Ep. 793 – What Scares Me About America dissects the left’s monstrous political rhetoric—Bernie Sanders as a "walking dead man," Kamala Harris as a "harpy"—while exposing Democratic hypocrisy on racism, free speech, and gun rights, from Pelosi’s selective patriotism to the partisan impeachment inquiry. Clint Emerson, Navy SEAL and author of The Right Kind of Crazy (Nov. 12), contrasts military mission-driven ideals with political cynicism, praising Trump’s al-Baghdadi takedown as strategic over diplomatic posturing, while warning that U.S. occupation in the Middle East must rebuild societies to erase extremism’s legacy. The episode ties cultural shifts—canceled comedy, social media censorship—to a broader fear of irrationality and enforced dogma, from gender sports policies to climate activism, framing America’s divide as a clash between free expression and ideological conformity. [Automatically generated summary]
It's Halloween, which means overexcited children pretending to be what they're not will be coming around your house asking you to give them your stuff.
So it's kind of like the Democrat primaries.
There'll be monsters, witches, vampires, and ghosts everywhere.
So it's kind of like the Democrat primaries.
You'll go out and spend your hard-earned money on treats, and then spoiled brats will come to your house and demand that you give those treats to them, or they'll put destructive tricks on you.
So it's sort of like the Democrat primaries.
This year's popular costumes include a walking dead man who will devour your brains, a screeching harpy whose hideous demeanor will paralyze you with fear and disgust, and a succubus, one of those female spirits who drain you of your life force.
Those are the Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren costumes, respectively.
There's also a Pete Buttigeg costume where you look normal until someone gets up close and then you suddenly become terrifying.
And of course, the Joe Biden costume in which you become a ghost of your former self and everyone can see right through you.
Halloween has a long tradition based on ancient superstitions and irrational beliefs.
So it's sort of like the Democrat primaries.
The word Halloween means All Hallows Eve and comes on the eve of All Hallows Day when believers honor the saints who are dead people whose power is still felt on earth, sort of like Democrat voters, only good.
Over time, the holiday developed its present fun traditions where young people dress up in various costumes and then other young people shriek in their faces about cultural appropriation and try to get them expelled, then go home and tell themselves what wonderful people they are, all the while harboring the secret suspicion that they actually suck, which it turns out is true.
Thus, Halloween has been transformed from an interesting annual event into a riot of rage, guilt, and shame.
Sort of like the Democrat primaries.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we're here, and it's Halloween, so I just send, you know, I don't like to put on costumes, but today I decided to dress up as Austin.
I don't know if you can tell which one is me, which one is him, but I have to tell you, when I walked in today and saw him sitting in my makeup chair, I did have a moment where I thought like, uh, what?
So excellent, excellent costume.
I feel sad for him.
I hope he doesn't get attacked on the street.
It is not an original insight to point out that the left is constantly accusing everyone else of doing exactly what they're doing.
They say they see everything in terms of race and accuse everyone else of racism.
They lie with media-protected impunity every single day and then accuse everyone else of lying.
And they rant about how Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler and then constantly accuse Donald Trump of exaggerating.
But perhaps the most outrageous projected accusation of all is the accusation that Trump is somehow violating the Constitution, coming from a bunch of clowns who want to curtail free speech, ignore the Second Amendment, end the Electoral College, and pack the Supreme Court.
Nice try, Ms. Pelosi.
The fact is, while Donald Trump may have brought the values of reality TV to the office of the president, it's the left who have turned our government into a showbiz sham.
Using their cronies in the media and their cronies in Hollywood, they've created an illusion of compassionate government, which is just a mask describing, disguising the face of power.
Democrat candidates show us videos of themselves drinking beer and getting dental work and dancing around at parties, so we'll know they're just ordinary guys like you and me whose proposals would cripple business and expand government and gut the middle class.
So who cares what they look like when they dance or do dental work?
They go on television and talk about justice while the cities they run become cesspits of drug use and homelessness and dysfunction.
Barack Obama served eight years as president, eight years of scandal-ridden incompetence.
But on TV, he was a lightworker, a visionary, a man who descended into the presidency from on high.
Now we're told Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a star.
But what has she ever done?
What has she ever accomplished?
