Ep. 728 dissects the Jeffrey Epstein case, exposing his 2019 arrest for sex trafficking underage girls after a 2008 plea deal brokered by Alex Acosta—now Trump’s Labor Secretary—while accusing media of burying Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein’s "black book." The host critiques Wikipedia edits removing Clinton’s name and contrasts the #MeToo movement’s selective enforcement, highlighting Epstein’s $576M in donations to Democrats. The episode ties this to broader historical revisionism, from erasing Washington and Jefferson over slavery to forcing Biden into segregationist apologies, framing it as a power struggle over narratives rather than truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Eric Swalwell has left the Democrat presidential race, which means the field has been reduced to everyone except Eric Swalwell, who once declared, I am you, which means that by leaving the race, all of us have left the race and the field is empty.
This means that everyone and no one are running for the Democrat presidential nomination at the same time.
An existential paradox which scientists say could either destroy the universe or reduce the Democrats to a party of toxic America-hating socialists spinning out completely unworkable ideas while viciously accusing one another of thought crimes against their radical dismantling of universal human norms.
In other words, things would remain pretty much the same as they are now, and Swalwell leaving the race will have no effect on anything.
Swalwell said he had decided to step down to do something more useful than running for president, like for instance, digging a big hole in the ground, throwing in all his supporters' money, and then setting it on fire in order to roast marshmallows.
Swalwell said that way, he would at least get some roasted marshmallows out of burning all his supporters' money.
Swalwell says now that he's out of the race, his proposals will no longer take effect, and he will be returning all the guns he confiscated in his imagination.
Gun owners were grateful to have their imaginary guns returned to them and said as a result, they would stop imagining shooting Eric Swalwell and anyone else who imagines taking their guns.
Some gun owners said they had already imagined staging a second American revolution in order to restore the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution and promised that now that Swalwell was stepping down, they would imagine returning the Capitol building to the civil authorities and imagine rebuilding the White House, which they had imagined burning to the ground.
In stepping down, Swalwell thanked his supporters saying, quote, I am you and you are me, so therefore when you support me, no one supports me but me, and that's why I'm stepping down.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
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It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
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That's ring.com slash clavin, and anyone comes to your house.
You say, how do you spell clavin?
And if they know, call the police.
Now, there's an old expression attributed to many different people.
History is written by the victors.
But in America, that's not true.
In America today, history is being rewritten by people who have never been victorious in anything, who have never achieved anything except the power to rewrite history.
Leftists who live in the freedom won for them by men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are seeking to erase men like Washington and Jefferson from our memories and our reverence.
Alleged Underage Exploitation00:16:11
They paint over murals depicting them, demand to remove their statues, stop celebrating their birthdays.
They condemn the human failings of these great men who risked everything to give us the liberty in which we move and have our being.
Why are they doing that?
What's the point?
Surely the ultimate target of the left is freedom itself.
They don't want us to revere the all-two human heroes who shattered the norm of top-down rule and replaced it with the American ideal of individual liberty and localized governance because they want to put you all back in chains.
They want to put you in the chains of a government that gives you everything and so has the power to control your words, your thoughts, and your actions by what it grants and withholds.
This brings me to alleged crap stain Jeffrey Epstein, who has been arrested again for allegedly raping and pimping allegedly underage girls like the alleged scumbag he allegedly is.
As I sit here talking, Epstein's Wikipedia entry is being rewritten to edit out Epstein's good pal and frequent companion Bill Clinton.
Epstein's longtime support of the Democrat Party is being left unmentioned in news stories.
Malfeasance by Democrat prosecutors in Florida is being overlooked and Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is being set up as the sole scapegoat and fall guy for Epstein's unfathomably widespread alleged history of inhuman abuse.
And that's mostly because Acosta provides a tenuous connection between Epstein, and you guessed it, Donald Trump.
Now, I'm not exonerating Trump of anything.
He hung out with Epstein somewhat, and maybe he joined in the satanic fun, I don't know.
But this is a story we should watch carefully, because through this story, we'll be able to determine who among our journalists and politicians cares for the truth and who only cares for power.
Because only the truth tellers should be trusted with our news, with our history, and with our freedom.
And you're already watching these people fall out.
Let's talk about this story a little bit.
I just want to read you from the Wall Street Journal.
Financier Jeffrey Epstein was indicted in New York on federal sex trafficking charges stemming from an alleged scheme to exploit underage girls, another chapter in a lurid legal drama that has surrounded the politically connected money manager for years.
So he was brought into court yesterday.
He was wearing his prison, his jail outfit.
He said he looked disheveled but calm.
This was after he was arrested Saturday at Teterboro Airport, which is in Jersey.
He was coming back from Paris on his private jet.
So he's really been, his lifestyle has really been disturbed by all this.
They are charging that he drew, the latest charges are that he drew underage girls to his townhouse in New York and to his place in, I believe, Palm Springs, Florida, and it would have them give him massages and the massages, of course, turned sexual.
