Ep. 737 skewers Democrats’ Mueller hearing theatrics—Jerry Nadler in polka dots, Adam Schiff’s confetti bombs—while exposing their media-driven obsession with discredited charges over crises like border chaos and $31T debt. The host mocks "not exonerated" as a legal farce, contrasts Me Too’s hypocrisy (ignoring leftist abusers), and ties elite narratives to Hawley’s "cosmopolitan consensus," where globalism trumps national loyalty. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s Brian Singer dodges child abuse allegations, proving power shields even in #MeToo’s wake, as the episode ties performative politics to systemic detachment from middle America’s priorities. [Automatically generated summary]
Robert Mueller is testifying before the House Judiciary Committee today.
Earlier this morning, a Volkswagen pulled into the Capitol Rotunda and onlookers watched with delight and wonder as all 235 congressional Democrats poured out of the car until committee chairman Jerry Nadler finally emerged wearing a baggy polka dot outfit, gigantic shoes, white makeup and a fright wig and announced to reporters that he did not want the hearing to turn into some kind of circus.
In a statement made by honking his nose in Morse Code, Nadler announced, quote, We know that people have read the Mueller report, we know that they've seen the movie, we know that they watched the miniseries, read the graphic novel, and received excerpts we stuffed into their fortune cookies and printed on their rolls of toilet paper.
But have they really had the information pumped directly into their brains through electric wires until they cried out in agony and promised never to vote for someone we elites dislike ever again, unquote.
Nadler then was chased away from the microphones by Adam Schiff, who squirted him with water from a gigantic flower, then threw a confetti bomb at him, thus eliciting squeals of laughter from every five-year-old present, plus the freshman congresswoman from Queens.
Schiff then made elaborate faces through his pancake makeup and told reporters, quote, Before this hearing, I disgraced myself and shamed my constituents by leveling unsubstantiated charges against the president without any evidence whatsoever.
And since every single one of those charges was proven untrue by Mueller's investigation, I thought it important I return here today to disgrace myself and shame my constituents by leveling unsubstantiated charges against the president.
Nadler vs. Schiff Confetti Battle00:15:12
Nyak Nyak, get it?
Unquote.
Schiff then amazed the crowd by balancing on a barrel and rolling around the rotunda while spinning a plate on a stick.
Democrats promised the hearing will astound and amaze ladies, gentlemen, and boys and girls of all ages who will not believe how long a bunch of clowns can talk without solving a single problem that affects the lives of Americans.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
The biblical book of Ecclesiasticus is not universally accepted as canonical, but it does contain this excellent piece of fatherly advice.
Son, observe the time and fly from evil.
This is a particularly good practice when watching the news.
I've said this before, but it's important to keep remembering the time is summertime, when the normal progression from bomby spring days to hot dog days provides most of us with an opportunity to hit the beach and Democrats with an opportunity to pretend global warming is a crisis that can somehow be solved by giving them more power to ruin our culture and economy.
In summertime, barring emergencies, there's generally a lot less news than usual.
So small controversies become big controversies.
Some idiot on CNN screaming that a non-racist tweet is racist, or even all the idiots on CNN screaming that a non-racist tweet is racist can garner coverage for days instead of the approximately zero seconds it actually deserves.
So essentially, what we're watching when we watch summer news is not news, but the inner world of an increasingly deranged mental patient, namely the Democrat Party, which runs the media.
This means this might be a good time to try to separate their incomprehensible blather from what's actually going on or the real news.
The real news is this.
We have a crisis at the border, which both parties have left untended because it serves both parties' powerful elite.
It hurts the poor by bringing in competitive workers at cheap prices and undermining the bargaining power of the weakest among us.
And it hurts the nation by discarding the rule of law, but it gives rich people cheap help and powerful Democrats, new voters, so you're a racist if you oppose it and your career is ruined.
Elites want power.
Get out of their way.
We also have a debt crisis, which both parties have exacerbated because it allows the right to win votes by bragging about our powerful military, while the left can buy off the poor with useless and debilitating programs.
Meanwhile, both parties put our posterity in hock because elites want power, so get out of the way.
But what's the news on TV?
Robert Mueller testifying about an absurd Russia hoax that's way past its sell-by date.
The so-called Me Too movement, which has devolved into a political gotcha game and one distortion after another meant to convince us that Orange Man bad and elite cabal of anti-American dirtbags good.
Why?
Because the elite want power.
Get out of the way.
Let's talk about this.
Mueller hearing, later on, by the way, we'll have the mailbag.
I just want to remind you, the mailbag is coming up after the break.
Cue the scream.
Where's the scream?
Thank you.
Jeez, I'm sitting around here.
All right.
Robert Mueller is testifying.
My impression.
