Andrew Clavin’s Matters of Life and Death skewers media hysteria over Trump’s tweets, mocking CNN’s fascist claims and Pelosi’s impeachment chaos while defending his pro-life shift after a debate, citing 60M+ abortions since Roe. He contrasts Trump’s March for Life attendance with Twitter’s censorship of LiveAction, then pivots to Kobe Bryant’s legacy, briefly addressing the 2003 allegation before dismissing Bolton’s book as a "book-selling ploy." The episode ends with Bernie Sanders’ Iowa surge framed as communist indoctrination, Warren’s student debt failures, and The Outsider as a supernatural rebuttal to materialism—tying politics, culture, and morality into one satirical, hyper-partisan critique. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump sent out a tweet today wishing America a good morning.
At CNN, Brian Stelter led a panel discussion on the fascist undertones of the tweet.
Addressing the CNN audience as the audience ran to catch his flight to Duluth, Stelter said, quote, Trump is clearly blowing a dog whistle to the white supremacists at Fox News, who deceptively allow openly conservative hosts to express openly conservative opinions, unlike our fair-minded journalists who spread left-wing propaganda we call news, unquote.
Stelter's guest, unindicted co-conspirator John Brennan, spoke from the shadows with a disguised voice, saying, quote, it's egregiously insidious at this nefarious confluence of flagrantly imperious, disputatious peregrinations to expostulate duplicitous expressions of benevolent anti-meridianism, unquote.
Brennan then slipped off into the darkness to avoid arrest.
At the New York Times, a former newspaper, a front-page analysis denounced Trump's good morning tweet, asking, quote, is it really a good morning for black and brown people?
Or is that just the self-satisfied voice of whiteness speaking in a recognizably male tones meant to send a chill of fear into the heart of every non-binary person trying to establish his slash her identity in a nation founded on the flagrant oppression of gender expression.
Unlike the peaceful tribes of Futajalu, where any man can declare himself a female in a moving ceremony of acceptance just before she sacrificed a ball, unquote.
On reading Trump's good morning tweet, Democrats in the House opened a new impeachment investigation with Nancy Pelosi wearing a military dress uniform with enormous epaulets while declaiming the Pledge of Allegiance until her personal assistant dropped the cue cards and she couldn't remember the rest of it.
In a 17-hour speech in the Capitol's men's room, Adam Schiff declared that if the president is allowed to wish people good morning without an intra-agency consensus, he's no better than a king.
NBC's Chuck Todd was so moved by the speech, he shook Schiff's hand and then later remarked, quote, hey, where's my watch?
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-boo.
Ship-shaped, ipsy-topsy, the world is a-biddy-zing, it's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray, it makes me want to sing, hoorah, hooray.
I just want to begin by apologizing to the people of Futajalu, a place I never heard of until this weekend.
And I thought the name was so funny I wanted to use it in my opening, but I'm sure they don't worship Baal there, whatever else they're doing.
Other than that, I want to talk a little bit about the art of making sense.
And while I'm doing this, it would be a perfect opportunity for you to go on Amazon and purchase my small and inexpensive pamphlet entitled The Art of Making Sense, which you will greatly enjoy.
In the pamphlet, I tell how I slowly changed my mind about abortion after losing an argument with a pro-life friend.
His logical proof of the human status of an unborn child made sense.
My libertarian babbling about a woman's right to choose did not make sense.
I hated to change.
I'm naturally inclined to leave people alone to do whatever the hell they want.
But I felt obligated to change because the pro-life side made sense.
Making sense has been a lifelong obsession of mine, and the reason is simple.
Reality makes sense.
When something in reality doesn't make sense, it's because we don't know enough about it.
That's why scientists search for theories that will unify their ideas about very small things and very large things, what's called the unified field theory, because it doesn't make sense that the rules should be different for quanta than they are for planets.
Criminals confess when the police catch them with alibis that don't make sense.
You've seen this on TV.
I've asked cops about it, and they say, yeah, that really actually happens.
