Ep. 729 – Sex, Lies and Children dissects the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as a politically weaponized distraction, exposing Alex Acosta’s 2008 plea deal (13 months for trafficking minors) while downplaying Bill Clinton’s ties. The host accuses left-wing media of ignoring systemic child exploitation unless it targets Trump, citing Hollywood’s unchecked abuse culture under Obama. Andrew Klavan blames the decline of civil discourse on the left’s post-Soviet "march through institutions," where dissent is silenced—from O.J.’s praise for Jackson to attacks on Trump supporters. Mailbag advice ranges from rejecting manipulative family members to embracing fatherhood despite discomfort, framing moral clarity as non-negotiable. The episode ties Epstein’s fallout to broader cultural decay: justice is sacrificed for partisan leverage, and personal accountability is eroded by institutional fear. [Automatically generated summary]
For those of you who thought there could be nothing more boring or meaningless than soccer, it now turns out there's such a thing as soccer played by women.
And get this, the women who play soccer are saying they should be paid more.
Now yes, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you mischievous rat scallion, we can always count on your impish sense of fun to bring a little spark of joy and merriment to our humdrum lives with some wacky shenanigans.
But no, actually, I'm serious.
There really is such a thing as soccer played by women, and the women are complaining because, you know, they're women.
That's what they do.
Apparently, these adorable little darlings run up and down a field wearing fetching little shorts and kicking a ball with their tiny, delicate feet, because of course, being ladies, they're far too dainty to pick the ball up with their hands like ordinary people.
And this goes on for who knows, hours probably, if anyone took the time to pay attention.
And every now and again, the ball goes into some kind of net contraption, and the gals jump up and down and make those cute, shrieky noises they make, and everyone pretends to be excited for them before going back to doing whatever they were doing.
And now, and really, I'm not making this up, these girls say they want to be paid like actual men playing real sports.
And don't get me wrong, women's soccer draws in almost as much money as your normal paper route, so it's not like I think they should be paid nothing.
But of course, real sports, the kind with men in them, actually pull down a fortune, which is why the men get paid a lot more.
But you can't expect women to understand anything as complicated as economics.
So my suggestion is we all try very hard to treat the women exactly like men and ignore them completely because they're playing soccer.
Good morning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-doo.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray for Hollywood00:04:30
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
I dedicate that opening to my friend Owen Brennan over at Madison McQueen only because I know it'll drive him up the wall.
All right, one of the best reasons to tune into this podcast, aside from having your life brightened by the sight of my fabulous face, is to hear tomorrow's news today.
Yesterday, I told you to watch how the Epstein sex abuse case was handled by politicians and the press so you could see history being rewritten in real time.
I told you the Democrats were going to try to make the whole case about Labor Secretary Alex Acosta and thus Donald Trump and try to bury the deep connections Epstein had with Bill Clinton and the entire Democrat Party.
Like the Harvey Weinstein story, the Epstein story so far is the story of a big-time Democrat donor who abused young girls and others nearly with impunity.
If Trump was involved, shame on him.
But the story as it stands is another Democrat donor sex abuse case, a la Harvey Weinstein.
So, all that is playing out exactly as I foretold.
And now I'm going to tell you what will happen next.
The coverage will quickly devolve into a finger-pointing match laced with salacious details about sex abuse.
If the law dogs do their jobs, maybe Epstein will do some time.
That'd be great.
But the real story, the deep story, which is the persistent, continual, widespread sexual abuse of children by men and some women with lots of money and power is going to go back underground and vanish from sight.
Children in trouble like this only become news when the left can use them for political purposes.
If they can attack Trump's attempts to secure the border or give the Catholic Church a bad name or take out a Republican candidate who did something wrong, then we hear about abused children.
But when it comes to the persistent, organized, widespread sexual abuse of underage girls and boys, the story always dies.
Now, let me put this as clearly as I can.
Pretty young girls like rich, powerful men, and rich, powerful men like pretty young girls.
I'm not trying to indict human nature.
I'm not trying to scour history and pinpoint some mistake this guy or that guy made in his life with a girl under the age of consent.
I'm talking again about the persistent, organized, underground, underreported, widespread use of young people for pleasure by straight and gay, powerful people of any and all political persuasions.
We know, yes, it happened in the Catholic Church.
The Southern Baptists have reported on it, and those instances are particularly awful because they give religion a bad name.
But I am virtually certain this is one of the most widespread and underreported stories out there right here in Hollywood.
And I'll bet the same is true in New York and Washington and other power centers as well.
The thing is, I myself do not have the reporting power.
I don't have the money or the manpower to go after this story as it deserves.
I only have the platform to ask certain questions.
How come this Epstein case has been around since 2008 and no one's followed up on it until now?
Why do kids keep coming forward in show business with allegations of abuse and then disappearing from the front page?
