Trump and Ricky Gervais expose America’s enemies—from Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, whose 2020 killing by Trump ended Obama’s appeasement, to Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar who mocked the strike while ignoring Soleimani’s role in killing 500+ U.S. troops. Middle East expert Michael Duran calls it a strategic masterstroke, crippling Iran’s proxy network, yet Democrats frame it as war while downplaying Soleimani’s atrocities. Meanwhile, Gervais at the Golden Globes skewered Hollywood’s hypocrisy—Apple’s sweatshops, Disney’s Epstein cover-up, and leftist narratives like gender fluidity clashing with biology—while Trump’s Ukraine aid stalling reveals Democratic theater. The episode ties it all: weak leadership empowers adversaries, from Tehran to Beijing, while performative outrage distracts from real threats. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats are calling for a day of mourning for Qasim Soleimani, the man who was called Iran's most revered military leader by the Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness if they have anything to say about it.
Soleimani, who was Iran's most revered military leader because he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers, was in the midst of plotting more such deaths when he himself died under mysterious circumstances, namely a missile decorated with the words, Dear Qasim, here's a missile in your ear from your friends in America.
Love President Trump and all my fellow Americans except Democrats and the Washington Post.
Soon afterwards, Soleimani woke up in paradise surrounded by virgins, although it was a lot hotter than he thought it was going to be, and the virgins were large muscular men with tattoos that said things like, welcome to hell, my new biach.
Crowds gathered to mourn Soleimani in Tehran yesterday and then rushed home in order to continue campaigning in Iowa.
Bernie Sanders responded to Soleimani's death by saying, quote, of course he was a terrorist, but who could forget his sparkling eyes, his charming smile, and that little laugh that wrinkled his nose just before he slaughtered my countrymen, unquote.
Democrat Senate leader Chuck Schumer wept copiously as he issued a statement to the painting in his basement of sad-eyed clowns holding puppies.
Schumer sobbed, quote, if only the president had informed me of his decision to launch this strike, all this sorrow could have been avoided, unquote.
These are the subtle jokes, you got to pay attention.
At universities around the country, students poured out of their transgender theory classes to protest the U.S. war in Iran.
They were led by Congresswoman Alexandria Akashnal-Cortex, who told the crowd, quote, we cannot defeat terrorists by killing them.
Only when we stand by and do nothing will they realize they can never win, unquote.
When the students were informed that there actually was no war in Iran, they returned to their dorms and continued smoking dope and watching porn.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
Ship-shaped, ipsy-topsy, the world is a-biddy-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray, it makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it was a bad weekend for Democrats.
Not only did Trump bomb a terrorist leader Ricky Gervais bombed Hollywood, and we'll talk all about that.
Obviously, I was joking in that opening satire about Democrats mourning the death of Qasem Soleimani, but I was only just barely joking.
The reactions have been amazing.
Look, if you don't enjoy the dishonesty, corruption, and fake sincerity of politics, you shouldn't pay attention to politics.
All that stuff is the fun part.
When Nancy Pelosi says she prays for a president she obviously hates, and when fake conservative columnist David Brooks declares this hypocritical garbage a wonderful Christian witness, and when Chris Matthews over at MSNBC intones that Pelosi is taking her sham impeachment show with, quote, sacramental seriousness because she dressed in black while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, probably with the help of cue cards.
These are the kinds of displays of grotesque, po-faced mendacity that make politics the hilarious circus of fallen human nature that it is.
This is what I'm here for, so we can all continue laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
The point is, I'm rarely shocked by whatever nonsense politicians do or say.
Sometimes they annoy me, but mostly they just crack me up.
But I was legitimately shocked by the Democrat reaction to Trump's triumphant destruction of one of the worst people on the planet, plus the head of the terrorist group Hezbollah and a bunch of their terrorist pals.
Not only did the Washington Post talk about how revered Soleimeni was, a reporter for the New York Times, a former newspaper, tweeted out video of Soleimeni reciting wistful poetry about how his friends had gone away while he was left behind.
Well, now he no longer has that problem, and he and his friends are reunited in the eternal flames of a just and terrible damnation, and we should all be glad.
But we're not all glad.
In our now almost completely useless House of Representatives, Shapely Knucklehead Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez declared the targeted killing of a known killer an act of war.
It wasn't.
It was a totally legal act of self-defense against a man who, according to our State Department, orchestrated 17% of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011.
That's over 600 of our troops.
Cortez went on to call the president a monster for letting the Iranians know they'd be sorry if they tried to strike back.
Anti-Semitic terrorist supporter Ilhan Omar, and that's not hyperbole, she openly supports the Council on American Islamic Relations, which has close ties to Hamas and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to funnel money to Hamas.
