Ep. 762 pits Andrew Clavin against media narratives, defending Trump’s prescient Hurricane Dorian call, economic gains for minorities, and Afghanistan withdrawal as pragmatic, while dismissing Democratic hypocrisy on climate and gun control. Michael Knowles joins to promote Another Kingdom, framing supernatural "interference" (e.g., unexplained debris) as proof of a bumbling adversary, then pivots to the "fried chicken wars"—Popeyes vs. Chick-fil-A—as evidence of tribalism over merit. The episode ties cultural polarization to media-driven outrage, from CNN’s Finderbinder witch hunt to Hollywood’s apology culture, concluding that ideological failures will force a reckoning—starting with U.S.-Taliban policy. [Automatically generated summary]
Campaign worker Mo Finderbinder has been drummed out of the Democrat Party after old tweets surfaced in which he suggested Democrats should, quote, mind our own business, unquote.
In a series of tweets that were dredged up by reporters at the New York Times, a former newspaper, Finderbinder said, quote, it always seems like we're telling people what they can eat, what they can say, even what they can think.
Maybe we ought to just leave people alone and mind our own business, unquote.
DNC Chairman Tom Perez said he was shocked to hear such opinions coming from a Democrat.
He demanded Finderbinder immediately clean out his desk, take off his clothes, and walk naked down Main Street while mobs of peasants hurled raw fruit at him, like in that scene in Game of Thrones where they pasted Queen Cersei's head on some other woman's exceptionally hot naked body.
Perez said the party was currently searching for a hot woman to paste Finderbinder's head on in order to get the proper effect.
Finderbinder tried to salvage his career by issuing a video of himself weeping and whipping himself with a scourge of thorns while he apologized, but the apology fell on deaf ears after the Times unearthed more tweets expressing such sentiments as, quote, live and let live, it's a free country, and reasonable people will disagree, unquote.
CNN scheduled a seven-hour town hall in which Democrats gathered to denounce Finderbinder.
Kamala Harris, for instance, issued a statement by writing it in the sky with black smoke from her broomstick.
The statement said, quote, to allow people to form their own opinions is not who we are as Americans.
When I look at my baby nieces and think they might grow up in a free country, I tear up in a particularly manipulative way that I hope will make you vote for me, even though I'm clearly an evil witch, unquote.
The CNN town hall was rumored to be continuing, though no one could confirm that without watching CNN.
Godlessness and Intellectual Powers00:03:15
That's just not going to happen.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-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.
So for many years, I've been predicting, as you know, a religious rival that will trickle down from the intellectual heights.
And I've pointed out repeatedly that the underlying logic that has led intellectuals away from faith has collapsed.
In fact, I've pointed this out so often that a hip-hop group called Hazakim has actually put my words to hip-hop music.
I think the atheist argument is falling apart.
The science no longer supports the idea of atheism.
I think in the age of Newton, even though Newton was a believer, it made sense to think, oh, it's a clockwork universe.
Eventually we'll know the clockwork and it'll all make sense and we won't need a God.
That's not the way it turned out.
In fact, it has turned out that at the quantum level, the world is quite weird and consciousness and creation are very much connected.
Thank you, Hazakim.
The most important thing about that is I now get to wear gold chains and get tattoos and shoot people, which is everything I know about hip-hop music.
And if there's anything else involved, I don't want to hear about it.
But anyway, what would a true religious revival look like?
Well, obviously, hopefully it would help stem the epidemic of self-destruction, addiction, and suicide that seems to be sweeping through our country.
I'd like to think it would make people a little saner about their sex lives, and maybe we'd even stop slaughtering unborn babies and telling ourselves it has something to do with women's rights.
It would also be a good thing if we could begin to reclaim and reinvent the structures of family, community, and charity that allow us to shrink government and act as free people.
But the reason God might help us do any or all of that is because in God, we see things whole.
We've all noticed that smart people can be very stupid and simple people can be wise.
Why?
because smart people are good at analyzing things, at taking things apart, and so they disdain to see them whole as they really are, the way wise people do see them, even if they're not high IQ.
Godlessness flatters the intellectual's powers.
Without God, things, people, life itself are all just objects made of various pieces that can be taken apart and examined.
Smart people are good at that, and so they think it solves everything.
They're like car mechanics who dismantle your Maserati and then say, look, I fixed it.
But no, a car is a thing entire with a purpose, and so are you.
You're an entire moral entity made for a reason.
And the only way to understand that entity and that reason are to study what your creator looks like when you see him in a human face.
Which brings us, you guessed it, to our old friend, Uncle Jesus.
Without God, no matter how smart you are, maybe even the smarter you are, the more you will find yourself talking crap.
And that's why a lot of sophisticated people are being made to look like fools, while our unsophisticated president, Donald Trump, even when he is foolish, keeps running rings around them.
Everything Looked Like a Problem00:12:42
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
What if?
What does the world look like when we just take Trump at his word?
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So just, I'm sure you've heard about this scandal by now.
It's a scandal.
