Ep. 723 dissects Madonna’s abortion claims clashing with the Pope, exposing identity politics’ divisive tactics—segregated graduations, reparations debates (H.R. 40 vs. Mitch McConnell), and Black writer Coleman Hughes’ rejection of racial payouts. Burgess Owens blames Democrats for slavery’s legacy, while Brad Thor’s Backlash (June 25) pits a captured Navy SEAL against Russia, critiquing GOP failures on fiscal policy and Obama’s Iran deal. Andrew Klavan warns: enforcing pre-liberal values risks collapsing freedom itself, urging resistance to censorship while defending God, family, and constitutionalism—all under fire from both leftist guilt-tripping and right-wing extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
Madonna says Jesus Christ would approve of abortion.
No, not the real Madonna.
Yes, the real Jesus Christ.
And no, I'm not making this up.
The superannuated pop star who named herself after the mother of God says the son of the real mother of God would approve of destroying a real human life in the body of a real human mother and explained she had come to this conclusion after a very long, hard period of having no idea what the hell she's talking about and being an idiot.
Madonna told an interviewer she would like to meet with the Pope to discuss the matter and went on to say she thought the Pope might actually be willing to meet with her to talk about this.
Still, not making this up.
Madonna then imagined out loud what she would say to the Pope during their meeting, which is not as odd as it sounds, since imagining out loud what Madonna would say to the Pope is a popular drinking game among people who've been drinking wood alcohol laced with hallucinogens.
Madonna said she would gently instruct the pontiff by saying to him, quote, and yes, a real quote, let's talk about Jesus' point of view about women.
What do you really think he thought of women?
And don't you think Jesus would agree that a woman has the right to choose what to do with her body, unquote.
In an amazing coincidence, it turns out the Pope had already considered these exact same questions even before Madonna asked them.
I know, right?
What are the odds?
Strangely, though, the Pope concluded that no, Jesus is not in favor of abortion.
In fact, at a recent pro-life gathering, the Pope likened abortion to murder for hire, asking the crowd, quote, is it licit to throw away a life to resolve a problem?
Is it licit to hire a hitman to resolve a problem, unquote?
Madonna responded to the Pope's remarks by saying she hadn't realized there was going to be a test and that the questions would be so hard.
She promised to return with some answers when she was not an idiot.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Breaking Chains00:15:03
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee, ship-shaped, ipsy-topsy, the world is a-biddy-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray, it makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
What really gets me about that Madonna story, which is completely true, is Madonna's idea that the Pope needs Madonna to get him to think about what Jesus would have thought about abortion, as if he hasn't been thinking about that for 2,000 years.
But it does tell you something about the people who preach to us and the level of their intellectual accomplishments and thought.
Anyway, the civil rights movement, at its best, was a movement not to enshrine the divisions imposed on people by racists, but to rebuke the racists by eliminating those divisions.
Martin Luther King, I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
So how is it that today's identity politics is about not eliminating, but continuing and even enshrining those racist divisions?
A national review survey of 173 colleges found that 46% offer segregated orientation programs and 72% host segregated graduation ceremonies.
And shame on them.
That's repulsive.
It's disgusting.
And it's not just racist divisions.
It's any divisions that can be created or discovered among us.
Men and women, whose ability to meld into one, not despite of, but because of their differences, is the source and joy of human life, are now supposed to turn against one another, fighting over whatever can be found to fight over.
Gays and straits are set at odds.
Every truth and norm of human life has to be destroyed to serve transgender people, a vanishingly small minority of humans, many of whom may be suffering from a form of body dysphoria.
And of course, the people who urge these divisions on us don't really care about the groups in questions.
They don't care about blacks and women, gays, transgenders.
We know this because if anyone from those so-called identity groups stands against the left-wing agenda, if any black or woman or gay or transgender supports Republicans or Donald Trump, he or she is excoriated, booed, shouted down, called names, and excluded from the identity feast.
It must be then that the leftism, not the identity stuff, is the whole point, and that the divisions are created in the service of the leftism.
We are segregated into groups and turned against one another, and then the government is supposed to descend deus ex machina and impose equality and justice on us.
Because of course, that's what leftism is.
It's more government, more top-down solutions, less individuality, less community.
Leftism is a form of slavery.
And yes, it's not the slavery of the body we've had in the past, but it's a slavery of the mind.
Here's what you're allowed to say.
Here's what you're allowed to think.
