Ep. 754’s When the Left is Right skewers Trump’s divisive "king of Israel" retweet, mocking Jewish leaders’ overreactions while exposing media bias in framing it as anti-Semitic. Andrew Klavan slams the two-party system’s binary trap, warning that leftist "virtue signaling" and woke corporate activism (like Gillette’s flop) hollow out capitalism’s moral core, citing Friedman’s principles as misapplied. He contrasts Ford’s worker-friendly model with Amazon’s automation, urging community over global abstraction, then pivots to Matt Best’s Thank You for My Service, where the Black Rifle Coffee founder rejects PTSD stereotypes and critiques political meddling in military ops. The episode ends by framing Trump’s appeal as a clash of values—not people—against Democratic extremism like open borders and the Green New Deal, leaving Klavan’s call for principled conservatism hanging as the only antidote to ideological decay. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump made some silly comments about Jews recently, and furious Jewish Americans have sworn to overreact by voting for Democrats who want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
In an absurd offhand remark, Trump told reporters he thought any Jew who voted for a Democrat would demonstrate, quote, either total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty, unquote.
The comment absolutely shocked observers who had believed until now that Trump was a careful and considered speaker who would never utter a foolish phrase without fully thinking it through.
Those observers are named Cyrus Barndinger and Virgil Snopes, and both men live in Florida.
Jewish Americans struck back immediately.
Harvey Bernstein, president of the Association of Jews who are nowhere near as smart as everyone always says they are, issued a statement saying, quote, how dare President Trump make this sort of insignificant error?
As a self-destructive and none-too-bright Jew, I plan to seize on this irrelevant bagatelle to justify voting for a Democrat Party that is trying to destroy the state of Israel and that can't even pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism without throwing in a lot of Hazarai that makes the whole thing meaningless, unquote.
Mr. Bernstein then punctuated his comments by firing a pistol into his foot and slamming his forehead repeatedly into a brick wall.
Trump further infuriated Jews by idiotically retweeting the fulsome praise of a radio host who said Israelis love Trump, quote, like he's the king of Israel or the second coming of God, unquote.
In an indignant statement released to a group of reporters who despise him, Bernard Mendelssohn, president of the National Association of Jews dedicated to taking this whole self-hatred thing and really running with it, said, quote, when the president who moved the American embassy to Jerusalem retweets stupid self-praise, I know it's time to give my vote to Democrats who sympathize with my homicidal enemies, unquote.
Meanwhile, the New York Times, a former newspaper, assigned three reporters to misinterpret Trump's remarks until they sort of sound vaguely anti-Semitic.
They're still hard at work on that story.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
So, in general, I'm a big fan of the two-party system.
Two-party system arranges our arguments into terms we can understand and keeps radicals on the sidelines while the middle-of-the-road majority argues things out among ourselves.
But occasionally, that system stumbles and has to be revamped, either with a major third party that ultimately eliminates one of the other parties, or by a reinvention of one of the parties that amounts to pretty much the same thing.
Right now, our two-party system is struggling.
In part, that represents something real that happened within the country.
The center-right consensus that held together since World War II has collapsed, and the parties are scrambling to find and redefine the new parameters of our arguments.
But a second problem is that a 24-7 news cycle has made campaigning for president a year-round event.
And that's a serious setback for intelligent debate.
Here's why.
An election is a binary choice.
There's no getting around this.
One candidate is going to win over the other, and if you don't vote for one candidate, you've essentially cast your vote for the other.
That's why the never-Trump conservatives who didn't vote for Trump have either wisely changed their minds or are still trying to rewrite reality to make it sound like they didn't make a moral mistake, which they did.
But of course, just because an election is a binary choice, that doesn't mean every solution to our problems involves a binary choice.
And if we're always campaigning instead of sometimes rethinking and debating, we never get to examine the issues from every side.
Here's an example, guns.
I think a thoughtful conservative might reasonably hold the opinion that we need better systems to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people.
Personally, I think crazy people who show signs of being violent should be institutionalized, and that would solve the gun problem.
But it's hard to make that argument when the other party wants to disarm America so it can impose its destructive European-style top-down governance on us without our resistance.
If we're always in a life-and-death election struggle with those idiots, it makes it hard to even think about compromise.
Prison reform, another example.
Right now, we have the Lock'em Up Party and the Let Em Go Party.
Of those two, I'm for Lock'em Up, and that's the way I'll vote.
But I wish there were a party called Lock'em Up, then institute specific programs to reform slum life so that it doesn't constantly produce criminals.
That's a discussion we could have during a non-election year if there were such a thing as a non-election year, which there no longer is.
Elections are binary black and white choices, but life is mostly gray.
And if we conservatives don't discuss the gray areas intelligently among ourselves, the left's simplistic, self-aggrandizing sanctimony will begin to sound good to a lot of young people who don't know the difference between virtue signaling and virtue.
And then we're lost.
And I'll show you some more about what I mean.
But first, let us talk about NetSuite.
When you look at me, you're not just seeing a beautiful version of humanity.