You know, I don't want to go off half-cocked about this because these things happen in the morning before I really, you know, while I'm preparing the show.
I really want to sit and watch and think about it so I can get back to you with actual insights and not just instant reactions.
But I do have to tell you, it looked like an utter disaster for the Democrats.
Mueller was fuddling around.
He hardly seemed to know where he was.
He hardly seemed to have read his own report.
It was as if he were a figurehead behind the people who were really doing the investigation.
And we all know who those guys were.
So, you know, it just really looked bad for them.
But I want to show you, I want to show you the way this stuff is covered just so you understand what it is washing over people day after day after day.
And I know we talk about this a lot, but it's worth going over because this is the power of the left.
This is what the left has spent 50 years garnering.
This is the long march into our institutions, the news media, the entertainment media, the academies, so that they control every piece of information that's coming out.
And look, it does have an effect over time.
It doesn't always have the effect they want, but it does have an effect over time.
I just want to start.
I want to start before I get to this.
You know what?
Let me do an ad first before I get deep into it.
Let us talk about Ring.
We love Ring.
It is an incredible system for keeping your home safe.
It's so cool.
First of all, they have these cameras, camera doorbells anywhere you are, anywhere you are.
If somebody comes to the door, whether it's a delivery man or a guy in a hockey mask with a butcher knife, you can look at him on your phone and say, ah, yeah, that's UPS.
No, that's the guy from Friday the 13th.
And you can decide whether to let this guy in or whether to call the police or whatever you want to do.
You can talk to him anywhere you are.
Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer.
And you might already know about the smart video doorbells.
They also have the floodlight cam that is activated through motion.
Anyone steps on your property, the lights go on, and you got them.
You can see them right there.
It chases people away in and of itself.
As a listener, you have a special offer on a Ring starter kit available right now with a video doorbell and the motion activated floodlight cam.
The starter kit has everything you need to start building a ring of security around your home.
Go to ring.com slash clavin.
That's ring.com/slash clavin.
Anyone comes to your door, wherever you are, you can say to him, how do you spell Clavin?
And if he knows, do not let that guy in.
So, like I said, the Mueller hearing looks like it was a disaster.
And that's important because we're going to talk about that tomorrow when we get more information.
But more important, I want to show you how this thing was set up.
Before I do that, just as a palate cleanser, remember Stormy Daniels?
Remember how the Southern District of New York, the U.S. Attorney, investigated payoffs made by Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet and the other girl's name escapes me?
That they slept with Donald Trump.
They were supposed to not talk about it, but they did talk about it and he paid them off.
And at worst, at the very worst, this would have been some kind of campaign violation.
But at the end of that investigation, at the end of that investigation, it seemed like there would be no more indictments, no more complaints, no problems for Donald Trump.
The Washington Free Beacon has put together this beautiful montage of the run-up to that investigation on the news.
Here's just a little bit of it.
This is where it ends for this president.
Many legal analysts have said that the Manhattan office of the Justice Department, the Southern District of New York, poses the real threat to the president.
He's not out of legal hot water.
There are a number of investigations.
Southern District of New York.
We're looking into the Trump organization.
Is there something there?
If our prosecutor is looking at everything you ever did, probably not.
Could Trump Order be in trouble?
You can see sort of the dominoes falling.
And as far as that 10 years in the Trump organization, that is where all the bodies are buried.
The Southern District of New York might offer more trouble to Trump in the Trump orbit than even the special counsel's investigation.
If they come out with some stuff, he is done.
Forget Mueller.
Forget about Mueller.
Russia collusion, whatever.
What's happening in the Southern District of New York is an existential crisis.
The Southern District poses an existential threat.
An existential threat.
Existential threat.
A greater existential threat.
I think Trump should be really nervous.
He's in big trouble.
Porsche is basically saying in the Southern District of New York, you're screwed.
That was the Southern District of New York.
Now, I play that.
A lot of that was from MSNBC, but still, not all of it was.
I play that because I also want to play the build-up to the Mueller investigation on Good Morning America, where Clinton hack George Stephanopoulos masquerades as a journalist.
Here is the build-up to the Mueller testimony this morning.
Just moments from now, Robert Mueller heads to Capitol Hill for that high-stakes hearing.
The big question, what will it mean for impeachment?
Mueller's moment.
The special counsel about to face off with lawmakers and answer questions about the Russia investigation for the first time.
Five hours of testimony about to start on Capitol Hill.
What will Mueller say about Russia, the president, and possible crime?
A consequential day on Capitol Hill.
Let's take a look at the hearing rumor.
Robert Mueller will appear today.
He's going to take questions for the first time from two House committees on his nearly two-year investigation into Russia's interference in our elections and ties to the Trump campaign.
Yeah, well, in just a short time, Robert Mueller will be sitting right here behind me, facing off with lawmakers in this high-stakes hearing, now two years in the making.