This is what you can believe.
These are the words you're allowed to use, the pronouns you have to use.
These are the sexual practices you must approve of and celebrate.
We're the government we know best.
They tell us this is the road to utopia, but in fact, it's a road that has no end.
It just goes on and on and on with more and more division, more and more hatred between us, more and more governments solving our problems by taking our freedom and telling us what to think and who to be.
Americans have been breaking chains for nearly 250 years.
We broke the chains of southern slavery.
We broke the chains of Jim Crow.
We broke the chains of Nazism.
We broke the chains of Soviet communism.
It's time to break these chains as well, these mental chains of identity politics and political correctness.
So I'm watching this yesterday.
This is a bad idea whose time has come.
Reparations, okay?
This is all part of what I'm talking about.
Tanahisi Coates wrote this article.
I think it was for The Atlantic.
Tanahisi Coates is overrated.
I mean, he has this kind of vague, dramatic way of writing.
He's a very personable guy when he's talking to people, but he doesn't reason, as far as I'm concerned, very well.
But he put forward the idea that yes, yes, yes, what we need is reparations for slavery and for Jim Crow because all that accumulated wealth, all that wealth was kept away from people and it now needs to be paid back because blacks are behind because of Jim Crow and because of slavery.
Never mind that Jews were excluded, never mind the Irish were excluded, the Italians, never mind all that, blacks specifically.
So now, of course, the Democrats, as they drift further and further to the left, have taken this up.
And the House Judiciary Committee, which is Jerry Nadler's crap show, they are having a hearing on a bill about reparations that it would basically create a federal commission to study and report on the impact of slavery and the Jim Crow segregation laws that followed abolition and who gets the money, who would get money to be paid back for this.
It's called H.R. 40.
And it's got a lot of supporters.
It's got more than 60 co-sponsors, sponsors, public endorsement from Pelosi, who has not endorsed a reparations bill before.
Now, before we look at the debate, I just want to start with something from Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell, the most brilliant thinker, I think, the most brilliant political thinker alive at the moment.
And I just want to take a look as he puts this into context.
Because I don't like this stuff where we start to say, well, yes, we had slavery, but, yes, we had slavery but.
However, you do have to put the institution of American slavery into context and hear Thomas Sowell talking to my pal Peter Robinson, the Hoover Institution, does just that.
The sad fact is that slavery has been a universal institution for thousands of years, as far back as you can trace human history.
And what we're looking at is if slavery is something that happened to one race of people in one country, when in fact the spread of it was around the world.
And in 1776, which is when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nation, as well as when the United States got started, he said that Western Europe is the only place in the world where there is no slavery.
And even the Western Europeans had vast numbers of slaves in the Western Hemisphere, but not in Western Europe itself.
And so if you're going to have reparations for slavery, it's going to be the greatest transfer of wealth back and forth and cross-hauling, as they say in the railroads.
Because the number of whites, for example, who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates, exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies before that, put together.
But nobody is going to North Africa to ask for reparations, because nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.
And here we have intellectuals who can imagine a different history from the rest of the world, even though it's so similar to the rest of the world.
He's saying, you know, only intellectuals create these ideas of America as uniquely guilty, uniquely sinful, where in fact America is actually uniquely great.
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So, Mitch McConnell is asked about this reparations thing, and he says no and puts forward the simple reason why it's not a good idea.
I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.
We've, you know, tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation.
We've elected an African-American president.
I think we're always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that.
And I don't think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it.
First of all, it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate.
We've had waves of immigrants as well who've come to the country and experienced dramatic discrimination of one kind or another.
So, no, I don't think reparations are a good idea.
So, Ta-Nehisi Coates now comes before House Judiciary and rips into McConnell, you know, basically saying, implying that McConnell is just as guilty as anybody.
And so he has to, he has to, he has to not be allowed to say these things.
Listen to this.
Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores.
When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all regardless of color.
But America had other principles in mind.
And so for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell.
We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox, but he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney.
He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodward.
He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft.
Majority Leader McConnell cited civil rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them.
He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion.
Victims of that plunder are very much alive today.
I am sure they'd love a word with the Majority Leader.
So the whole problem with this is America didn't do this.
People did it.
People did it.
Whites didn't do it.
People did it.
Individuals did this.
Some governments run by individuals.
And those people are to blame.
And those people are to blame, not the people who didn't do it.
