Ep. 777 skewers Adam Schiff’s self-contradictory "sealed lies" stunt and exposes media bias, calling out suppressed scandals like Benghazi and IRS targeting while amplifying Kavanaugh’s false accusations. The Ukraine impeachment is dismissed as a rushed "Schiff setup," with inconsistencies in the whistleblower’s timeline and alleged collusion with Democrats. John Brennan’s communist ties and FBI overreach against Trump are highlighted, while the Amber Geiger case contrasts forgiveness with societal vengeance. Henry Olson predicts Trump’s 2024 resilience despite Democratic attacks, grading his policies as a B for working-class appeal but criticizing missed opportunities in education and infrastructure. The episode ends by framing free speech debates—like Winchester’s "Islam is right about women" signs—as exposing leftist hypocrisy. [Automatically generated summary]
Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff has announced that he will investigate himself for lying repeatedly, unless he's also lying about investigating himself, then he won't.
In a statement made through both sides of his mouth at once, Schiff said, quote, I am absolutely shocked at my level of dishonesty.
I myself heard myself repeatedly say I was an honest person, but it now turns out even that was a lie.
I am therefore going to start a full investigation into myself, unless it turns out that that's also untrue, in which case I'll be forced to investigate that unless I'm lying about that as well, unquote.
In a sworn statement to the rubber duck in his bathtub, Schiff said, quote, the fact that I have lied about President Trump repeatedly for three years brings into question my swearing to tell the truth.
So I am hereby ordering the committee to open an investigation into my committing perjury, which would begin immediately, except for the fact that I'm not really ordering the committee to investigate my committing perjury.
I'm just saying that I am, unquote.
Schiff later showed up on the steps of the Capitol building, where he waved a sealed envelope back and forth in front of reporters until they fell into a deep sleep and promised to report every absurd thing he said as if it were true.
Schiff then said, quote, I have this envelope.
I have in this envelope a list of over a dozen lies I have told about President Trump.
And since I've been claiming to have evidence against Trump all this time and I haven't, I think I must be innocent of lying if I'm claiming I'm lying now, except that I'm also lying about being innocent, so maybe I do have evidence against myself in this envelope.
At this point, who the hell knows, unquote.
Schiff went on to say he had found himself to be so dishonest, he was resigning from the committee chairmanship effective immediately.
He then called the committee to order.
Good morning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dooking.
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.
All right, it's been clear for a long time now that the American press is no longer objective, but is a Democrat enterprise run by Democrat corporations who hire Democrats with an interest in skewing the news in favor of other Democrats.
It's disturbing to be lied to on a regular basis like this, but what's even more disturbing is that because the media lies, they have an interest in causing us to forget the truth we already know.
The media has an interest in inducing amnesia in the American public.
In order for us to take the media's intense and reckless scrutiny of Donald Trump seriously, we have to forget how they treated Obama, the nothing-to-see-here approach to Obama's misuse of the IRS to silence his critics, or his repeated lies about the tragic disaster in Benghazi, and so on.
In order for us to take this content-free Ukraine story seriously, we have to forget three years of walls closing in, tipping point, beginning of the end coverage of the content-free Russian collusion story, or the my ass was pinched so he must be a rapist, content-free slander of Brett Kavanaugh, or the elevation of suspected felon Michael Avenatti to presidential candidate status, or all the rest of the content-free slanders the press has thrown at Trump since even before he took office.
To help us forget, the media now even has a search engine, Google, which returns skewed and phony replies to our questions about the past, and Google's video arm, YouTube, where damaging videos about Democrats regularly disappear.
It's incredibly sinister and Orwellian, and it'll work, too, if we don't fight back, if we don't consistently seek to tell the truth without fear or favor, and build our own sites, not conservative sites, but honest sites, to keep the truth alive.
It's not just the press either.
All leftism requires induced amnesia.
We have to forget the murders of communism, the failures of socialism, the small government capitalist path that led us to the freedoms we have.
When our soldiers die fighting for our freedom, we promise never to forget them.
But we have children being taught history through the anti-American work of communist Howard Zinn, so that the memory of those who died to make them free is being snuffed out.
The left depends on induced amnesia, and our freedom depends on remembering.
During this Ukraine nonsense, and it really is nonsense, it may seem to some of you that I've become an apologist for the president, that I'll let him off the hook for anything.
It's not true.
Trump is not right about everything, not even close, but he's right about the one thing that matters.
We are being lied to on a massive scale.
And those who are tasked with informing us have instead developed an interest in making us ignorant of not just the present, but of the precious past as well.