What has any Democrat in Congress done recently besides harry the president and try to overturn the election over absolutely nothing?
It's all glitter and show as befitting people who run Hollywood and the news media.
It is glitter and show to mask the fact that our government is no longer ours.
It's run by ghostly shadow men who turn into spies and informants against anyone who tries to reclaim power for the individual.
This Halloween, you want to know what frightens me about my country?
Well, for one thing, it's the media attempt to put a mask of compassion and liberty on the naked face of power.
And it's a still open question of whether the people will fall for the masquerade.
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So I guess we have to start by just pointing out that they passed this resolution to bring the impeachment hearing out into the open, sort of, kind of, not really, but it looks like a show, making a show of it.
And here, to her everlasting disgrace, is Nancy Pelosi.
I mean, really, these are people, the Democrats are people, they don't want the electoral college, they don't like the First Amendment, they don't like the Second Amendment, they don't want the Supreme Court now that they're not making law by it.
And if they do have the Supreme Court, they want to use it to make law by it.
They don't think the legislature should be able to make the law.
Barack Obama said he was not going to enforce Bill Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act because he didn't agree with it.
So if the executive is not executing the laws that the legislator make, the legislature has no power and the executive becomes the king.
These are not people who really care about the Constitution and they are certainly not people who believe in the flag.
Do you remember during the wars on terror when George W. Bush was president?
I'm sure some of you remember how they dissed the flag, how they dissed patriotism, how Katie Couric went on TV and said, oh, you know, I get very nervous when we talk about patriotism.
When Trump talks about America first, they say, oh, this is, oh, it's fascist, it's terrible.
And suddenly, suddenly, Nancy Pelosi is on the floor of the House with a gigantic mock-up of the American flag.
And this is what she said.
This flag.
So many have fought and died for this flag, which stands for our democracy.
When Benjamin Franklin came out of Independence Hall, you've heard this over and over, on September 17th, 1787, the day our Constitution was adopted, he came out of Independence Hall and people said to him, Dr. Franklin, what do we have, a monarchy or a republic?
And he said, as you know, he said, a republic if we can keep it.
If we can keep it.
And this Constitution is the blueprint for our republic and not a monarchy.
But when we have a president who says Article II says I can do whatever I want, that is in defiance of the separation of powers.
That's not what our Constitution says.
So what is at stake is our democracy.
What are we fighting for?
Defending our democracy for the people.
What a load of bull.
I mean, truly, truly, these are people, they don't want the Electoral College.
They don't want the president that was elected legally to stay in power.
They don't want you to have guns.
The Constitution guarantees your right to have guns.
They hate free speech.
They're always talking about banning this kind of speech, knocking this one off and that one off their platforms.
And yet she's going to sit there and wave the flag, which I thought, I thought the flag to a Democrat was like a cross to a vampire.
I thought when she held it up, she was going to have to sink back into her coffin.
But they wave the flag and they tell us our Constitution, our democracy is under threat because Donald Trump said something to the Ukrainian president, which maybe was a little bit reckless, maybe not.
I don't know.
You know, I mean, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden certainly do seem to have had a somewhat suspect relationship, a somewhat suspect.
Hunter Biden seems to have had a somewhat suspect career where he's profited off not just the office of Joe Biden, but some of the actions of Joe Biden, as the Washington Examiner reported.
And so Trump's saying, I want you to investigate this.
I want to investigate the malfeasance that happened during the 2016 election, which was at least allegedly so much worse than this.
And they're not even reporting on the DOJ investigation into it.
And this is what we're supposed to be afraid of.
This is their Halloween mask, their big scary Donald Trump Halloween mask, where they're going to say, boo, you know, your Constitution is in trouble.
Just give us back the power.
Give us back the deep state power.
And their newspapers are touting the deep state, how what a wonderful thing it is.
And we're supposed to be afraid of Donald Trump on the phone to Ukraine when we already have the transcript.
We know it was in the phone call.
I don't know.
It's crazy.
Here's Devin Nunes making his Nunez, Nunez, Nunez, whatever, Nunu.
I don't know what the hell the guy's name is.
But where he is, the guy who has really worked hard to expose a lot of this and has done a good job of it.
Here's his response on the floor.
First, they insisted that the president is a Russian agent.