If the only way we can say that white people or even America is to blame is basically by using the same logic that the racists used.
I mean, after all, America did tear itself to pieces.
350,000 Northerners died and almost 700,000 people died fighting over this very, very question.
So who is, you know, who gets the dough?
You know, when you say, when you come and say, show me the money, who gets the dough?
But it's more than that.
It's more than just that.
It's a question of imagination.
And this is the thing that gets me about Todd Nekisi Coates is that he wins every award because he serves the left.
And the left, the people who give awards, the elites, mostly white, who give awards, reward him for doing what he does for leftism.
But if you actually use a little bit of imagination, you see that what he's asking for will only harm us.
I'll talk about that in a second.
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And you say, sure, you say write Klavan, but how?
How can I do that?
How do I spell Klavan?
There are no keys in Klavan, K-L-A-V-A-N.
One day in the future, I'll get tired of that joke, but not today.
So all you have to do is use your imagination.
What would happen if there was this transfer of wealth to black people to say, oh, now you've been paid off.
You've been paid off for slavery.
Just try, try to imagine a world in which now suddenly Democrat politics who have done nothing but acquire power and accumulate power on accusations of racist, racism, suddenly they're going to stop.
The payment has been made.
It's fine.
Just like they stopped when Barack Obama was elected president.
Oh, you will elect a black president.
Obviously, the racism has passed.
That's fine.
We're done.
I mean, come on.
Come on.
Nobody can imagine this.
So there was a writer from Quillette, obviously a left winger, Coleman Hughes, stood up and he pointed this out, that it's not going to solve the problems.
It's simply going to exacerbate them.
And guess what?
That's the point.
This is the first Coleman cut.
Black people don't need another apology.
We need safer neighborhoods and better schools.
We need a less punitive criminal justice system.
We need affordable health care.
And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.
Nearly everyone close to me, nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today.
Divided Nation's Dilemma00:05:49
They told me that even though I've only ever voted for Democrats, I'd be perceived as a Republican and therefore hated by half the country.
Others told me that by distancing myself from Republicans, I would end up angering the other half of the country.
And the sad truth is that they were both right.
That's how suspicious we've become of one another.
That's how divided we are as a nation.
If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today.
So two things about this.
First of all, he's obviously using his imagination.
He has a realistic picture.
When I say his imagination, he's thinking into the future of what would actually happen.
Not in the moment, not how I can assuage my guilt like some kind of drug in the moment.
I can shoot these reparations into my arm and then I won't feel guilty for something that I never did anymore because they're trying to make me feel guilty and that will stop it.
He's saying what would really happen?
What would really happen?
More bitterness, more division.
And as he says, when you have more division, how do you build the coalitions that you need to move forward as one country?
It's that they do not want to let go of this identity politics because it's not about identity.
It's not about equality.
It's not about blacks.
It's about the power of leftism.
It is about giving power to the government.
And you can tell it's not about blacks because they're booing him.
The fact that he doesn't tow the party line, they boo him and they shout him down.
There are people behind, if you can't see, there are people behind burying their face in their hands, you know, because, oh, my gosh, how foolish this young man is.
I think he's a guy who says he's only voted for Democrats.
He might consider the idea of not doing that anymore.
He might consider voting for somebody else who wouldn't exacerbate these divisions.
Plus, he uses his imagination to think about what would happen to him personally.
Play that one.
Take me, for example.
I was born three decades after the end of Jim Crow into a privileged household in the suburbs.
I attend an Ivy League school.
Yet I'm also descended from slaves who worked on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation.
So reparations for slavery would allocate federal resources to me, but not to an American with the wrong ancestry.
Even if that person is living paycheck to paycheck and working multiple jobs to support a family.
You might call that justice.
I call it justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living.
I understand that reparations are about what people are owed, regardless of how well they're doing.
I understand that.
But the people who are owed for slavery are no longer here, and we're not entitled to collect on their debts.
Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims.
So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent.
I mean, that is incredibly smart.
And there's two things to point out there.
One is that when he talks about where resources are needed, and we may disagree on how those resources get there, but when you talk about where resources are needed, race doesn't come into it.
There may be more black people in need of resources than white people, but that's not why.
They're in need of the resources because they're poor.
They're in need of the resources because they're disadvantaged, maybe because of their behaviors, maybe because of other things.