You remember that Disney girl I told you about?
I think it was last week, Bella Thorne?
How come only right-wing outlets like The Blaze and Breitbart and me covered that?
How come no one at the LA Times or Variety followed up on her claims that she was abused all that time and asked more questions?
I've sent her an invitation to come on here, but I doubt she'll show up.
Why didn't alarm bells go off when Harvey Weinstein and the rest of Hollywood elites rushed to the defense of Roman Polanski, a man who shrugged off the fact he drugged and sodomized a child by saying, well, we all like young girls?
The answer has got to be that everyone knows this is going on all over and no one wants to touch it.
The people doing the abusing are too powerful, too connected, and the news outlets don't want to lose their advertising and the people who want to do the reporting don't want to lose their jobs.
Listen, if I could reach out my right hand and put it on the throat of each man who abuses a child for his amusement, every damn one of them would be dead this very day.
I can't do that.
But at least we can all keep an eye on these stories, watch how they're reported, and try to keep them from vanishing mysteriously every time they arise.
All right, we're going to talk about that more, and then we're going to have the mailbag, which will solve all the problems everywhere later on in the show.
But first, there it is.
I knew I was waiting.
I was waiting for it to creep up on me.
Post Office Problems00:15:34
First, let me talk about stamps.
Listen, I love the post office.
I have lived off the post office my whole life, submitting stories, doing business on it.
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I want what the post office does inside my computer.
That's why I use stamps.com.
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And right now, my listeners can get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
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Enter Clavin.
You'll be able to print the stamps right out on your computer and right away to your friends and say, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So, just like I said, the Democrats immediately moved to make this story about Alex Acosta.
Alex Acosta is a labor secretary.
He was a U.S. attorney over a decade ago, 2008, I believe it was, when a deal was made to bury this Epstein case.
It looks like a bad deal.
It was a secret deal.
It meant that he only spent 13 months in prison, in jail.
During that time, he was allowed to work.
And so here's Chuck Schumer reliably racing to the scene to make sure that this thing is somehow about Donald Trump.
It was not just that Acosta failed to get it right in 2008.
The evidence suggests he didn't care to.
Accordingly, I'm asking three things.
First, I am calling on Secretary Acosta to resign.
It is now impossible for anyone to have confidence in Secretary Acosta's ability to lead the Department of Labor.
If he refuses to resign, President Trump should fire him.
Instead of prosecuting a predator and serial sex trafficker of children, Acosta chose to let him off easy.
This is not acceptable.
We cannot have as one of the leading appointed officials in America someone who has done this.
Plain and simple.
The president needs to answer for his statements he has made about his relationship with Mr. Epstein.
In 2002, he said he'd known Epstein for 15 years and he was, quote, a terrific guy who enjoyed women, quote, on the younger side, unquote.
Epstein was also reportedly irregular at the Mar-a-Lago Club for years.
The president needs to answer for this, and I don't recall, is not an acceptable answer in this case, particularly since President Trump appointed Mr. Acosta to such a powerful position.
Now let me tell you why Chuck Schumer is a scumball for doing this, okay?
Because this is a widespread practice.
Again, I'm telling you, it's happening out here in Hollywood as I speak.
I'm sure it happens in D.C. I'm sure this guy has done it all over the place.
This is a big story.
It is not just an opportunity for Chuck Schumer to stand on the abused bodies of young people in order to get his political will done.
And I'm happy to say the Wall Street Journal, which has far is not that attached to Donald Trump and has far more reporting power than I have, confirms my instinct on this Acosta deal.
It says they have a piece on the op-ed page today on the editorial page.
The innuendo here is that Mr. Acosta went easy on a sexual predator as a favor to the masters of the universe who were known to socialize with Mr. Epstein, including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, who you noticed was not mentioned there at all, as well as his high-powered lawyers, Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr.
So Democrats are now demanding that Mr. Acosta resign his cabinet post.
But they go on to say there is nothing in the Epstein indictment of the Epstein indictment by Acosta to indicate that Mr. Acosta abused his power or violated his oath as U.S. attorney.
I was talking about this yesterday, but this is their reporting confirming what I said.
By all publicly available evidence, Mr. Acosta acted honorably and drove a tougher deal with Mr. Epstein than state prosecutors, all Democrats and some lower-level U.S. prosecutors, sought.
The non-prosecution agreement required Mr. Epstein to cop the two state felonies that led to a 13-month jail sentence, register for life as a sex offender, and pay restitution to the victims as well as their attorney fees.
That was the big one that Acosta was trying to get in there.
He was trying to make sure, in spite of the malfeasance of the state prosecutors and the lower-down federal prosecutors, he was trying to make sure that Epstein, that the victims could go after Epstein.
According to documents unsealed in a related federal case, low-level federal prosecutors initially sought to have Mr. Epstein plead guilty to a misdemeanor, but Mr. Acosta pushed back against Mr. Epstein's lawyers.