Then they claimed he's a money launderer and a tax cheat and a fraudulent businessman.
And now they've decided they don't like the way he talks to foreign leaders.
But they have no evidence and no argument to support impeachment.
All they have is the unconditional cooperation of the media and their advance to advance their preposterous narrative.
You know, it's true.
The thing is, what he's saying is true.
They have come up with one charge after another.
This is a Congress.
Remember, it's passed no laws.
It's done absolutely nothing, but one charge after another.
And it is just, to me, it's so, I mean, even on Fox, they're talking about, well, now the thing is going to be open.
They're calling the Republicans bluff.
Wait and see.
Wait and see whether Adam Schiff is going to let people get cross-examined.
Wait and see.
I mean, the description of what is going on in these secret hearings from Jim Jordan, unbelievable.
Listen to this.
Chairman Schiff has prevented the witness from answering certain questions we have during the deposition.
You know, one of the things you do in these depositions is you ask the basics.
Who, what, when, where, why?
You ask those questions.
When we asked the whistleblower who he spoke to after important events in July, Adam Schiff says, no, no, no, we're not going to let him answer that question.
Even though at the start of every one of these depositions, and you all know this already, every one of the start of every single one, he says this is not classified.
He tells us that the witness has their counsel there, their lawyer there.
They don't need Adam Schiff being chairman and lawyer.
But that's in effect what happened today, and he would not let the witness.
And look, the Democrats run out here and say, oh, the Republicans are trying to figure out who the whistleblower is.
We're trying to figure out who a witness Liz is.
You know, it's interesting, by the way, about the whistleblower, talking about Halloween masks and the mask coming off.
Real Clear Investigations has a story by Paul Sperry that the name of the government official fitting the description of the so-called whistleblower is now an open secret in normally leak happy Washington and has been repeated in closed impeachment depositions and other private venues.
His name is Eric Ciaramella.
Eric Ciaramella, 33-year-old.
He has anti-Trump and pro-Democrat political leanings only hinted at in previous disclosures.
Sperry reports he's a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, a Ukraine expert who previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump.
He had to leave his NS, a National Security Council posting in the White House West Wing in mid-2017 because he was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump, said a former NSC official before filing his complaint.
Sharamella is pronounced, Sharamella, huddled for guidance with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
So all of this stuff, all of this stuff is a Halloween charade.
It's all a mask of justice and constitutional governance over a naked, naked face of power, a grab for power.
And because of that, because it's all fake, because it's all fake, controlling the media, controlling the flow of information is essential to it.
I'll talk about that in just a second.
But let me talk about my new beautiful watch.
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Different Kinds of People00:13:42
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Speaking of which, by the way, the Clavenless weekend is coming up.
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Hilarious story.
A hilarious story with a serious underpinning, all right?
Donald Trump tweeted a picture of the dog who chased Baker al-Baghdadi into the tunnel, right?
Beautiful dog.
We now know he did.
At the time, he couldn't declassify the dog's name, but we now hear the name is Conan, just a beautiful animal who courageously went after this terrorist and was hurt a little bit in the explosion, but apparently is doing fine.
So our guys in the Daily Wire art department, who are constantly making stuff up and putting out these memes, took a picture of Donald Trump giving the Medal of Honor to James McClon, a retired Army medic, and took out McClon and put in the dog.
So it's got Donald Trump putting on this medal, and we even changed the Medal of Honor to a little dog paw.
So we've got this hilarious meme we put out of Donald Trump giving a medal to the dog.
Trump retweets the Daily Wire meme.
Okay, so we love this.
We're very excited about it.
The President of the United States retweets one of our memes, deservedly, obviously showing that Trump has a sense of humor and thought this was cute.
Later on, he thanked us for it.
He said he thought it was cute.
The New York Times assigns two reporters to this and runs it as a story with a kind of air of suspicion to it, right?
It's like Trump tweets faked photo of hero dog getting a medal.
President Trump on Wednesday shared an altered photograph of himself placing a medal around the neck of the dog.
You can't make this stuff up.
But at the bottom of the story, it says, the Trump White House is fluent in and speaks often in the language of internet memes.
See, this is what bothers them about it.