Over five hours, he will be grilled by 63 lawmakers.
For Democrats, this is a chance for them to bring the Mueller report to life, to show the American people what they feel is the president's vast misconduct.
For Republicans, the opposite, a chance to highlight what they believe clears the president.
Either way, what we see in this room here today will likely be a turning point in the fight to impeach.
This morning, the moment Democrats have been waiting for.
It's a turning point.
It's an existential crisis.
It's over for this president.
It's unbelievable.
Again and again and again, these guys, it's like, you know, do you know you ever hear the term hoist with your own petard?
A petard is a bomb, and what would happen is when you would like the bomb if it blew up in your head, your hand blew you off the ground, you were hoist with your own petard.
These guys, I've constantly, I mean, I love it because it is comical, but this is absurd.
And I just to add one more thing.
Well, let me add two things to this.
First, a new poll comes out from, I believe it was Gallup, that showed that what people are concerned about, the thing that most people are concerned about, is immigration, illegal immigration.
So Trump is making inroads, despite the fact that this is what these guys are talking about.
People are now more worried about what he's worried about than what the Democrats are worried about.
You know, nobody, well, I have to say, the second thing was poor leadership, the government and poor leadership, but who knows what that means.
We're all worried about that.
We're just worried about it from different angles.
So then, just to still, this is just the buildup.
I just want to do the buildup to this.
The other thing was a report that was in all the major outlets.
The DOJ tells Mueller to limit testimony to his report.
This was from Politico.
The Justice Department argues that anything outside the report is covered by presidential privilege.
So Bill Barr sent a letter, the Justice Department sent a letter to Mueller saying, don't talk about anything except what's in your report, which is what Mueller had said he was going to do anyway.
Okay.
So now, now the head of the Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler, comes out and says this is just proof of a cover-up.
This is Cut 13.
I think it's incredibly arrogant of the department to try to instruct him as to what to say.
It's part of the ongoing cover-up by the administration to keep information away from the American people.
This is a big cover-up.
This is incredible.
The DOJ is telling him what to say.
Now, here's Bill Barr, head of the DOJ, the Attorney General, on special report telling how that came about.
14.
He intended to stick with the public report and not go beyond that.
And in conversations with the department, his staff was reiterating that that was their position.
And they asked us for guidance in writing to explain or to tell them what our position was.
So we responded in writing.
The department sent the guidance they had requested.
So Mueller actually requested something?
Yes.
It's like a complete non-story.
I mean, it's like everything is a scandal until the truth comes out.
And of course, the thing is, the thing reporting the scandal, the story reporting the scandal, is put out on Twitter and it gets five gazillion retweets as the Democrats pass it around and then the correction disappears.
I mean, that clip is the only place I've seen that is on Brett Baer's show.
So the fact that this was just something that Mueller asked for clarity on, what are the rules about this?
And Barr gave him the rules.
All right.
So then we're going to get to the hearing itself and more.
We've got more to talk about.
But first, let's talk about Noom.
I know that when I'm talking, it's very distracting that I just look so great.
And the fact is, I exercise constantly.
I watch what I eat.
And I need things to help me with discipline.
And Noom is an exceptional app that really will help you discipline your mind, right?
It's not a diet.
It's not a program.
It just will help you to discipline your mind and give you advice on how to get forward.
It's a habit-changing solution that helps users learn to develop a new relationship with food through personalized courses.
It's based on psychology, and Noom teaches you why you do the things you do and arms you with the tools to break the bad habits and replace them with better habits.
It's based on a cognitive behavioral approach, and it works.
I've been using it.
It actually is great.
Noom's not a diet.
It's a healthy and easy-to-stick to way of life.
If you go off track, it doesn't shame you.
It just gives you tips to help you to get back on the horse so you can stay healthy.
You don't have to change everything in one day.
Small steps make for big progress.
Sign up for your trial today at noom, n as in Nancy, O O M as in Mary.com slash Clavin.
Visit noom.com slash Clavin to start your trial today.
That's noom.com slash Clavin, the last weight loss program you will need.
And of course, the most important thing you need is you need to know how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Let me give you the entire hearing, all the substance of the hearing in three clips.
All right.
Three clips give you the entire substance of the hearing.
Jerry Nadler tries to get Barr to say, you know, and again, Barr tries to get Mueller to say that essentially Trump is guilty and that's what the report means.
Here's the exchange.
And remember, you know, they're making fun of Mueller because he stutters around a lot and he seems lost.
But I think part of it is that he's just trying to keep within the limits of the report.
And part of it is that he seems to have been a figurehead who didn't do the actual investigating.
So here's Nadler getting what the Democrats so desperately want.