The U.S. attorneys who've been negotiating with defense counsel have for some time complained to me regarding the tactics used by the defense team.
Mr. Costa wrote to Mr. Starr.
It appears to them that as soon as resolution is reached on one issue, defense counsel finds ways to challenge the resolution collaterally.
He went after them.
He went after them and he got something.
Not enough.
True, not enough.
And the story.
And so, you know, then this is what gets me.
Okay, bad deal.
Then the story vanishes.
2008, that's 11 years all through the Obama administration.
And again, I don't mean to hook Obama to this.
I'm not saying he's guilty of anything, but all through the Obama administration, Eric Holder, you know, Lynch, they didn't do anything about this.
They let it lie.
And suddenly, during the Trump administration, this is a Trump appointee, Jeff Berman, I believe his name is, going after this guy.
This is a Trump Justice Department going after it.
Suddenly, the Trump Department is going after it, and it's all Trump's fault.
It is all Trump's fault.
You know, Chris Ruddy was on with Don Lemon.
This was really telling because Don Lemon is, I believe, just a completely self-deceived human being.
He's a guy who thinks he's a fair reporter.
He really does.
He is the most biased guy on television.
And he has Ruddy on, who is a legit pal of the president.
Obviously, he runs Newsmax, I believe it is.
And they get in a fight about who did the prosecuting of Jeff Empsey, who brought this case back.
This is cut number five.
Justice Department is reprosecuting this guy.
Okay, was it Obama?
Obama knew basically all the facts about Epstein that we know.
This all happened before.
The Trump Justice Department.
Obama didn't take office until 2009 when he was.
The plea agreement had already been made.
Okay, and he had eight years to fight this guy.
When I have a friend of the Obama administration on, I will ask.
So I'm asking you about this.
And so I'm telling you, as not only a friend of the president, but somebody that is looking at the news and covering the news, Jeffrey Berman was the appointee of Donald Trump.
The Southern District of New York is very aggressively pursuing this case.
The thing that I call so self-deceived about Don Lemon is he always says things like, when I have a friend of Obama on, I'll ask him about it.
No, he won't.
He won't.
I mean, good for him for having Ruddy on.
It's perfectly fair to ask Ruddy as a friend of the president.
He comes on as a friend of the president.
It's perfectly fair to ask him tough questions.
But he'll never ask those questions.
For eight years, he never asked any questions.
All I ever hear from Don Lemon is what a saint Obama was, this scandal-ridden, unconstitutional president.
And now they're going after this story.
And Ruddy asks him about it.
He says, why don't you talk about Bill Clinton?
Why don't you talk about all the Democrats?
And it's always the same thing from Lemon.
It's always, well, I've got you here, so I'm talking about that.
But he never has anybody else on.
He doesn't have the people on and ask him those questions.
And I don't know if he thinks he does or not.
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Okay, so let's talk about Trump for a minute.
What happened with Trump?
Trump didn't have this comment that he made many years ago where he said, This guy's a great guy, and he likes pretty girls as much as I do.
And some of the girls are on the younger side.
And there is information that he took one flight with him on this so-called Lolita Express.
And I'm sure they're going to go after that with everything instead of the 27 flights that Bill Clinton took and Epstein's involvement with the Clinton Foundation.
But here's Donald Trump talking yesterday about his relationship with Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein is a terrific guy.
Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.
I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him.
He was a fixture in Palm Beach.
I had a falling out with him a long time ago.
I don't think I've spoken to him for 15 years.
I wasn't a fan.
I was not, yeah, a long time ago.
I'd say maybe 15 years.
I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.
I was not a fan of his.
So I feel very badly, actually, for Secretary Acosta because I've known him as being somebody that works so hard and has done such a good job.
I feel very badly about that whole situation.
But we're going to be looking at that and looking at it very closely.
Now, the problem for Acosta here, by the way, just on the side of this, is Jonathan Swan of Axios was talking about this: that the conservatives in Congress don't like the job that Acosta has done as labor secretary because he hasn't been aggressive enough in cutting regulations, which is part of the Trump, one of the reasons the Trump economy is going so incredibly well, is because of all this.
And so there's a possibility that they will use this Epstein thing to throw him under the bus because they don't like the way he's doing the regulations.
And that too would be a shame because that's, listen, I want regulations cut.
As far as I'm concerned, you can cut regulations with a match, right?
Just set the regulations on fire and they're gone.
That would be fine with me.
So I'm all for cutting regulations.
But it would be a shame if Acosta got nailed for something he essentially didn't do, which is mishandle this case, as just another way of deflecting from what this case is really about.
Now, just to continue on Trump for a little while, it is said that Trump barred him from Mar-a-Lago, barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for his abuse.