In April, Mr. Trump shared a spoof video of a video of a spoof video of Joe Biden Jr. as Mr. Biden sits cross-legged on a sofa and speaks what looks like a cardboard cutout of Mr. Biden pops up behind him, seeming to mock his remarks.
In August, he tweeted a fake image of a gleaming Trump tower on Greenland.
That was hilarious, by the way.
A country that he had reportedly talked about buying.
He has also tweeted a doctored gif of him, that's what you say, is a GIF, we actually pronounce it GIF, right?
Of him hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball and another of him wrestling CNN to the ground.
So they hate this stuff.
They hate the fact that he really knows what he's doing and he has a sense of humor.
Half the time, I think, with Trump, he's laughing at people.
Half the time, he is saying these things with a dead, serious face that he is actually making a joke about.
Jeremy Boring, the God-King of the Daily Wire, receives an email from the Washington Post, so help me.
Hello, I'm with the Washington Post and wanted to get confirmation this photo originated with you.
And if it did, that you digitally removed Medal of Honor recipient James McClon and replaced him with a dog.
And Jeremy responded on the record, you've got to be effing, joking.
Please quote me on that.
And this, my friends, is why we call him the God King, because that has got to be one of the great responses of all time.
But why the anxiety, right?
Why so much anxiety about the fact that Trump is funny?
He's got a sense of humor.
And the reason is, this is what they have.
This is what they thought they had.
Does anybody think, does anybody think that Stephen Colbert and Samantha B and everyone that they've got on late night spewing out this true anti-Trump hatred?
It really is twisted, depraved hatred of the president.
Does anybody think they're as funny as he is?
He's funnier.
He's funnier than they are.
Trump, you know, Christian Toto, you know, we have him on the show sometimes.
He has that website, Hollywood and Toto.
He quotes a comedian, Jimmy Fila, F-A-I-L-L-A, who says, I don't know that comics are ready to become Republicans, but I do feel the Democratic Party has lost comedy.
The only comics who are outredly Democrat now are ones no one respects.
Our thinks are funny anyway.
I don't think anybody's watching Colbert and saying, this guy is great.
It's not really about Republican Democrats.
It's not about comedians becoming Republicans or Democrats.
It's about the fact that they are violating this canceled culture that is what the left is.
See, this is the thing.
When they tell us, oh my gosh, there's all these power imbalances.
We have to pay attention to intersectionality.
We have to make sure this happens and that happens.
They never say what the world is going to look like, what the world is going to look like when all this power equals out.
Because some people have naturally more power than other people, more talent, more ability.
They're faster.
They're smarter.
They're stronger, whatever.
They're going to have those things.
How do you even that out?
The only way to make people equal is to crush them.
The only way to make people equal is to take the people at the top and force them down because you can't take the people at the bottom and force them up.
They just haven't got the capability.
That's why it has turned out the way it is.
So it's not about this.
It's just about the fact that in order to have what Democrats say they want, you have to crush freedom.
You've got to.
You've got to do it.
If you want equality, you can't have freedom because when people are free, some people rise and some people fall.
So you have Dave Chappelle, who won, got this great honor, the Mark Twain Award, one of the truly prestigious awards in comedy.
It's kind of almost like the presidential medal for comedy.
And they come up to him because his comedy is so outrageous.
And he did this whole thing about LGBTQ and he made fun of them.
And that was so shocking to them, which, by the way, there's nothing shocking about it.
You know, they keep saying the LGBTQ community, there is no LGBT community.
Gay people and lesbians don't like each other.
Neither of them trust transgender people or think they're part of it.
It just isn't true.
Go ahead and ask them.
Ask the real one, not the activists.
Ask the people on the street what they think of each other.
You know, it is true.
I've never heard a gay guy say nice things about lesbians.
I've never heard a lesbian say nice things about gay guys.
And I've never heard either of them say, yes, we are at one in the community with transgender people.
So it doesn't even exist.
So they asked Dave Chappelle about how he feels about his political incorrectness.
This is a cut nine.
And here's his response.
Political correctness has its face, its place.
Excuse me.
We all want to live in a polite society.
We just have to kind of work on the levels and come to an agreement of what that actually looks like.
I personally am not afraid of other people's freedom of expression.
I don't use it as a weapon.
It just makes me feel better.
And I'm sorry if I hurt anybody, et cetera, et cetera, yada, yada, yada.