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I am a self-owned business.
I write, I produce things.
I sell my services to the Daily Wire, and that's how I run my life.
I'm an independent business.
And when you have an independent business, you have to pay attention to the numbers.
You got to know what's going in.
You got to know what's going out.
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And the problem is that growing businesses find they don't know their numbers because there's a hodgepodge of business systems.
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That's netsuite.com slash clavin to download your free guide, seven key strategies to grow your profits at netsuite.com slash clavin.
And the first thing they'll tell you is how to spell clavin so you can get the guide.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So finally, they put up backstage.
People were asking me why our backstage live wasn't up for subscribers.
It's up now.
I think it's up for everybody, I believe.
So you can listen to it.
Vision For A Woke Business Roundtable00:15:41
It really was a terrific time.
We all had such a good time.
We were so happy to see the people who came in, the people who bought the VIP ticket and introduced themselves.
It was really wonderful to meet them, and we really appreciated it.
I certainly appreciated it.
The people who came in and who were enjoying what we do here.
You know, I'm sitting here.
I know you're out there and I know I'm talking to you, but we're in a room without getting to hear back from you.
And as I always say, I'd much rather hear from you than hear from me.
I already know what I think.
And we had this discussion backstage.
We were talking about all the candidates.
We were just discussing the election.
It was me and mostly Jeremy.
Ben was in it too a little bit.
But we were discussing why we have all these old people as presidential candidates.
Now, as an official old person myself, I will say that old people are not as old as they used to be.
We exercise, we take care of ourselves.
Our brains stay sharper.
It's great.
You know, I believe that 70 is the new 30, basically.
And so I plan to be around for another 150 years.
But, you know, at some point, at some point, you do want the younger generation to take over.
Even old people want the younger generation to take over, especially, especially from my generation.
My generation sucked.
the baby boomer generation was a terrible generation.
I always say, I wish my generation could die off without taking me with it, you know, because I think we were awful.
We were awful.
Not only did we destroy the culture, but we maintained what we got out of our parents' culture.
Our parents fought the war.
They fought the depression.
They got through all that and they handed us this wealthy, rich country with on top of the world, the most powerful country on earth.
And what did we do?
We were like, we don't want it.
We want to complain.
We don't want to go to Vietnam.
They're shooting at people.
It's terrible.
You can get hurt.
I mean, it was awful.
It was an awful generation.
And we sold you this stuff, drugs, dropping out, getting rid of Western civilization in colleges.
We sold you this stuff that was crap, and we didn't have it ourselves.
We understood to give up drugs.
If you look at the older people, the people who are rich, they get married.
They don't take drugs.
They have kids in wedlock.
They don't have kids out of wedlock.
But we told you, we told younger people, oh, you know, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
That was a baby boomer idea.
That was brilliant.
That was a really brilliant idea.
I mean, it was just, oh, and drugs.
Drugs are great.
They expand your mind.
Terrific.
You know, who got nailed by all those policies?
It was the poor.
Of course it was.
And then you have, you know, and a lot of the poor were black.
And so then you have people saying, oh, this is a bigoted country when it's really the least bigoted country on earth.
It was just bad ideas.
And a lot of those bad ideas came from my generation.
And I'd be happy to see my generation hand over the reins of power to the next generation.
The problem is this new generation has no vision.
They don't have an American vision.
And we did have an American vision.
It just happened to suck.
You know, I mean, that's the thing.
So we had, and we had, you know, guys, I mean, even Reagan wasn't a baby boomer.
He was actually older.
He was the last generation and actually governed like it was the last generation.
And our vision was defined a lot by the Cold War.
It was defined by the Russians.
We thought the Cold War was going to go on forever.
We had no idea that Reagan was actually going to end the Cold War like he said he was.
And when you define things in opposition, when you define your ideas, your vision in opposition, that's a very human tendency, is a very human trait.
But it really does produce problems because it means you don't have to exactly know who you are.
I think conservatives do this with leftists.
We look at leftists and they're so crazy.
They're so stupid.
Their ideas are so bad that we can just make fun of them, but we don't really have to define what it is we believe in except in the most the vaguest terms.
We don't have to define our vision of the future.
It becomes a negative vision.
And I think that's what happened with the Soviet Union.
And when that happens, and when you beat the Soviet Union, when you beat the Nazis, a lot of time their policies become your policies.
I mean, America beat the Nazis and now we're aborting people just like the Nazis did.
You know, oh, is this kid sick?
Is he not going to be perfect?
Let's kill him.
You know, that's a real good Nazi policy.
We have anti-Semitism on the rise again.
We have, you know, we beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Now we're talking about being socialists.
We're talking about adopting the policies that we're fighting so hard when you could see them right in front of you.
When you could see the Soviet Union was a bad place.
It was easy to oppose them.
So we had a vision, but it was, in fact, a negative vision.
And that's why when we turned our attention to our own country and started to say, you know, take drugs, you know, forget, burn the flag, all the stuff that we said during the 60s, we were idiots.
You know, it was really bad stuff.
You have to have a positive vision.