But the fact is they all have the same problems, whether they're hillbillies who have the same kinds of dysfunction in their families and are in need of structure and civilization and religion and the kinds of things that hold communities together, or inner city places where they need all the same thing, religion, family, fathers that hold communities together.
You know, it doesn't matter what their color is.
They need the same thing.
So he's got that point right there.
And, of course, he's being stripped of all the things.
He was born with privileges.
Good for him.
Some people are.
Some people aren't.
He's made use of those privileges.
He's gone to an Ivy League school.
He doesn't need to be treated.
He doesn't need to be condescended to.
He doesn't need to be reduced to what they say black people are.
He doesn't need that, and he doesn't see why anybody else should get it who wasn't suffering from the original crime.
Also involved in what he said is the fact that you can't fix the past, which is the tragic thing that the left never likes to embrace because they just don't want to let it go.
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The Devil Has Changed Teams00:06:33
And, you know, I said before that that writer, Coleman Hughes, he might think about maybe not voting for the Democrats because this is part of this thing that is being sold to us is that this is a problem that the Democrats are going to solve instead of a problem that the Democrats created.
And one of the most powerful moments at this hearing was the NFL player, Burgess Owens, who I think he was on the Jets, and I think he was on the Raiders.
He won a championship on the Raiders.
He was a terrific defensive back.
And he went on and said, hey, you know, it's not the Republicans who created this problem.
I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race.
I do not believe in reparation because what reparation does, it points to a certain race, a certain color, and it points them as evil and points the other race.
My race is one that is not only becomes racist, but also beggars.
I do believe in restitution.
Let's point to the party that was part of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, that has killed over 40% of our black babies, 20 million of them.
State of California, 75% of our black boys cannot pass standard reading and writing tests, a Democratic state.
So, yes, let's play restoration.
Let's play restitution.
How about a Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race, and those, after we learn our history, decide to stay there, they should pay off so they're complicit.
And every white American, Republican or Democrat, that feels guilty because of your white skin, you should need to pony up also.
That way we can get past this reparation and recognize that this country has given us greatness.
This country has given us greatness.
I mean, that's an amazing thing, but this mythology, the mythology is that, you know, the Democrats, yes, the Democrats defended slavery, yes, the Democrats defended Jim Crow, yes, the Democrats instituted the Ku Klux Klan, yes, that was the Democrats.
But then, then there was a magical shift, and that mythology has become so ingrained.
I mean, one of the women actually said this, a commentator, an author named Julian Malveaux, this is cut number five, she actually said this.
People want to talk ugly about Democrats.
People change their ideologies.
So the Democrats were the devil once upon a time.
There were these groups called the Red Shirts, which wore the Klan.
They were Democrats.
However, the Republicans took that over.
They became the devil.
And I'm just saying, forgive me, Brother Chairman, I know you said I'm not supposed to say that.
Forgive me.
But in any case, people do change ideologies.
So all this throwing at Democrats, Democrats and Republicans have been racist, but in Wilmington, North Carolina, Republicans and black people came together to form a fusion government.
And white folks were so frightened that they took all the prominent black men in that town, arrested them.
The next morning, gave them tickets to leave town.
They had to leave their property, their livelihood, their families, everything.
This is why we need reparations.
Some Republicans have become the devil.
Now, this mythology is so ingrained.
It's untrue because even this reparations thing comes out of the same racism, the same sense of racism, the same way of organizing people in your mind that was behind Jim Crow, that was behind the Klan, that was behind even slavery in America, some kinds of slavery in America.
But Joe Biden, who has always got his foot in his mouth, he made a comment.
He was talking about how people used to work together across the aisle.
And he said he could even work.
He could even work with segregationists, people that he didn't like and guys like Jim Eastland and Hermie Talmadge.
He could work with these segregationists.
And he said he said Talmadge was one of the meanest guys I ever knew.
You go down the list of these guys.
He says, Biden says, well, guess what?
At least there was some civility.
We got things done.
We didn't agree on much of anything, but we got things done.
We got it finished.
But today you look at the other side and you're the enemy, not the opposition, the enemy.
We don't talk to each other anymore.
And of course, the left went nuts.
What a terrible thing to say that you could work with segregationists, even saying they were mean, even saying you didn't like them, even saying you disagreed with anything.
But listen to how MSNBC reported the story.
Still to come, Joe Biden references his relationships with two former Republican colleagues at an event in New York City.
The only problem, they were both segregationists.
The only problem is they were both Democrats.
They were both Democrats.
They weren't Republicans.
