked in the cockpit there and the two pilots were in there and they were both African Americans.
And I said, wow, but the thing that really got me is, would you guess that they were both female?
So my last question, because I'm out of time, unfortunately, I could talk to you for a long time.
You've seen so much change.
I mean, you've seen so much become different over your lifetime.
Yes.
When you talk to young people, what is it you want to tell them?
I want to tell them to keep their eye on the prize.
And whatever you do is pursue excellence in doing it there.
And don't let hate or hurt turn you around from what you want to do there.
You know, dismiss that as just an emotion that you can overcome and pursue your dreams.
And if you do have to turn around that dream because it's evaporating or something like that, find yourself a fallback position and get that fallback position early, just in case what you wanted doesn't come true there and do like I had done to a fallback position there.
I decided to go back to school.
I went to New York University, got my degree in mechanical engineering, followed the career path up through the private industry then, and actually I retired as vice president of a Fortune 500 oil and gas pipeline company.
Colonel Stewart, you know, you've not only helped defeat one of the greatest enemies of humankind, you made our country a better place.
It's an honor.
It really is.
Thank you so much.
It's been my pleasure.
Thanks very much.
Already.
That's Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart.
The book is called Soaring to Glory, a Tuskegee Airman's Firsthand Account of World War II.
It's co-authored by Philip Handelman.
You can tell I got, you know, I admit it, I was overawed by the guy.
I mean, he just, you know, I have this theory that change comes.
I'll say this is a final reflection here, that activists don't do anything, that activists ride the tide of change.
Change is made by guys like that, okay?
You know, when I was studying all these different aviation heroes, I watched the HBO movie Tuskegee Airmen.
There are two movies.
One was made by the Lucas people.
It's called something like Red Tails.
Colonel Stewart himself said that that one was a little bit, it was too much Hollywood, but the HBO one was pretty good, I thought.
And John Lithgow is in it as kind of an evil or racist, I should say, senator trying to stop the airmen from being formed.
And I was watching it with my daughter, who was still living at home at the time, and Lithgow makes this racist speech.
And she turned to me and she said, is he insane?
Is this senator, not Lithgaw, is this senator insane?
And I tried to explain to her that when insanity is the narrative, sane people do insane stuff.
I talk about this with George Washington holding slaves.
I think it's true today of the left with abortion.
I think that good people are supporting horrific, horrific, abominable things because the narrative surrounds them and they can't think outside it.
And once that narrative passed, it's easy for activists to get up and open their big mouths and shout and parade and pretend to be heroes.
But meanwhile, a guy like this, he uses the word, I kept my eyes on the prize.
What he means is he did what he wanted to do with this tidal wave of narrative of racist narrative standing against him.
And these guys are giants.
They're giants.
And just to be in the guy's presence, he's old enough.
He's literally old enough to be my father.
And to be in his presence, a guy who just, with his body, not with his mouth, not with his mouth, with his body, walked into that tide of prejudice.
You know, what I was saying about my daughter is people today don't know.
They don't understand what it was.
Even I am too young to really understand the kind of racism that permeated the atmosphere, not just of this country, but really the world.
But it was bad in this country and certainly in the South.
And just to say that like a guy couldn't fly a plane because he was black.
He couldn't fight for his country because he was black.
He couldn't then, even after the war, become a commercial pilot because he was black.
And this guy just pushed that back with his body, not with his mouth.
He just made a change by himself.
God bless him for what he did for all of us.
I'm sure he will.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
So be here, ask your questions.
Got to subscribe at dailywire.com.
Hit the podcast button.
Hit the Andrew Clavin podcast.
Hit the mailbag.
Ask anything you want.
All my answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
How much better than that can he get?
And the subscription is only $100 for the entire year.
Plus, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
And I can't even list all the other things.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This 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 Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, there is this straight pride parade, this heterosexual pride parade that's happening in Boston in a few weeks.
Now, we're told that this event is offensive and stupid, but if it's stupid to have a straight pride parade, then isn't it also stupid to have a gay pride parade?
We'll talk about that.
Also, the LGBT lobby has not stopped going after Jack Phillips at Masterpiece Cake Shop.