It's just a ridiculous kerfuffle, as we used to say, where Trump said that I talked about it before.
Trump said this Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama.
That's one of the places it might hit.
And everybody said, oh, we said nothing about it.
We said nothing about Alabama.
What are you talking about?
They foolish Trump, this idiot.
He must be insane.
Let's invoke the 25th Amendment.
Let's get him out of office now in impeachment.
I mean, it was nuts.
Let me just show you a little bit of this.
Also, when Trump then put up a map and he was talking about it, somebody had taken a Sharpie and made it so the hurricane looked like it was going to hit Alabama.
This is a tremendous scandal.
Let's look at, what's his name, Brian Stelter.
He's on top of this, man.
He has got this thing covered.
This is cut seven.
Brian Stelter really getting into the meat of this incredible scandal.
Here's how I would frame it.
This Alabama story was about the president failing a basic geography test.
At the time he warned Alabama that Alabama might get hit.
At the time of that tweet, this is the forecast his own government released at 11 a.m.
This is the most up-to-date forecast at the time of Trump's tweet.
And look at this track.
It turned out to be spot on with Hurricane Dorian right up the coast, just as forecast.
Fantastic work by government forecasters at the National Weather Service.
Anyone who can read a map knows what this shows.
No one looked at this and thought that Alabama was going to be at risk.
All right, nobody looked at it and thought Alabama was going to be at risk.
Here, also on CNN, is Don Lemon reporting on the hurricane as it approaches cut one.
Many states that are under threat right now, Derry.
At least six from the Carolinas right through Georgia coastline into Florida, certainly, and then also even into the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, you need to be on the lookout.
So the DDS.
Play that just one more time.
But there are many states that are under threat right now, Derry.
At least six.
From the Carolinas right through Georgia coastline into Florida, certainly.
And then also even into the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, you need to be on the lookout.
Louisiana, Alabama.
So Trump was right.
I mean, the whole thing was right.
So they actually are writing articles now that say, yeah, well, Trump was right, but he was wrong because he took it seriously.
In other words, what the press doesn't like is the press is so used to lying about Republican presidents and presidents who have policies they don't like.
They're so used to it without being challenged, especially because George W. Bush never fought back against them, which he later said, or at least Karl Rove, his advisor, later said was a mistake.
They're just not used to having people fight back.
So Trump fights back.
He doesn't like it.
He doesn't like being called a liar.
Funny thing, he doesn't like being called a liar.
He's constantly pointing it out.
And he's constantly, constantly in the right.
And it's just indicative.
I know the scandal itself is nothing, but it's indicative of the fact that this is the way every word out of Trump's mouth is taken.
Everything he says is looked upon like it's a problem.
At no point, at no point does anybody ever say, well, wait, just let's stop for a minute.
I know Trump said it.
Evil Trump, demon Trump, Adolf Hitler Trump.
I know he's, but maybe it's true, okay?
You know, there's a story, James Mattis' book.
This came out, I think it was Friday, maybe over the weekend.
James Mattis has this new book called Sign Chaos.
And now people are going through it and they keep trying to get at this thing where Mattis quit and he must hate Trump and Mattis won't criticize Trump.
And that's the big story.
But buried in this is a story about a foiled bomb plot against a Washington, D.C. restaurant that was planned by the Iranians.
It was supported by the Iranians.
And Mattis writes in his book, had the bomb gone off, those in the restaurant and on the street would have been ripped apart, blood rushing down sewer drains.
It would have been the worst attack on us since 9-11.
I sensed, Mattis says, that only Iran's impression of America's impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple of miles of the White House, absent one fundamental mistake.
The terrorists said engaged an undercover DE agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb.
The Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack.
Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history.
Now, this is under the Obama administration, right?
So he wanted to respond.
He thought we should respond.
This was going to be an attack.
Just the fact that it was foiled doesn't mean the attack didn't exist.
It did attack.
And he says, I wanted calculated actions to restrain the regime so it couldn't thrust us into a war.
If you allow yourself to be goaded and trifled with, one of two things will happen.
Eventually, a harder, larger fight will explode, or you will get moved out of the neighborhood.
In other words, either the Iranians would destroy us or we'd have to go to war in a much bigger way.
He says, in my view, we had to hold Iran to account and strike back when attacked, but there was a reason for the administration's restraint.
The Obama administration was secretly negotiating with Iran, although I was not privy to the details at that time.
In other words, just like Obama closed down a DEA investigation into Hezbollah drug trafficking in America because he wanted to get his idiotic Iranian nuclear deal in place, just because in the same way he did that, he would not respond against an attack that would have been devastating to the United States of America, and he would not show Iran what's what because he did not want to get in his deal.
This guy was a terrible president and he was an incompetent president.
It has nothing to do with him being a secret Muslim or from Kenya or hating America, nothing to do with it.
He was an incompetent because his ideas were untrue and he was too big a narcissist to acknowledge it and change his ideas.
And once he realized that everything was going bluey under Obama, once he realized that that was happening, he just fell back on the old Democrat playbook of divide people into identity groups and set them against each other.