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So I love all this stuff they're saying now about, you know, whenever the president fights back, they just lie and lie about him.
You know, it really, again, it's not, I'm not, I've said everything I have to say about the president and the problems I have with what he does.
And when he does things I don't like, I say so.
But it's absurd, this Russian collusion story, the Stormy Daniels story, and now this Ukrainian thing, which is just nonsense.
Everything he did, we've seen it right there on the transcript.
To me, it's like it's nothing.
It's a nonsense.
I don't see why.
In something like 10 days, 10 days, we've had this rush to impeachment.
Just remember, impeachment in the past has always taken years to get around the, even the Russian collusion thing took years to investigate, and that was a complete nonsense.
This also is a complete nonsense.
We also, every no, and the story is unraveling, and I'll tell you about that.
So when Trump fights back, suddenly he's lashing out.
Oh, he's lashing out.
He's angry.
Why is he so angry?
Why isn't it, you know, why is Obama was civilized?
Yeah, Obama was civilized.
He got questions like, what enchants you about the presidency, Mr. Lightworker?
So yeah, he was civilized.
But when you get hit by lies for three years in a row, you start to lose your temper.
So Trump comes out yesterday and he gives a presser.
And he's with the president of Finland.
And as he's walking out, an aide hands him a story from the New York Times, which now the Times is kind of buried.
But the story is that Adam Schiff saw the whistleblower's report about his Ukraine call before it came out.
And Trump comes out and he is ticked.
Well, I think it's a scandal that he knew before.
I go a step further.
I think he probably helped write it.
Okay, that's what the word is.
And I think it's, I give a lot of respect for the New York Times for putting it out.
Just happened as I'm walking up here, they handed it to me.
And I said to Mike, I said, whoa, that's something.
That's big stuff.
That's a big story.
He knew long before, and he helped write it too.
It's a scam.
It's a scam.
He's right.
Schiff lied about this.
Schiff lied repeatedly about this.
He said that he didn't know.
Here's just one example.
This is a cut four.
We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.
We would like to, but I'm sure the whistleblower has concerns that he has not been advised, as the law requires, by the inspector general or the director of national intelligence just as to how he is to communicate with Congress.
And so the risk for the whistleblower is retaliation.
Will the whistleblower be protected under the statute if the offices that are supposed to come to his assistance and provide the mechanism are unwilling to do so.
But yes, we would love to talk directly with the whistleblower.
So he lied.
This guy has been lying.
This is what gets me about Schiff.
He lied.
Remember, he came out and he said, oh, yes, I've seen the evidence.
It's coming out.
It's more than circumstantial evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians.
And now when they talk about this, when they talk about the collusion story, just what you can just listen.
If you're listening to them, you can hear them obscure the truth.
They keep saying, well, Trump is questioning whether the Russians fiddled with our elections.
Russians always fiddle with our elections.
He's not questioning that.
He's questioning why he was spied on.
Did they have any reason to spy on him?
So Trump comes out and he gets angry about this and he's handed this thing.
And you know Trump, he's a big mouth and he just shoots off it, shoots from the lip, as they say.
And he comes out and he says, oh, and I think Adam Schiff wrote this.
And everybody says, well, that's evidence-free.
That's evidence-free.
There's no evidence that he did that.
And the thing is, that's true.
I mean, there's no evidence Trump did anything wrong with the Ukraine either, with Ukraine.
People keep telling me I shouldn't say the Ukraine because that's what the Russians used to say to obliterate it as an actual territory.
And the reason I keep saying the Ukraine is that my father-in-law, when he was a little boy, went to a school.
There was a Greek, you know, a Russian religion school, and they used to have to sing this song.
This is a little Irish kid, right?
A little Irish-American kid went to the school and he used to have to sing this song, We of the Ukraine are the children of the czar.
Hey, he used to walk around singing this.
So I've got the Ukraine stuck in my head.
I know it insults you.
I don't mean to do it.
I'm trying to break the habit.
Ukraine.
All right.
So the thing is that he has no, Trump has no evidence that Schiff wrote this, but this is something that the Republicans have been discussing since this whistleblower report came out, that it's a Schiff setup.
Now, come on, Schiff is a shifty guy.
I mean, Trump calls him Shifty Schiff, and he is shifty.
He's a McCarthyite.
I have said this for a long time.
He lies.
He throws around accusations.
He's never held to account for it.
And people were speculating about this before.
Here's Fred Fleitz.
He's a former Trump aide.
He went on Chris Cuomo's show.
And this is before the New York Times story came out.
Before the New York Times story came out, he was just analyzing the evidence.