Omar said she was outraged by what she called Soleimani's assassination.
Bernie Sanders also called it an assassination and refused to criticize Soleimani at all.
Elizabeth Warren began by criticizing him, then stopped when she came under fire from the left and began proposing a conspiracy theory about how Trump was trying to distract from the make-believe impeachment no one was paying attention to anyway.
Let me be honest about this.
When Osama bin Laden was taken out during the administration of Barack Obama, it cost me something to sing Obama's praises, but I did it.
He deserved it.
And the press dutifully echoed the Democrat talking point that Obama had made a, quote, gutsy call.
Someone ought to make one of those montages of the number of times journalists use that phrase, gutsy call.
But if we're in dangerous new territory with Iran, Obama can take a lot of the blame.
He failed to support the Green Revolution there because he was too busy negotiating the absurd nuclear deal with the Mullahs, and to get that worse-than-useless deal in place, he bribed the Iranians with nearly $2 billion in untraceable cash, cash that no doubt funded Soleimani and his murder of our guys.
And if Trump is a monster for fighting back against terrorism, what about Obama?
In 2016 alone, Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries.
His drone strikes killed countless civilians, including children and some American citizens, one of them a terrorist-supporting 16-year-old.
There was no outrage from the Democrats then, and you know what?
There was no outrage from me either.
We do what we have to do to break the back of this awful Islamist movement.
And then, of course, there was the Hillary Clinton-engineered overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
Remember how Hillary laughed about that and a CBS reporter laughed right along with her?
Here's the videotape.
We came, we saw, he died.
Hilarious.
That led to the fatal attacks on our compound in Benghazi, where the Obama administration failed to increase security or send help in time and then lied and lied and lied about the resulting American deaths.
Some Democrats called the recent attack on our compound in Baghdad Trump's Benghazi because Trump sent help instantly, prevented any American deaths, and then struck back by taking out Solmani.
So it was exactly the same.
Again, hypocrisy, lies, corruption, these are all part of politics, but not in matters like this.
Democrats should grit their teeth, sing Trump's praises, then move on to their other arguments.
But they've fallen for the deadliest political error of them all, reactionism.
If Trump does it, it's bad.
If Republicans like it, they hate it.
That way lies insanity.
Rockauto.com: Save and Succeed00:02:05
We all do that sometimes.
It's part of politics too.
But at some point, at the point where Americans are dying, being murdered, at the point where terrorists are on the loose, it's got to stop.
Democrats today show zero sign of liking this country at all.
They say the U.S. was founded in racism, which is a stone lie.
They attack the First and Second Amendments because they promote individual freedom over socialist schemes.
They attack constitutional protections of our federal system like the Electoral College.
And if the Supreme Court rules against them on constitutional grounds, they start threatening to pack the court.
They've lost the plot of America, and that's bad.
But if they will not put our safety first, our lives first, our servicemen and women first, what claim do they have to be our fellow citizens at all?
Shame on them.
We're going to talk about this with our guest, Michael Duran, one of the clearest thinkers about the Middle East, in just a second.
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Write Klavin in their how did you hear about us box so they know we sent you.
So you have to know how do you spell Klavin?
Exactly.
There are no easy.
Europe's Moral Weakness00:15:53
That's what I was going to say.
And there are no easy and claven.
I just make it look this incredibly easy.
So Michael Duran is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
He specializes in Middle East security issues.
We had him on after Trump pulled out of Syria.
He was the only person who had a clear take on it.
And then, Mike, it's good to see you.
Good to see you.
You published a terrific piece in the New York Times.
How did you get that piece into the New York Times?
You know, for me, making the readers of the New York Times read my take on Suleimani was almost as good as Suleimani did take it out.
I thought the paper was just going to burst into flames in my hand.
I did, though.
I called it an assassination.
I thought it was a neutral term.
I was just thinking that when you said that.
Yeah, I mean, an assassination, you think of a legitimate guy that you shoot.
This guy's a terrorist.
No, I wish I hadn't used the word assassination.
Well, explain, though, why this guy was special.
I mean, you start out by talking about the fact that he's different than a lot of people.
Oh, this is absolutely strategic.
This is the most important shift in the structure of Middle East politics since the Iraq war.
No, really.
No doubt.
Yeah, it's huge because he's the architect of Iran's militia strategy of building up these militias all over the Arab world.
He's the actual foreign minister.
Zarif is his errand boy.
He's the actual foreign minister for all Middle Eastern countries.
He's the head of special operations for Iran.
He's an absolutely unique individual.
He's the big brain, the architect of all this.