Everything I'm supposed to say.
It doesn't sound like he's taking political correctness and canceled culture all that serious, all that seriously when he spits and says, yada, yada, yada, whatever I'm supposed to say.
That is a complete dismissal.
So, you know, when I talk about what scares me about America for Halloween, just as a theme idea, what scares me is silence and irrationality.
And those two things are related.
The left has poured for the last at least 10, maybe 20 years, the left has poured all its energy into what I used to call shutuppery, shut up culture.
First video I ever made, the first time I ever made a political video, it was called Shut Up.
You can still find it on YouTube.
God, I look gorgeous then.
But it's, you know, I don't know, it must be 15, 20 years ago now.
The first thing I said is everything they say translates into shut up.
When they call you racist, all it means is shut up.
When they call you sexist, all it means is shut up.
Homophobic, Islamophobic, it all just means the same thing.
Shut up.
And this is what scares me about what they do, because they're now going after social media.
Why?
Because social media broke the dam.
It broke the dam of leftist control of communication.
So now they're trying, they are ganging up.
I played some videos yesterday of how they're ganging up on Facebook.
You know these guys at Media Matters, they have dozens of researchers at Media Matters.
This is a George Soros-funded company started by David Brock, a truly, truly terrible human being who specializes in the smear.
That is what Brock does.
He specializes in the smear, has his money from George Soros, and we know what he's trying to turn the world into.
And all they do is they have researchers who listen to me and they listen to Ben and they listen to Michael and Walsh and they try to find things that they can use and take out of context and make us sound hateful.
And so they then take those to the sponsors.
They don't create anything.
They don't make anything.
They don't do anything but try to silence other people.
That's the entire thing they do.
It's a shameful way to live your life.
It's a sad and pitiful way to live your life.
I mean, I compare them to the guy, the clown and it, who lives in the sewer, you know, as an evil clown living in the sewer.
That's what they remind me of.
But it's all about the silence.
It's all about the silence.
They're going after Facebook.
I showed you that.
22 I believe it.
First of all, remember when President Obama was doing social media?
And that was when we got stories like Obama uses social media to engage and persuade.
But now that Donald Trump has won, oh no, it's a disaster.
It is a terrible disaster.
There are 22 news outlets who have expressed outrage at Facebook, the fact that Facebook will not censor political ads, that Mark Zuckerberg will not assign himself the task of deciding what the president of the United States should say, but feels that people should find their own way to finding the truth and whether they believe him or not.
If he can speak and Pelosi can speak and Bernie Sanders can speak, we will find the truth.
He is trusting us, but they don't want that.
And Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, has said that they're going to stop all political advertising going forward.
Why?
Because who's better at it?
Who's better at it?
And we know, we know from Project Veritas, getting those secret interviews with Twitter people, we know they're trying to shut down the right.
Here's just the snippet of that.
You look for Trump or America and you have like 5,000 keywords to describe a redneck.
And then you look and you like parse all the messages, all like the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches like that sucks.
So is it going to like ban, essentially bam certain mindsets and or people who could be negative?
No, it's not going to bend a mindset.
It's going to bend like the way of talking.
And you know, the silence leads to irrationality.
You know, there is no science.
There is no science that says climate change is going to kill us in 12 years.
0% science, absolutely none.
That science does not exist, that we're all going to die in 12 years.
But they can say that if they can silence the opposition.
There's plenty of science that shows that little girls and little boys are different at birth, that women and men are different.
They are different kinds of people.
They are the only different kinds of people.
There are only two kinds of people, women and men.
And yet if they can silence people who object, if they can shout them down, then they can take over women's sports with transgender people and basically destroy the kind of sexual moral fabric of America is silence and irrationality.
The passion, the passion with which people show up to shout down speech, which with which they call you fascist when you defend freedom, the kind of craziness that I believe that the people in Antifa who put on masks and hit people when they stand up for freedom.
I believe they seriously think they're anti-fascist instead of what they actually are, which is fascism.
These are the things that scare me, silence and irrationality, because they are linked together and the Democrats know they are the only chance they've got.
The Soviet Union fell.
Socialism fails everywhere.
Their cities are garbage.
They've turned some of our most beautiful cities into hell holes.