Reading from page two of volume two of your report that's on the screen, you wrote, quote, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.
Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment, close quote.
Now, does that say there was no obstruction?
No.
In fact, you were actually unable to conclude the president did not commit obstruction of justice.
Determined But Not Exonerated00:04:07
Is that correct?
Well, we at the outset determined that when it came to the president's culpability, we needed to go forward only after taking into account the OLC opinion that indicated that a president, a sitting president, cannot be indicted.
So the report did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
All right, so it did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice.
Now, that's everything basically the Democrats are going to get out of this.
Now, here is the Republican side.
And I mean, I'm talking about what people are looking at.
I don't know how many people are watching this.
I suspect not that many.
But here is Doug Collins.
Here's Doug Collins asking about Russian collusion, which is, remember, what this whole thing was supposed to be about.
Was your investigation curtailed or stopped or hindered?
No.
Were you or your team provided any questions by members of Congress with a majority ahead of your hearing today?
No.
Is it true the evidence gathered during your investigation, given the questions that you have just answered, is it true the evidence gathered during your investigation did not establish that the president was involved in the underlying crime related to Russian election interference as stated in volume one, page seven?
We found insufficient evidence of the president's culpability.
So that would be a yes.
Pardon?
That would be a yes.
Sorry.
This is an existential threat to the presidency.
Nobody tried to obstruct the investigation and they didn't find any evidence of collusion.
That's it.
That's it.
But on this one thing, now remember, this whole thing is because the Democrats, and remember, the Democrats live within the media bubble just like the Republicans do.
So the Democrats just have their imagination fed back to them all the time.
If they believed in green dragons eating the Empire State Building, the media would say that's what was happening.
And it would shock them to find out that everyone in New York is looking at the Empire State Building and there's no green dragons.
So in other words, they don't know.
They don't know this.
What they think is that we read the report, but we didn't get the report.
We're not smart enough to get the report.
We need the visuals.
We need it on TV.
We're not going to read the book.
We need to see the movie.
They keep saying this.
They keep actually using those terms.
Okay, so now there's no, nobody tried to instruct.
You know, this is what Trump keeps saying.
No obstruction, no collusion, no obstruction, no collusion.
There was no obstruction and there was no collusion.
So that's the end of that.
But just in this one point, that he was not exonerated.
John Ratcliffe really went after him on this.
And listen to this clip.
Your report, and today you said that at all times the special counsel team operated under, was guided by, and followed Justice Department policies and principles.
So which DOJ policy or principle sets forth a legal standard that an investigated person is not exonerated if their innocence from criminal conduct is not conclusively determined?
Can you repeat the last part of that question?
Yeah.
Which DOJ policy or principle set forth a legal standard that an investigated person is not exonerated if their innocence from criminal conduct is not conclusively determined?
Where does that language come from, Director?
Where is the DOJ policy that says that?
Let me make it easier.
Can you give me an example other than Donald Trump, where the Justice Department determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined?
I cannot, but this is a unique story.
Okay, well, you can't.
Time is short.
I've got five minutes.
Let's just leave it at you can't find it because I'll tell you why.
It doesn't exist.
Of course it doesn't exist.
The principle that you have not been exonerated does not exist in law.
Accused and Abused00:10:46
I mean, think about it for yourself, right?
You're accused of some horrible thing you didn't do, right?
You go to trial.
They either find that you are not guilty or you're guilty.
You either did it or you didn't, right?
You're innocent if they can't prove it.
That's the standard.
That's the legal standard.
It is so important.
It is such an important legal standard because you can ruin anybody with innuendo.
You can charge anybody with anything.
As I always say, you can indict a hamp sandwich.
You can charge anybody with anything.
How would it be if you got charged of some terrible thing and they said, well, we couldn't prove you were guilty, but you're not exonerated.
You never do that.
You never do it, right?
You say, not guilty.
I was found not guilty.
And even if it's a miscarriage of justice, you are innocent until proved guilty, all right?
So this whole thing is just, talk about being hoisted with your own petar.
This just blew up in the Democrats' face.
I mean, I was going to come on.
I didn't know whether the hearing was going to start before I came on.
I was going to come on and tell you it was going to blow up because I read the report.
There's nothing they can get out of this except for him saying something that he shouldn't be saying.
You know, like, oh, yes, I think he's guilty, but I couldn't do anything about it, which would be absurd.
I mean, it would just be an absurd thing for him to say.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, there are new polls coming out, an NPR PBS News Hour Maris poll, which shows that the policies of the Democrats, the actual thing that we are voting on, because this is trash, this is a hoax, the actual thing we're voting on, the people hate Democrat ideas on health care for illegals.
62% say it's a bad idea, including 47% of moderate Democrats, 67% of independents.