And that's why when I look at some of these candidates, I look at some of the old candidates on the left.
And when I look at Trump too, I mean, I think Trump's vision is a stopgap vision.
You know, a nationalist vision is a stopgap vision.
We're going into a global world.
What is it we need in that global world?
You can't stop that from happening.
It is going to be a global world.
It's going to be a global economy.
But he was right.
There were a lot of problems with that global economy that hadn't been thought out yet.
You know, let's just listen for just a minute to Elizabeth Warren talking about the Green New Deal, because the Green New Deal is there, is the left's idea of a vision, and it's so backward and so ridiculous and so negative.
This is what they are trying to replace the Cold War and World War II with.
Here's how we have to think of this.
We've got to know what the goal is.
This is what the Green New Deal is all about.
It tells us two things.
It tells us that this is an emergency, and it tells us where we got ahead.
And it's a lot like, for me, what it was like for landing on the moon, right?
John F. Kennedy set the goal.
He said, I want to be on the moon.
He said it time that he wanted to do it.
People looked left, looked right, and said, geez, I don't know how we land on the moon.
But what did we do?
We invested in science.
We innovated like crazy.
And we counted on American workers.
We do those three things right here in America.
We can not only clean up our country and clean up our planet, we can actually build a manufacturing future for the United States of America.
And that's good job, Spark.
Bad idea.
And I'll tell you why for a lot of reasons, it's a bad idea.
But one thing is by going to the moon, it was a wonderful thing that we went to the moon.
But have you noticed that was the end of the space program, basically?
We built this, you know, these shuttles.
We didn't do anything with them.
We decided, oh, we're going to make friends with the Russians.
We didn't do anything really moving forward with that.
We haven't really explored Mars the way we should.
Why?
Because the government sucked all of the science, all of the energy out of the private sector.
And it's taken a long time for the private sector to get back in the space game.
That's happening now, and that's going to make a big difference.
But okay, we went to the moon, but going to the moon was, in fact, a positive vision that came out of a negative competition.
In other words, we wanted to beat.
We saw the Russians put up Sputnik and we panicked.
We wanted to show that our system was better than theirs, and that's why we went to the moon.
It was part of a competition.
The idea of building an infrastructure, a manufacturing infrastructure by business, by government cleaning up the environment is an absurdity.
It's an absurdity.
Because first of all, the planet, we're not going to, that's not the way the planet is going to get cleaned up.
The planet is going to get cleaned up when corporations feel that that's something that has to be done.
People feel that it's something that has to be done.
Corporations will do it because otherwise the people won't buy their products.
Government will help.
There will be regulations when there have to be regulations.
The environment belongs to everybody.
So government does have a role to play in saying, you know what, we got to cut down on certain things that we're doing.
I have no problem with that.
I think it's because government has a role to play that the left overemphasizes it, that the left panics and tells us we're all going to die in 12 years.
That's why they do it.
Because government has a role to play.
That's where they put the panic, right?
We don't have to panic.
That's ridiculous.
Within 30 years, I'm sure we'll have the technology to clean up the planet.
And maybe government will have to say, you know, you've got to use some of this stuff like they did with the catalytic converter.
That's fine.
But that's not a vision for the future.
That is a vision so that things don't fall apart.
At its worst, at its worst.
If the Democrats are right about everything in the climate, it's still only a vision for saving things.
We need a vision of who we are and what we want to build and what we want the country to look like.
And that does not come from government.
It never does.
That comes from individuals and it comes up from the bottom.
So here's this thing.
This is the thing that's driving conservatives crazy, all right?
I don't know if you heard about this.
This is this thing that the CEOs put out.
And this is, you know, you've heard, if you've listened to Backstage, you've heard me and Ben argue about this.
It's really interesting.
Ben and I had this kind of ferocious debate in the, not in the backstage live one we did, but the one before that.
And it got a lot of attention.
And now people are suddenly writing about it, although they don't mention us.
And I'm not sure if they got it from us or it just happens to be in the atmosphere.
They're starting to talk about the fact that free marketers, the people who love the free market, and I do love the free market, forgot about values.
They forgot about values and they forgot about national values.
They forgot about the fact that when the free market is going great, but it's destroying the middle of the country and it's destroying the country's manufacturing base, you can't just say, well, you know, move somewhere else and get a job.
You can't just do that.
That is not going to sell.
First of all, it's not going to sell.
It's not a good idea politically.
And it's not moral because you need communities to establish the things that conservatives love.
There will not be the things that conservatives love, like self-governance, if we don't have communities, if we don't have churches, if we don't have clubs, if we don't have neighborhoods where children grow.
Those are the things that we need.
And you can't just say, oh, your community fell apart.
Too bad because somebody in China is making something cheaper.
That is a valueless point of view.
And a free market, I love the free market, but free market comes second to values.
Capitalism comes second to values.
And that's one of the things we have to talk about as right-wingers.
So now people are talking about this.
So there's a new statement out from this thing called the Business Roundtable.
And this is 200 of the CEOs of the biggest companies in America, right?