Chris Ruddy says that Trump, whenever he sees a troublemaker, gets as far away from him as possible, which is an interesting take.
James Patterson, the famous thriller writer, was talking about, he was a big visitor at Mar-a-Lago, and he was talking about what happened between Trump and Epstein there.
President Trump said earlier that he had a falling out with Epstein about 15 years ago.
Do you know what that was about?
Well, I know that there were some complaints about Epstein at Mar-a-Lago.
And also, I spoke to the head of the spa there.
And she said that I said, did you ever meet Epstein?
She said, oh, yes.
She said he would come, and he was inappropriate with some of the younger women there.
And she said, I went to Mr. Trump and Trump threw him out of the club.
So that speaks well of Trump.
I like to hear that.
I like to hear that he's standing up for the women in his employ.
Estaina Perino, obviously interviewing James Patterson.
But again, again, all these things, all this is politics, all this is politics, and the children, the little girls, I call them little girls.
These were probably 13, 14, 15-year-old young ladies, they get lost in this because this is happening all the time.
And listen, you know, the questions of consent shouldn't even come up because a girl that age doesn't know what she's doing.
She's dazzled.
She's overwhelmed by the power that she's dealing with.
This is the responsibility of us to go after these guys.
Now, there's people saying that Epstein was running more than just a sex operation.
He was running a sex and blackmail operation.
And that may account for some of the reasons this stuff disappears.
As I keep saying, it disappears in Hollywood all the time.
It drives me crazy.
It drives me crazy because these child actors come out and they say, I was abused.
And then variety will run a little story saying, oh, people are nervous in Hollywood.
Gone.
Gone.
Nobody goes out and does it.
I mean, if I were an investigative reporter in LA, this is what I would be doing full time, finding out how much of this goes on.
Because listen, we know that women use sexuality in Hollywood to get jobs.
We know they do that.
We know that men take advantage of that fact.
Again, I'm not trying to indict human nature.
What I'm talking about is children, 13, 14, 11, 12, girls who cannot make decisions, who are being sent on the altar of their parents, abandoned on the altar of their parents' ambition and left to these rapacious men who then use them, and it just doesn't get into the paper.
And so here's Thomas Lifson writing at American Thinker.
He says, it strikes me as quite unlikely that Jeffrey Epstein's motive for allegedly inviting powerful figures from the U.S. and Europe aboard the Alolita Express on a trip to Orgy Island was mere fellowship, as if they were playing a round of golf together.
My dominant hypothesis, and again, he's making a guess, but he says, my dominant hypothesis is that he was videotaping highly illegal and morally reprehensible rapes for use as blackmail material.
It might have been insurance against serious prosecution for his indulging in his own perversions, which would explain why his punishment the first time he was prosecuted was laughably light.
And Ann Coulter backs him up on this.
She says the same thing.
My theory was that he was the concierge of this underage sex club, so to speak.
And some wealthy men paid for this.
Niche Pervert Theory00:08:44
But, you know, this is kind of a niche sexual fetish.
Underage boys that are.
Panophilia.
I mean, how many billionaires do we have here?
Which makes me, and let me throw the other second thing that I think is very interesting about this case.
Epstein, according to both the girls' accounts, he wanted them to have sex with powerful men, come back to him and report on it, describe what they wanted, what their fetishes were.
And he had cameras throughout the house.
So this is obviously for blackmailing purposes.
It just seems to me there is a bigger, something much bigger is behind this.
And, you know, yes, it's a niche fetish, but it's not as much of a niche as you would think because all through history, I mean, it used to be, you know, Romeo and Juliet are like 15 years old.
You know, it used to be that girls got married much earlier and it's only civilization that has moved up the age of consent and really invented, even invented the concept of childhood.
And it is that concept that I think there are powerful forces on the left.
This goes beyond blackmail, goes beyond anything else, that are trying to normalize this.
John Nolte, my pal over at Breitbart, he wrote about this many, many years ago back in 2009, which is I think when Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen and the rest were standing up for Roman Polanski because he'd been busted and they didn't want him extradited to America and he wasn't.
And Nolte started writing about the fact that movie after movie after movie was coming out in that year, 2009, to normalize and make you sympathize with people who abuse children.
He talked about doubt.
Now, doubt is a very good play, but in doubt, there's a scene where a priest who is accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy is kind of given an out by the boy's mother saying, well, the boy's father didn't understand him.
At least he had this priest to understand him.
I mean, it's a very, and I remember seeing this play in a theater, and there was a question time afterwards.
And I remember a gay guy getting up and sort of waxing lyrical about what a wonderful thing it was that this priest had molested this boy and given him some kind of some kind of place to go, some kind of sympathy.
There was another one.
Let me see if I can find it.
A Towelhead with Aaron Eckhart and Maria Bellow.
It's a film that Nolte says Roman Polanski might have seen many times while wearing a raincoat.