He's the number two guy in Iran, really.
And Trump said with this act, I'm not going to get into this tit-for-tat with you.
I'm not going to play this game where you have a little militia over here that you run and I pretend that it was that militia that attacked me and not you.
I'm just going to go to the head of the snake.
And that is totally new.
And so this guy, he was brilliant.
I mean, when they call him a brilliant, he was doing a brilliant job destroying the Middle East.
He was brilliant.
He was creative, and he was a great also self-promoter.
They created this whole mystique around him.
So in this article that, again, I'm shocked to have seen in the New York Times, you talk about this being the end of Obama's strategy in the Middle East.
What exactly do you mean by that?
Well, Obama aligned the United States with Iran from Baghdad to Beirut in order to get the nuclear deal.
And Trump came in and he wanted to reverse that, start working with allies against Iran, and he put maximum pressure, that's all the economic sanctions, and got out of the nuclear deal.
But Trump didn't actually have a strategy for pushing back against Iran on the ground.
I mean, technically, the Trump policy is rollback.
We're going to get them out of Syria, get them out of Iraq.
But there was no real tangible American effort to do that.
And we're actually in an uneasy condominium with the Iranians in Iraq.
And this has ended all of that.
We're not going to work on the ground with our boots on the ground, but we now have something like a ground game against Iran.
And this is what you had thought would happen.
Every time you're on, you say, we just have to stop Iran.
A government can't do that.
The job of the United States in America is to contain and weaken Iran.
That's our number one job.
If we do that, everything else that we want to do in the region gets easier.
If we don't do that, everything we want to do gets harder.
One of the things that is constantly being said about Donald Trump is that he doesn't have a strategy, that he's completely a gut guy, that he just does what he wants to do in the moment, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Do you agree with it?
I don't, actually.
Although I had a conversation recently with somebody who spent a time with Trump, and he tells me, no, no, you're totally wrong.
He's totally a gut guy.
I think I've known a lot of people like this in life, that there's a lot going on in their head that they just don't ever, they don't ever express.
I wrote a book about Eisenhower.
It was a very hard book to write because Eisenhower wasn't voluble.
He didn't go around telling people what he was thinking.
He played his cards close to his chest all the time.
There was a lot going on in Eisenhower's head.
It's very hard to write about it because you can never find the text to say.
You always have to infer what's going on.
The difficult thing with Trump, I think, is that sometimes he is erratic.
Sometimes he is mercurial.
Sometimes he is just shooting from the hip.
Sometimes there's thinking behind it.
It's very hard to know which is which.
He also, I think, likes it that way.
He wants to keep everyone guessing.
So one of the complaints, and this is a complaint I don't have a problem with the Democrats expressing.
I mean, if they had praised Trump for what he did and then went on to express their fear that this might escalate war in the Middle East, I would have been fine with that.
It's all right to be the opposition party.
Is that a legitimate fear?
I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of people marching around Baghdad today and complaining about this.
Are we afraid that we're going to get into a big war?
Yes and no.
There's a legitimate concern.
This is not what they're expressing.
There is a legitimate concern.
Our position in Iraq is not strong.
But that is the result, as you suggested in your intro, of 10 years of letting them build up these militias.
Trump didn't create that situation.
Trump said, okay, I'm going to do something about it.
So we're in a very perilous situation with Iran, but we're stronger.
If it goes to war, we're going to win.
Now, war doesn't have to be a George W. Bush-style invasion of Iraq.
We can shut down in a weekend the economy of Iran.
All of their oil exports go out and 90% of their oil exports go out of one port.
We can shut down that port.
We could shut it down forever with drones.
We don't even have to have a single any boots on the ground.
We can shut down their oil economy.
We've already partially done it through the sanctions, but they have an illicit, an illicit economy.
We can do that.
All kinds of things that we can do to them that will be a national calamity for them, and we won't lose a single American life.
We have forgotten that we have that kind of power.
But do we want to do that?
No, we don't want to do that.
There's all kinds of bad results that could come from that.
But the Democrats have systematically, since Obama, downplayed this guy, Sulaimani, and what he represents.
He represents the will of Iran to drive us out of the region, to take over the region.
Iran is responsible with Russia for the 10 million people being uprooted from their homes in Syria, over 500,000, I would say more like a million people killed in the most hideous way.
And they have downplayed all that, and they've downplayed the connection to Tehran.
And so they're continuing to do it.
And they're buying into this mystique that the Iranians want to put out about Soleimani with his poetry and all this nonsense.
The guy's a stone-cold killer and a strategic mind behind it.
He's the strategic, you know, he created a strategic machine to murder people.
And they've completely turned a blind eye to that.