You know, when he started talking about, oh, the police are killing black people.
Untrue, but he sold it because the press helped him sell it.
When he started talking about, oh, poor little children who think they're girls can't go into the girls' room because they're really boys.
That's the whole, that whole identity playbook, that's what it's about.
It's to distract you from the fact that their policies do not work.
And that was the Obama presidency in a nutshell.
And yet, and yet, when Trump comes along and does a good job and does things that might work and some of which do work, even if they do work, he is held to a totally different standard.
Now, I'm going to talk about the Afghanistan thing because that's the latest thing, but I just want to play just an example.
I want to go back to Don Lemon for a minute.
Don Lemon talking about Trump and the way that there was also news at the end of the week last week that Trump now has set a record of unemployment among blacks, right?
Blacks now have more jobs than they've ever had.
So they are doing better than ever under the Trump administration.
Trump, obviously, the worst white supremacist ever.
He just cannot get this white supremacy thing right.
He keeps helping minorities.
It's also true of the Latino American community.
Trump just can't figure it out.
He said, I know I'm supposed to be a white supremacist.
I saw it on CNN, but I keep screwing it up.
So Don Lemon does this incredibly dishonest thing.
I'm not going to play the whole thing, but he starts jiggering around the statistics to make it sound like Obama did as well for blacks or better than Trump did.
And the way he does that is by comparing the slow, slow, slow recovery that Obama did everything to try to stop over eight years with the booming recovery that Donald Trump has had in two and a half years because he got off the brakes.
He took his foot off the brakes.
So he does that.
And then he says, when are blacks going to wake up to the fact that just because they're doing great doesn't mean they should like Trump?
And listen carefully to the two examples he uses he throws out there of why they should hate Trump, both of them false.
One is the Charlottesville hoax where they keep saying he said there are good people on both sides as if he were talking about the Nazis when he explicitly said he wasn't.
And the other is when he said Baltimore is rat-infested hellhole, which it is, right?
He was just telling the simple truth.
Now, those are examples of his racism.
Listen to the way Lemon treats Donald Trump.
How do black voters in 2020 weigh these low employment numbers against the president's racist behavior, Joseph?
Charlottesville, slamming Baltimore, rodent-infested, and you know, go on and on.
Look, I think there's we have the numbers and then we have the message, right?
The numbers, to your point, are encouraging.
I think that, again, we think, you know, no one gives more of that, keep going, right?
Yeah, so we need more of that.
But I think the message is something that does not resonate with black communities and black communities simply because of the rhetoric that has come out of the White House.
And so I think I said almost two years ago to the day on this program that if someone spits in your face and then hands you a napkin, you don't get to say thank you.
Can we talk about this?
Because I often hear that not only on this show, not only from, but also in my personal life.
Well, I don't understand.
Black unemployment is down and people are doing better.
But as you say, if someone spits in your face and hands you a napkin, what is that supposed to?
I don't understand that argument.
Does that mean that the only part of your brain or the only part of our being that matters is money rather than how someone treats you and what someone says about you?
I mean, all Trump has ever done about this, he hasn't said anything except the stuff that they have twisted.
Oh, he sold the Martin Luther King statue at the flea market.
You know, I mean, all this stuff that they've lied about and twisted.
It's them.
It's all them.
But I guess they know that.
I guess at this point they know they're lying.
But what would happen if we looked at it a different way?
So, okay, Donald Trump and Afghanistan.
I'll talk about this in just a minute.
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Trump's Camp David Meeting00:12:42
Anyway, so Trump revealed that he was going to have a Camp David meeting with negotiators from our old pals, the Taliban.
And here is Mike Pompeo explaining to Jake Tapper why they were thinking of that.
We've been having conversations.
The president believed that we could further that, that we could further America's national interests by having conversations with the people that have the capacity to actually deliver, Jake, on what you just described.
That was the effort.
That was the mission.
That was the purpose that President Trump has laid out.
But I think, as you saw, if the Taliban don't behave, if they don't deliver on the commitments that they've made to us now for weeks and in some cases, months, President of the United States is not going to reduce the pressure.
We're not going to reduce our support for the Afghan security forces that have fought so hard there in Afghanistan.
So people went nuts.
I mean, both sides.
Liz Cheney said it politely, but she was attacking Trump for this, basically saying we shouldn't negotiate with the Taliban.
And just so you remember, Trump also attacked Obama for saying he might negotiate with the Taliban.
So Trump himself is attacking this idea.
But underneath this, right, is the fact that Trump, like Obama, wants to get out of Afghanistan.
And this is something that should be seriously discussed.
Now, Obama blew it because he campaigned on the idea that Afghanistan was the right war because the guys, the Saudis who attacked us on 9-11, trained and launched their attack from Afghanistan.
So that was a good war and the Iraq war was the wrong war.
Actually, as I said, at the time, he got it exactly backwards.
So he blew Iraq.
Obama blew Iraq by pulling everybody out.