They put out this business roundtable statement of purpose.
And the headline on it was, Business Roundtable redefines the purpose of a corporation to promote an economy that serves all Americans.
And conservatives went nuts, okay?
Because instead of saying the idea with a corporation is it's supposed to serve the shareholders.
It's supposed to serve the people who own the corporation.
The people who own shares in the corporation want to optimize profits, right?
They want the thing to make the most money it can possibly make.
That's why you take shares in a company.
You don't take shares in General Motors because you want General Motors to change the world, right?
That's ridiculous.
That's not why you do it.
You do it to make money.
But the thing about optimizing profits, it's not the same as maximizing profits, okay?
So this is why I did not go as crazy.
So anyway, let me finish what the business roundtable statement basically said, we're not going to serve shareholders.
We're going to serve, we're going to have a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders, right?
And stakeholders are not just customers and employees and suppliers, but they're also the communities in which we work.
And shareholders, it says ride the caboose.
This is a Wall Street Journal is complaining that it puts shareholders behind stakeholders.
Stakeholders is a leftist, one of those leftist terms that really doesn't mean anything.
It's a way of bullying companies into doing the things, the woke stuff that people like Elizabeth Warren wanted to do.
And the Wall Street Journal says basically the business roundtable is afraid that Elizabeth Warren is going to become president and they're trying to get ahead of the socialism stuff by saying, oh, we're going to do such great stuff.
We're going to be woke.
We're going to be woke.
Well, if it turns out that that's what they're saying, then I agree with the Wall Street Journal and all the other conservatives who are yelling about this.
I do not care about woke companies.
I do not want to watch companies become woke.
That is absolutely nonsense.
I mean, this is the thing that Gillette did.
I'm sure you remember the Gillette shaving thing came out about when Me Too was a big deal.
It was anti-toxic masculinity, and Gillette's slogan is, Gillette, the best a man can get.
So they put out this idiotic commercial about how toxic we all are.
And this was supposed to sell razors.
Here's just a minute of that commercial.
Bullying.
The Me Too movement against sexual harassment.
Toxic masculinity.
Is this the best a man can get?
Is it?
We can't hide from it.
It's been going on far too long.
We can't laugh it off.
Who's the daddy?
What I actually think she's trying to say.
Making the same old excuses.
Boys will be boys.
But something finally changed.
Allegations regarding sexual assault and sexual harassment.
And there will be no going back.
Because we, we believe in the best in men.
Men need to hold other men accountable.
Smile, sweetie.
Come on.
To say the right thing.
To act the right way.
Bro, not cool.
Not cool.
If you're not watching, I just love the picture.
And there are these two girls in these really skimpy bikinis and the guy makes a move on them and another guy says, come on, what are you doing?
The girls are practically naked.
You think, like, you know, I mean, there is a kind of back and forth here that one person can affect the favor of another.
But anyway, I saw that and I thought, Gillette, take your razor and stuff it.
Okay, that was my reaction.
I thought, make me a razor that'll shave my face, tell me it'll get me girls and make me popular or whatever the hell you want to tell me.
But do not sit there and tell me that I have to reform to your idea because there's a Me Too panic going around.
And then I'm supposed to buy your razor.
So of course, it wasn't just me.
It was a lot of people.
They lost $8 billion and they announced that we're now shifting the spotlight, they said, from social issues to local heroes because we want to sell our products.
So if the CEOs of the business roundtable are talking about getting woke, then they're going to find themselves stepping on a board that springs up and hits them in the face, okay?
But there is something else.
I mean, a lot of this is based on the idea, this whole idea, you know, that everything is about the shareholders is a limited idea.
You're not here to maximize profits.
You're here to optimize profits.
The difference is simple.
If I cut everybody's pay at the place that I work, if I just say, all right, I'm paying you all a dollar an hour, okay?
I will maximize profits.
I will maximize profits.
But are the best people going to come to work for me?
No.
Obviously, they're going to go where they get paid more.
If I don't treat them well, they're going to go where they get paid more.
And I'm going to have bad workers.
My product is going to be bad.
My service is going to be bad.
And pretty soon I'll be losing money, right?
And this has been proved again and again.
It's been shown again and again that a good company treats people well.
It treats its customers well, and it treats its workers well.
And that makes for a happy company.
And it makes it for a good company.
I mean, it works all the time.
You know, this is one of the things Hewlett Packard did.
Hewlett Packard said, you know, when bad times come, we're not going to lay off our workers.
We're going to tough it out with our workers.
Friedman's Focus on Results00:15:20
We're going to stick with them.
And that worked.
That really worked.
And it was Carly Fiorina who came in and started to just fire people.
And Hewlett Packard lost something like half its value.
I mean, it just collapsed.
One of the reasons Carly Fiorina is not president today is when she said, I was the CEO of Hewlett Packard.
People said, yeah, but you were a terrible CEO.
And one of the reasons she was a terrible CEO is she abandoned the policy of supporting the workers and sticking by your workers.