You're supposed to, if you are in the intelligence agencies and you want to blow the whistle on something, you're supposed to go to the inspector general of the intelligence departments.
You're not supposed to go to the intelligence committee.
You're not supposed to go to congressmen because then it all becomes politicized, but people do it.
And here's Fred Fleitz analyzing this again before the New York Times story came out.
I've seen a number of whistleblowing complaints from intelligence officers in my time with the CIA and the House Intelligence Committee.
When I saw this one, I thought it was very unusual, not just that it was extremely well written, but it had legal references and legal footnotes.
That was a little bit unusual.
But I compared that with the fact that Adam Schiff was talking about the subject matter of this complaint throughout the month of August.
He posted a footnote, a tweet at the end of August, almost identically reflected this complaint.
Now, I know from my time on the House Intelligence Committee, whistleblowers frequently come directly to the committee.
They're not supposed to, but it happens all the time.
So I put this out on Twitter.
The day that I did, a senior staffer with the House Intelligence Committee, a Republican, told me, we think you're exactly right.
And this was a group project, and my colleagues were involved.
And also that evening, a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, also a Republican, said, we think you're right on target and we want to ask this whistleblower under oath, how did you put this together?
Who did you work on with it?
And did you work on this with the House Intelligence Committee, Democrat lawyers?
All right.
So when you say it's evidence-free, it's not evidence-free.
I mean, this is something that people have been picked up on.
I talked about it here like a week and a half ago where I said, you know, this whistleblower's complaint looks like it was put together by a lawyer.
It looks like it was, he had help writing it up.
Now it turns out that he went to Schiff with the complaint, with Schiff's committee with the complaint.
They referred him.
They say to a lawyer, they say they never saw the complaint itself, but we don't know because he lies all the time.
So we don't know.
And in this, people are picking on Chris Cuomo because Cuomo goes after flights and says, you don't have any proof of this.
You don't have any proof of this.
And Cuomo deserves a little bit of that because where is his intellectual curiosity?
Why is it these guys don't want to know how this stuff is going down?
Why is it they are only curious about everything Trump does?
And they just have this blank spot when it comes to the malfeasance of the Democrats.
I mean, it's so amazing when you think about it.
A reporter, a good journalist, should be suspicious of everybody.
I don't listen to Donald Trump and think, oh, yes, everything the guy says is golden truth.
I don't think like that.
I know the Republicans have an interest too.
Their interest aligns with mine, and I say so.
And so I agree with them more often.
But I know they're working off interest the same as Democrats are.
But why is it our press, which is supposed to be reporting fairly, why is it they're completely incurious about how this Russian collusion thing got started?
Did the Democrat computer actually get hacked by the Russians?
Why didn't they ever let the intelligence agency see it if they did?
Why did the FBI take the Democrats' word for that's what happened?
I don't understand that.
You know, this story is unraveling.
Okay, now just so you remember, the story is that Trump called the Ukrainian president and said, I want you to investigate Biden.
The transcript comes out and that's not what he said.
He said, do me a favor, investigate.
And then it was a little garble, but what he was obviously saying is investigate the story about the Russian hacking on the computers.
He wants to know whether this is real and how it all got turned around on him.
Mason Debunks Trump Claims00:09:38
That's what he wants to know about.
And this is something, remember, it has nothing to do with Mueller.
Mueller said he was not investigating that.
They keep bringing up the Mueller report, nothing to do with that.
And then later, when the Ukrainian president mentioned Rudy Giuliani coming to visit, Trump also said, yeah, and you should investigate that crazy Joe Biden as well.
He did not.
They keep saying, well, it was a quid pro quo because he withheld aid.
Here are two things that come out.
One is, of course, this story about Schiff.
I mean, the story about Schiff really does put this, make this seem like a setup.
It makes it seem like a setup.
I can't guarantee that's true.
Trump is still talking off the top of his head, but he has good reason to feel that Schiff is out to get him.
He has absolutely good reason to feel that way.
And if anything, if anything, at this point, after three years of this garbage, the press should be suspicious of Adam Schiff.
The guy lies, right?
He lies.
And we've seen him lie.
And he's been exposed as a liar.
And they keep bringing him back.
As I say, it's like goofy.
It's like, oh, okay.
Well, you lied last time, but are you a lion now?
I don't think so.
You know, it's just, it's just absurd.
But the other thing about this was it now seems that the Ukrainians didn't even know about the suspension of U.S. military aid.
When Trump and Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, were talking, they had no idea that the aid had been withheld, so they couldn't have been pressured by the aid.
So that doesn't make any sense.
So Trump has a right to be angry.