The protagonist is a 13-year-old Jazeera, and the story surrounds her sexual abuse at the hands of a number of men, including Eckhart's Gulf War vet.
Rather than the repeated abuse damaging the young girl, the filmmaker portrays the rapes and molestations as a healthy and sexually liberating experience.
And here's the one that drove me crazy was the reader, Kate Winslet, one last year's best actress, Oscar.
Again, reading from Nolte for her role in The Reader, in which she plays a sympathetic Nazi guilty of mass murder who seduces and then engages in a steamy sexual affair with a 15-year-old boy.
I wrote about this too when this film came out.
I thought, what the hell are you talking about?
The woman's a Nazi.
She's a sex molester.
I do not care about her.
I don't support her.
But this, you know, Nolte believed, and he has a good case to make, that this is on purpose.
I mean, we're having it now in California where they went to teach little children about pedophilia and pederasting.
When somebody went to complain, they said, this is done in this school district in California.
They said, this is done because we're talking about historical perspectives of how gender relations and different type of sexual orientations have existed in history.
Well, screw you.
I mean, you're normalizing.
You are normalizing the abuse of children.
You know, the other day, I'm going to wrap this up because I want to get to the mailbag, but the other day, I'm on Twitter where I'm under attack now.
They're trying to get me thrown off Twitter.
And O.J. Simpson, O.J. Simpson puts out a video paying tribute to his old pal, Michael Jackson.
And I looked at this and I thought, we're all going to hell.
I mean, I thought, thank God, O.J. Simpson isn't saying he voted for Trump because then Twitter would throw him off.
But if O.J. Simpson, a man who I think reasonable people are justified in thinking is a savage killer, is praising Michael Jackson, a man I think reasonable people are well justifying in thinking he was an abuser.
I think Jackson, I personally believe Jackson used his wealth and his power and his fame as a spider's web to lure in and abuse little boys.
And I just thought, you know, this is this normalization process.
Nobody complained about this except our friend Michael Knowles, the only guy who pointed it out.
And I just think, you know, we have traded morality for politics.
And these people who are going after Donald Trump and going after Alex Acosta and leaving these children in the dirt, which is what they're doing by just making it all about politics, and Don Lemon making it all about politics and the news media making it all about politics, are abandoning these children to the abuse of powerful people because they haven't got the guts and they haven't got the means and they haven't got the willpower to go after the powerful people themselves.
Epstein, if Epstein was blackmailing people, there must have been a lot of people on those tapes.
I'd like to see him.
I'd like the U.S. attorney to see him.
And good for Donald Trump's Justice Department for going after him.
I hope they go after him with everything they've got.
But I just watch how this story disappears and watch how this story never gets bigger than a certain field because unless they can use it for politics, unless they can use it to go after Trump, I do believe the press will not follow it up.
Mailbag, coming up.
Come on.
Come on over.
Don't you want to be that excited?
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Mailbag!
I always look to do that.
See if I can find them with their hands off the switch back there.
All right.
From Jacob.
I'm a man in my mid-20s who has been blessed enough to find the woman I believe God intends for me to marry.
I'm truly in love with her, and she's been nothing but a positive influence in my life.
Pardon me, the problem I have, however, is that I still find myself looking at other women and fantasizing about them on some level.
I absolutely hate this about myself as I abhor cheating after seeing what my dad's infidelity did to my mom.
How can I lock that lustful part of myself away and make sure it doesn't affect the lives of both my future wife and I?
In the past, I've had issues with pornography, and that's something I've been trying diligently to get under control.
I wonder if the use of that has rewired my brain or if I'm just nervous about proposing.
I'm at a loss.
Thanks for all you do.
Well, first of all, no.
You should stay away from the pornography, no question about it.
Stay off it.
But that has not rewired your brain.
You desire other women because you're a man, you're a human male, and that is the way we are set up to be.
That is basically the way nature makes us because it wants to reproduce, right?
And we preserve our humanity and preserve our decency by attaching that powerful wave of desire, not to every woman in our way, but to the woman that we love.
And that's how we transform this natural desire into love.
So it's nothing unnatural about you.
There's nothing that you have to abhor about yourself.
The answer is easy.
Don't cheat on your wife and stay away from the porn.
I mean, this is a funny thing, you know.
I mean, some of the guys around here even make fun of me about this because people will get married and they'll give them all kinds of advice.
And my advice is get married.
Don't sleep with anybody else.
Your wife won't like it.
That's what you have to do.
Don't rake yourself over the coals for every time you look at another woman.
We all do it.
It's something, it's just part of nature.
It's part of the way we're built.
Don't beat up on yourself, but don't act on it.
Do not act on it.
If you act on it, then you're a creep.
So don't cheat on your wife.
Don't look at the pornography.
Leave the pornography alone, but don't kill yourself over this.