And Mattis writes about the fact that Biden simply would not listen to the fact that we needed to leave some troops behind.
And that's how ISIS got started.
That's how we lost the Middle East and lost the gains that Trump had made, that Bush had made with the surge.
Okay.
So then he couldn't pull out of Afghanistan because he said that that's the war we should be fighting.
So he had this make-believe surge.
He announced when the surge would be over.
So the Taliban were going, okay, well, we'll just wait in the Fatah and the tribal territories and we'll come back when the surge is over.
And that's what they did.
And so they're still there.
They're still operating.
But the idea is that Trump wants out and the military keeps saying, if we leave, the place is going to fall apart.
The Taliban will return.
Al-Qaeda will return and we'll be attacked here instead of there.
So the theory, basically, is this is now Germany after World War II.
We have had troops in Germany since World War II, right?
So that's a long time now.
I can't do the math.
It's almost 75 years, I guess.
75 years.
We've had troops in Europe since World War II.
We've had troops in South Korea since the Korean War.
So now they're telling us, well, we have to have troops in Afghanistan.
Essentially, we're having this imperial idea that we have to police every little place that's ever given us trouble.
What would happen if we left Afghanistan?
Bad things, bad things.
The Taliban would come back.
They're horrible people.
They're essentially Muslim fascists.
They would come in, they would destroy the people.
But you can't argue, you can't argue that patrolling Afghanistan is the same as patrolling Germany or South Korea.
These are very civilized countries that are basically westernized, even South Korea, where our troops are standing there to keep the peace and help out.
But it's not the same as this tribal wasteland of Afghanistan where people are fighting feuds they've been having for hundreds and hundreds of years.
We are not going to achieve anything in Afghanistan.
Now, listen, if we pull out, like I said, bad things are going to happen, but at least, at least let us have an open conversation, an open conversation about whether or not we want to stay in Afghanistan forever, because that's what you're talking about.
Is Afghanistan part of this new American empire that we're going to establish with our troops all over the place?
Or are we wasting our time, our money, and our lives over there?
I mean, I have to, ever since I went there, I have felt that we should come back, that we should get out and come back because there's nothing we can do.
There's no way we can build a civilized society there.
It's going to take hundreds of years for that to happen, and it's not going to happen with us doing it.
I thought we were right to go into Iraq.
It's just a question we shouldn't.
And I think that Trump's instincts are right on this.
I think his instincts are right on China.
You know, every day in the Wall Street Journal, they talk about, oh, the terrible thing that Trump is doing in China by having this trade war, and the stock market is going down, and people, investors are nervous and all this.
Does anybody want to go back to the way it was with China?
And here's the other thing.
China's official data shows the economy has sunk.
They were growing at some like fantastic rate of like 8%.
Now they say they're voting, they're growing at 6.2%.
But there's a growing belief among economists, companies, and investors around the world that the real picture is worse than China's official data.
They are having a bad, bad time.
Who said that?
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump said it.
He said, you know, they're doing much worse than they think.
Everybody's saying, well, they can wait them out because they don't have to deal with elections.
They don't have to deal with democracy.
And that's true.
That's China's bet that their authoritarian government can outlast our Democrat government.
But who is helping, or Democratic government?
But who is making that possible?
It's people like the Wall Street Journal who continually complain.
Does anybody, does anybody want to go back to the way it was with the Chinese before Trump got there?
When Trump said, oh, I'm the chosen one, kind of laughingly, he said, I'm the chosen one to negotiate with China.
He was being absolutely right.
He was being absolutely direct and honest, that he was the guy who got stuck with this because nobody else would do it, because the short-term problems keep people from thinking.
In democracies, nobody ever thinks about the long-term benefits.
They only think about the short-term problems.
Trump is right about a lot of stuff.
He's right about a lot of stuff, and he's right about a lot of stuff because he takes things as they come.
He's not overthinking it.
He thinks America is a great country.
It is a great country.
He doesn't have problems, sure.
But he thinks it's a great country.
He thinks patriotism is a good thing.
Why?
Because patriotism is a good thing.
He thinks the Chinese are screwing us.
Why?
Because the Chinese are screwing us.
He thinks we should get out of Afghanistan.
Why?
Because we should get out of Afghanistan.
And everything he says, everything he says, they go nuts on.
Now, listen, I'm joking about Trump being right about everything.
Obviously, he's not right about everything.
But if we stopped and just said, okay, the president says this, let's assess, instead of allowing this incredibly rabid press to jump down his throat every time he opens his mouth, we'd probably get a simpler and more accurate take on what's happening in the world.
And, you know, let's compare Trump to the opposition.
I mean, the opposition that sat around and talked about Russian colleagues.
Here's another thing that Trump was right about.
Trump has talked about, well, maybe it would be a good thing if we got along with Putin.
Now, Putin's a gangster.
He is a stone gangster.
There's no question about it.
But there's a guy, Kudovila, I think his name, Angelo Kudovila, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, who points out that before the Russian Revolution, before the communists came in, Russia was run by a czar.