The only thing they have is silence and irrationality leading you to be passionate about things you know nothing about.
And those are the things that frighten me and it's still an open question.
It is still an open question whether people are going to fall for this or not.
Let us talk.
Silence And Irrationality00:11:36
We have a good guest coming up.
It's Thursday, so we'll stay online and let you listen.
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Clint Emerson spent 20 years as a Navy SEAL, which took him around the world with Team Six and the NSA, where he specialized in subterfuge, improvisation, and the best tech in recon and surveillance.
He's got a new memoir out, The Right Kind of Crazy.
It comes out on November 12th.
Clint, are you there?
I am here.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
You have pointed out, let's talk about this book first, The Right Kind of Crazy, which is a great title, by the way.
And you point out that the things that make you a great soldier don't always make you the best kind of person.
Explain that.
Yeah, I mean, so having a career 20 years plus before I went in, I knew I had an appetite for risk, right?
And when you have a profession that is nothing but risk, whether you're in training or overseas, sometimes taking risk becomes the actual thing you get addicted to, if you will.
And then, of course, it bleeds over into your personal life.
And so this book is all about how, you know, we always hear bad decisions make great stories.
I filled this thing up with a whole bunch of bad decisions.
It sort of depends.
I mean, justifying that, that you turn into a certain kind of person when you do this, sort of depends on having faith that you are up against the bad guys, doesn't it?
I mean, you have to know that you are the sharp end of a good spear.
Yeah, of course.
You know, when you go in, initially it's, hey, I just want to do cool stuff, right?
You want to shoot guns, you want to blow things up, you know, all that kind of man stuff.
But once you're in it for a while, you start to actually become more about the mission, the greater good, you know, reaching across the globe and making a difference, you know, and it becomes less about yourself and more about the greater good.
So that's the thing I've always wondered.
When you talk to guys who are active military, they never want to talk politics.
They never want to tell you, you know, how they feel about the current commander-in-chief.
He's the commander-in-chief.
You go where he sends you to go.
Is there an undercurrent when you're even though you're not saying those things publicly, is there an undercurrent where you're thinking these guys just do not know what they're doing or does it go back and forth or what?
Yeah, one thing I've noticed, I've had the opportunity to work for Republican.
I've had opportunity to work with Democrats.
And I, one thing across the board for special operations is that there are two things in the Oval Office.
You know, there's a desk and then there's the special operations hammer, right?
And it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican, they like to use us either way, right?
We make them look good no matter what political side of the house they're on.
But there's always, yes, an undercurrent, you know, and some of it you don't know about.
For example, being in the SEAL teams during the Obama administration, we were working nonstop, but had no idea that he had turned the regular Navy into, you know, a graveyard, basically, cut all those budgets.
And since then, we've had to start rebuilding it.
But when you're in the SEAL community, you just don't know about that kind of stuff until you talk to some other sailors or other professionals in that environment.
And then they'll let you know, no, that guy was horrible for us.
So it really depends on the environment you work in within the military, whether you feel the impact of a president, which I never really felt the impact of a president during my career.
That's really interesting.
When you saw Trump the other day come out and announce the killing of al-Baghdadi and the news media that hates Trump so much went into this whole thing about the way he talked and how he talked about al-Baghdadi whimpering and dying like a dog.
What was your reaction?
How did you feel about the way he made that speech?
I personally enjoyed it.
You know, I think there is this political undertone that if we come out and present information in a nice manner, that somehow radical Muslims will change their mind and not kill us.
But that's just not the case.
And it's been proven now for decades, if not hundreds of years.
So for someone to come out and just lay it out there that the bad guy died whimpering and is a coward, whether it changes radical Islam's minds or not, which it probably wouldn't, it's status quo.
Things stay the same.
There's nothing that's going to change in their minds.
They're already radicalized.
They already have front-sight focus on us.
And so whether you're a president presenting it nice or presenting it a little raw, I think the raw route is probably the better way to go, just so that the followers know how he died.
I mean, yeah, I think that's giving them a slap in the face.
They probably feel that as humiliation.
It probably is no bad thing.
Right.
It's just another, you know, we drop bombs on them, so why can't we talk, make fun of them?
We're talking to Navy SEAL, former Navy SEAL Clint Emerson.