And we're going to talk, I'll show you how angry he got, because he really did get angry.
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So Trump finally blew up.
He comes in this press conference with the Finnish president.
And he's talking about this, and Jeff Mason of Reuters starts questioning.
And, you know, everybody's defending Jeff Mason of Reuters.
And it's not about Jeff Mason of Reuters.
I have made this point continually.
When the press is corrupt, which the press is, it doesn't matter if the people inside the press are decent people.
Jeff Mason, I'm sure, is a good reporter.
Everybody who knows him says he's a great guy.
I'm sure he is.
I'm sure he is.
I'm sure he didn't deserve this.
But the press deserves it, and he's part of the press, and that makes him part of a corrupt system.
It's like if you're doing, if there's a system that does something wrong, whatever it is, and you're in that system, you can be a nice version of that system, but you're still corrupted by the system.
And that's the problem Jeff Mason has.
But everybody's complaining about Trump going off in them, but I can understand it.
So if Trump finally says, ask a question of the Finnish president.
Stop badgering to me about this stupid Ukraine story.
And Mason keeps asking him a question.
And this is Trump's response.
Are you talking to me?
Yeah, it was just a follow-up of what I just asked you, sir.
You ready?
We have the president of Finland.
Ask him a question.
I have one for him.
I just wanted to follow up on the one that I asked.
Did you hear me?
Did you hear me?
Yes.
Ask him a question.
I will.
I'm giving you a long answer.
Ask this gentleman a question.
Don't be rude.
No, sir.
I don't want to be rude.
I just wanted you to have a chance to answer the question that I asked you.
I've answered everything.
It's a whole hoax.
And you know who's playing into the hoax?
People like you and the fake news media that we have in this country.
And I say in many cases, the corrupt media, because you're corrupt.
Much of the media in this country is not just fake, it's corrupt.
And you have some very fine people, too.
Great journalists, great reporters.
But to a large extent, it's corrupt and it's fake.
Ask the president of Finland a question, please.
Okay, I'll move on now.
You talking to me?
You talking to me?
You're talking to me?
But who the hell else are you talking?
Talking to me?
Well, I'm the only one here.
So, I mean, I feel for both of them here, you know.
I mean, I wish, listen, do I wish Trump had more control over his temper?
Yes.
But do I understand why he's ticked off?
Of course I do.
Of course I do.
And yeah, is it Jeff Mason's fault specifically?
Did he just get hit by the steamroller?
Yeah, he did.
He's doing his job.
He's trying to do his job.
He's trying to ask the questions.
But when you're surrounded by a press that was completely for eight years incurious about anything that Barack Obama was doing, when you had those questions, you know, what enchants you, Mr. Lightworker, Mr. George Washington, who has descended, has descended from being a visionary leader of a movement into the Oval Office to serve us as president.
He has come down from his high.
You know, that's the way they used to talk about this guy.
And then suddenly with Trump from November 2016, from November before he takes office, it's like, is that tweet impeachable?
Is that tie, that red tie?
Is that impeachable?
How can you blame him for being ticked off?
Yeah, he's a hothead.
Yeah, he's a big mouth.
But how can you blame him for being ticked off?
And this guy, Mason, gets caught in the crossfire.
That's too bad.
And meanwhile, meanwhile, on the other side, and this is an unbelievable clip.
I mean, this is an unbelievable piece of sound.
John Brennan, one of the guys who helped set this thing off, this CIA guy who used to be a registered communist, right?
So that makes him a communist spy, right?
That literally makes him a communist spy.
He's on MSNBC and was that Nicole Wallace, I guess.
She says to him, why are they investigating you, my friend?
Why you, why would, and he has, and Brennan has no idea why anyone, why would anyone turn, he's, look at this face.
Look at this honest face.
Here's a guy who's been lying and calling the president treasonous.
He too has been calling the president treasonous.
And then when the president fights back, it's like all on the president.
But listen to this.
Listen to this.
Investigate moi?
Listen.
Do you understand the motive?
I don't.
And I'm supposedly going to be interviewed by Mr. Durham as part of this non-investigation.
I remember William Barr, you know, when he was testifying in front of Congress, he said he didn't understand the predication of the counterintelligence investigation that was launched into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
I don't understand the predication of this worldwide effort to try to uncover dirt, either real or imagined, that would discredit that investigation in 2016 into Russian interference.
You know, on one hand, the Obama administration is crucified for not doing enough.
And now they're looking for what we might have done in order to try to understand better and to prevent the Russian interference.
And I do agree, it's not just that Trump doesn't care about Russian interference.
I think he is hoping that he's going to get it because he knows that Russia interfered on his behalf.