67% are opposed to the Democratic plan to decriminalize illegal border crossing, with 47% of Democrats, 68% of independents, and 63% of minority voters opposing the left-wing push for open borders.
And 37% of progressive Democrats also agree that decriminalizing border crossing this is a bad idea.
And, you know, by the way, Trump's approval ratings are rising.
And those are, so far, the latest poll I saw was an approval rating just of adults.
When they start to talk about voters, I think his approval rating is rising even more.
Let's take a quick visit to our favorite place, the New York Times op-ed page, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
One of the knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row, Thomas Friedman, is finally waking up to what they're almost not allowed to say in the pages of the New York Times, that this woke stuff, this leftist stuff, this socialist stuff is a bad idea.
When I drilled down on people and said, why do you feel Trump's going to win?
I kept bumping up against the Democratic debates when they heard people talking about decriminalizing people who enter the country illegally, that act.
And I personally think you should have to ring the doorbell when you come into our country.
That was a position Julian Castro.
And many people seem to, some people there seem to agree with.
I don't think giving away health care to illegal immigrants is an automatic thing.
I think it's something we really better be thinking about, especially when you consider the health care needs and demands of Americans like veterans, for instance.
And I think taking away the private health care of 250 million Americans who are one way or another covered by that, I'm replacing it for Medicare with all.
That may be a good ultimate goal.
But that's something you really want to very gradually build up to.
And I think that just shocked a lot of people.
It shocked a lot of moderate Democrats.
And certainly was probably a real shock to some of those independents, moderate Republicans, and suburban women whom you're going to need to win.
And my main point, Anderson, was this.
You want a revolution?
I'll give you a revolution.
Four more years of Donald Trump.
You should see the look, if you're listening to this, the look on Anderson Cooper's face, like he's like he's watching the world explode and there's not a damn thing he can do about it.
But I mean, really, really, there's the news, right?
The policies they're proposing, the real things that are happening.
And then there's the news, which is this fantasy that the Democrats have that is broadcast, dutifully broadcast.
I don't even know sometimes whether the media is broadcasting the fantasies of the Democrats or the Democrat fantasies are guiding them or being piped into the Democrats from the media.
In other words, I don't know which one is doing the imagining, but it is an imaginary world.
It's an imaginary America because they haven't been paying attention to what people want all this time.
You know what else is blowing up?
The Me Too movement.
And this is kind of a shame because I do think women are mistreated.
Although I also think, you know, if you want to go to work, if you want to say I'm equal to men and I want to go to work in the office, yes, it behooves men, especially powerful men, to treat you with respect.
We should all treat one another with respect, of course.
But also, you're going to have to stand up for yourself.
You can't be both a helpless female who needs to be rescued and a strong independent woman who wants to go to work.
You can't be both.
You've got to be able to say to a guy, get your hands off me, stop chasing me around the desk.
We're not doing this.
I mean, that is the thing that goes on.
And they want to get rid of this Me Too thing because why?
Because all the power centers, all the power centers are left-wing.
So the New Yorker, Jane Mayer, publishes a piece saying Senator Al Franken, who was resigned after like eight women said he was been groping them and kissing them when they didn't want to be groped and kissed.
He resigned.
He shouldn't have resigned.
It was a hit job by the right.
It was a hit job by Sean Hannity.
It was Sean Hannity who forced him to do all this stuff.
And as Molly Hemingway points out, Jane Mayer is the same person who spewed all this garbage at Brett Kavanaugh about stuff that he, you know, he was running rape gangs and he was doing all this terrible stuff.
And that's the same, same person.
The problem that they have, the problem that they have, is that elites abuse people.
It's not just women, because if they're gay elites, they abuse guys and the female and the women working for the elites, like Jeffrey Epstein, had a couple of powerful women going out there and bringing women to him.
So it's not just male or female.
It is power versus less power.
Believe me, Epstein was not messing with the children of millionaires.
He wasn't getting the girls from Park Avenue who were 15.
He was getting 15 year olds who couldn't defend themselves, who had nowhere to go.
I want to show you something.
And I do this.
I want to say this is the actress Olivia Munn.
And I don't want to pick on Olivia Munn.
It's not about that.
It's just about how blind people are to their power, how blind people are to where they are and who they are.
Let's just, she goes off on Me Too, right?
And suddenly Me Too is not so much fun because who's it taking out?
It's taking out Hollywood people.
It's taking out media people.
It's taking out powerful people, many, many of them on the left.
Remember, the left runs the media.
I mean, think about this.
We have had many, many more.
The conservatives, Republicans have had many, many more Supreme Court picks than the Democrats.
The Supreme Court has been liberal for years.
Why is that?
Because the media controls so much of the atmosphere that the right is afraid to deal with them too.
And the right has its elites as well as the left.