And then, well, let me put on Jeff Berman, the U.S. attorney in New York, talking about what else Epstein did.
Epstein also paid certain victims to recruit additional girls to be similarly abused.
This allowed Epstein to create an ever-expanding web of new victims.
This conduct, as alleged, went on for years, and it involved dozens of young girls, some as young as 14 years old at the time that they were allegedly abused.
As alleged, Epstein was well aware that many of his victims were minors.
And not surprisingly, many of the underage girls that Epstein allegedly victimized were particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
The alleged behavior shocks the conscience.
And while the charge conduct is from a number of years ago, it is still profoundly important to the many alleged victims, now young women.
They deserve their day in court, and we are proud to be standing up for them by bringing this indictment.
Now, you know, it always gets me about these guys.
The guy's virtually a billionaire.
I mean, it has hundreds of millions of dollars.
Given the way the world is, I'm sure he could have hot and cold running 18-year-olds all he wanted.
Why these guys cannot keep their hands off children, I do not know.
I believe the town that I'm sitting in now, the town of Los Angeles, I believe that people, young people of both sexes are being continually abused right beneath the level of our eyes, and that nobody's covering the story.
Again and again, these child actors come out and say they've been abused and that it makes it into the trades a little bit and into the LA Times and then it disappears because all these people are dependent on these powerful people to give them ads.
But I just think that this abuse of children, the powerful, powerful people's abuse of children, and many of the people helping Epstein were women.
So it's not just men.
It is just this absolute use of the abuse of the least powerful people.
It is sadistic in the literal meaning of that word, meaning the Marquis Desaud would have very much approved of this.
This is what he thought a world without God should look like, that powerful people sexually taking pleasure off the weakest people and the most vulnerable people.
And that's the story.
And what makes this such a big story is the connectedness of this guy.
He had black books that had more than a thousand names with close friends like Les Warner, Lex Wexner, I'm sorry, who was the founder of Victoria's Secret, a big businessman.
There was Prince Andrew from the UK.
Members of the Trump family made appearances in there, and there was even an entry for the main number to the White House.
We know that Bill Clinton was on his plane that was called disgustingly the Lolita Express, Lolita being, of course, the famous novel by Vladimir Nabokov, a great novel about a man who is in love with a child, essentially, or sexually attracted to a child.
The names also in his black book included well-known performers, including Rafe Fiennes, Alec Baldwin, David Blaine, Jimmy Buffett, and Courtney Love, media figures including Charlie Rose, Mike Wallace, and Barbara Walters, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, industrialist David Koch, and the late Solomon Brothers, Chief Executive Officer John Gutenfreund and his wife Susan.
Now, that's not saying they had all, now, please, this is not saying that those people had done anything wrong.
It's just that that's how connected he was.
We don't know all the people who traveled with him.
Here is one of the very good investigative journalists who've been covering this case and keeping it alive, despite the fact that prosecutors dropped it more than a decade ago.
And we'll get back to that.
That's an important part of the story.
But here's Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown talking about the fact that a lot of people are nervous with this indictment.
Well, I felt a lot of pressure.
Needless to say, these are very powerful people, and I think that they're sweating a little bit, especially today.
We don't know how much, how deep this went, how far reaching it went in government, but there's been a lot of people that, you know, I could see their names on these message pads on a regular basis as part of the evidence.
You know, these message pads where they would call Epstein and leave messages such as, I'm at this hotel.
You know, why do you do that?
Except that you're expecting him perhaps to send a girl to visit you at your hotel.
So there are still probably quite a few important people, powerful people who are sweating it out right now.
We'll have to wait and see whether Epstein's going to name names or what kind of information he's going to try to trade to, you know, maybe get out of this in some way or lower his culpability.
I mean, this is, as far as I'm concerned, the story.
The story is who was participating in this.
What she's saying there is that, you know, you come to town and you just get on the horn to old Jeff and tell him that you're in a hotel and some 13-year-old girl is sent over like some plate of food or something like this.
You know, so who is doing that?
I mean, how wide a range?
How powerful are these people?
How high up do they go?
We do know that Trump at one point made some kind of remark about him being a great guy who loves beautiful women as much as he does, and some of these women are young.
But he also is said in court documents to have banned him from Mar-a-Lago, his resort, because Epstein assaulted an underage girl.
I mean, I'm laughing in the sense of shaking my head here that this is who this guy was, that this guy was so powerful and operated basically with impunity with so long.
But the stories that go on, the reason I just think it's a big story, it's not a, you know, it's obviously an interesting story that some rich guy did this, but what makes it such a big story is all the people who were connected.
This lady, Vicki Ward, who was a writer for Vanity Fair and is now a New York Times investigative reporter, she said she worked and worked and worked on the story, and Grayden Carter, big friend of Bill Clinton's, took out, edited out the story about young girls.
She was doing a kind of profile of Epstein.
Where did his money come from?
It's kind of mysterious.
He came along so fast.