And the Tsar wasn't always a nice guy.
Like he says in this article, the guy Ivan the Terrible was called Ivan the Terrible.
He wasn't called Ivan the Nice Guy.
It's not a fully westernized country, Russia.
But it is a Christian country.
It is a country that we can get along with.
It is a country in which the 70 years of the Soviet Union were, to some extent, an anomaly, and that Cold War is over, right?
So maybe it would be a good thing.
You know, guys like Kasparov, the chess expert and now dissenter, keep saying, well, we have to take out Putin because he's a gangster.
But why is it our job to take out Putin?
There are gangsters all over the place.
Why should we be taking out Putin?
In fact, our interests are a little bit more aligned with the Russians than they are with the Chinese.
It might be a wise thing for Russia.
Before, under the Soviet Union, we needed the Chinese as sort of a buffer against the Russians.
But now we might be thinking about, hey, maybe we can get along with Putin, always understanding he's a gangster.
Just keep him out of South America and we'll stay out of the Ukraine and we will get along and we'll join up against China.
That's not a terrible idea.
And that's the kind of thing that Trump is talking about.
But the minute he says it, always colluding.
He's destroying our democracy.
We have to impeach him.
It's distorting.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, you listen to the way the crazy Democrats are talking, the way they're talking about climate change, which is, I'm sorry, I know that there is such a thing as climate change.
I'm sure human activity has an effect on the climate.
But this idea that it's a crisis, if it were a crisis, people would be acting like it's a crisis.
The Obamas would not have just spent whatever they spent, like $150 million to buy a house, really buy a $15 million house that would be gone if anything they were saying about climate change was true.
Al Gore would not be buying a huge house in Santa Barbara if he thought Santa Barbara was going to be gone because the ocean was going to rise.
I mean, this idea of climate change is ridiculous.
And the RNC, the Republican National Committee, put together a montage of all the people at, all the Democrats on CNN talking about what they would ban to stop climate change, which is really what it's all about.
It's about them getting into our business.
There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking.
We're going to be okay if the vast majority of the world goes vegetarian immediately.
Coal burning plants.
No one's going to build another coal burning.
We've got to shut the ones down we have.
Do you ban plastic straws?
I think we should.
I love the vision of the Green New Deal.
Do away with commercial air travel and a lot of other things.
We have to take the combustion engine vehicles off the road as rapidly as we can.
What about offshore drilling oil?
Would you ban it?
Yes.
Absolutely yes.
Yes.
Some of it is with light bulbs.
Some of it is on straws.
Some of it, dang, is on cheeseburgers, right?
A little unfair to Elizabeth Warren, but only a little unfair.
What she says is those aren't the we should do all those things, but those aren't the important things.
What we really want to do is destroy the energy business.
So Don Trump is always wrong, and these clowns are always right.
And listen, you know, they're talking about gun rights.
Your gun rights guaranteed by your Constitution.
And remember, the Constitution is there to defend us against emotionalism.
It's there to defend us against democracy.
The Bill of Rights is there to tell us what democracy cannot touch.
Rights that you're given by God that you're not allowed to vote away.
And so who do they bring on on MSNBC to talk about this?
They bring on David Hogg, this kid who was in the shooting, the Stoneman Douglas High School shootings last year.
And they bring him on and like, you know, they put you in this impossible position.
This is the point.
You don't want to attack him because he's a kid, but he's obviously a disturbed kid who is talking rote crap.
I mean, everything he says is the kind of thing you would expect your kid to say, right?
It's the kind of thing you'd expect an 18-year-old kid to say.
I mean, just play, just play this first cut of him talking about defending our gun rights.
So this is cut to the broader conversation that we all have to realize is that for us to be successful in this movement, we need to create, we don't just need to change Congress.
The only thing that ever has truly changed Congress or has changed our country is when our culture changes.
And I think with that, we need to actually be talking about why there are these motivations for people to believe that violence is a resolution to our problems.
Why people feel that it is more American to pick up a gun because you're afraid of what you don't know than it is to actually explore what you don't know and have the courage to actually address that.
Because I would personally argue that peace is patriotic, right?
Loving your fellow Americans is patriotic.
I mean, that's what I would expect a kid to say.
I mean, it's dumb.
It's ill-educated.
It has no sense of history.
It has no sense of why our gun rights were guaranteed.
Why didn't, you know, Thomas Jefferson was a bright fellow.
George Washington was an absolute icon of virtue.
Benjamin Franklin was a genius.
They thought this was a good idea.
David Hogg, really, really, this high school student?
I mean, come on, come on.
So you have one side that is spewing, it's like pollution.
It's spewing this stupidity into the air that we have to save the earth by stop eating cheeseburgers.
And then Trump says, well, maybe we should get out of Afghanistan.
It's, oh my God, what an idiot.
You know, Trump says, you know, Trump says, maybe we should stand up to the Chinese.
Chick-Fil-A And Philosophy00:15:13
Oh, this is a disaster.
Everything that Trump says should be taken seriously.