That myth is so ingrained.
But here's the thing.
The very fact that everybody jumped on him, including, you know, CNN anchorman, John King called it stupid that he said this.
Cory Booker demanded an apology.
And Biden, at least so far, I haven't checked Twitter lately, but Biden so far stood up for him.
Play Biden's response to Cory Booker saying he should apologize.
Are you going to apologize like Cory Booker has called for?
Apologize for what?
Cory Booker has called for it.
He's asking you to apologize.
He knows better.
There's not a racist bone in my body.
I've been involved in civil rights my whole career.
Period.
But this is the point I was making before.
This never ends.
It never ends.
There is never a point when somebody says, ah, it's over.
The past is done.
We're free.
We're equal.
The government has done what it can.
Always some sin and evil in human life.
Always a lot of sin and evil in human life.
Always bigots.
You know, Jews are going to run into bigots.
Blacks are going to run into bigots.
I hear Catholic bigotry, anti-Catholic bigotry all the time.
I hear anti-Protestant bigotry sometimes.
There's always going to be bigots.
There are always going to be people who group people together and hate them on the basis of some group ideology.
It's always going to be.
But they're never going to stop.
So what happens?
They start to eat each other.
They start to eat each other because they have to move further and further along or else the game stops.
If the music stops, all the power chairs are taken away and there's no place for the left to sit anymore because that's what it's about.
It's about leftism and leftism is a form of mental slavery.
We see it in Europe.
It's already come to Europe where people are so afraid to call out Muslims, so afraid to be called racist that they let them rape their children.
Basically, they sit there.
The police sit there and let it go on because they're so afraid of crossing that line.
That's what leftism does to people.
It's mental slavery and it's actual slavery in the sense that the government eventually acquires the power to put you away when you do not toe the line.
Backstage Live: Scott Harvath Series00:02:13
They already want to find you in New York.
I think they can find you in New York if you use the wrong pronoun, essentially deciding how you can describe reality.
You can't describe reality as you see it.
You have to describe it as they see it.
It is mental slavery.
These are new chains, new chains that America has to break as we've broken all the chains in the past.
Backstage Live is coming up.
The Backstage Live show.
You love our backstage shows.
You get to watch the smoking cigars and killing ourselves with liquor.
You can actually watch that in person.
It is a one-night-only event.
It's at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California on August 21st.
Ben Shapiro will be there.
Daily Wire God King.
Jeremy Boring will be there.
I'll be there.
And what's the other guy's name?
Oh, Knowles.
Michael Knowles.
He will also be there.
We'll be talking politics, pop culture, and most importantly, we will be answering questions live from the audience.
We'll have some laughs, some drinks, some insights, some drinks, and even better than that, we'll have a merch booth and some drinks.
Tickets go on sale to the public tomorrow, but today is the last day for Daily Wire subscribers to get pre-sale tickets.
So subscribe now at dailywire.com and get your tickets today and come join us for a fantastic event.
I have an interview with Brad Thor.
I love Brad Thor.
Not only as a writer, he's a terrific writer of thrillers, best-selling, number one New York Times best-selling author of 19 novels, but also just an honest, straightforward guy with a lot of information who has a very specific point of view that he can describe very eloquently.
And I got him to do this in this interview.
His latest book is called Backlash.
The plot just sounds great.
I haven't read it yet, but I will.
It just sounds terrific.
This is part of his Scott Harvath series, and we talk about that, too.
It's out on June 25th, Backlash, by Brad Thor.
Here's my interview with Brad.
Brad, it's good to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
Always my pleasure, Drew.
Glad to be here.
So for the two or three people who haven't read your books, tell us first who your hero is, who Horvath is.
Okay, so my protagonist is named Scott Harvath.
He's a Navy SEAL that gets recruited into a secret part of the government to go and carry out operations that we don't want U.S. fingerprints on.
We'll put it that way.
Kind of an American James Bond.
Russia And Iran Influx00:12:07
Critics have said things like that.
Younger, hip, or cooler James Bond is what they've said.
All right, so what's this?
I have to tell you, I read the back of this book.
I'm going on vacation.
I hope to read it while I'm gone.
This plot, it sounds great.
It sounds like just my kind of thing.
So explain what happens to him this time.
So what happens in this book, he's never been taken captive.
So on page one, I have the Russian government.
This guy has screwed up everything for them on behalf of the president.
They decide, you know what?