All right.
You know, propose to the girl if you love her and stay true to her.
You can do that.
You can do it.
But don't expect your mind to just shut down.
It's not going to happen.
You know, you cannot indulge it.
You cannot overindulge it.
You cannot feed the beast, but don't kill yourself over the fact that you're going to feel that way.
It's just humanity.
It's just the way you're built.
All right.
From Daniel.
Hi, Andrew.
I subscribe to Hear Ben, but your show might be my favorite.
Don't tell Ben.
All right.
He's not listening.
I enjoy debating and discussing things, politics, social issues, firearms, pretty much anything.
I remember being in debate clubs in school and things always staying civil and respectful, even when we disagreed.
When Did Civility Collapse?00:03:25
Things seem to have changed with social media, and people usually resort to personal attacks and insults rather than talking about issues.
And I see it from both sides of most issues.
My questions are, what do you think changed?
When and how did we lose our ability for civil discourse?
And two, what can we do to get it back?
Is there a place or a way for people to still engage in civil debate?
Thank you very much, Dan.
This is a great question.
And again, they're after me on Twitter, and they're doing that left-wing thing where they pretend a joke you made was serious.
So I'm getting all these reports from Twitter.
And I just said, you know, if Twitter wants to throw me off, I'll have more time in my day.
But I hope they don't, because I hope Twitter will commit itself to the American value of debate and plurality and different voices.
Here's what happened, in my opinion.
The Soviet Union fell.
Reagan won and the Soviet Union fell.
I cannot tell you what a blow this was.
You want to know what a blow was?
You only have to look at Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders is running to rewrite the history of the utter, complete, disastrous failure of his philosophy.
He backed a country that slaughtered people in their tens of millions.
He backed an economic system that collapsed and always collapsed.
Socialism sucks the life out of culture.
It sucks the life out of the economy.
I'm not saying there should be no welfare state whatsoever.
One of the wonderful things about capitalism is it can stand a little touch of socialism, but you got to keep it under control because it kills everything.
Just as Europe is dying now, just as the Soviet Union died, it takes about 70 years and socialism destroys everything.
Reagan was elected.
When Reagan was elected, it was a shock to the system of the left-wing media.
The media leaned left, but they did not hear the people saying, we want something else.
And they thought Jimmy Carter was such a bad president, kind of like Barack Obama, except Barack Obama was luckier in his economy.
But Carter was a terrible president, and Reagan got in and they did the same thing to Reagan that they're trying now to do to Trump.
They demonized him.
He was an idiot.
He was an actor.
He didn't know what he was doing.
He was a warmonger.
He was going to kill us all.
You cannot believe, you cannot believe the intensity with which they attacked him.
And he succeeded in their pet project, the Soviet Union, collapsed.
And that, I think, was the moment when the press started to say to itself, this is never going to happen again.
And the left started to say to itself, we must take over the institutions.
I remember I was a left-winger when Reagan was president.
And I remember thinking, gee, if the people love Reagan so much, why is every TV show a left-wing TV show?
Why is everybody talking, all the left-wing stuff is going into the culture?
And I figured, well, because they're out of politics, the left must have gone into the culture.
But no, it was actually a strategy.
And because socialism doesn't work, and because top-down government is always oppressive, always becomes oppressive, the left has no argument.
And because they have no argument, they can't allow debate to take place.
That's why.
That's why O.J. Simpson can come on and sing the praises of Michael Jackson on Twitter and nobody says a word.
But if you go on and say, I support Donald Trump, like the guy at Home Depot, they boycott you.
Why should he not be allowed to support Donald Trump?
Because we've won the argument.
Because we've won the argument, the argument has to be stopped.
Because we've won the argument, the argument has to be demonized.
Because we've won the argument, people have to be silenced.
Painful Trust Issues00:11:41
That's why.
And now with the advent of the media explosion, social media, internet, where small voices can become big voices, where the Daily Wire can start up and five years later be a major enterprise.
Now they've lost control of even the social constructs like the media and the universities.
They're starting to lose control of that project that they did, the march through our institutions, we're beginning to take back that ground.
We're in a revolution.
I've said it again and again.
We're like the guys, except without the gunfire, we are peeking up from behind the rocks and taking pot shots at an empire of lies.
And that is driving them crazy.
And that's why nobody can have a discussion.
Listen, I'm a very civilized guy, but I will argue my point and I will do it politely.
And it drives the left crazy.
They simply will stop knowing you because they know that their virtue is tied up in their politics and they do not want to hear arguments about why their politics don't work.
They don't want to hear arguments about the fact that the things that they say they want to accomplish can be better accomplished by smaller government and capitalism.
So that's why they shut things down.
All right.
From Keith, dear Sir Clavin, I find myself in a rut.
I used to be Sir Clavin before I became Lord Clavin.