And a lot of people who are capitalists, right, a lot of people who are dedicated to capitalism, they just say, hey, hey, you know, if it's a downturn, you've got to lay off your workers.
But it's just not true.
And a lot of this comes from a misreading, I feel, of Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman talked about the fact, one of the things he talked about was that companies are there for the shareholders to make a profit for the shareholders.
And if they say they have some other point of view, some other reason for being, they're lying.
So you shouldn't trust them, right?
And that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
But in his own words, I mean, he did talk about the fact that they are there to make the profit in keeping with the values of the society in which they live and the neighborhood in which they operate.
And this is a big, big deal, right?
I was talking about this earlier this week about how technology has changed, has brought us so much together that the idea of localism is vanishing.
And this is part of the thing that I think we're all noticing.
That we have, you know, you know the moment when I thought Obama, the Democrats were going to lose the next election?
This was way before Trump was in it and way before there were any primaries or anything like this.
But when Barack Obama started talking about transgender people and, oh, you know, transgender, you have got to let transgender children use the restroom that they want to use.
And a lot of people were looking at one another.
And I remember saying to a liberal friend of mine, you know, I think you guys just lost the next election.
And he, of course, went to the liberal place.
Oh, you're a hater.
You hate transgender people.
It's if I even care about transgender people.
I feel for them.
I truly do.
It has nothing to do with that.
It had nothing to do with transgender people at all.
It had to do with my understanding of the Obama administration as an utter and complete failure.
Every policy he had failed.
And so he went to the liberal position of basically dividing us and bringing out ideas and calling people hateful.
And that was supposed to make him virtuous instead of us saying, hey, you know, your Middle East policy has set the world on fire.
Your economic policies have almost killed the comeback we're supposed to have made after the 2008 crash.
We weren't supposed to notice that.
We were supposed to talk about racist cops and transgender people.
And why I said I thought that that was going to make the Democrats lose the election was because it was about a Chicago Paul in Washington, D.C. telling people in Tennessee and Arkansas and Texas and all these other places how they should run their private schools.
It was a violation of federalism and a violation of localism.
The whole point of freedom is we want to run our own lives.
You don't run your own life alone.
You don't run your own life alone.
You run it in community.
You run it in the community you're in.
My community is not the world.
I'm not a citizen of the world.
I'm a citizen of the United States.
I'm a citizen of California and I'm a citizen of the neighborhood that I'm in.
And that's the way I want, there should be more power the closer it gets to me, okay?
And that is the reason, that's the reason that capitalism, when it works, works because it works in a community.
And now that we have global businesses, you have to have, you still have to have local solutions.
You still have to hold, you know, Amazon may be a global business, right?
But when it's in America, doesn't it have to live by America's community standards?
Doesn't it have to be a good citizen of America?
When Mitt Romney said corporations are people and the left started mocking him and picking on him, all the conservatives said, no, he's right.
A corporation is just a collection of people.
People have to behave in keeping with community standards.
That is the whole point.
And, you know, community standards have disappeared.
We see this with pornography.
Remember, the Supreme Court said that pornography should be judged by community standards.
How can you do that if it's all over the internet?
Let's take a look just a minute at Milton Friedman, because Milton Friedman said things that kind of became misinterpreted later on, but he really talked about the values of capitalism.
And here's what he said about the way you tell where values come from.
Let's take a look at Clip 1.
The problem of trying to interpret and analyze a system, either pro or con, in terms of such concepts as the morality of the system or the humanity of the system, whether capitalism is humane or socialism is humane, or moral or immoral.
The problem with that is that moral values are individual.
They are not collective.
Moral values have to do with what each of us separately believes and holds true.
What our own individual values are.
Capitalism, socialism, central planning are means, not ends.
They in and of themselves are neither moral nor immoral, humane nor inhumane.
We have to ask, what are their results?
We have to look at what are the consequences of adopting one or another system of organization.
Friedman is basically saying that values come from individuals.
They come from people.
They come from communities.
And the thing about it, I'm an individualist, but one of the things I've learned over time, because I have moved around a lot over time, is you're not as much of an individualist as you think.
You get married after a certain number of years with your spouse, you change, right?
You change.
You become a little bit more like your spouse or a little bit more of a foil for your spouse.
Your individuality changes.
The borders of our bodies are permeable.
And when you live in a society, you become like that society.
I mean, I've moved all around.
When I lived in England, by the time I left England after seven years, I started smoking again.
I started drinking because that's the way people lived in England.
The people I knew lived that way.
And so I started to live that way.
I got to California and after a few years I started to get healthy again and started to get rid of those English bad habits and started to live more like a Californian, get outdoors more and things like this.
So we're not just individuals.
We actually are part of a community and you have to keep those communities alive.
And you can't sell them down the river to capitalism.
You can't sell them down the river to anybody.
So Friedman talks about the actual results of things.
He says why socialism is so appealing.
This is cut number two.
Socialism, which means government ownership and operation of means of production, has appealed to high-minded, fine people, to people of idealistic views, because of the supposed objectives of socialism, especially because of the supposed objectives of equality and social justice.