By the time he was 40, he had just made this incredible fortune off hedge funds.
And he was kind of out in front of the hedge fund movement, I guess.
And Graydon Carter edited out the young women from the story, the underage women from the story.
Vicki Ward says she burst into tears when he did it, and she said, why are you doing it?
And Graydon Carter said, he's sensitive about the young girls, but we still get to tell the story and basically, you know, decapitated the tale.
I mean, just basically covered up for this guy in Vanity Fair magazine that has been dedicated to basically covering up for Clinton and promoting all things Democrat for all this time.
And if that's how far they're going, you know, I'm sorry, you have a right to support Democrats.
Of course you do.
You have a right to support Republicans.
But no, you do not have a right to sacrifice these young girls, these vulnerable young girls, on the altar of your desire for power.
I mean, that is stepping over the line.
And again, I'm not exonerating Donald Trump.
I don't know what he did.
He's said to have gone on one of the flights.
But Bill Clinton was on these flights something like 26, 27 times, all right?
And Clinton releases a statement.
his people released a statement, President Clinton knows nothing about the, you got to love the guy.
He never changes, right?
I did not have sex with those 550 underage women.
President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.
The statement from the Clinton spokesman says, in 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein's airplane, one to Europe, one to Asia, and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation, an already dodgy group.
Now, a investigative reporter for the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking, Conchita Sarnoff, says almost every time that Clinton's name is on the pilot logs, there are underage girls there, and there are initials and there are names of many, many girls on that private plane.
Joe Lockhart, Clinton's former press secretary, was on CNN and they asked him about Clinton and you will hear what he does.
immediately makes a very mealy-mouthed excuse and then diverts to Donald Trump, which is the strategy that I'm getting to.
On the Clinton matter, you know, I stay in touch with the foundation.
And I know, you know, to clear up the, you know, the trips versus the flights, I think the number was 26 or 27.
Each of these trips, and I've been on many of these trips where you go to Asia, you go to Africa, and each flight is counted.
So each trip will be six or seven different flights.
I know most of the Clinton circle.
Jeffrey Epstein's not part of it.
I've never met the guy.
I've met most of the president's friends.
But all of this should come out.
You know, the New York DA, Cy Vance, he should answer questions about why he wasn't registered as what they call a level three sexual offender.
The really striking thing for me, though, with this administration is there's no discussion at all about the underlying behavior.
No one questions Alex Acosta's judgment in letting this guy go through.
It's all about, well, will this look bad on the president?
So Alex Acosta, Alex Acosta was the federal prosecutor, the U.S. attorney in Florida who arranged a very light deal for Epstein over a decade ago and is now labor secretary.
And so this is the strategy here is to deflect everything onto Acosta so that they can link it to Trump.
And I'm going to get back to him in a minute, but here's the thing.
This guy, Epstein, was a big Dem donor, right?
This is from the website Open Secrets.
From 1989 up until 2003, Epstein donated more than $139,000 to Democratic federal candidates and committees and over 18,000 to Republican candidates and groups, according to data from Open Secrets.
Notable recipients include former President Bill Clinton, former Senator Bob Packwood, a Republican, and in 2003, a couple of years before a full-scale investigation into the allegations of sexual exploitation of underage girls, his political giving abruptly stopped.
From 1999 to 2003, Epstein donated $77,000 to Democrats John Kerry, Richard Gephardt, Chris Dodd, and other high-profile politicians and committees.
Dodd received $1,000 contribution for Epstein during his reelection campaign in 2003.
However, the contribution was returned in 2006.
After a hiatus in political giving during the investigations into his sexual abuse, Epstein gave to Independent Connecticut House candidate Gwendolyn Beck and U.S. Virgin Islands Democratic delegate Stacey Plaskett, both in 2016 and most recently in the midterms.
Most recently, Epstein contributed $10,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
This is in 2018.
It was swiftly returned by the committee four days later.
Christine Pelosi, of course, Nancy Pelosi's daughter, but also a Democrat strategist, she tweeted out, this is the one honest thing anybody has said, as far as I'm concerned.
This is the one honest remark.
This Epstein case is horrific, and the young women deserve justice.
It is quite likely that some of our faves are implicated, like our favorites are implicated, but we must follow the facts and let the chips fall where they may, whether on Republicans or Democrats.
Okay, now that's an honest statement.
I'm praise to her for saying it.
Good on her for saying it.
But listen to the way the New York Times led with this, all right?
They found in when they raided this time, when they raided Epstein's house, they found all these photographs of girls, naked girls, some of whom the prosecutors say are underage.
And so, I mean, a good indication that Epstein hasn't changed his ways, that he's not a reformed character.
You know, they're arguing, this was a bail hearing yesterday.
They're arguing that he shouldn't be given bail because the guy owns two private jets.
He has houses all around the world.
He's a flight risk.
He can disappear just like Roman Polanski disappeared and has never been brought to justice.
And they're saying Epstein could do the same thing.