The guy obviously is operating at a level higher than the media, which has been wrong about absolutely everything.
Listen, I understand, as I always say, I understand all the problems about Trump, but if we took what he was saying seriously and kind of put those problems aside and just listened to what the guy was saying, I think the news would be a lot closer to accurate.
However, we're going to descend from that high thought to talk to Michael Knowles in just a minute, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
It's allows you 10 bucks for the month, allows you 100 bucks for the year.
And for that, for that, we get your 100 bucks.
And that's the important thing.
All right, come on over.
Knowles.
Is that the author of Another Kingdom ISIS?
It is.
Hey, we've actually started recording again.
We have.
That's why everything's falling apart.
I know the devil hates this.
Your car fell.
My car broke.
The plumbing in my house.
The plumbing in your ass.
I actually, I'm not even really joking.
Every time we start doing Another Kingdom, the devil starts attacking us.
I told you that when I gave the manuscript to my wife to read, the next day she came out and there was a organic glop on her car.
It was about the size of a, I don't know, bigger than a squirrel.
It was like as big as a raccoon.
We couldn't figure out what it was.
It was just like something out of the exorcist dropped on our car.
What shape is Moloch?
I don't know what shape our.
So we're fighting.
We are fighting the devil.
Knowles and I are fighting the devil.
Yeah, no, we're doomed.
We're doomed.
But we will get this story out.
We will get this story out.
Do you know when it's case?
October.
Yeah, I think it's starting in October.
And the thing is, all the devil can do.
St. John Bianni talked about how the devil was a little idiot.
All he can do is kind of bug you and scare you.
But he's like the stupidest guy in the world, right?
He decided not to worship God.
That's probably bad ideas.
And he was there.
He was there.
He actually saw the guy, you know?
Like, we have to have faith, but he was right there.
All right, but we will continue this.
And you did, I hate to say it, you did a great job.
In fact, it was, I think, you've done the first two seasons.
I think this was your best performance.
Yeah, I think, look, we've been in this story now for three years or so.
I mean, you've been in it longer because you actually had to write the thing.
And it's really beautiful.
This third installment is, you know, it's very rare.
There are a few exceptions where the sequel is living up to the original.
The Godfather is one of them.
I guess the second Star Wars is pretty good.
That's pretty much it.
This story gets better every time.
It actually is a thousand-page novel.
It actually did come out to be like one work, which I'm really happy about.
Yeah.
But let's talk about something important like fried chicken.
Like fried chicken.
You're right.
But you know, I keep seeing this.
It's Popeye versus Chick-fil-A.
Yes.
I know nothing about this.
What is going on?
This is, you're probably, you're either focusing on the spiritual war between speaking of the devil and the angels of God.
You're probably focusing on the war in Afghanistan.
No.
This is the important one.
This is the important one, the fried chicken war.
Of course, of course.
Three weeks ago, a Popeyes marketing executive gets a message on WhatsApp from a colleague of his saying that Chick-fil-A had tweeted out a critique of the new Popeyes chicken sandwich.
Uh-uh.
Things go to DEF CON 5.
Red Alert.
15 minutes later, within 15 minutes, this marketing executive had retweeted the Chick-fil-A tweet talking about kind of subtly attacking the Popeyes chicken sandwich.
And Popeyes said, y'all good.
What?
What does that even mean?
Them fighting words drew y'all good.
And this kicked off the great chicken sandwich wars.
What will you tell your grandchildren?
Where were you during the chicken sandwich?
These are the two chicken sandwiches.
Do you know which is which?
I don't know.
I guess one is a chicken sandwich.
We should test this.
Yeah, go ahead.
We should test this.
Now, regardless of your opinion, we can get to that in a second, of which makes the better chicken sandwich.
I have really nuanced and complex thoughts on this.
Chick-fil-A won the war.
Okay.
So this tweet storm sent people flooding out to the various stores.
But it is not just a matter of preference on who won.
Oh, no, we have to hate each other.
You have to hate each other.
And Chick-fil-A did technically win the war.
Popeyes literally ran out of chicken sandwiches.
Here are the headlines.
New York Times.
15 minutes to mayhem, how a tweet led to a shortage at Popeyes.
NBC, Tennessee man sues Popeyes for running out of chicken sandwiches.
And this is my favorite from the Washington Post.
A man pulled a gun to demand Popeyes chicken sandwiches after they sold out.
Wait, wait, isn't it good that they run out there?
That doesn't that mean they're selling well?
So technically, Chick-fil-A wins the war.
Tactically, Popeyes has a major win here.
They sold out of their chicken sandwiches.
I mean, I know, by the way, I know that this man pulling a gun to demand Popeye sandwiches, I know it's true because in college I lived next to a Popeye's.
I almost got shot at a Popeye's.
There was a shooting at this Popeye's one hour after I left it.
This is not raising my opinion.
No, Popeyes is good but you get shot.
I don't want to besmirch the whole corporation.
The Popeyes in New Haven, not the most savory place in the world.