Iran, yesterday, I think it was, they announced they're no longer going to hold up their end of the Obama-nuclear deal.
And one of the things that has been in the news repeatedly is, yes, they were fulfilling their end of this Obama-nuclear deal.
Were they?
No, of course they weren't.
No, there's this whole mythology that Obama, Obama found this, unlike George W. Bush, who had this stupid war in Iraq, Obama had this other way to get along with Iran and stabilize the region.
He didn't.
It all failed.
It was all fantasy.
It was based on a complete misunderstanding of how the world works.
So what Trump should do about this nuclear thing, he should move to unilateral snapback in the UN.
Obama built in.
The one good thing Obama did in the JCPOA is they built in this mechanism where any signatory to the original signatory to the JCPOA can reimpose all of the sanctions and all of the, not just the sanctions.
More importantly, the Security Council resolutions, that the six Security Council resolutions pertaining to the nuclear program prior to the JCPOA.
They were not wiped out by the JCPOA, they were just held in abeyance.
We can slap them on again.
It's.
It matters because with because we can take the nuclear program and put it outside of international law again, and then, and then the Europeans what this distance between us and the Europeans will the, the resentment from Europe will still be there, but they but they, you know, they believe in international law.
So they'll have to pay attention to it.
When it was the other day that Iran was posing with China and Russia, essentially saying, now here we are all together.
Is there any danger that China and Russia will join this fight on their behalf?
Yes, I'm so glad you mentioned that because this is why, for for your audience in particular, this is why we have to care, because I'm sure a lot of people are saying, what are we even doing there?
What do we care.
You know it's a.
It's a.
It's a pile of garbage.
And who who, what do we care?
If Iran is on top of the pile of garbage or not, we know we should care.
We should care because the fear would be that China, who has this belt and road initiative, will work with Iran to take over all of the oil resources of the Gulf.
That's a realistic fear.
Think about it, because if I told you a decade ago when we're, when we had 150,000 troops in Iraq, and I said you know what I think is going to happen, I think we're going to hand this country on a platter to Iran, you'd say you're crazy.
But that's what happened, that's what we did.
So from the Iranian point of view, although they're weaker than us, they see that they have a Strategy for because we, because we're so half-hearted about our imperialism, you know, of just exhausting us and we'll get up and leave.
But then they take over the oil resources.
Why does that matter?
Those are the oil resources of Europe.
We're back to Cold War thinking here.
The Chinese can then own the energy resources of Europe, and they can use that to start detaching Europe from the United States.
I mean, it's the old thing about you don't want one single power to dominate the Eurasian landmass.
That's not good for the United States.
And Europe seems to be kind of trend that way.
Europe seems to want to do business with Putin instead of us.
What's the point?
Look, we want Europe as part of the American, the Western democratic system that we run, and we want that system to be dominant.
There are going to be elements in that system who are going to say crazy things, right?
You've got people in your family, I'm sure, that you see on Thanksgiving who say crazy things, right?
They're still part of your family.
You want them to be at Thanksgiving dinner, even though they're going to say crazy things.
The European take on Iran is pathological.
What happens next?
I have no idea.
Trump totally changed the.
They were before they would rump us into this tit-for-tat.
We would always play their game according to their rules.
They had this four-star asset, Suleimani, and they thought that was going to be the tool that Khamene was going to use to really put pressure on Trump.
And Trump just took it off the board.
Now, the humiliation to Khomeini is enormous.
And this is a regime that cannot be humiliated like that.
So the imperative for him, he's already vowed vengeance.
And the imperative for him to go and show the world that he's not going to take this is incredibly strong.
But Trump has listed, he said, I've got 52 sites.
I can visit a national calamity on you.
I don't want to do it.
But if you do this, I will do that.
Make no mistake.
So we're at the brink of war.
Neither Trump nor Khomeini want to go to war, but there's a very strong imperative for Khomeini to do something.
How he's going to play it, I don't know.
That's amazing.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Michael Duran, Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute.
What's the Eisenhower book called?
Ike's Gamble.
It'll change your life for the better.
Even for the better.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
Always, always clarity from Duran, and really from almost nowhere else at this point.
You know, I want to continue talking a little bit more about this because I want you to see the kinds of things that the Democrats are saying and actually listen to some of this.
I mean, you have to remember that a mob attacked our embassy, right?
A mob attacked our embassy in Baghdad.
And the Democrats are saying, oh, this is Trump's Benghazi.
And the New York Times called them, the New York Times called these people who attacked the embassy, called them protesters and mourners.
It was the same thing they tried to do in Benghazi, where they pretended that this was some kind of spontaneous event that just grew up naturally out of the Iraqi soil.