And he was, and obviously, hasn't reformed.
So here's the New York Times lead, all right?
This is the first two paragraphs.
A trove of lewd photographs of girls discovered in a safe inside the financier Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan mansion the same day he was arrested is deepening questions about why federal prosecutors in Miami had cut a deal that shielded him from federal prosecution in 2008.
Palm Beach Indictment00:04:13
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Mr. Epstein on Monday with sex trafficking, dealing an implicit rebuke to that plea agreement, which was overseen by Alexander Acosta, then the United States attorney in Miami and now President Trump's labor secretary.
So Bill Clinton, I don't think, appears in this story.
What at all?
Yesterday, Clinton was down around the 11th paragraph.
I lost count.
He was down so low.
The whole thing is to lay this on Acosta.
So what happened with Acosta?
Acosta, they had they, the local Democrat authorities, and I believe it was Palm Springs brought a case against Epstein and then dropped it in the federal people's laps.
Now the secret deal that they arranged gave Epstein something like 18 months in prison, of which he served in jail, of which he served 13 months, and during that time he was allowed out.
He was allowed to go to work.
So it wasn't exactly what you would call the worst you know, the worst case ever.
It wasn't a terrible thing.
He suffered.
He himself compared it to being in he was.
He was not called a sex, it was.
He said that the the way he was charged was the difference between being called a murderer and being accused of stealing a bagel.
In other words, he pleaded down to almost nothing.
Okay, now Tim Kaine, when Acosta was up for confirmation as labor secretary, asked him about it and did a good job questioning about it.
I'm gonna play a fairly long clip in which Acosta explains from his point of view what happened.
This matter was originally a state case.
It was presented by the state attorney to the grand jury in Palm Beach County.
The grand jury in Palm Beach County recommended a single count of solicitation not involving minors, I believe and that would have resulted in zero jail time, zero registration as a sexual offender and zero restitution for the victims in this case.
The matter was then presented to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
It is highly unusual and, as I was speaking to some of your colleagues that have been involved in in prosecutions, they they mentioned that they don't know of any cases personally where a U.S. Attorney becomes involved in a matter after it has already gone to a grand jury at the state Level.
In this case, we deemed it necessary to become involved.
And we early on had discussions within the office and we decided that a sentence or how should I put this, that Mr. Epstein should plead guilty to two years, register as a sex offender, and concede liability so that victims could get restitution.
Okay, so what he's saying, I know that's a long cut, but what he's saying, it's Palm Beach in Florida, obviously, not Palm Springs, I keep saying it, but it's Palm Beach.
What he's saying is the Democrats, the Democrats who ran Palm Beach, went into a grand jury and came out with bupkis.
So we don't know, obviously, what happens in a grand jury.
That's secret, but they came out with nothing.
And it didn't involve a young person as far as he could remember.
It was a one-count indictment, which he said would not have allowed the victims to get restitution.
So they dumped what the police call a bag of crap onto this guy, onto the federal prosecutors, which, as he said, is not the way it's usually done.
It's not done that the local prosecutors take it, and then they dump it on the federal prosecutors.
And obviously what Acosta is saying there is this was the best he could get out of the garbage case they gave to him.
So I'm not saying, look, again, I'm not defending anybody.
I'm not defending anybody.
I'm simply saying that when you put Acosta at the center of this and now the latest headline on the Wall Street Journal online is that Democrats are calling for Acosta to resign.
In other words, all of this is going to be an attempt to get at Donald Trump again.
Manipulating History and Power00:15:03
Well, we know how these work out because we know that the Democrats, I mean, when the Me Too movement started, they thought, oh boy, we've got Donald Trump now and who's gone down instead?
I mean, it's been almost all Democrats, from Harvey Weinstein to the guys in the press, Charlie Rose, all those people in the press who got caught, you know, Matt Lauer, these were all pro-Democrat reporters.
They all got caught.
Al Franken, I mean, you know, look, men are men and they do bad things to women when they can, when they can get away with it, when they have power and no conscience.
We know they do these things.
It doesn't matter which side they're on.
However, however, it is interesting that the Me Too movement has swept so many powerful Democrats away and that it is being stalled in places like, for instance, Virginia, where they don't want to lose Democrat politicians.
Suddenly, the MeToo movement goes away.
And so this is going to be an interesting case because, you know, if you click on, here's an article from Red State.
If you click on Wikipedia, he says, upon clicking on Epstein's bio on Wikipedia, you'll be treated to various facts about his life, such as the fact that he was good friends with Clinton, as well as disgraced actor and sexual assaulter Kevin Spacey.
In fact, it details that Clinton had been on Epstein's private plane 26 times.
Or at least that's what you would have seen if you had pulled up Epstein's page at around 8.30 this morning.
According to some eagle-eyed Twitter users, the page was edited sometime between then and 10.30 this morning with the connections to Clinton and Spacey now completely gone.
Twitter user Desiree Mills posted the screenshots to Twitter, as you can see.