His book is called The Right Kind of Crazy and comes out on November 12th.
Now, there was also talk that this raid on al-Baghdadi would have been easier had Trump not pulled out, pulled back from the Syria-Turkey border.
Do you think that that's true?
Or basically, are these guys so good at what they do that they could have dropped out of the moon?
Right.
I agree with you later.
You know, they, this is years and years that culminated into two hours on target, right?
So, you're talking literally, probably thousands of people have been involved in the collection aspect of this over, you know, how many, I think a decade he's been on the target list.
He started with 10 million on his head and he ended with 25 million on his head.
So, over that time, you've had people rotate in and out, in and out of Iraq, work in this target package.
And then finally, they figure out where he's at.
Someone talks.
People talk for 25 million bucks, you know.
So they get the information they need, they locate them and they get them.
And that's the thing: the special operations community and how we operate doesn't rely on conventional forces.
So, whether we're occupying a certain region or not really doesn't mean anything because special operations is designed to deploy, you know, from continental United States and hit a target in 72 hours, usually.
You know, that's what we train to.
So, it doesn't matter if conventional forces are there or not for us to do our job.
You know, I have to tell you, as when I was watching this, my suspense novelist mind was going to the question: when people talk and they talk for 25, there's a lot of incentive to talk for 25 million bucks.
How do you know you're not walking into a trap?
You mean for the operators?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, well, you know, you're really relying on the vetting process that goes into determining whether or not somebody is legit and they provide you information.
And that vetting process, that the human collection side of the house has been, they've been making it better and better and better over the years because you're right, we have run into traps, or you hear about, you know, CIA folks going to a meeting and the person they're meeting with lights off a suicide fest, which happened on one of the camps in Iraq early on.
So, over the years, the vetting process has gotten better.
They validate every little thing coming out of that person's mouth and they ensure that the information is correct the best they can.
But ultimately, you know, that's also the other dotted line that you're signing on our end as operators: you're going into the target and you're going to go no matter what.
So, you hope that all the information intelligence is correct and accurate.
So, I have to ask you this: when you're looking at our policy in the Middle East, obviously, whenever I talk to military guys, they always want to stay because they always have a lot of confidence in their ability to do what has to be done, which I completely respect.
But on looking back, stepping back a little bit at the bigger picture, is this just an endless mess, or is there something we can actually achieve there that's worth doing?
That's a tough one.
My personal opinion is this: I tend to go with personal experience and facts.
All right.
So, the last war we saw to the end and stayed and made sure things went the right way was World War II.
Okay.
So, we stayed, and to this day, we still occupy Europe.
Nobody likes that word occupy, but the reality is, is after Europe was disseminated, we went in and did our thing, and we stayed and rebuilt the, you know, all of those countries back up again.
And we are still there to this day.
So, I personally feel that if you're going to go in any country and take down a dictator, you have to stay and see it through to the end, unfortunately.
And the idea, really, in my mind, is this: you have to stay long enough so that the conflict is this big, it's nice and small in the minds of all those kids.
And then all of the, you know, building schools and getting infrastructure back up and running and turning, you know, roads that have been bombed into roads again.
You're changing their minds and they're changing their hearts with the time by occupying and staying for the long haul so that the conflict aspect becomes the smallest memory in their mind, hopefully, because all of those kids are all potential next generation terrorists.
And you're sitting in a country where there isn't a whole lot of opportunity, right?
I mean, here, if we have hate in our body, at least we have options, right?
The Best Way to Tell a Ghost Story00:07:09
I might culturally hate something, but I can still go be a doctor.
I can go be a lawyer.
I can be whatever I want.
But over there, if all you have is hate and then the only option in your future is terrorism, well, then, of course, terrorism will continue.
My personal thing is, hey, you stay until it's done and you make conflict as small a memory in those kids' minds as possible so they don't grow up wanting to kill you.
Yeah, it's something to think about when you're deciding whether to go in.
Clint Emerson, the author of The Right Kind of Crazy, which comes out on November 12th.
Clint, thank you so much for coming on.
That was really fascinating.
I appreciate it.
No, I appreciate your time.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks a lot.
That was a really interesting take on that.
I was glad to get to talk to him.
Final reflection as we go into the weekend on Halloween.