Criminals lie until you point out to them that their lie doesn't make sense, and then they have to confess the truth because everyone knows reality makes sense.
On Friday, President Trump became the first president to appear in person at the March for Life.
I found this deeply moving, a profoundly moral gesture.
The lives of our unborn children are human lives.
We have no right to take them away.
And our president should stand up for that in no uncertain terms, not from the Oval Office, not on TV.
He should get out there and make a speech the way he did.
Now, anti-Trump voters went nuts on Twitter.
They declared the president was a hypocrite because there are unproven rumors that he has paid for his lovers' abortions.
Speaking bluntly, it would not surprise me if some of those rumors were true.
We know what his life was like.
If they are true, I hope his heart has changed since then, as mine has changed.
But even if he's a hypocrite as a man, as the leader of this country, as our representative, he did what was right.
He used his power to speak for the powerless who have no voice with which to speak for themselves.
Whatever his past, whatever his flaws, in that moment, he was a great president because he and through him, we were finally making sense.
And that's what we're going to be talking about a lot today, about making sense.
But first, let's talk about something that really does make sense, namely investing through Robinhood.
These are good times on the stock market.
You want to take advantage of it and you want to be in control of what you do down to the smallest detail.
And Robinhood allows you to do that.
With Robinhood, you can invest in stocks, options, and ETFs right from your phone.
You can even spend and earn interest on uninvested cash.
And with fractional shares, you can buy stocks in any amount, including companies like Apple, Amazon, and Tesla, for as little as one buck.
And that's with no commission fees or account minimums.
So whether you're new to investing and ready to learn or just looking for a better experience, stop waiting and join the 10 million Robinhood users.
And listeners can get started with a free stock by going to clavin.robinhood.com.
Get a free stock if you go to clavin.robinhood.com.
Plus, you can learn more about how to do this and claim your free stock.
All investments involve risk.
This is not investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation of any security.
Other fees may apply.
Visit rbnhd.co slash fees, rbnhd.co slash fees.
The free stock program is subject to certain limitations.
Annual percentage yield on uninvested cash is paid by program banks and is variable.
Robinhood Financial is not a bank.
Every Moment Matters00:03:38
More importantly, Hattie's book life.
Exactly.
There are no E's.
I was just going to say that.
There are no E's in Clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
Another Kingdom is coming to an end.
The last penultimate.
Episode 16 is out today for everybody.
So please take a listen.
17 and 18 will both come out next week.
So it will end with the month.
I didn't get to cover the March for Life, so I just want to cover it briefly now.
I want to talk about this.
I want to talk about what Trump said, which, as I said, I found profound.
I found it really moving that he went out and said this.
This is cut number two.
This is Trump talking at this massively attended March for Life, which the media almost never covers.
To all of the moms here today, we celebrate you and we declare that mothers are heroes.
Your strength, devotion, and drive is what powers our nation.
And because of you, our country has been blessed with amazing souls who have changed the course of human history.
We cannot know what our citizens, yet unborn, will achieve.
The dreams they will imagine, the masterpieces they will create, the discoveries they will make.
But we know this.
Every life brings love into this world.
Every child brings joy to a family.
Every person is worth protecting.
And above all, we know that every human soul is divine and every human life, born and unborn, is made in the holy image of Almighty God.
This is so important because we're moved by stories.
We tell each other stories.
Everything is a story in one way or another.
And the thing is, the stories of women who have had abortions can move you.
They can break your heart.
You can totally understand the desperation that they were in, the problems that they were having.
But the thing is, they get to tell their story.
The baby doesn't get to tell his story.
He doesn't get to tell what he would be, what he would do.
And there's the president of the United States, the biggest voice on earth, the biggest voice on earth, telling that baby's story, that story that can't be told.
And the thing is, everything you can say about that child, I mean, it's a human life.
And everything you can say about that child that negates its life is true of a sleeping person.
They say, well, the child has no preferences yet.
Well, that's true of a sleeping person.
The sleeping person can't make decisions.
The sleeping person can't express himself.
You don't kill a sleeping person.
Why?
Because eventually he will wake up.