We need to pull him off the chessboard.
They run the risk of entering into war with us to do a snatch and grab on U.S. soil.
They grab him.
It's very bloody.
Page one, a lot of action.
They're going to take him to a black site in Russia, interrogate him.
And then the Russian president himself wants to put a bullet in the guy's head.
The plane goes down.
It's his one chance to escape.
And the entire book is about them chasing him inside Russia, him trying to get to the Finnish border, and everything that happens in real life back in the United States if we lose a high-value operative like this.
All of the machinery that goes in motion.
So the research for this was very intricate, but a lot of fun.
That sounds absolutely great.
It really does.
That's a great plot.
Thank you.
So let's talk about this.
You, by writing these, by virtue of writing these, you've become really versed in international, what do we call it, the international situation.
Is that fair to say?
Sure.
International policy and kind of the overlaps of international policy and what happens with the military, all that kind of stuff, the whole global stage, if you will.
Yes.
So you're looking at the world right now.
I mean, I know now we should tell people, I won't call you a never-Trumper, but you've been really hard on Trump, and especially for economic reasons, I think.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
It's the economic reasons why I left the Republican Party and no longer consider myself a Republican anymore.
They told me for years, Brad, help us get the House.
Help us get the Senate.
Once we have a Republican president, we'll balance the budget.
There'll be no more deficits, we're going to start whittling away at the debt, and they didn't do it.
They essentially, regardless of what I think about President Trump, the Republicans had two years to do everything that they promised us they would ever do.
There's no wall, there's no reduction in my health care costs that I pay for my family because I'm self-employed, are through the roof.
Wow.
So the Republicans lied to me on every single issue but judges, and you know what, Republicans?
Up yours.
That's not good enough.
I love the judges.
Thank you for the judges.
But you cannot cut taxes and increase spending.
You guys lie about everything.
You only came through on judges, which is important.
I care about the future of this country and making sure that we hew to Madisonian democracy as closely as possible.
But they lied about everything else.
They sat on their lazy, self-interested asses in D.C.
And Donald Trump, by all accounts, doesn't sleep, Drew.
Why were they not putting legislation, piece of legislation after another, like a conveyor belt going?
Donald Trump would have signed anything they put in front of him, and they didn't.
So they all suck, and they don't deserve my time.
They don't deserve my door knocking.
And they certainly aren't going to get my dollars because they didn't live up to their end of the bargain.
I did everything they asked me for.
Now, I would guess that most of the people who are listening to this are thinking virtually the same thing.
Yes, but.
Everything you just said, absolutely true.
But the other side, they're nuts, right?
I mean, they're socialist crazy people.
Okay.
But is this where we're at now in this country where we can never vote for the other?
I'm not going to cast a vote for the Democrats.
That's just the way I am.
But are we at, is every election now a Flight 93 election?
Because if it is, and I'm not calling for a civil war, but honestly, if that's it, we really should consider just splitting the country in half.
We'll divide the debt, you know, and we'll meet you at the DMZ in 10 years and see whose political philosophy is working out better.
Because I can't do this every single election cycle where it's a Flight 93 election and anything goes.
That, you know, just the petty partisan tribal politics.
I don't want my kids.
I want my kids to see some normalcy.
And I get it.
It was a completely different thing with Trump.
There was no way I was going to vote for Hillary.
I actually voted third party in the last election because I'm the son of a U.S. Marine.
And I believe leadership and quality of character matters.
I didn't buy into the Flight 93.
I voted third party, though.
Easy for me to do in Tennessee.
I'll admit I knew the state was going to go red.
But character counts.
Character matters.
And Donald Trump is seeing that right now with his polling numbers.
We're still a ways out from the election.
It's multiple lifetimes in politics until that election.
But if he just hammers the economy and makes this about socialism versus capitalism, I think Donald Trump will get more votes the second time around than he did the first time.
Wow.
OK.
I really believe that.
So so let's talk about the the international scene.
I was talking earlier this week about Iran and a complex situation.
But they're blaming Trump for pulling out of that Iran deal, which seemed to me to be a con to begin with.
Is Trump doing the right thing?
Well, first of all, I can't judge the president on this one because I don't have access to all the information that he has.
Listen, President Obama screwed up the Iran situation so badly.
You'll remember the Green Revolution that was ongoing.
We could have dropped that.
We could have parachuted in satellite phones with Internet access so that when the Iranians cut off Internet access during that revolution, the young people still could have gotten on social media, all this kind of stuff.