And I think as he sees his political fortunes dwindling, I think he really is hoping that his pal Vladimir is going to come through once again and help him get elected in 2020 if he's going to be in office by then.
And she's nodding.
I understand it's MSNBC.
They're fighting there for the left, for leftism.
I get it.
I actually respect that they do that out in the open.
It's not like CNN or the New York Times where they're pretending to be objective.
Like Fox, Fox has its point of view and MSNBC has its point of view.
But she's sitting there nodding.
And the guy is lying to her face, obviously.
He's saying that what Trump is doing is he's trying, he's not only trying to disprove Russian intervention, he's hoping that he will get it again from his pal Putin.
And remember, Brennan has been talking like this forever.
He's been calling Trump a Russian asset.
He's been basically saying that Putin pulls his strings.
I mean, Putin loves this stuff.
Putin loves the fact that we're divided and fighting with each other and throwing lies at the president.
Putin could care less about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
He cares.
He could not have known that Trump was going to win the presidency.
No one knew.
He was going after doing whatever he could to cause dissension and to cause trouble and to cause chaos.
And he got everything he wanted from the Democrats.
And why not?
Brennan's a registered communist.
Why wouldn't he work with Putin?
But that's not the thing.
The thing is, everything he just said, why would they investigate me?
I was just trying to stop Russian inclusion.
He was spying.
He was encouraging spying on an opposition candidate that the CIA, that the FBI, that they would tap the phone of a Republican candidate for a Democrat president is obscene.
That's obscene.
And we need to know about that.
And as Andy McCarthy has pointed out at NRO, they had no predicate.
They had no reason to think this.
And so they used that stupid steel report, misinformation, disinformation from the Russians to get it all started.
And he's sitting there with the innocent look on his face.
It's garbage.
All right.
Why Would They Investigate?00:07:31
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You know, before I finish up, well, let me just finish up what I'm saying about this Ukraine thing.
Daniel Henninger, who's no blind Trump supporter at all, he points out that part of the reason that Washington, D.C. is in a bubble and it's actually getting the news later than the rest of us is that they're still reading the newspapers.
And when this story came out, the day after the White House released the text of Trump's conversation with the Ukrainian president, the New York Times, under a banner headline, that's that big declared war headline, ran Trump Ask for Favor in Call Memo Shows.
They spread a reproduction of the transcript across the top half of the page with six sections highlighted portentously in yellow marker.
That day's Washington Post filled its first section with an astounding 19 separate impeachment inquiry stories, each more or less pegged to this single transcript.
So they're getting this sense like, oh my God, this is the biggest story ever.
Oh, this is a tremendous scandal.
But I just think it is empty, empty stuff.
I think it is incredibly empty.
I think the fact that Schiff knew about it casts real doubt on its origins and on its provenance.
I think the fact that the Ukrainians didn't know that the aid was being withheld means the entire story doesn't make any sense.
I think that Washington, D.C. is going to get the news after the rest of us that this thing has blown up in the Democrats' faces.
I think this story is unraveling.
I think it's blown up in the Democrats' faces.
I think the whole thing from beginning to end has been an ugly, ugly attack on Trump, and they deserve everything that they get about it.
But before I stop and before I take a break, and we have Henry Olson coming on, one of the great, just to talk to him about what he thinks is going to happen in 2020, because he's one of the great observers of elections, always much closer to the truth than most of the people who talk about elections.
But before that, I want to cover a little bit about this Amber Geiger story.
If you haven't seen this clip, it is something really worth seeing.
This is, of course, the policewoman who walked into the apartment of Botham Jean, and his door was ajar.
She claims she thought it was her apartment.
It was right underneath her apartment.
This poor man, an accountant, a beloved guy, a Christian guy, was sitting there eating ice cream and watching TV, and she thought he was a burglar, she says, and she shot him.
She was convicted.
It became a racial story because she's white and he's black.
And this is in Dallas, and people got very tense about it.
She was convicted of murder and sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison, which is something some people said that's not enough.
But she herself, you know, was very obviously on the stand.
She was in tears about the entire thing.
It's a weird story.
It's a weird story, clearly an act of malfeasance on our part, and something has to be done for this innocent man who's sitting there shot to death in his apartment.
It's a tragic, tragic story.
The guy's brother gets on the stand during the sentencing hearing, and he too is a Christian, and this is what he said about the woman who killed his beloved brother.
And I wasn't going to ever say this in front of my family or anyone, but I don't even want you to go to jail.
I want the best for you because I know that's exactly what Botham would want you to do.
And the best would be give your life to Christ.