As you know, I am a ghost story fanatic and a ghost story aficionado.
And what I love and what I always want to recommend are not horror movies or horror stories.
I've never liked things that just make you disgusted or, you know, what they call in Hollywood boo scares or startle scares, where they just jump out at you.
I've always liked things where even when you describe them to someone, they say, hmm, that's a scary idea, right?
Something that is just mentally frightening, something that affects you the way it can affect you to be in an empty old house where you see things out of the corner of your eyes, where you hear noises and you don't know what they are.
Those are the kind of subtle stories that I like.
And those are the things that I recommend.
The best way to tell a ghost story, no question about it, is as a short story.
The best ghost stories are short stories.
The second best way, I think, is a movie.
And I think that ghost novels, you know, there are some good ones, ones I've enjoyed, certainly The Shining, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
You know, The Woman in White by Susan Hill.
These are good ghost stories, but it's just a hard thing to sustain that subtle feeling, that subtle chill up the spine.
It's really a one-momentary thing.
And so I always like short stories better.
If you've never read the story, The Monkey's Paw, it probably remains the greatest by W.W. Jacobs, probably remains the greatest ghost story ever written.
A beautifully written story, packed with cultural information and packed with, you know, very, very, very brief, but just horrifying to the imagination.
Ringing the Changes by Robert Aikman has one of my favorite moments in ghost stories.
I won't tell you what it is, but a really, really powerful ghost story.
Turn of the screw, of course, by Henry James.
Children of the Corn by Stephen King.
The movie was so bad.
The short story is so great.
And The Front Room by Susan Hill, which I only read last year, really a wonderful, wonderful story.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James was made into a ghost story, The Innocence, which was written in part by Truman Capote, starred Deborah Carr.
Ask any director of horror movies or ghost stories, and he will tell you that that is the great one.
Incredibly subtle.
If what you want is bloodshed and if you want things jumping out at you, it has nothing like that.
It is simply Henry James' story translated to the screen with a sort of Freudian undertone, but just brilliantly acted and incredibly well shot.
The first version of The Haunting, which is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House with Julie Harris, is also brilliant.
I watched that quite recently and it still holds up.
Paranormal Experience, which is just a recent one, obviously a big hit, but something that I just thought was really great.
One of the things I love about Paranormal Experience is the sexual relationship that's implied between the woman and the man.
And the fact is that the woman, though she's sexy, is not as attractive as the man.
The man is kind of a hunk, you know, and the girl is not.
And it implies that he has a certain hold over her that he uses throughout the picture.
And it is a very, very Christian movie because what it shows you is this guy wants to be in control.
And when she starts to feel like, well, maybe we should turn to God for control, he gets angrier and angrier and angrier at having to give up his control over this woman, which he exercises quite powerfully and quite psychologically.
He doesn't want to give it up to God.
And so he falls prey to what's in the house.
And it's got, of course, that wonderful, subtle scene.
This is the kind of thing I love where they spread powder, I think flour on the floor, and they wake up the next morning and they see footprints, a paranormal activity.
What did I call it?
Paranormal activity.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Where they find footsteps in the flower, and so they know something has been in there, but they don't know what it is.
That's incredibly subtle, incredibly good.
If you want a couple more slightly obscure ones, Lake Mungo is made in the same found footage way as paranormal activity and paranormal experience, I call it paranormal activity.
Lake Mungo is made in the same way.
It's got a plot flaw in it, but it's still really, really creepy if you haven't seen it.
Great movie to watch for Halloween.
And I thought the Conjuring 2 was absolutely terrific.
I hate all the movies in the Conjuring universe after that.
I liked Conjuring.
I thought Conjuring 2 was great.
But those are some great ghost stories for Halloween.
Not too bloody, not too disgusting, but really creepy and really psychological.
All right, the Clavenless Weekend is upon you.
It is here.
If you talk about scary, I mean, that is scary.
The great weeping, the gnashing of teeth, the chaos, the earthquakes, the fires.
It's almost as bad as California.
But remember, if you subscribe, you could be listening to Another Kingdom on Friday tomorrow.
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If not, you got to wait till Monday and your chances of making it that far.
I don't even want to think about it.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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There's footsteps in, but there's no footsteps out.
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