There were so many good things we could have done to tip Iran into getting rid of the mullahs.
And Obama didn't do it because he was too busy writing them love letters during that time.
It was such a wasted opportunity.
The Iranians could have had democracy and Obama stood in the way of it because he wanted the Iran deal.
So that's a big, big problem.
I think anything that curtails Iran's influence in the region and around the world is a good thing.
And I don't think the Iran nuclear deal was taking us in the right direction.
I was not a fan of it from the get go.
So, so, so far, Trump is, you know, saying he doesn't want war, but he does want to stop blowing up ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
I mean, which seems like a good plan.
Will, will anybody stand with him?
Will Europe find the courage to stand with him and make common cause with him?
It's a good, it's a good question.
I don't know because Europe is driven by its own national goals, national policies, each country within Europe.
I'm kind of thinking globally of the, of the EU.
It's going to be hard to see.
We're going to have to apply our pressure not only to Iran, but to our European partners not to do business with Iran.
So, listen, President Trump is, is pursuing a type of foreign policy that has not been pursued before.
And if it does bring results, I know there's been stutter starts with the North Koreans and all this kind of stuff, but the same old stuff has not been working.
So, as much as I disagree with some of the things the president does, he's doing something different that's important because what's the definition of insanity?
It's doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
And sometimes God chooses imperfect vessels for the most difficult tasks that a nation faces.
So, let's see, let's see what happens.
He was democratically elected.
The Russians didn't elect him.
We did as citizens of the United States.
This is what he wants to do.
There you go.
And if it's a problem, then Congress has to deal with it.
And at least right now, there doesn't seem to be much desire to, to, to tweak his foreign policy on the Republican side.
They seem to be good with it.
So, again, they have access to more information than I do, than I do.
And if this is working, or if it does end up working, then, you know what, if we, if the bull gets let loose in the China shop, but it, it punches through that wall that we need to get to the hostages on the other side, then we broke a few plates on the way.
If it works, it works.
That's kind of where I am right now.
All right.
Fair enough.
So, so the, so the new book, I'm trying to be fair, Drew.
I'm trying to be fair.
So the new book, what's the title of the new book again?
Backlash.
Backlash.
June 25th.
Okay.
So, so backlash is about Russia.
It takes place in Russia.
You, you, your description of the Russian president, uh, makes him sound like a stone gangster, which I think we can agree.
That's what he is.
That's what he is.
How, how dangerous is that guy to us in, in real life?
I mean, I, I, I feel like he hasn't got that much money, uh, to run a real, um, expansive invasion campaign, but he looks like he has, you know, uh, territorial ambitions.
How dangerous do you think it is?
So Putin is incredibly dangerous, but I think having Donald Trump in office has curtailed his territorial ambitions.
At least it's put it on hold for right now.
I, I, you know, it, it really, really ticked me off under the Obama administration when the Russians took the Crimean peninsula and Obama did nothing.
A little bit of saber rattling, strongly worded letter.
Uh, and that was it because for, for your viewers, when the Soviet union broke up, a third of their arsenal was in Ukraine.
And we promised the Ukrainians, if you give up those nukes, we promise you that we will protect you.
We will make sure no one takes your territory for you.
Not only us, Russia, Russia signed that treaty as well.
And so when the Russians violated it, they took the Crimean peninsula.
Look at, they went into Georgia under George Bush to W Bush.
So they're not doing these things under Trump.
That's a good thing.
So I'm happy in, in that respect that they haven't done anything else, but they're still in Ukraine.
They're still doing, they still got the little green men and all that kind of stuff.
They're still in Crimea.
This is a, this is a, if we've halted temporarily their ambitions, that's great, but it's not good enough for me.
I want to see them rolled back.
I want to see all of those little green men and all of Putin's influence out of Ukraine.
And I want to see Crimea, the Crimean peninsula returned.
Uh, I don't know if that's on Donald Trump's wishlist and if he's going to push for it, but we owe it to the Ukrainians.
We promised them this would not happen and we should be working night and day to reverse what the Russians have done.
Is there any danger to Putin at all in his own country?
I mean, this is a country where some people are still, uh, miss Stalin.
Is there any chance that the Russian people are going to say we're tired of a gangsterocracy?
I mean, listen, it's a kleptocracy there.
It is meet the old boss, same as the new boss.
We just have nicer suits.