I'm not going to say anything else.
I think giving your life to Christ would be the best thing that Botham would want you to do.
Again, I love you as a person.
And I don't wish anything bad on you.
I don't know if this is possible, but can I give her a hug, please?
The judge, Tammy Kemp, then gave him permission to hug her, and the two embraced.
The brother and the woman who killed his brother embraced for at least 20 seconds, talked to each other in hushed tones.
Both were wiping away tears after they parted.
Both and Jean's sister could be heard crying from her seat in the audience.
Judge Kemp then walked over to where Botham's parents sat in the audience and told them she was sorry for their loss, trust in the Lord, the judge told them, and gave them both a hug.
The judge then went to talk to Ms. Geiger, consoling her before exiting, to bring back a Bible to hand to her and said, I believe in Christ.
This is the judge talking to her.
You haven't done so much that you can't be forgiven.
You know, in this moment of like dissent and hatred where everybody's screaming at each other, you see this kind of elevated reaction to a genuine, genuine tragedy.
I mean, just an absolute act of horror.
And it's hard to comment on it, except I just want to say one thing.
I mean, it really doesn't need me commenting on it, but I just want to put this one thought out there.
A lot of times when we talk about religion, we talk about good and bad.
We talk about sin and doing the right thing and restraining yourself and all this stuff.
We forget to talk about joy.
And by joy, obviously, I don't mean happiness.
What I mean is the vitality of life, what Christ called life in abundance.
Christ came to give people life in abundance.
And we don't talk about the joy, but just ask yourself, here's this guy, Brent, Gene, who is obviously not happy today.
He's heartbroken.
He's heartbroken.
He's going to be heartbroken for a long time.
And his scar is going to be there forever.
But who do you think, who do you think is going to find joy in life, not just the next life, but in this life, faster and recover faster and come back to be with his brother in his heart again faster?
This guy full of the love of Christ who forgives or the person who lives in vengeance and rage all his life.
I mean, people forget, forget that Jesus didn't come to make you good.
He didn't come so your mom would be proud of you.
He came to give you life in abundance.
And I think when you see that, what you're seeing, you're witnessing is life in abundance right in front of you.
Another Kingdom 3, the final season has come.
It's the final installment.
You don't want to miss a minute of it.
Episodes 1 and 2 drop Monday, October 7th, but subscribers get exclusive access to them tomorrow.
So don't wait.
Two Ways to Appeal00:14:02
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Also, subscribers exclusively can catch up on past seasons at dailywire.com.
So get ready for the final season today.
I have heard the final version of the first episode.
It is absolutely spectacular.
I wrote it myself, so I shouldn't be saying that, but I'm just saying the guys who put it together did a great job.
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I want you to hear Henry Olson.
Henry Olson is the guy on election night when everybody was telling me that Donald Trump was going to be blown away.
I kept my mouth shut because I was still, I was too insecure, basically, to come out and say that I thought it was going to be much closer than that.
But the only reason I knew it was going to be closer is because I had been reading Henry Olson.
He is the best observer of polls and trends that I know.
He's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is a think tank in Washington, D.C. He's a columnist at the Washington Post.
Great stuff in the Washington Post.
I'm always surprised they have him in there because he's so honest and straightforward and conservative.
Henry, are you there?
I am.
Good to see you again.
It's good to see you again as well.
Thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
You know, let's start here because I want to ask you about the latest Ukraine stuff and all this story coming out.
But let's start before that.
You wrote a piece saying that Trump's current approval ratings are bad news for Democrats.
What did you mean by that?
Yeah, what I mean by that is that you have to remember that Trump does not have to win the popular vote to win reelection.
That he won last time, even though he lost the popular vote by 3 million.
His coalition is still intact.
And so instead of looking and seeing how much he's behind on his job approval, you need to be looking at the level.
And that they've been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at him and sometimes the kitchen sink too for the last three years.
And yet this guy is still sitting a little bit shy of 45% in the job approval rating.
And that's only a point or two lower than he needs nationally to have an electoral college majority.
So you just look at this and you say, this is the unsinkable Molly Brown, it appears, that he may, you know, you used to have a commercial when I was younger.
Weebulls wobble, but they don't fall down.
You know, that's Trump.
He wobbles and then he bounces right back up.
And if I were the Democrats, they are so sure they represent the majority of Americans.
I wouldn't be so sure.
I think all it takes is a little bit of good news for Trump.
Maybe this Ukraine thing blowing up.
And if he gets the 46 or 47 percent job approval rating, he's going to get reelected.
Wow.
Wow.
That's quite a prediction.
Now, you're looking at this Ukraine thing.