And it's elites who are sticking together against the rest of us.
So Olivia Munn is talking about Me Too and the fact that a lot of people who mistreat women are getting away with it and not being accused at all.
You know, we have stuff with, you know, the afflex, both of them.
And they just keep going and hoping that, you know, nobody's going to find out.
We've got, you know, Tarantino, who admitted to abusive behaviors on set and also admitted to knowing what Harvey Weinstein was doing.
Yeah, you know, if we get enough people to join on board and do his movies, we all just kind of keep moving forward.
And, you know, for me, I think the frustrating thing that has always been there, and as you see it happening still, is that, you know, when most people mess up, we have to go to the back of the line and earn our way back up.
But then there are these certain men who, when they mess up, they kind of go, oh, sorry, my bad.
And then just resume their place in line.
And the thing is that, not that they're not incredibly talented in their own right, but when you are given the opportunity to have any kind of power and you abuse that power, I believe that you immediately lose all positioning and that you don't get to have that power anymore.
And you need to make room for the other people who can come in and have an opportunity to be great directors or writers or producers or actors.
And that, you know, the abusers need to go to the back of the line.
And, you know, redemption is possible, but you got to earn it just like everybody else.
So there's an obviously lovely, intelligent, articulate woman speaking with a lot of honesty about powerful people in the industry and how they've gotten away with Me Too.
Now here she is promoting and discussing one of these Marvel Universe movies that I can't stand.
And she, what's the name of her character, guys?
Cylock Cylock.
All right, so her name is Cylock.
And she talks about the fact that the director and the writer didn't know enough about her character.
When I was doing X-Men, I was actually surprised that the director and the writer didn't even know that Cylock had a twin brother.
And I had to talk to them about a lot of different things about Cylock and some other parts of the world that they didn't know.
And that, as a fan, was very frustrating.
Okay.
Now, the director of that film is Brian Singer.
Brian Singer, who's I think directed something like five of these films and has been repeatedly, repeatedly accused of passing around little boys at parties where the gay mafia in Hollywood pass around little boys.
He's been repeatedly accused of this.
He was thrown off a bohemian rhapsody because of the controversy.
Once it got above the level where it might have hurt the picture, he was hired for it, but he was thrown off it.
And her problem with him is he didn't know enough about Cylock.
Okay.
So it's all I'm saying is powerful people commit these abuses and they blend into the woodwork.
You don't see them when they're a powerful person.
Again, here's an honest woman.
She's speaking out about a lot of people who could hurt her in the industry.
So I'm not attacking her.
I'm just saying it vanishes.
It vanishes in front of you when it's part of the power that you're involved in.
And that's why Me Too has become so unhappy.
Let me just end.
I've gone long and it's going to cut back on the mailbag, but I'll be back on the conversation later on.
I'll tell you about that in a minute.
But let me just end with a speech that Senator Josh Hawley made for the National Conservative Conference, where he talks about what the real division in this country is.
And I want to make sure we get the right one.
This is cut seven.
Powerful Abuses Vanish00:02:01
For years, the politics of both left and right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.
This class lives in the United States, but they identify as citizens of the world.
They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.
And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places.
Things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties.
The priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.
Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.
On economics, this consensus favors globalization.
Closer and closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms.
The boundaries between America and the rest of the world should fade and eventually vanish.
The goal is to build a global consumer economy, one that will provide an endless supply of cheap goods, most of them made with cheap labor overseas, but funded by American dollars.
So he was immediately attacked because cosmopolitanism is something that's been used in the past to attack Jews.
But the thing is, the attack on Jews was unfair.
The attack on cosmopolitanism is not unfair.
The point is, however, that we are getting the news from large corporations, from the elite, from the powerful.
We are getting the news from the people with the biggest motivation to lie.
And yes, most of the time that serves the Democrats, but there is a large swath of the Republican Party that is in that same boat and has been paddling in that same direction, albeit a little slower, over time.
That's the news.
That is the real news.
Everything else is just what they're trying to convince you of.
Moral Judgments and Sense00:11:06
I'm going to go to the mailbag and I'm running out of time.
I'm running out of time.
But we're going to have the next episode of the conversation later today at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
I'll answer all your other questions, and I guarantee my responses will change your life, possibly for the better.
And they'll all be exactly correct.
And the important thing, the real thing that you care about is that Alfonso Rachel will be the host of the show.
And he is always great, always terrific to listen to.
If you subscribe, go to dailywire.com and subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks for the year, and then you can ask your questions, and I will answer them all 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation.
Let's take a break.
And then we will have the mailbag mailbag.
All right, from Dave.
All hell, Clavin, Supreme Leader of the Multiverse.
Thank you.
Much deserved.
My parents were married for nearly 32 years prior to my father filing for divorce and getting married to a longtime coworker less than a year later.