Now those are fine objectives.
And it's a tribute to the people of good will that those objectives should appeal to them.
But you have to ask the question, does the system, no matter what its proponents say, produce those results?
And once you look at the results, it's crystal clear that they do not.
Where are social injustices greatest?
Social injustices are clearly greatest where you have central control.
The degree of social injustice and torture in a place like incarceration, in a place like Russia, is of a different order of magnitude than it is in those Western countries where most of us have grown up and in which we have been accustomed to regarding freedom as our natural heritage.
A lot of the kinds of socialism that the Democrats are talking about are not really socialism.
They're simply pillaging the profits of capitalism, which is much different.
It also has its bad points, but it's not quite the same as government taking over the means of productions, which is what socialism is.
But the thing is, it is about results.
But capitalism can have all kinds of different results, right?
Capitalism has results according to the people that it serves, according to the people in the community and according to the definition of that community.
You know, a lot of times we conservatives, we quote, we quote John Adams saying our Constitution is for religious people.
Our Constitution is for religious people.
And really all the founders said that.
And what they meant was the Constitution leaves people so free, so free in their community, that they have to have a moral standard.
They have to have a way of an absolute idea of what the moral standards are so that they can live a moral life even though they're free.
Because if you don't live a moral life, ultimately you won't be free.
If you want to sleep with anybody, eventually you're going to be a cripple.
If you want to take drugs, eventually you're going to need help.
Eventually you're going to be a slave.
That's why the Democrats love free sex.
They love drugs.
It's all great because they will take care of you and they will get all the power.
If you want to be free, you have to live a moral life.
The problem with conservatives when they quote that line, when they quote that line of John Adams, is if people don't believe, they can't believe.
And if they don't believe, then the Constitution isn't working for them anymore.
Okay?
So in other words, we have to have, you cannot have churches without communities.
You can't have communities if you're so committed to a free market that is going to leave those communities in the dust because they can get cheaper stuff from China.
Now, I'll end with this.
The final thing is that when people say these things, they hear Tucker Carlson and Tucker Carlson says, well, we shouldn't have as much.
He's a little bit of a Luddite.
We shouldn't have the technology if it's going to destroy these communities.
The market does know a lot.
The market can't be told what to do and still be a great market, right?
Every time we tell the market what to do, the market actually gets dumber about profits.
So we have to understand that everything we say has a cost.
But a lot of problems, a lot of times when we address problems as a nation and we say we're going to have these national solutions, that's where the problem is.
If you have community solutions, you can actually do a lot of things that you can't do as a nation.
And that's one of the reasons I think that we have to fight back against technology, not by getting rid of technology, but still behaving within our town, within our state, before we start to think about taking our problems to Washington, D.C.
A lot of the problems of the Industrial Revolution were solved by some regulation, child labor laws and workplace safety laws, but they were also solved by guys like Henry Ford, not a nice guy, but who realized that his business would go better if he treated his workers well.
And Amazon is now doing training sessions that mean that their workers will be ready when their warehouses become completely automated.
These are good things.
These are things that government and communities can support.
But we're going to have to start thinking locally because if we don't think locally, then this top, the morality is going to come to us from the top down.
And it's not going to be the morality we like.
It's going to be the morality of power.
And that is what we're trying to stave off.
If, if the Democrats, if the left talks in terms of values and we talk in terms of money, they're going to win, okay?
Because it's all about values.
It's all about values.
And we have to have solutions that are free market solutions and are local solutions or else the solutions are going to come from Washington, D.C. and we're not going to like it.
The Daily Wire has turned four years old and we are absolutely thrilled.
We're so delighted to be here and so delighted.
It's been such a big success, an amazing success, really.
We started it up four years ago in Jeremy's pool house, the changing house next to his pool, me and Ben doing like these 15-minute podcasts, and now is virtually a television studio production company.
It's really amazing, and it's all down to you.
It really is.
It's all down to you, people who have supported us and subscribed and listened.
And as a thank you to you, we are giving away one month of our premium monthly subscription to anyone who uses the code BIRTHDAY.
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So come on over and join the fun.
So we did a wonderful interview a couple of days ago with Matt Best, who is one of our wonderful sponsors from the Black Rifle Coffee Company.
They make great coffee, and they are based on bringing together veterans, military veterans.
Matt joined the Army at the age of 17.
He deployed five times to Iraq and Afghanistan with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, and he has a book out.
It is called Thank You for My Service, which is just a great title.
And here is my interview with Matt Best.
Matt, it's good to see you.
Thank you for coming in.
Thanks for having me.
This is awesome.
So the title of your book is hilarious.
Thank you for my service.
You cracked me up just with the title, but it refers to the fact that you loved your job.
Absolutely.
I think it's kind of eye-catching.
And most importantly, you know, I got to serve my country in a special operations capacity and literally got paid to jump out of planes, fast rope out of helicopters and take care of people that want Americans dead.
So I couldn't be more thankful for the opportunity to serve the greatest country in the world.