To me, it looks like it's blowing up in their faces, but obviously they don't know it.
It's kind of like Wiley Coyote before they look down.
That's what it looks like to me.
How does it look to you?
Do you think they're going to get anywhere with this?
Well, you know, I think we are so partisanly divided that the question is, what they're not going to do is remove him from office over this.
There's not going to be a lot of Republicans who say, you know, I really thought the president was doing a good job, but this has tipped the edge over for me.
And they need 20 Republicans to switch over in the Senate to remove him.
So they are not going to remove him from office over this based on what we know right now.
So what they are, the best case scenario for them is that they harden the feelings of the 52% who have been negative about him throughout his presidency.
But that's not something, that's their best case scenario.
I think the worst case scenario is you start to find more about Biden.
You start to find more about what's been going on.
You find out who the whistleblower is.
And we will, you know, if there's going to be a Senate trial, Mitch McConnell would be remiss in his duties not to have the president's attorneys question the person who started it all in public with lawyers.
We don't know what's going to happen.
I think it's very hard to see how the Democrats win this in the sense of removing him from office.
And it could very well be that we find out more and the middle of America just finally gets sick of the Democrats' political shenanigans.
You know, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal today about Trump has shifted his tone, they said, to appeal to women.
Do you think that's true?
Do you hear him kind of softening a little bit?
Well, I don't hear him softening in the last 72 hours.
This is a guy who wants to feel, once again, feels that he's done nothing wrong and is under attack.
But there was a softening of an appeal before that.
It was one that we saw.
And I don't think it's necessarily to appeal to women, but it's appealed broadly to these people who dislike him but don't hate him.
And that's where the election is going to be won or lost.
There's two ways to appeal to those people.
One is to make them think that maybe he's a better guy than they thought.
That's getting them to like him more.
And the other is to contrast him with whoever the nominee is and say, you don't have to like me.
You just have to understand that I'm better than that person.
And so right now, I think the president was pivoting to that.
Now he's having to defend himself again.
But if he could control himself, there's nothing that prevents him from getting back to that point in a week or two.
And then contrasting with specifics.
I'm here to fight for you.
They just want to fight for their political interests.
And once that contrast starts to be made, then I think the Democrats are on a very difficult ground.
When you watch, I mean, you're just expert at watching the polls and what affects the polls.
When you watch his approval ratings go up and down, what works for him and what doesn't?
What doesn't work for him is tweets and arguments that are perceived as borderline racially either, you know, racism is what the left will say, racially insensitive is what people in the middle might say.
That does not work for him.
You saw it in 2017.
You saw it with the squad earlier in the summertime when he started saying they should quote unquote go back and double down on that.
That did not work for him.
But once those tweets are gone, once he stops doing that, the poll ratings bounce up pretty quickly because people then start to thinking about, well, he may not be the guy I want to have over for dinner, but he's doing an okay job.
And that's what Trump needs to be focusing on.
And if he could make him a little bit more, self a little bit more like the guy you want to have over to dinner, that's just sauce.
That's just gravy on the dinner.
You know, you wrote a book called The Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism.
And you've been making this argument for a long time that Republicans kind of left Reagan conservatism behind when they emphasized small government and free markets, but forgot the working man and forgot the safety net that Reagan, in fact, defended.
And you kept saying this, and the Republicans kept not listening to you.
And Donald Trump, leaving out the tweets, leaving out the kind of Trumpian trumpiness of him, leaving that out, he was almost as if you had created him as a candidate.
He actually did say those things to people and he did speak to the working class.
Has he lived up to his promise in your eyes?
Yeah, I'd give him a B on that, you know, which is that he said what the working class of America wanted was somebody who had their backs on cultural and economic matters, particularly on economic matters.
He has not moved to cut entitlements.
It's something that the Wall Street Journal editorial board absolutely hates.
Establishment Republicans wish that he would be doing that.
Paul Ryan's criticized him for not doing it.
Well, guess what?
A majority of Americans don't want that.
They don't want Ryanism.
If they did, Mitt Romney would be in the seventh year of his presidency.
And So on that, he gets an A. He's also done very good on things like trade, which is another strong point of break from Republican orthodoxy.
And I think he gets an A on that.
Where he doesn't get as strong of a grade is that I think there are things that he could have been doing, things like increased vocational education, things like really making the infrastructure bill a priority rather than something that he raises up the flagpole and then pulls back down when people don't immediately jump on board.
He should have been making that the focal point of his presidency.
Instead, he's been a little more orthodox, but I'd give him a B.
And he has certainly made the sort of argument that I was making as far back as 2010 somewhat respectable.