And it wasn't.
This was Iran doing what they do, which is using proxy forces to try and chase us out of the Middle East, as Mike said, with a lot at stake, a lot of oil reserves that a lot of people want to control that will give them more power and more force in a Europe that, let's face it, is morally weak, okay?
And so instead of what, you know, it's just you have to go back and remember not only the weeks and weeks and weeks of Benghazi, the people in Benghazi calling for hiked security.
Remember, you had Hillary Clinton who took out Gaddafi, and Obama himself called that the worst mistake of his administration, that he was not prepared for the chaos that would ensue.
And then, remember when Benghazi was attacked, 13 hours, you can watch that whole movie, right?
They didn't send help.
They let four of our guys get killed.
It was an absolute disgrace.
As Hillary Clinton was saying, what difference does it make how they died if they died through my incompetence?
What difference does it make?
And that was the kind of thing that was happening again and again and again.
Again, ISIS had a caliphate the size of Ohio in Syria and in Iraq.
And that was all Obama's doing while meanwhile, he was sending in pallets of cash.
I'm just setting that up.
So here's Trump talking about announcing this raid that killed this guy that Mike was just telling us was one of the major, major players in this game of thrones.
Salome made the death of innocent people his sick passion, contributing to terrorist plots as far away as New Delhi and London.
Today we remember and honor the victims of Salome's many atrocities and we take comfort in knowing that his reign of terror is over.
Salome has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilize the Middle East for the last 20 years.
What the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago.
A lot of lives would have been saved.
Just recently, Salome led the brutal repression of protesters in Iran, where more than a thousand innocent civilians were tortured and killed by their own government.
We took action last night to stop a war.
We did not take action to start a war.
I mean, that's an important point.
And again, you know, I don't have a problem with the Democrats being the opposition party.
I don't have a problem with them saying, good job, Mr. President.
Remember when Osama bin Laden was killed, people were in Times Square cheering.
This guy was more important than Osama bin Laden.
I realize he hadn't hit us like Osama bin Laden hit us.
He hadn't pulled off that kind of elaborate attack on our homeland.
I get it.
But still, this guy was more important because he was a strategist.
He was the engineer.
He was the architect of their strategy.
So at least, at least a moment of patriotic unity saying, good job, Mr. President.
However, you know, we have these problems with your strategies and we hate you and your hair is orange and you talk to the Ukraine.
Whatever, go ahead.
Strategist's Downfall00:05:12
But still, just a moment, but here's Bernie Sanders.
He refuses.
Bernie Sanders refused to say a single negative word about Solmeni, but this is what he did say.
Yesterday, President Trump ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, Qassam Soleimani, in Iraq, along with the leader of an Iraqi militia.
This is a dangerous escalation that brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East, which could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars and lead to even more death, more conflict, more displacement in that already highly volatile region of the world.
All right, but who knows about cocaine?
Anyone ever seen cocaine?
Hold it, one at a time.
What about cocaine?
Good thing, bad thing, what?
We just spliced that in as Bernie's selling Coke to the kids.
So, you know, what he's referring to, he's bringing up the specter of what was called the Cullen Powell Doctrine, which was you break it, you own it, right?
And that was George W. Bush's big mistake.
He went into Iraq.
He got rid of Saddam Hussein, had to be done, should have been done.
And then he decided that we were going to build a democracy there and build a democracy in Afghanistan, which is absurd.
We're never going to build a democracy in Afghanistan because there is no Afghanistan.
It's just a bunch of tribes in a medieval, primitive, really not medieval, primitive area.
They're still feuding over kidnappings that took place 300 years ago.
So that's what he's saying.
But that doctrine is not Trump's doctrine.
And as Michael Durand was saying, it's very hard to distinguish, to figure out exactly what Trump is thinking.
I know Ben is always saying he doesn't have a thought in his head, but I just cannot agree with that.
You do not have the kind of success the guy's had throughout his life without having plans, without having strategies, and without having a viewpoint.
And I think he just doesn't express it all the time, but he is not going in there.
Remember, as opposed to the you broke it, you fix it idea from Colin Powell, there's also you hurt us, we kill you.
Then we come back and kill you again.
And every year, we come back and kill your top guys.
Until finally, look, these guys are thinking about one of two things.
They're either thinking about how to hurt us or they're thinking about how to escape being hurt.
If they're thinking about how to escape being hurt, they have less time to think about how to hurt us.
It's that simple.
It really is that simple.
There's nothing else they're going to think about.
They're not doing what they're doing because we did something wrong.
It's not like, why do we hate us?
This is what always drove me crazy after 9-11.