I think that, you know, we have a kind of sensitivity we've developed that you're not supposed to enjoy killing our enemies, but it's actually something that needs to be done, right?
Yeah, I think Hollywood romanticizes about war and there's nothing glamorous about war, but I think there's a lot of individuals that are willing and gladly step up to the plate to ensure the safety of America.
So I don't think there's something wrong with enjoying the culture of defending your country.
Obviously, if you never had to take another person's life, that'd be amazing.
But humanity has proven that that's not the case.
Right, right.
And somebody, you know, it's something, it is a kind of raw challenge that I think most of us never get to experience.
And it's got to be very intense.
Absolutely.
I think also part with that cover is I didn't want, I get frustrated with the narrative that veterans are victims.
And it seems that everybody that returns from war is completely broken, completely messed up.
And yes, there are issues within our community that we have to solve, but we have to be proactive as a nation to solve those.
But most importantly, not bucket every single veteran into that.
You know, I'm a guy with a decent amount of experience.
There's people with far more than I have, but that came back, transitioned successfully into the civilian sector, and became an entrepreneur and successful.
So I want to be an inspiration and influence, hopefully, for the community that we can achieve things post-war and post-military.
Well, let's talk about this for a minute because this bothers me too, because I've worked in Hollywood and I just, every veteran becomes a serial killer.
And they're all, as you say, they're victims, which I just think is the opposite of the truth.
What is it that when you come back?
What is the challenge?
Is the challenge that there's things you've seen or is the challenge leaving behind something you love?
And that's the problem we have right now.
That is completely on an individual basis because there's people that have moral grief.
There's people that have transition.
There's people that have PTS, PTSD.
So to segment the whole entire veteran community as they have PTSD is so wrong and we're going down the wrong direction.
Supporting Veterans Beyond PTSD00:05:40
And I worked with a few organizations.
One of them is the boot campaign.
And their whole purpose is to go in and they do a reboot.
So they do a whole brain analysis, brain scans, blood tests, and we actually find out what's wrong with the individual and treat the individual.
Because PTS and antidepressants, we're treating symptoms, not the causes.
And we know that doesn't work in medicine.
So I just hope people understand that not everybody coming back has, you know, I don't know, PTSD.
It's not the case.
So I hate to do this to you, but I want to hear war stories.
Sure.
What exactly were you doing?
I served in 2nd Ranger Battalion.
So I did five deployments with them, which is pretty much all direct action stuff.
So it was killer capture, high-value targets.
I do tell a lot of those stories in my book, but I kind of put them a completely different narrative where it's not dry.
I kind of write it in a humorous level of, here's this 22-year-old fire team leader in Ranger Battalion that's loving his job, but then, you know, having people blow themselves up in front of your face every day.
And there's some sense of kind of got to laugh at it because you're so close to dying every day.
It's kind of funny when your buddy almost dies.
Not when they do, but when they almost, you're just like, man, I can't believe this is my job.
And I kind of try to put that team room humor and that the brotherhood and sisterhood that we have in the military into that book.
I mean, this is what I've talked to a lot of cops because I wrote crime novels and they're the funniest people I've ever met.
And they see, their assignment is basically to look at the ugliest things that happen in the world.
And they are just hilarious.
You have to have a macabre sense of humor.
And I think that breaks the boundaries of PC culture.
And I think that's probably why some veterans, to include myself, had a really time hard assimilating into the civilian sector is because I can't talk how I talk and how I was exposed to such crazy stuff.
I think that the reason why I started a coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee, was let's have civilians assimilate into veteran culture.
We're going to be what we want.
We're going to create the ecosystem for success for post-military.
And if you guys want to come play with us, that's awesome.
But it's our culture.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
I mean, that gives both a world for you guys to live in and a world that we can visit if we want to.
Absolutely.
So obviously you're you're a ranger, so you weren't like charging over the out of the trench across the field.
You're kind of doing secret stuff.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, most of the stuff we did again was direct action and um, what does that mean to translate that?
Uh, kicking down doors, blowing down doors and trying to find the worst of the worst okay, which was an amazingly fun job because you get to play with lasers and you're not doing, and it's cool because you normally have enough intelligence to know that these are very bad people we're going after.
So it gives you a very heightened sense of purpose to know that this guy's building bombs to blow up American soldiers and if we get in there and take them out well, we're going to save some lives, and it's a very fulfilling job.
You were both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and where were you?
In Afghanistan?
I was next to Bagram okay, so that's right near Kabul, right?
I mean yes yes, fairly close yeah, so when you're, when you're operating in a place like that, I mean, I was there for about three days, you know, and I found it to be almost like there was no culture there.
That was kind of disappeared.
Did you ever feel, did you ever feel like that there's nothing we can do here?
This place is beyond our help?
Yes I, it's.
It's hyper challenging, I think, in the sense of Afghanistan, because it's such a tribal mentality and they don't have kind of a nationalistic approach to it.
So to rally a whole nation to kind of be governed, I don't know how that's possible and that's the job of people far smarter than me.
But I know that continually, continually killing people is not the answer.