I find myself in a rut with my relationship with my older brother in his mid-30s.
And in the past, he constantly belittled me, and I felt he manipulated those close to him.
He recently got divorced and going through a tough time.
He's promised that he'll treat me with more respect, but I can't get over my suspicion that he's manipulative.
He's manipulated my parents because they enable him not to have a job.
They've given him a place to live.
They're constantly buying him dinner and cleaning his house.
He appears to be sincere that he wants a better relationship, and I want to support him through this difficult time, but I do not want to want what I see as manipulation to seep into my life.
What do you think the Christian thing to do in this situation is?
Yeah, don't let them manipulate you.
Don't let them manipulate you.
There are people in life that you can be kind to, but keep them at bay.
And there are people you can't keep at bay, okay?
And sometimes you've got to let those people go.
And it's painful because when it's your brother, when it's somebody in your family, it can be very painful to let them go.
If you can be kind to him in his tough time and listen to his problems without being manipulated and without being belittled, do it.
If you can't, let him go, walk away.
That's the choice you have to make.
It is not a Christian thing to let him abuse you because you have other people in your life that you're responsible to, other people that you have to be there for, and you can't have this leech sucking off you basically without a job, without anything to support him, and taking things from you when you need them to deal with the people that you're responsible for.
So be kind to him if you can.
Listen to his problems if you can.
But if he starts to belittle and manipulate, you walk away from him.
Pardon me.
From Garrison, Dear Clavin, Lord of the Multiverse.
I have dealt with anxiety and depression quite a bit.
One particular reason is my love life.
When I find myself in a good relationship, I find myself getting anxious about it.
If she will leave me, if she's cheating on me and so on, I know it's a trust issue.
Do you have any ways through your experience of combating these feelings that have sometimes ruined a good relationship?
Two things.
One, make sure you go out with ladies you can trust.
Look at your past history.
Have you been actually able to trust the women you go out with?
Do you have good taste in women and get women that you can be with and trust them?
If you have, if you have, in fact, gone out with women who can be trusted, then you have to find out what the root of this is.
Use a therapist if you need to, but it's probably something that happened in your past that has made you untrusting.
You want to root it out and get rid of it because it will ruin your relationship.
If you have a woman and you are sure that you can trust her or at least feel reasonably that the evidence is reasonably convincing that she is a trustworthy person, then you got to put these feelings away and not act on them and not constantly pester her about it.
And if you can't do that, you got to root it out.
You got to find out where it comes from because it probably is rooted in your childhood or something and you can use a therapist to do that.
But, you know, it's obviously, as you say, it's a trust issue unless you have a history of picking out these women.
And then you got to find out why you're doing that.
If you have a history of picking out women who, in fact, are unfaithful to you, then you have to find out why you're doing that and stop so you can find women that you can trust.
From Luke, dear Lord Slayer of Ease and Lord of the Multiverse, you've mentioned many times that you're a fan of the horror genre.
Let me correct that.
I'm a fan of the creepy ghost story genre.
I don't like bloodshed and gore.
I don't like slasher movies.
I don't like people being torn to pieces.
What I like is eerie, spooky stories.
Have you read the works of H.P. Lovecraft?
And if so, what are your thoughts on his work and cosmic horror in general?
Listen, I've read a lot of Lovecraft, and not every story he writes is great.
Some of them are kind of pulpy, but the ones that are good are really good.
And I like the kind of cosmic implications of it.
If you ever want to read something great about H.P. Lovecraft, my friend John Miller wrote for Claremont Review of Books.
And if you can track it down and find it, he wrote one of the great pieces on Lovecraft.
I'm a fan.
I think he's good.
I think the stories that are good are really good.
And he is an innovative, like Edgar Allan Poe, he's an innovative inventor of modern horror.
So I think it's really interesting to go to him and see how much he's contributed to the genre.
So I really like him.
From Robert, I am a 23-year-old Christian man.
I moved back to my hometown after college one year ago.
I've recently reconnected with a female friend from high school, and we've gone on several dates.
Things are going great, but my hang-up is she has a three-year-old son.
I like him a lot, but I'm noticeably uncomfortable hanging out for long periods of time around him because I've never been in this position.
And his mom, my girlfriend, has started to take notice.
My biggest problem is my parents.
They now live across the country, but I've not told them about our relationship yet for fear of upsetting them for doing things out of order.
I guess that she had a child before she was married.
I worry that this nervousness has become obvious and is fueling fear in my girlfriend.
I really care about her and her son, though I have trouble showing my care for him.
Any wisdom or encouragement you have on the situation is much appreciated.
This is from Robert.
Yeah, first of all, okay, here's the thing.
When you date a woman with a child, you have to make sure that you are committed all the way.
So first of all, what you need to do is you need to walk away for a minute by yourself and ask yourself, are you taking this all the way?