People saying, why do they hate us?
They hate us because they have an anti-freedom, small-minded, hate-filled philosophy that they are acting out in the world.
At least pay them the respect.
I mean, this is what drives me nuts about the left with these people is they treat them like they have no agency.
They treat them like children.
They say, oh, it must be something we did that made them angry.
No, they're adult people with a philosophy, which includes killing us.
So we're either killing them or they're plotting how to kill us.
They're either afraid or they're bold.
Those are the only two options we have.
And obviously, Trump is trying to choose the latter.
He wants them afraid.
You know, they keep calling this an assassination.
And Mike said that he called in his New York Times, amazing New York Times op-ed, he said that he called it an assassination.
But the reason it's not is an assassination is illegal.
This is totally legal.
Alan Dershowitz wrote about this in the journal today, the Wall Street Journal.
He said, the president has the constitutional authority to take military actions short of declaring war that he and his advisors deem necessary to protect American citizens.
This authority is extremely broad, especially when the actions must, by their nature, be kept secret from the intended target.
Congress has the sole power to declare war, but it hasn't formally exercised that power since World War II.
And since then, the U.S. has fought long and costly wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
So here's Liz Warren.
Liz Warren started out because Liz Warren is still, there's still somewhere deep inside Elizabeth Warren.
There's still deep inside her somebody with a little bit of common sense.
She started out calling Suleimani the murderer that he is, and then she got hit by the left, and she pulled it, and she started pushing this incredible conspiracy theory.
Here she is pushing it to Jake Tapper.
I think the question that we ought to focus on is why now?
You know, why not a month ago?
Why not a month from now?
And the answer from the administration seems to be they can't keep their story straight on this.
They pointed in all different directions.
And you know, the last time we watched them do this was this summer over Ukraine.
As soon as people started asking about the conversation between Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine and why aid had been held up to Ukraine, the administration did the same thing.
They pointed in all directions about what was going on.
Look at her cheekbones.
Look at her cheekbones.
Why Now?00:14:17
You know, this is the thing.
I mean, this is amazing.
If a right-winger were saying this, we'd be hearing about Fox News.
We'd be hearing about conspiracy theories.
We'd be hearing about all this talk about how crazy it was.
But when the left does it, it's like, yeah, Trump is really going to call a bombing raid because he's afraid of impeachment.
I mean, right now, impeachment is just good for Trump.
It's a humiliation to the Democrats.
They're still stalling about bringing it to the Senate.
Mitch McConnell is making noise like maybe he'll just vote the whole thing down without seeing their stupid impeachment thing.
If this was such a crisis, if it was such a crisis that President Trump said something he maybe shouldn't have said to the Ukrainian president, why aren't we hurrying to save our dear, dear constitution that Nancy Pelosi loves so much?
We're not doing anything because it was a purely political kabuki show.
Trump is not bombing people to get out of this impeachment.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
And you know, the thing that's coming out also, of course, is from our entertainment community, including guys like Colin Kaepernick, who called this like a racist attack.
There's nothing new about American terrorist attacks against black and brown people for the expansion of American imperialism.
That's Colin Kaepernick.
And Michael Moore said, basically, we're just killing this guy.
Now you're supposed to learn to hate him.
All these people came under fire yesterday at the Golden Globes Award from Ricky Gervais, who deserves a medal in and of itself.
And now we're going to talk about that and the Golden Globes.
Now, listen, I'm not paying attention to most of these award shows, but I was paying attention to this.
But first, we got to take a break.
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So while Trump was killing the enemies of America overseas, comedian Ricky Gervais was taking them out here.
He was at the Golden Globes.
This was the fifth and last time he was going to host the Golden Globes.
And as he said, he no longer cares and he actually never cared, he said.
And you know this speech was a big deal because both the New York Times and the Washington Post, who are living under the illusion that anyone cares what they think about culture, they still think New York Times used to have a really powerful hand in culture and still has a powerful hand in stagnant, sclerotic, old-fashioned culture, like what New York people think is culture.
But they have absolutely no relevance.
But they both, New York Times and the Washington Post said, oh, this speech didn't mean it.
Oh, nobody cared.
Nobody cared about.
No, no, no, this is the way they handle these things.
They either ignore them or they pretend that we who really know the culture know this didn't matter.
But the fact is nobody was watching the Golden Globes, but everybody was tweeting Ricky Gervais' speech and Hollywood Hypocrites, I think it was, was trending on Twitter.
Here's the thing.
There's an important clip where Gervais told people to get up and accept your awards and don't make political speeches.
And everybody's playing that part of the clip, but they're not playing the part that comes before.
I'm going to play the whole clip.