We need education and we need to create a new generation that values life, and so that's the success I see there.
But yeah, is it frustrating?
I, I always every military guy i've ever talked to they basically leave the politics out of it, which I kind of appreciate.
But at the same time, when I look at our politicians, they send you one way and then they send you another way.
Does it?
Is it ever frustrating to feel like these guys just don't know what they're doing?
And i'm the one who's out here, I think so.
I think everybody wants to support veterans till it's time to support veterans and I think post-war and in war and i've seen politics get involved in war and get people killed and there's no room for that.
You have to let us do our job and do it correctly.
You know is.
Is there something uh, that the?
Is there something the government should do that it's not doing to help veterans as they come back?
Very good question.
I think the Department OF Defense can be so much better as far as setting people up for success and having they do have programs, but I don't think they're good enough for transitioning veterans.
You know, I got out of the military literally a month and a half after my last deployment, my fifth deployment, and then all of a sudden, I was a civilian in Los Angeles California, trying to go to college.
And here I am, you know, shooting people in the face for lack of better words a month and a half ago.
And then i'm trying to go to college with people that hate America, they look at the flag as divisive and go against every ounce of my, my being, and it was hyper challenging for me and I, you know, I put that in the book about trying to find myself again and I probably wouldn't have turned out to how I am if I didn't have friends, kind of call me out and say, why don't you go back and be a contractor and work back overseas and get that purpose again?
We're talking to Matt Best author.
Thank you for my service.
Um coffee, what?
How'd that happen?
You know, I was in entertainment for a while.
I had a couple of successful businesses and then I met my business partner, Evan Hafer, who has an amazing story, former Green Beret and CIA contractor.
And he used to roast his own green beans overseas and kind of had this like little business of every morning serving coffee to the guys, not making them pay for it.
So we joined forces and kind of with my media and branding and where I wanted to take my entrepreneurism.
He was very in line with that.
And then Black Rifle came to be.
More because we wanted to create, like I said earlier, everybody wants to support veterans until it's time to support veterans.
So we're just going to lead from the front and look out for our own community since no one else is.
Matt Best Author Thanks00:02:05
Cool.
It's good coffee, too.
And I'm a big coffee fan, so it's really good stuff.
Matt Best, author of Thank You for My Service.
Thank you for your service.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for my service.
Thank you for coming on.
It's good to talk to you.
Thank you so much.
All right.
A final reflection, a piece in the Courier Journal, which is a Gannett paper, I guess.
They can now call it part of the USA Today Network.
But this is by Michael Smith, an opinion writer from Kentucky.
And he writes that he says, Democrats' message may swing my ballot to Trump.
And it's not what you think it would be.
It's not the policies and the crazy leftism.
He says, I'm not a Trump supporter, but if the alternative to him in next year's election is open borders and the Green New Deal, I may become a Trump voter.
It's a distinction without an electoral difference.
But hear me out.
The president has earned, he says, a lot of the racial heat that comes his way.
He says a full list of the things he said is long and ugly.
It would speak for itself if Trump's opponents would let it, but they haven't.
Instead, they've trafficked in hysteria and hyperbole, particularly in their response to the El Paso, Texas shooting.
Democrats fell over themselves to implicate the president's rhetoric and policies.
Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez pronounced Trump directly responsible for the massacre.
And he says, imagine having never met the gunman, the freshman congresswoman looked into his heart and determined that he wouldn't have killed if not for Trump.
And he says, second, the message to voters, he says, for decades, progressors have denounced America as hopelessly retrograde and racist.
Naturally, they're talking about everyone except themselves.
The insult them until they join our side strategy has gained devotees since the mass shootings.
While no fewer than five presidential candidates have called Trump a white supremacist, their fellow progressives are shedding their reluctance to say the same of his supporters.
And I've pointed this out, you know, about a hundred times, that they hate you.
When Hillary Clinton talked about deplorables, she was not speaking for herself.
She was speaking for a large, large contingent of the left who have taught themselves that there is their opinion and there's hate.
There's not their opinion and the opposite opinion.
Hate You Until They Join Us00:02:15
There's no room for compromise.
It's their opinion and hate.
This is why they show up and heckle and riot at universities when we come to speak, because they already know we're hateful bigots.
They don't even want to hear what we have to say.
So what this guy is saying basically is I'm not going to elect people who despise me.
You cannot despise me into voting for you.
That's basically what he says.
If you think you're going to tell me that I stink and I'm going to think, oh, well, now I'll vote for you, ain't going to happen.
And I think that that is a brilliant point.
And I think we on the right should remember it too.
We are fighting against ideas and we're fighting against some of the leaders who push those ideas, but we're not fighting against the people whose ideas, who are people of goodwill who disagree with us, who might be convinced or at least might be convinced to at least compromise.
It's an important distinction and it's a distinction the leftists stopped making and we should not follow them down that path.
All right, you got a short Clavenless weekend, but you're still not going to survive it.
Let's face it.
I mean, come on, two days without me.
How will you live?
Survivors, if there are any, will be here on Monday, and I will be here too.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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