And you see some of the younger congressmen and senators are taking a look at that and saying, you know, actually, I think Trump might have been on for something.
If we have a sanitized PG-13 rated Trumpism, maybe more people will show up at the movie.
Is that, you know, we keep hearing that America is not going to be a majority white country and that's going to make Republicans unelectable.
Is there a version of the Republican Party that conservatives can stomach that can appeal even into that new America?
Absolutely.
You can, look, the largest minority that is going to be growing in strength is the Hispanic minority.
The Hispanic voter is a working class voter.
The median Hispanic makes like $45,000 a year in household income.
Median Hispanic is a high school graduate.
And it'll probably take their children three or four generations of working their way up, just as every other immigrant group has taken three or four generations to make it so that they are representative at the top.
The African-American community is hugely a working class community.
If you cannot talk to these voters where they live, which is that they want opportunity and assistance, they want free enterprise and an active government.
You just can't talk to them.
But a Republican Party that does that then distinguishes itself from a socialist, the Democratic Party, that is offensive to a lot of these people's religious values.
And many immigrants and African Americans remain religious and is also a group and an ideology that is cutting off the private sector opportunity that they want.
So if you can move to the middle and talk to these people in ways that say you respect and understand the role that government has, that allows you to do what Reagan did, which is cast the Democrats and their left as the adversary.
And that is what can make what Reagan called the new Republican Party.
Henry Olson, you can find his work in the Washington News Post, his excellent work in the Washington Post.
He's the author of the working class Republican, Ronald Reagan, and the return of blue-collar conservatism.
Henry, thanks so much.
I hope you'll come back as the election approaches and talk some more.
I'd love to be back.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks.
Thanks very much.
All right.
Time for a quick final reflection.
I have to play this troll that was pulled off in Winchester, Massachusetts.
This is the local Boston station covering this, one of the great trolls.
Somebody's putting up signs through Winchester.
Controversial signs are popping up in Winchester about Muslim women that are causing confusion and outrage.
But now the debate has been sparked here in Winchester.
Are these free speech or hate speech?
It says Islam is right about women.
They read Islam is right about women.
Several more found at the elementary and high schools and Unitarian church.
It's unclear who they target, women or Islam.
This is one of about a dozen signs found here in Winchester.
People we talk to say they don't even know what it means.
Find a philosophy's confusing.
Subject to interpretation.
I really don't know because everybody has their own opinion and I respect it.
Everybody's entitled to say whatever they want.
Anita Davison says she spotted this flyer Wednesday morning on Main Street in Winchester Center that says Islam is right about women.
I told the first one down and then when I saw a second one I decided to bring it to the police department here.
People in town say they think the signs are referring to strict laws applied to women.
I think that putting signs up that make people feel uncomfortable is unfortunate, particularly in this time and age.
I asked the cop if you caught me posting a sign like that on one of these polls, would you arrest me?
The officer said it's complicated.
It's complicated.
What I love about this story is it's just a pitch-perfect troll, right?
Because the left's philosophy makes no sense.
You can't criticize Islam.
You can criticize Christianity forever, but you can't criticize Islam as if it were a race.
They treat Islam as if it were a race.
And people, when I make jokes about Islam, Media Matters was trying to do it to me on Twitter just the other day.
They say, oh, well, you're a racist.
And I think, what race?
What race?
What race am I attacking?
I mean, by the way, I'm in favor of racial humor.
I think it's good for everybody to let off steam.
But when I'm talking about Islam, I'm not talking about a race.
I'm talking about a series of ideas.
And some of those ideas strike me as incorrect.
Some of them strike me as dangerous.
And I always want to say to leftists when they attack me for this, which ideas of Islam do you support?
Do you support the oppression of women?
Do you support the idea of God?
Do you believe in God?
What do you support?
You know, and so what they do when they say this is, who's the victim here?
They don't know because their ideas make no sense.
You could not do that to a conservative.
You just couldn't do it.
You couldn't find a way where the guy wouldn't know who was being offended or whether it was right or wrong unless it was just pure gibberish.
It is an amazing troll and it just points out the fact that leftism makes no sense.
A Series of Ideas00:01:41
That's why it depends on shutuppery and amnesia.
That's why.
The Clavenless Weekend is upon you, except, except tomorrow if you are a subscriber.
If you're a subscriber tomorrow, you get two episodes of Another Kingdom and you can suck up some more claviny goodness to get you through Saturday and Sunday.
The rest of you, you're doomed.
But if you make it to Monday, there'll be more that then Another Kingdom will be available to you.
And I will be back.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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