And you have to listen carefully because this is the heart of what Gervais said.
And it's so important to our understanding of culture right now and of the dilemma leftists are in.
Here's Gervais telling people, telling the award winners not to come up and make political speeches.
Apple roared into the TV game with a morning show.
A superb drama, yeah.
A superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.
So, well, you say you're woke, but the companies you work for, I mean, unbelievable.
Apple, Amazon, Disney.
If ISIS started a streaming service, you'd call your agent, wouldn't you?
So, if you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech, right?
You're in no position to lecture the public about anything.
You know nothing about the real world.
Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
So, if you win, right, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God.
We couldn't play what he told him to do.
He said, get off.
Thank you.
But everyone's playing the part where he says, don't make political speeches because you don't know what you're talking about.
But what he begins by saying is he talks about Apple, Amazon, Disney, and the fact that these are corrupt and abusive companies.
And Tim Cook of Apple was sitting right there with that little tight smile on his face like he was thinking, I'm going to have this guy killed.
And this is the same guy, Tim Cook, who got up and made that incredibly self-righteous speech about how he was going to ban hate speech from his platforms because it's the right thing to do.
I mean, and what does that mean?
It means people who disagree with Tim Cook.
It means the CEO of a billion gazillion dollar company is going to be telling ordinary Americans what they can and can't say on his platforms.
It is a violation of every American principle.
It is not righteousness.
It is self-righteousness.
And these are companies, and you know, Disney owns ABC.
ABC are the guys who killed the Jeffrey Epstein story and then went after the whistleblower who revealed that they killed the Jeffrey Epstein story.
I mean, these are, and Gervais had something to say about Epstein too that was pretty funny.
He was talking about the show Bird Box, which was on Netflix and was kind of, if you saw a quiet place where you weren't allowed to speak, this was an apocalyptic story where you weren't allowed to open your eyes or you would see something that would drive you insane.
And here's how he announced that award.
Our next presenter starred in Netflix's Bird Box, a movie where people survive by acting like they don't see a thing.
Sort of like working for Harvey Weinstein.
You did it.
I didn't.
You did it.
All right, that was the wrong clip.
I wanted the clip on that.
Let's go back and just play the clip on Epstein, the Cut 7.
You could binge watch the entire first season of Afterlife instead of watching this show.
That's a show about a man who wants to kill himself because his wife dies of cancer.
And it's still more fun than this, okay?
Spoiler alert, season two is on the way.
So in the end, he obviously didn't kill himself.
Just like Jeffrey Epstein.
Shut up.
I know he's your friend, but I don't care.
I know he's your friend.
I mean, look, it's important.
This is a guy who did know all these people, who knew the richest people there.
He made a joke about Ronan Farrow coming after all the executives because they're all sexually abusive.
It matters that these are the people lecturing you and me about our morality.
These are the people who are selling you a kind of feminism that makes no sense.
I'm getting screamed at on Twitter because of what I said about the witcher and women in sword fights, which what I said was absolutely true.
And everybody's yelling and screaming, oh no, women could fight in a medieval battle with a sword, killed in two seconds.
Every single woman who did that would be killed in two seconds, except maybe the occasional exception.
I mean, I'm willing to admit that all things have exceptions.
But they're yelling at me about that, but they forget that these images are created by the people who abuse them.
These images of feminism are created by the people who abuse them.
I don't abuse them, and they think I'm the bad guy because I explode the fictions that these people create.
Okay?
I mean, this is the thing.
They are living in a world of fiction.
They're living in a world that they think is beautiful and real because it lies to them.
Not just women, all the left.
They are living in this world where Apple, Tim Cook getting up and saying he will censor free speech.
They think that that's profound.
But the fact that he's using slaves to build his iPhones, well, that's just a, you know, I got to have a cheap iPhone.
You know, you don't want me to pay more, do you?
I mean, geez, I got my kid in these private schools.
You know, I can't pay more for my iPhones.
So if a Chinese slave has to build them, that's the way it is.
You know, 60 Minutes last night did a thing on Jeffrey Epstein, which basically was catching up with Fox News.
I mean, this is the thing that the mainstream media does all the time.
Fox News.
They don't even have to argue.
They just say the word.
They just drip disdain.
Fox news.
That's just something they say on Fox News.
And then six weeks later, they're reporting what Fox News was reporting.
They had that guy, Michael Baden, the guy who sat in for Epstein's lawyers on the autopsy and said, look, this may have been suicide, but it looks like murder to me, right?
And they just found out so many things had gone wrong in the security for Jeffrey Epstein.
They don't have any film of Epstein dead in his cell.
There was all kinds of notes that he was being abused by prison guards.