My two siblings and I are all adults with our own lives, but in the aftermath of my parents' divorce, my sister in particular hasn't seen or spoken to my father in years.
As a practicing Christian, I believe in the commandment to honor your father and mother.
I've been trying for some time to convince my father and sister to mend fences, largely to no avail.
I find this personally exhausting, but I don't want to see their lack of a relationship continue for years to come.
How much responsibility should I take in trying to bring them to the table and how much responsibility should be theirs?
Thanks very much.
And keep up the great work.
The answer is none.
None of this is your responsibility and none of it really is your business.
You know, one of the things about this, you know, one of the things I've noticed in sometimes having debates with people who read the Bible differently than I do, who read it absolutely literally and think that the entire thing is one word of God, which is not what I believe, and I'll try and talk about that later on.
But one of the things I find is that a lot of times when you get to the parts where Jesus tells you to mind your own business, which he does repeatedly, saying that him who is without sin throw the first stone, judge not lest you be judged, take the plank out of your eye, don't worry about the moat in your brother's eye.
All these things.
Suddenly people get very legalistic.
They know exactly what Jesus thinks about homosexuality, which he never mentioned.
But when he says something direct, suddenly it doesn't quite mean that.
It means don't make hypocritical judgments.
It means, well, Jewish law said, you know, the woman brought an adultery.
It should be too big.
No.
I mean, Jesus is the word of God.
He's speaking.
He knows what he's saying.
He knows that what you're going to hear.
He means it.
He means it.
Judge not lest you be judged.
Worry about the plank in your own eye.
If you're worried about the fact about honoring your father and your mother, honor your father and mother in ways that are appropriate and in ways that don't destroy the people around you or the people around you.
But if your sister has a beef with your father, and by the way, she may be siding with your mother or talking to your mother.
Ultimately, your job is to act as you see fit as a Christian.
Your job is to act as you see fit as a Christian.
The thing about this advice, judge not lest you be judged, take the plank out of your own eye instead of the moat in your brother's eye.
Let him who is without sin throw the first stone, it's great advice.
It will make you so much happier.
It will improve your life.
It will take the burden of judgment, which is not yours to make.
It will take it off your shoulders.
It doesn't mean that you can't make moral judgments.
It doesn't mean that you can't prevent crimes or see people or get angry at people who commit crimes.
What it means is you cannot judge other people's relationship to God and what necessarily they should be doing in a place where they have the right to make the free choices of their own lives.
You will be so much happier if you leave this alone and be good to your sister, be good to your father, be good to your mother, honor them all, treat them all with love and respect, and leave them alone.
It's great advice.
It's so much in the gospel, it's great advice, and people do everything they can not to hear it.
All right, from Patrick, during the backstage special with Senator Ted Cruz, you mentioned how Game of Thrones' biggest flaw was that it had no vision.
Actually, this vision was contradictory.
Now that Game of Thrones is over, HBO will be launching an adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials book series.
It has an overarching vision, but devolves into atheistic propaganda urging for the killing of God in order to create a republic of heaven on earth.
That is true.
It is a very angry, I find not very appealing book.
A lot of people think it is this wonderful, wonderful children's story, but I find I read the entire trilogy of his dark materials and I found it angry, small, pinched, and nasty.
First book was the best of them, but it just got angrier and angrier as atheists tend to do.
So, Patrick says, I'm an aspiring fantasy writer myself.
My question for you is: how do writers establish a vision for their works without devolving into simplistic propaganda for a particular belief system?
Thanks so much.
Love the show and your work.
Well, listen, it's a great question.
I mean, only Shakespeare does it perfectly.
Only Shakespeare so disappears into his worlds that you really can't really necessarily understand what Shakespeare believes.
When people say Shakespeare says, what they mean is a character in Shakespeare says.
The rest of us all have a problem with this.
But the thing that you have to do is, first of all, the problem with Game of Thrones is that the author's vision of metaphysics makes no sense.
It makes no sense in the context of his story, right?
He doesn't believe that there's a supernatural world and yet supernatural things happen.
He doesn't believe there's a God, but things happen that could only happen if there was a God.
He said that he's an atheist, and it just makes no sense that people can worship the Lord of light and come back from the dead, that people come back from the dead and say, well, there was nothing there.
If there was nothing there, where'd you come back from?
That doesn't make any sense either.
So that was my problem with it, simply that in the context of the story, it made no sense.
You want your story to make sense in its own context.
And in order for that to happen, you have to think through what it is that you see.
What do you see about life?
You don't have to put into, you know, your characters don't have to tell us what you think about life.
You don't have to, you don't have to even have anybody mention what you think about life.
You simply have to build a world that has integrity, a world that where the rules simply don't change and the rules are the same for everyone.