It seems Wikipedia, this is the tweet, seems Wikipedia has altered Epstein's bio already.
First screenshot of Epstein's bio was at 8.27 a.m.
The second was at 10.30 a.m. admitting Bill Clinton and Spacey yet leaving Trump.
That is frightening.
Same exact bio of Epstein, only different.
The Red State article goes on, it is unclear who is editing the page, but it should be noted that anyone can edit the page with the right login.
Some pages on Wikipedia are locked and unable to be altered by the public, sometimes for this very reason.
However, if the page suddenly does become locked with the information subtracted from Epstein's page, we'll know that it wasn't just randoms on the internet looking to separate Democrats from something Democrats have recently been known to do, and that's involve children in sex.
And I mean, this is something, you know, I've been hitting social media for this.
Twitter, yesterday, I posted a joke on Twitter because I believe it was Vox ran this absurd story about what a nightmare it would be if we went to war with Iran.
Now, I don't want war with Iran.
I think so far Donald Trump has done a really good job of avoiding war with Iran as Iran tries to hold us hostage in order to get back the deal that allowed, the Obama deal that allowed them to fund so much terrorism while secretly developing nuclear weapons.
That's what they want to get back.
And Trump has been rattling his saber and fighting back against that.
I don't want war with Iran.
But this article was so dumb about what a long, drawn-out war, a war with Iran would be that I posted, or maybe we just wipe them off the face of the earth in 15 minutes and the world would be a better place.
And so I was accused of genocide.
I got a note from Twitter this morning saying, we received a complaint about you, but we found that you didn't violate any rules.
Well, Twitter, bite me.
You know, I'm going to make jokes.
You want to throw me off Twitter?
You'll save part of my life as far as I'm concerned.
But this idea of manipulating history as it's happening goes very, very deep because they're not just manipulating the history of the moment.
They're manipulating our actual history.
I want to show you something that is so deeply complex and ironic that it could really come out of a novel.
All right.
We're talking about the editing of history, and we're talking about the fact that if you don't care about truth, it is likely all you care about is power.
All right.
And so we all know that Donald Trump is alleged to have said that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville, nightmare of Charlottesville violence in which Nazis and white supremacists battled fascists called Antifa.
So as far as I'm concerned, it was a bunch of dirtbags fighting each other, but it was one of the people who was against the fascists who was ultimately killed, the woman who was ultimately run down by some nutbag in a car.
Obviously, an ugly, ugly story.
But underneath that story was a local story that had been commandeered by these creeps, okay?
It was a local story about renaming a park and taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee.
And when Donald Trump said there were good people on both sides, we know for a fact that he was referring to people on both sides of the statue question, okay?
Now, here's a clip of that press conference when he said that, when he started talking about taking down the statues of the statue of Robert E. Lee and why he didn't agree with it, why he thought it was a dangerous precedent.
Was George Washington a slave owner?
So will George Washington now lose his status?
Are we going to take down, excuse me, are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington?
How about Thomas Jefferson?
What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?
You like him?
Okay, good.
Are we going to take down the statue?
Because he was a major slave owner.
Now we're going to take down his statue.
So you know what?
It's fine.
You're changing history.
You're changing culture.
And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.
But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?
And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
This is a moment of novelistic complexity, right?
Because that quote, that quote was rewritten to mean that Trump was a friend of white supremacists.
They're still using it.
Joe Biden used it when he started his ridiculous campaign to lose the presidency.
He used that quote saying this is a guy who says there are good people in the fascist movement, in the white supremacist movement, which he clearly is clearing up right there.
But at the same time, he is talking about.
So that moment was rewritten by the press while he was talking about the effort to rewrite history.
And when he said that about comparing Lee and saying, what about Washington?
What about Jefferson?
The New York Times, the Rolling Stones, I was joking about this in the open yesterday, Time magazine, they all just jumped on him.
And the headline in the New York Times was, historians question Trump's comments on Confederate monuments because the New York Times hasn't got the guts to come out and say it themselves.
They attribute it.
They get themselves some liberal historians and they attribute it to them.
I'll get back to this in a minute.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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I forgot to mention that.
I've got to mention that, I've got to remember to mention the mailbag.
Ah, right, that's what, see, that's why I don't do it.
That's why I don't mention it because I just can't stand the screaming anymore.
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We'll get back to this conversation in just a minute.
So Trump gets up and says there are good people on both sides of the question of the statues.
That's rewritten.
Then he says, what are you going to do?
You take down Robert E. Lee.
Are you going to take down Washington and Jefferson?
And that's attacked, right?
That is assaulted.
Then Charlottesville, the same town where the violence happens, declares that they're no longer celebrating Thomas Jefferson's birthday because evil Thomas Jefferson, who invented freedom, basically, owned slaves and was part of a, you know, when you're in a corrupt system, just like with abortion today, you're not a criminal, you're a victim.