You know, it's, it's, it's, it's Armani's instead of Vladimir's or whoever the, uh, the equivalent of, uh, of the, uh, the suit maker in Soviet Russia was.
So I think they need to be very careful in Russia, but he's, you know, listen, the elections are all fixed there.
He gets elected every time.
I mean, the guy is a gangster.
That's a great way to put it.
And there's some of the Russian people are absolutely fantastic.
They read a lot of books.
They love the ballet.
They love music.
There's some wonderful, wonderful people in that country, but that country is getting raped by a handful of oligarchs that are just taking all the resources for themselves.
Uh, and it's just a bunch of gangster KGB guys running it.
It's, I feel badly.
I feel bad for the Russian people because it's, it is a country I'd love to go visit, but I'm sure as hell not going under this regime there.
Yeah.
All right.
Last question.
Uh, China, do you think that, uh, it's the bigger threat?
Then Russia, or do you think that Russia is still really our, our worst flow?
You know what?
I've had my hand, uh, my share of, uh, physical altercations, uh, over my life.
And sometimes the smallest guy can hit you harder and faster and you don't even see it coming than the biggest guy.
So I don't rank the threats.
I think they're all equal.
I think we need to be watching China.
We need to be watching Russia and we need to be watching the Iranians.
I think the Chinese are a little bit more sophisticated out of all three.
I think the, the greatest danger of unseen threats and ones without fingerprints.
And can we pin it on the Chinese?
I think it's going to come from China.
I think they're the most cunning of the three.
So therefore, if you had to rank them in order of danger, China would be at the top because I think they're the smartest and are willing to invest, uh, whatever it takes to undermine the United States.
Brad Thor, a master, one of the true masters of the modern, uh, international thriller.
Force Pre-Liberal Values00:02:37
The new book, Backlash, it just sounds terrific.
I can't wait to read it.
It's great talking to you, too.
You too, my friend.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Good to see you.
All right.
Final reflections.
And this is it.
The Clavenless week is upon you.
There will be zombies.
Uh, there'll probably be acid rain and possibly, uh, the earth will just open up and swallow a lot of people.
But, uh, those of you who survive can come back in a week.
Uh, my final reflection, this has been a kind of dramatic time for me, uh, finishing, uh, the third, uh, volume of Another Kingdom, the end of the trilogy is essentially writing a thousand page book over the course of three years, uh, coming to an end of that feeling that maybe I've come to the end of, uh, writing novels entirely.
Uh, but, you know, the, the thing that has really been interesting to me is this kind of new debate that has seeped into the right, uh, this debate between people who say we need to, uh, force the public square essentially to readopt the, uh, pre-liberal values that sustain liberalism.
We need to have, uh, righteousness back in the square.
We need to get rid of these, uh, you know, transvestites reading books to children in San Francisco libraries and so on and so forth.
Uh, and the other side, the kind of the liberal side, I would call it a truly liberal side saying, no, we have to use the systems of liberalism to keep liberalism alive.
We have to fight within the confines of liberalism because if you force people to be good, you have lost the freedom that that's the whole point of the enterprise.
What good does it do to reestablish the pre-liberal assumptions on which liberalism stands?
If you destroy liberalism itself in the process, it makes no sense.
You can't force people to be free.
And this is why I, I, it saddens me to see the discussion, the great discussion about the culture, because the culture is the one tool we have to reestablish the ideas, the pre-liberal ideas that support liberalism, to reestablish the idea of God, to reestablish the idea of family, to reestablish the idea of patriotism, uh, when attached to the ideas of the constitution, to reestablish the things that keep freedom alive and without which freedom will fall.
That is the left's point is to destroy that freedom.
We have to reestablish those things in the culture.
We can't do it by force or we destroy the freedom we're trying to preserve.
Uh, we really need to keep that, that cultural conversation alive.
We need to keep it alive in the arts, but we also need to keep it alive in our behaviors, in our unwillingness to fall silent when they de-platform us and ban us, uh, from making money on YouTube when they use their incredible power, the incredible power of their corporations and their media to silence us.
We have to keep talking.
We have to keep saying the things we say, even when they demonize us, even when they falsely call us racist, all those things we have to do.
Never Give In00:00:58
We have to never give in, never, never, never, never, and keep talking.
Uh, I'll be back, I hope, in a week.
Those of you who survive, meet me here.
It'll be July 1st and I will see you then.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling, executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Klavan Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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