So it is good.
I mean, everybody wins, right?
They all sell sandwiches.
At one point when Popeyes sells out, Chick-fil-A is sending its employees in North Carolina to hand out free sandwiches to the stressed out employees.
It's really mean.
I like that.
There was an estimate from the Apex Marketing Group said Popeyes got $65 million in free marketing out of this little stupid Twitter thing.
And it's a tactical win for Popeyes in the sense that there really is no comparison between Chick-fil-A and Popeyes.
Chick-fil-A is the most profitable fast food company per unit in the country.
Popeyes, it doesn't even make the list.
So any way that Popeyes can use Chick-fil-A's marketing to carry them is a big win for them.
Beyond the chicken sandwiches, which, you know, look, it does carry a lot of import for our culture.
This tells us a lot about pop culture and politics in 2019.
Popeyes and Chick-fil-A truly do represent political affiliations.
You can see this with other fast food brands too.
Chick-fil-A has come to represent because of the hysterics of the left, which I think the owner of Chick-fil-A is a Christian.
Yes.
As a result of this, it has now been concluded that Chick-fil-A is like torturing gay people, is leading pogroms.
He supported traditional marriage.
Yes.
While saying, just so we have the facts, while saying that he had nothing against gay people, he reached out to them.
He simply thought that marriage was how it had been defined for thousands and thousands of years.
By everyone everywhere on earth for all of his life.
But that's all he, and I think he contributed to defeating Prop 8 or supporting whatever it was.
And that was it.
But he reached out to the gay community.
He said, you know, I love you.
I don't know nothing against you or anything like that.
And he's been very civilized and decent.
That's his belief system.
Yes.
And the left now is going to kick Chick-fil-A out of anywhere they can.
They try to kick them out of universities.
They tried to kick it out of Manhattan, even though it's one of the most popular stores in Manhattan.
Because he doesn't apologize.
Yes.
I wish every corporation would pay attention, because it happened to Nike too with Colin Capern.
I was against them doing that, but they just didn't apologize.
They stuck to their guns.
Exactly.
But you do have to wonder, why on earth are chicken sandwiches being politicized?
I actually kind of prefer the taste of Popeye's chicken sandwiches because they're greasier.
It's good.
I've only had Chick-fil-A.
Yes, they're both very good.
Popeyes is more disgusting, which for fast food makes it better.
That's what you want.
But because there are these political connotations now, you have to choose sides.
And you say, why do you have to choose sides on your sneakers?
Why do you have to choose sides on your chicken sandwiches?
I think it's because Americans no longer share much of a common culture.
We don't go to the same churches.
We can't even agree to salute the flag.
We don't really have a lot in common.
We don't watch the same TV shows.
We don't watch the same movies.
And so every little detail in the culture becomes tribalized and politicized.
That's a really interesting point.
It's also, in a way, it's part of the whole system because when you're promoting fiction, you can't get on TV.
You cannot get on TV to promote a novel and just say, this is a really entertaining novel.
You'll love it.
It's exciting.
It's like this or this.
You can't do it.
You cannot get a birth unless you can find a source of controversy.
So that's why for Mel Gibson, it's like, oh, is this anti-Semitic?
He loves that stuff.
I mean, maybe it was hard on him when it happened, but he knew that that was promoting the passion of the Christ.
And now the Joker is coming out and people, you know, they love it.
These guys are saying, oh, the Joker, it glamorizes in so violent.
You know, it's like, it's a Joker.
You know, it's a comic book movie that we've had for 60 years.
The only way you can sell it is through controversy.
And maybe you're right.
Maybe it's because we have to make everything into a tribal warfare.
We do.
It is, and it's our fault.
You know, H.L. Mencken said democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard.
And so this is reflected in our corporations, which serve the customers.
The customer is always right.
And it's reflected in our politics because the politicians in a democratic republic are a reflection of who we are.
This ultimately, though, shows you a shallow society.
I mean, C.S. Lewis made this point where he said, a society has to worry about politics.
Like a sick man has to worry about his sickness.
If you don't pay attention to it, it'll kill you.
But if all you worry about is politics, then you've lost the point in the first place.
And, you know, the point of politics in our country is so that we can enjoy chicken sandwiches.
No, you're absolutely right about this.
And it's the reason the right can't address the culture because the only way they can think to address the culture is in a fighting fashion.
So that's, you know, like, these people are normalizing homosexuality.
So what are you going to do?
You're going to write books in which all the gay people are evil?
You know, that's ridiculous.
You know, that's not, I mean, art is supposed to be humanizing.
It's supposed to approach every person as a whole person, as an actual entity, even evil people.
I mean, even you read Macbeth and you come away thinking, like, oh, I get it.
I get where Macbeth is coming from.
You know, so we can't do it because it's not a tribal game.
Art is a metagame.
It's a game above the tribal.
And I think it's an amazing fact that we are this shallow.
And you're right.
It's kind of sickening.
It's an interesting inversion, too, when you think about, for instance, one of our favorite novels, Crime and Punishment.