This is why I'm always uncomfortable with saying abortion is murder, because many of the women who are having abortions are good people caught in a corrupt system.
They get caught in this narrative, you get caught submerged in this idea that this is somehow all right to kill these babies or this is somehow all right to own these people and you become a victim of that corrupt system.
That's why, you know, when Mandela took back South Africa, he didn't say, let's kill all the white people because he understood this was a corrupt system.
Apartheid was a corrupt system.
And many of the people who did things that they might come to regret or they might have seen differently were victims of that system.
Okay, so Thomas Jefferson, a victim of that system, as he even knew at the time, he was very angry about the fact that slavery was in place when he was born.
So here is Donald Trump talking about this.
They say, oh, it's ridiculous that he would compare Lee to Jefferson.
Then they move on to attacking Jefferson and attacking Washington, taking down murals with Washington in them because they include slaves.
What is the point?
I mean, it's so Orwellian.
I mean, this is 1984.
This is the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union, it was like a joke in the Soviet Union that people, as Stalin was killing people, they had to rename the streets.
They had to paint over the signs.
They had to edit people out of pictures.
That's what we're doing here because the left, these are the same people.
The left are always the same people.
It's a complex.
Being a leftist is a complex.
It's not something that you're different because you're a Soviet leftist and you're different because you're an American leftist.
It's all leftism.
So they're rewriting history.
And what is the point?
And obviously, it's the same point as editing Clinton out of the Epstein story.
It is the point of conserving power.
You know, so many times in life, you know, there's only a few choices.
And by pretending there are choices that aren't there, you allow yourself to do evil.
So what the left is essentially pretending is there's some world in which by editing out these people, we're all going to become better people.
And we're all going to be, it's all going to be wonderful.
Everybody's going to lose their moral failings.
Human beings will be perfected.
Society will be perfected.
But of course, that's not a choice.
There's a choice between truth and power.
You can choose to live on the side of truth or you can choose only power.
Those are the choices.
And the left obviously chooses power because if they decide one day that Washington is a bad guy, if it's one day Lee is a bad guy and if you stand up for Lee, you're supporting the Confederacy and supporting slavery, then the next day it's Washington.
Oh, and you got caught supporting Washington.
This is happening.
You know, it's so ironic.
The complexity of this dishonesty is so ironic and deep that, like I said, it's novelistic.
Joe Biden comes out, makes his speech starting his campaign, and uses that quote of Donald Trump, which is a lie, to tag Donald Trump as a white supremacist, which is also a lie.
I mean, you know, Trump may be many things, but he is not a white supremacist.
Then Biden gets tagged in exactly the same way by Kamala Harris, who tags him for supporting, for not supporting busing, which was a terrible thing, which blacks and whites hated.
And she herself now says, well, there shouldn't be mandated busing.
And now, this is the point.
It's all about the power.
Biden has to apologize.
So here's Biden with his, now he's got to apologize for having consorted with segregationists in fighting busing.
Here he is.
I chose to work within the system to make it better, to get things done for the least among us.
Was I wrong to do that?
I don't think so.
I do believe we have work to do, even with those who we find repugnant, to make our system of government to work for all of us.
I believed then, and I believe now, and I know it can be done without compromising on your principles.
Was I wrong a few weeks ago to somehow give the impression to people that I was praising those men who I successfully opposed time and again?
Yes, I was.
I regret it.
And I'm sorry for any of the pain or misconception they may have caused anybody.
That's a plug.
You know, all they do is apologize because the goalposts keep moving.
You're always going to get, because it's about power and not truth, because it's about power and not truth, you're always going to be apologizing.
And is the apology going to be accepted?
Guess.
Guess.
Let's just listen to Spartacus, Corey, Spartacus, Booker, in the least gracious acceptance of an apology in the history of accepting apologies.
We need to extend grace to each other, and I'm never going to not accept somebody I respect and admire that finally has come to terms with this and has apologized.
I was very hurt by what he said and then even more hurt that he tried to, I almost felt attacked that he was saying that I should be apologizing for him when he clearly, as he says now, was the one that did something wrong.
But this, this, we need leaders that are going to be models of forgiveness and be models of grace and help to heal.
And he took a step towards healing today.
And I, as somebody who was directly targeted by him and saying I needed to be apologized, want to extend to him grace as well.
And forgiveness for what he said about me, forgiveness for that as well.
He can't apologize.
He can't get the apology in between the attacks.
He's got to weave the apology in with the attacks.
They never accept your apology.
They never accept your apology because how can they?
It's not about the truth.
It's not about your apology.
It is about rewriting history for your power in order to achieve power.
It is happening in the moment while we're sitting here.
It's happening on Wikipedia.
It's happening in the New York Times with the Jeffrey Epstein case.
And it's happened.
I mean, poor Joe Biden, I mean, it's hilarious.
He himself, because he's such a dunderhead, he's such a blockhead that he himself is a victim of the rewriting history in his own mind.
This is one of the hilarious gaffes.