You know, this is stuff that's been on Fox News all this time.
It's on Fox News that they're talking about this stuff, but this is also stuff that was covered up by ABC, owned by Disney.
So when Disney is making, you know, little princess movies in which the princess doesn't, she doesn't need a man.
She's just going to be a queen on her own and she's going to be powerful.
Those people are covering up the guys who are sleeping with little girls.
That's what they're doing.
This is ABC Disney and they're covering it up and then they're telling you what will make you as a woman be strong.
Think about it for a minute.
Just think about it.
Think about who you're listening to.
Think about who is selling you your idea of yourself and what they are really doing.
And, you know, in terms of the Harvey Weinstein, and I won't, we played that by accident before, but Gervais was joking about that too.
I'm reading Ronan Farrow's book.
I'm almost done with it.
And Ronan Farrow writes about the book as how he exposed Weinstein.
And this is at NBC, where he was working.
And not only did they do everything to kill this story about for Weinstein's sake, on Weinstein's request, in fear of Weinstein and in tribute to Weinstein, they tried to kill this story, but then they lied and lied and lied about it and tried to get Farrow to lie about it too.
And Farrow, you know, I mean, Farrow is not exactly Humphrey Bogart.
He's kind of like this fragile guy who's had a very difficult life.
And he writes about himself, honestly, as a kind of fragile guy.
And they were just putting all this pressure on him, not just to kill the story, which they would never come out and just say, kill the story.
They would say, well, let's put it on the back burner, Ronan.
Let's say, you know, let's put it, let's press pause.
Let's press, we don't have this story.
Whereas when he brought it to the New Yorker, the New Yorker ran it almost immediately.
I mean, they fact-checked it and they added to it, but they ran it very quickly.
Ask yourself this.
Ask yourself this.
Would the Weinstein story have run at all if Hillary Clinton had won the election?
Because one of the things about Farrow, I mean, look, I pay full, I give him full credit for being a hero in breaking this story.
But he then also went after Trump for a consensual affair.
And I'm not condoning Trump's consensual affairs.
I'm just saying it's not the same thing.
He went after Kavanaugh with very, very little proof.
So, I mean, there is this bias there.
And I'm not sure Weinstein, I'm not sure that Weinstein still wouldn't be a powerful producer in Hollywood completely untouched if Hillary Clinton had won the election.
So these are corrupt people.
These are hypocritical people.
And when they preach to you, you have a right to say to yourself, well, wait a minute, wait just a second here.
You know, are these the people who should be telling me what I should be like as a woman?
Are these the sort of people who should be telling me what injustice is?
Or are they the people who are actually actually committing the sorts of injustices that I want to change?
It's that simple.
It is that simple.
It is not, it's not the politics.
It's the lies.
It's the lies and what they really do.
You know, let me end on a final reflection about this, because like I said, I've been being under attack because I said that a woman couldn't be in a medieval battle with a sword.
And of course, people would say, well, what about Joan of Arc, who never fought with a sword?
She would just show up and inspire people.
But the reason people get so upset about this is because the left has been told that lies can change the world.
And it's true, lies can change the world, but they can't change the world for the better.
If you are living in lies, you are not going to be happy in the long run.
And this in feminine, you know, it's been a long-term joke about women that they want to be lied to.
The woman comes to you and says, oh, does this dress make me look fat?
And if you say yes, even if it does, she gets angry at you.
I mean, that's an old joke, right?
There used to be a commercial about it with Honest Abe, who had to tell the truth, and so his wife got angry at him.
But do you want to be lied to?
Is that what you want?
Do you want to be told that in a fistfight with a guy your size, you're going to somehow come out of it okay?
Do you want to be told that that's where your strength lies, that your strength lies in being a man, that your strength lies in having the kinds of ambitions that men have?
Or do you want to be told the truth?
The thing is, the left has convinced itself that if you call a man who says he's a woman a woman, somehow that will make him a woman.
They have convinced themselves that narrative changes everything.
Narrative changes nothing.
The truth remains the truth, and it's the truth that sets you free.
And that's why they get so upset over fictions instead of really looking at the facts and really looking at the kind of people who are selling them the fictions they sell.
I got to stop there, but I will be right back here tomorrow.
Narrative Changes Nothing00:01:27
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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President Trump responded to Iranian attacks on U.S. servicemen and diplomats last Thursday by splattering Iran's top military official all over the Baghdad airport.
We will examine the brilliant geopolitical strategy behind the droning, and we will attempt to explain why the left is so upset over the death of the world's most notorious terrorist.
Then, speaking of killing it, Ricky Gervais absolutely slays at the Golden Globes.