When you read Crime and Punishment, I am not an axe murderer.
I've never killed an old woman with an axe.
And yet I read it and you think, oh my gosh, this guy is me.
How does Dostoevsky know so much about me?
And today, we are looking at two identical chicken sandwiches.
There is virtually no difference between them.
And one of them is awful and one of them is wonderful.
We should think about this more because you're making really excellent points and we should come back and talk about it.
I'll stop while I'm ahead.
I don't want to go off the rail here.
What are you talking about on your shirt?
Today we're going to be talking about vacationing with the Taliban, whether or not that's a good idea for U.S. policy.
And also, speaking of quotes about democracy, Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.
I think President Trump is the worst president in recent history, except for all the other ones that we've had.
Everybody's attacking him.
All right, thanks a lot.
Your show coming up.
Final reflection, Drew Brees, one of my favorite football players, quarterback, obviously, for the New Orleans Saints.
The reason, Drew Brees is the reason I can't, one of the reasons, I canceled my subscription to Sports Illustrated because I got so tired of them not just attacking the politicians I supported, but also attacking God.
There was an article, a profile of Drew Brees in Sports Illustrated, a very positive profile.
It was written by a woman, I can't remember her name.
And at one point, Brees was talking to a bunch of kids, and they said, what's your motivating force?
And he said, faith.
And the woman then wrote at least a paragraph, but a long paragraph, talking about, well, when Breeze means faith, who says faith, he could be talking about faith in training or faith in football.
He was talking about faith in Jesus Christ.
That's what he was talking about.
But Sports Illustrated couldn't face it.
They couldn't face it, and so they had to dilute it.
So the other day, Breeze comes out with a video.
He makes a video.
It's apparently Bring Your Bible to School Day is coming up.
I don't even know.
Do you know when it is?
I have no idea what it is.
Bring your Bible to school day.
But he says, bring your Bible to school.
But the video was sponsored by Focus on the Family, which also supports traditional marriage.
So he was immediately swamped by the outrage mob.
Oh, you hate gay people.
And, you know, Breeze, he ain't be hating nobody.
You know, he's a really decent guy.
Everybody says this about him.
So he has to put out this video defending himself.
Hello, everyone.
There's been a lot of negativity spread about me in the LGBTQ community recently based upon a article that someone wrote with a very negative headline that I think led people to believe that somehow I was aligned with an organization that was anti-LGBTQ and so on and so forth.
I'd like to set the record straight.
I lived by two very simple Christian fundamentals, and that is love the Lord with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbors yourself.
I think the first one is very self-explanatory.
The second one, love your neighbors yourself.
What does that mean to me?
That means love all, respect all, and accept all.
So that is actually how I live my life.
That is what I try to do with my family, with my teammates, with people in my community, with my friends, all people, no matter your race, your color, your religious preference, your sexual orientation, your political beliefs.
It doesn't matter.
You know, I almost wish he hadn't done that.
Obviously, I agree with most of what he's saying.
I talk about this too, the two rules that Jesus said are the most important commandments.
Obviously, I agree with what he's saying just because.
But if a reporter now comes up to him and says, do you believe in gay marriage?
Do you support gay marriage?
What is he going to say?
Because he probably doesn't.
I don't know what his opinion is on the subject.
I don't care.
The guy's job is to play football.
That's my relationship to him.
He should just do his job as well as he can do it so I can be entertained by playing football.
He has the right to any belief he wants in the same way Colin Kaepernick, who hates his country, has the right to any belief he wants, right?
He can have any belief he wants.
The apology culture is in itself corrupting.
It is in itself corrupting because what it is saying is that something about your belief system is subject to the judgment of Twitter, a bunch of angry people on Twitter, instead of being discussed philosophically and where you stand.
Listen, I differ with a lot of my fellow Christians on the question of gay marriage and the question of gay rights.
I differ with a lot of them.
But every time I talk to them, I find 85 to 90% of them loving, thoughtful, philosophical, and in no way condemning the people, but simply condemning ideas and practices that they find immoral.
That's not bad.
It's not a bad thing to debate those things and talk about them and allow people to hold them and address each other in love.
If we're going to have a tribal society in which we can only deal with ideas through hatred, we're not going to be around for very long.
Listen, I don't think it's going to stay this way.
I think things are going to change.
I think that the left, I'm watching the left, that the ideas they're talking about are outdated.
They've failed already.
I do not think they're going to win.
Things Are Changing00:01:40
I do think we're going to have to get past the Trump administration until the waters smooth out a little bit.
But mostly, we're going to have to reform the press and the entertainment industry so that every voice in our ear is not coming from one direction.
I got to stop.
Knowles is coming up.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Clavin Show.
see you tomorrow.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
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The good news is that President Trump has called off secret talks to negotiate with the Taliban at Camp David days before 9-11.
The bad news is that President Trump had invited the Taliban to Camp David just days before 9-11 in the first place.
We will examine foreign policy follies from Barack Obama to James Mattis all the way up to President Trump.