Every time Biden opens his mouth, he makes another gaffe.
But this is him talking about the evil of Donald Trump being elected by the Russians, because we now know that Russians came over in their millions and went into Pennsylvania and voted for Donald Trump, or maybe they took out some ads on Facebook.
St. Paul's Obligation00:10:35
I can't remember what it is.
But he talks about this Russian interference.
Listen to what he says.
Look at what's happening with Putin.
While Putin is trying to undo our elections, he is undoing elections in Europe.
Look what's happened in Hungary.
Look what's happened in Poland.
Look what's happened in Mogula.
Look what's happening.
You think that would have happened on my watch or Barack's watch?
You can't answer that, but I promise you it wouldn't have.
And it didn't.
But it did.
It did.
All the things that they did, it didn't happen under Trump's watch.
All the things that Putin did in the election, in our election, happened under Obama's watch.
He knew it was happening.
He did nothing about it except, except bug an opposition president campaign.
So I guess what I'm saying here is this Epstein case, you know, these sex cases are interesting because you get dazzled by the sexuality of it.
You get dazzled by the wealth of it and the corruption of it and the evil of it.
And we all get off on saying how evil the guy is because it makes us feel better about ourselves, whatever crazy thing we're doing.
But underneath that, underneath that is an obligation to tell the truth.
Now, it may come out in this that Donald Trump or somebody associated with Donald Trump was involved in this.
It wouldn't surprise me.
It wouldn't surprise me.
We're going to have to tell the truth about that and we're going to have to bite the consequences of that.
But in the meantime, in the meantime, this case should not be rewritten to say that Alex Acosta is somehow the only villain of the piece or even a villain in the piece.
The guy seems to have been caught with a bag sent to him by Democrat local prosecutors.
I think that what we should do is find out who was using these pimping services that this guy was providing because clearly, clearly, that's what was going on, or at least that was what allegedly was going on with this alleged crap saying, who is maybe just an alleged scumbag instead of the alleged scumbag he allegedly seems to be.
It's a really important story to watch.
All right, I want to end with a final reflection about just something that happened to me yesterday that really has kind of rattled around in my head a little bit.
I've agreed next week I'm going to talk to a group of high school kids.
It's a kind of a conference that run by a guy named Doug Wilson at New St. Andrews College.
And I was asked, would I give a speech, a talk about my conversion to Christianity, and would I give a talk about what I feel is the obligation of being in Hollywood, of Christians working in Hollywood, and how that should be done.
These are things I think about a lot and things that I'm a little, my attitude is a little different about.
And then I was going to be on a panel.
So this magazine or outlet called Pen and Pulpit put up this thing saying Doug Wilson hosting pro-gay marriage speaker at his conference for high school kids, which made me laugh because it made me sound like some kind of gay activist whom, and you know I hate the gay activists, even as I stand up for gay people and believe they should have rights and acceptance as in our society, but also in our Christian world.
And they wrote this thing, we are unhappy to report that Doug Wilson of New St. Andrews College will be including the strongly pro-gay speaker, Andrew Clavin, within the lineup for their upcoming high school conference, a respected crime and suspense novelist.
Clavin is also known as the host of the Andrew Clavin Show podcast on the Daily Wire.
Now, to the credit of Doug Wilson, they wrote to me and they said, we disagree with you, but we really dislike this virtue signaling cancellation of speakers.
So would you come and be on a panel where we'll discuss it with you?
And I said, of course I would.
And I really appreciated them getting in touch with me in that way.
And I then got contacted yesterday by the Christian News Network.
And they asked, can we interview you?
And I thought, well, here it comes, but I'm not going to hide away from it.
But they got on the phone with me and for 45 minutes, which I thought was, I don't want to hit them because they were very polite.
They were aggressive, but they were very polite and they were not dishonest.
I haven't seen the piece.
I haven't heard what they've said about it.
They taped it, so I assume they will be accurate.
And they were not unkind to me in any way.
But it was a continual hurling of what they call proof texts of quotes from the Bible against not just my position on gay people, but also on the fact that I write horror films, that people curse in my stories, and they do bad things because I believe that the arts are not evil just because they contain events of evil.
And I believe that idea is one of the reasons that Christian art sucks.
Christian art stinks.
It convinces nobody.
It's a bath, a warm bath for Christians to be in, which is fine.
There's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't approach the level of art.
I try to write things that take genre to the level of art, which means telling the truth.
So when it was over, I felt that like it was such an aggressive interview and such an aggressively pointed interview.
What about this quote in the Bible?
What about that quote in the Bible?
All of which I had heard, all the quotes I'd heard before, that I felt like I had defended the plate like a batter.
I had defended the plate from a lot of fastballs, but maybe I hadn't hit the ball.
And I wanted to come on and just say again what it is that I believe.
I'm not a theologian, and I'm not a priest, and I don't run a church, so I'm not responsible for any of the church disciplines or any of that.
It does seem to me, it does seem to me that Christianity is not a book of rules.