And in that society, just like in real life, people can have a million different opinions.
You can have people who say there is no God.
You can have people who say there is a God.
But whatever happens in the story, it has to make sense.
And that will convey a vision and it will be your vision because you're the person creating the world.
So, you know, it's really more a question of knowing how you think the world works.
How do you think the world works?
This is one of my problems with Christian fiction, right?
The world works in such a way that a series of accidental incidents can kill an innocent person, an innocent child.
That's something that happens in real life.
And if you can't contain that within your vision, you're not, I'm not saying you have to write about that, but if you can't contain that fact within your vision, it's not a good vision.
It's not a vision that actually describes the world.
You want a vision big enough and ugly enough and true enough to describe the world as it is, but that doesn't mean you can't also say that there's a moral universe, which I think is also pretty obvious, that there's a moral universe that actions represent.
It is if you punch somebody in the face.
I mean, if you punch somebody in the face, that has a different moral connotation than if you rescue a child from a fire.
And if you can't write in such a way that you convey that, you're not going to be able to write in a way that anybody understands.
I remember a while back, I think it was the New York Times, it was probably other leftist outlets as well, saying, why can't we write a story in which abortion is a happy ending?
The answer is, it's abortion.
That's why.
The world is a moral universe.
You can't transgress that moral universe and write something that's true.
You can write an evil story that has evil logic to it because evil exists in the world, but you want to know what you think, what your vision of the world is, and then try and make your story make sense and it will reflect your vision.
You don't need people preaching about it.
All right, from Mariah.
Lord Claven, I've been watching your show for two years.
I finally became a subscriber.
Good for you.
I'm a 24-year-old Christian woman.
I've been married to my best friend for four years.
We have a wonderful marriage, and we're both very much in love.
In 2017, he joined the Navy.
He was deployed for the first time on submarines, so we hardly get to email.
It's very random when we do.
He was recently in a foreign country for about a week.
It was hard for me to see him traveling the world without me, but I was happy for him.
Last week, he went back underway, and two days after, I found an email on his account about a tattoo appointment.
I looked at his photos, knowing he would take a picture if he got one, and apparently he got a tattoo and never mentioned it at all.
This is irritating because we usually tell each other everything and he has several tattoos already.
What bothered me is that he lied to me about where he was the day he got it and what he spent his money on while he was there.
Then I found a message on his phone saying it's his last night in town.
This is obviously a written message, not a voice message.
His last night in town asked, do you work tonight?
Beautiful.
There were no other messages, so I have no context for the message.
I don't know if he sent it or one of his friends did.
I'm going back and forth between knowing he's not that kind of person and we don't have that kind of marriage to seeing very suspicious behavior right in front of my eyes.
Since we have been married, he has never once given me even the slightest reason to believe he would or could ever cheat on me.
I know he deserves at least the benefit of the doubt, but I really need your advice.
Oh, wise one.
Your show is amazing and I've learned so much from you.
Yeah, well, you may not like what you're about to learn right now.
Look, what it sounds like, I don't have, I can't prove this, but just from reading your letter, what it sounds like to me is he got out among his Navy pals, he got into that society and started to act according to that society and not according to your marriage.
That's what it sounds like to me.
The best thing to do, you're not going to be able to solve this while he's away.
The best thing to do is to wait till he comes back and then take this to a disinterested third party, like a pastor, and talk to him about it in front of the pastor.
If you have someone who runs your church, sit down and talk with him about this because it does sound to me like he's doing stuff he shouldn't be doing.
He certainly shouldn't be getting tattoos without at least telling you, especially if he knows that that's something that bothers you.
And that text message sounds very damning to me.
It sounds very damning to me.
So it seems like you are justified in worrying that what he did was he stepped out of the world of the marriage, which held him in one set of moral responsibility, one set of relationships and moral responsibilities.
And he stepped into the world of the Navy, which swept him away into another set of relationships, which made him feel like he had other responsibilities, maybe to act like these guys were acting and not as he knew he should act.
That's something that you really need to address.
You can't let it go.
You can't be blind to it.
Now that you know, you can't unknow it.
So take it before your pastor and make sure you get straight answers.
And you don't want to live in doubt.
And you don't want to be cheated on and you don't want to be betrayed without your knowing it.
You want to know the world you're living in.
So the truth is knowing is better than not knowing.
So take it to your pastor and find out what you think.
You know, the rest of these questions, great questions, but I ran out of time.
I just went too long.
Questions For The Mailbag00:00:55
And so come to the conversation this afternoon at 7 p.m. Eastern.
That's 4 p.m. Pacific.
And I will be answering more questions there.
And of course, we'll have the mailbag again next week.
Be there at the conversation, and we'll be back tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Ngulo.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.