Because that child does not need to be abandoned by you, okay?
This is a tremendous responsibility.
If you're not going all the way, by which I mean marriage, if you're not going to marry this girl, you should get out.
If you're not going to marry the girl, you're going to get out.
If you are going to marry this girl, then you should get into the business of being this kid's dad figure.
You should start to make sure this kid is included in your relationship with this girl.
It's no good saying you're uncomfortable or your parents and all this.
What you're doing is you're projecting all your anxiety and unease on your parents and on your girlfriend.
You're talking about how much they're worried, about how much your parents are worried, how much your girlfriend is worried.
You're not talking about your own feelings about this.
And you have got to walk away and say, where do I stand?
Okay.
Are you in for life?
Are you in with this girl for life?
If you are in, it doesn't matter what your parents think.
It doesn't matter if your girlfriend is worried.
If you are in, get in and stay in.
Do not walk away from this little boy.
The kid needs you.
If you are going to have a relationship with this girl, part of your relationship is with this child.
And you have got to make that happen.
And, you know, your discomfort, you're uncomfortable.
Too bad.
Get over it.
Don't be uncomfortable.
Be the father this boy needs you to be.
But make sure you're in it for the long run, man, because the kid needs you and doesn't need to have boys running, coming in and out of this girl's life and then leaving them because that boy will attach to you like a leech.
Little boys are hungry for father figures and he will ask that of you and you have got to be ready to deliver.
If you're not ready, don't do it.
If you are ready, do it and do not care what other people think, including your parents.
All right.
From Brendan, my dear Andrew, Jesus always condemned murder.
How do we defend murder for the means of self-defense and war?
Well, it's not murder.
It's not murder to kill someone in self-defense and it's not murder to kill somebody in war.
The Bible, the Ten Commandments says thou shalt not murder, which is a very specific thing, which is the unjustifying taking of another human life.
If you're defending yourself, that's why they don't put you in prison for it.
If you're defending yourself, that's not murder.
If you're in a war, that's not murder.
Jesus never says anything about war.
He mentions it just one time that I can recall in the Bible.
I'm sure he wasn't thrilled about it, but also he seemed from his one comment to realize it's a fact of life.
So that is not murder.
All right.
Let's see.
I'm running out of time here.
From Ashley, due to factors ranging from drugs to family tensions, the siblings and cousins with whom I grew up and have fond memories are becoming increasingly distant and feel less like relatives than acquaintances.
Despite being 22 at family gatherings, I find I have more in common with 70-year-old grandparents than with close family of my own.
I'd like to be close again.
Am I being realistic here or is nostalgia getting the better of me?
And should I just move on for my hopes of recreating childhood closeness?
Thanks.
Your advice would be much appreciated.
Yeah, you're being nostalgic and you should just move on.
If this is drug abuse or family tension or you're not getting along, it's really painful.
I know this from my own life.
It is painful to lose touch with people, people you love, people you grew up with, people you're related to.
It is very painful.
But if the relationship is not there and you're in it on your own, it's not coming back, right?
And especially if there are drugs involved.
But really, the thing is, assess this realistically.
If there is no chance of bringing these relationships back, move on and find new relationships in your life that will replace those.
I mean, it's sad.
I know it's sad and I know it's painful and it's a burden forever.
But if it's not there, it's not there and there's no use pretending.
I got to answer this one more question because it was in the mailbag last week and I didn't understand it, so I didn't get to it.
It's from Anonymous.
He says, my girlfriend of two years broke up with me because I do not speak the same language as the church she goes to.
And he means this literally.
They didn't speak the same language there.
We had no quarrels.
We discussed this over a year and a half ago and agreed it was fine.
I really do want to be with her and was planning to ask her to marry me in the near future.
Do you have any advice on what to say to her to save this our relationship?
Thank you for everything you do.
I love your intros.
Yeah, this is too strange, man.
I mean, like, you should be able to go to a church where you understand what they're saying.
And she should not be insisting that you go to a church where you can't understand what's happening.
So it seems to me the problem, if she left you over that, the problem goes much, much deeper than that.
And she's just trying to get out of the relationship.
That's my take on it.
That's the way it sounds from this letter.
If that is really why she broke up with you, that just doesn't make sense to me.
As your girlfriend, if you're going to be a couple, you should go to a church where you both understand what is being said.
So if she broke off with you for that reason, my suspicion is she broke off with you for a deeper reason, and maybe you're going to have to just walk away with your broken heart.
You can ask her about it, but don't pester about it.
You can ask her one time if this is the real reason because it doesn't really make any sense to me.
You should be able to go to a church with her where you can both understand what's being said.
I got to stop.
Supervising Producer Mathis Glover00:00:49
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you again tomorrow.
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 Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Joe Biden gets extraordinarily radical, says he'll release hundreds of thousands of criminal prisoners.