It's a relationship with the king of the universe in the person of Jesus Christ.
And he gives you a lot of instructions for how to have that relationship, one of which, repeated several times, is that we should judge not lest we be judged.
Now, I've never committed an act of homosexuality, and I don't know what it does to you interiorly.
I know that if you are in a loving, stable, gay relationship, you're not hurting anybody.
You're not hurting anybody that I know of.
And whether that relationship is separating you from God is something you have to deal with.
I don't even know why I should be asked my opinion of it when I'm busy dealing with all my sins, you know, all my pride and lust and all that.
If you want to ask me about what those things do to you, I can talk about, I can talk about all of that.
But I understand that a church has to have a position and they have to say things that they allow and don't allow.
And that is part of the tension that exists between the world as we hope it will become when there will be no giving in marriage or giving in marriage.
And I assume that things will be a lot more fluid than they are in human life, where we are men and women and we have responsibilities to one another.
But I think in the afterlife, things will be a lot different.
We don't know what that's going to look like.
But there's a tension between that world to come and the world we're living in now, and we're trying to move toward that world.
Now, my instinct, my instinct is that the question that he asked me that I really couldn't give a direct answer to because I'm not a theologian was, is homosexuality a sin per se?
Is it a sin in and of itself?
If somebody is in a loving, stable, consensual, homosexual relationship, are they committing a sin?
And the thing about it is, is Jesus, the word of God, the word of God, who had three years to say what he had to say, never mentioned it, which means to me that it probably wasn't central to his thinking in some way.
I mean, if that was the main thing that was on his mind, he could have said so, he would have said so.
He didn't say so.
So that means something to me.
But the quote that always comes up is the quote from St. Paul.
And St. Paul said that God gave over non-believers to shameful lusts.
Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones in the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed for lust with one another.
Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And that's the quote that's always made.
And a lot of people argue that he's talking about people who have gone against their nature.
And if you're a gay person, that it is not you're going against your nature to have gay relations.
I don't know about that.
That stuff is kind of beyond me in some way.
I'm not going to make that argument.
But I will tell you how I read the Bible.
I've told you this before.
I take the Bible entirely seriously.
I believe it is the word of God.
But I believe it is written.
I'm a storyteller.
I've spent all my life studying stories, and I believe there are different genres in the Bible.
There are legends, there are myths, there's history.
There's all kinds of things in the Bible.
When I see St. Paul said a lot of things.
He said it was shameful for a man to have long hair.
He said women should not be allowed to be leaders in the church or to teach or have authority over a man.
I don't believe those things.
I don't believe those things.
So what do I make of the fact that St. Paul said them, who I take his words very seriously?
But he's not Jesus.
He's not inerrant.
He is a man trying to build a church in a world that is not the world that it will become.
And I believe God chose St. Paul for that purpose.
I believe he's the perfect vehicle for that purpose.
But I do not believe that he is meant to lock us into first century morality.
And I know I've said all these things before, but I want to make sure I get it down on record what I actually believe before an article comes out saying things that I don't believe.
I do not believe St. Paul was there to lock us into first century morality, but to set an example of how we use our Christian faith to answer the morals, the moral questions of our time.
That is what I believe.
I believe he is a role model in the same way I don't believe that Moses is a role model when he murders rebels against God.
I don't believe that that's what we should do.
I believe he is an example of a man in history acting in the knowledge of God.
And so that's what I think of St. Paul.
My instinct is that no, homosexuality is not a sin per se.
My instinct is that a man in a loving relationship with another man, a stable, loving, non-promiscuous relationship with another man, will be able to stand before the throne of God.
Don't take my word for it because I don't get a vote.
You know, study the theology yourself, pray yourself.
I say this all the time, and check yourself.
But as far as I'm concerned, my role is to love God and to love your neighbor.
And insofar as I have a value as a Christian speaker, it is bringing to you my joy and my experience of serenity that comes from taking that attitude with people.
I am in no way responsible for condemning the guy next to me, only for loving him and allowing him to take communion with me as Judas took communion with Jesus Christ.
So that's my statement.
That's what I have to say.
It was a really interesting interview.
And again, I don't want to give the impression that the guy was mean to me.
He wasn't, and I hope he'll be honest in his reporting.
But it was very aggressive and very intense.
And so I just wanted to make sure I went on record.
That's it.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
Boycotting Home Depot?00:01:32
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I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, there is a movement afoot to boycott Home Depot because one of the founders gave some money to Donald Trump.
There are a lot of dumb boycotts out there.
Every day there's a new one.
This one is even dumber than most, and I'll explain why.
Also, Jeffrey Epstein is allegedly a scumbag, sex-trafficking predator pervert, and he has a lot of predator pervert famous friends.
Is one of them Bill Clinton?
Well, Bill Clinton says no, but we'll talk about that today.
And some police officers were kicked out of a Starbucks because their presence apparently was upsetting to a customer who felt unsafe around police officers.