And that's the thing.
That's the whole point is a lot of arguments, a lot of tricky arguments work by leaving the element, the dimension of time out.
We live in time.
And everything, you know, it's like me saying, oh, yeah, I committed that murder yesterday.
You can't punish me for it today.
No, I'm the same person today as I was yesterday.
I am the same person tomorrow that I am today.
And the thing is, that's true of the baby too.
And all the things, all the stories that you hear about women in pain and in suffering who felt that they had to get an abortion, those stories are true.
And my heart goes out to them.
But you can't solve your problems by killing somebody else.
And the baby doesn't get to tell the story of what he would have done, what she would have done, who he would have loved, who she would have loved, the things they would have said, just the moments they would have had.
Just the simple moments, just the simple fact of being alive.
When you think, wow, it's a great thing to be here.
All that stuff is taken away in the moment of abortion.
And, you know, I think this message is getting through because it makes sense.
And the thing is that sense is a powerful thing because we all know reality makes sense.
Good for Donald Trump for doing what was right.
It really is a good thing.
Inspiring Kobe's Legacy00:09:37
All right, let us move on.
I have to talk about Kobe Bryant.
And I know that's not news in the sense of being political, but it's a big deal here in LA.
And I think it's a big deal for anybody who loves sports and anybody who loves excellence.
And it's also, you know, how can I put this?
It's a complex and interesting story.
And I want to talk about, you know, I'm not a sentimental guy.
And when celebrities die, I don't make a fuss about how sad I am or anything like this.
Kobe Bryant, obviously, for those of you who don't follow sports, an icon in basketball.
The Lakers are kind of the New York Yankees of basketball.
The Los Angeles Lakers, the great team, the greatest franchise in basketball.
Kobe Bryant, one of their greatest players ever.
He was killed in a helicopter crash at the age of 41.
His 13-year-old daughter, Gianna Gigi Bryant, was also killed.
Just, you know, it's something that just stopped the city for a moment.
And everybody kind of went, wow, that is a big, big deal.
I love sports and I love to watch sports, but I have a very odd way of watching sports.
I'll follow a team for a season, but I don't have a lot of loyalty to teams.
What I have a loyalty to is greatness.
What I love is watching individual players who are great.
I never understand.
I have never understood why people pick on great players.
And they do.
I mean, Tom Brady is the perfect example.
I will watch the Patriots till the day Tom Brady falls down because he is the greatest player who ever played football.
He is the greatest quarterback who ever played football.
And that to me is riveting.
There is a thing in people's brains.
A brain scientist explained this, a literal brain surgeon explained this to me at a party once, that where our brains mirror the actions that we look at, and men have this more than women do.
They have it more intensely than women do.
That our brains mirror the actions that we see, so that when we watch sports, the same thing goes on in our head as in the guy who's throwing the ball or bouncing the ball or whatever he's doing.
So that is why guys get so intensely, one of the reasons guys get so intensely taken up with sports.
And when you watched excellence like Kobe Bryant had, competitiveness like Kobe Bryan had, it inspired you.
When I saw the final game that he played just before he retired, it is a famous, famous game where he scored 60 points, won the game virtually single-handedly against the Utah Jazz, but at the last seconds, he was throwing the penalty shots that you throw from the key, and it takes incredible attention, incredible stillness of mind.
And here he is, he knows it's his last game, he knows it's the last shot of his career, and he hits the shot without even, you know, with no problem whatsoever.
That's inspiring, especially to people who do things that sometimes take a little bit of nerves, like public speaking or anybody.
We all do things that take a little bit of nerve where you say, this is this moment, this is my big moment, I've got to do this.
And when you've seen somebody do this, you know it can be done.
You know, one of the, I love stories in sports, the stories that are told through the actions of sports.
And one of the stories I love is when two great players play together.
And probably because I had an older brother.
I have an older brother, and in my youth, I idolized him and was competitive with him.
And I loved it when the Mets in the 1980s had Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter, two very different players who made the team great.
When I first came back from the UK, from living most of the 90s in England, I was starved for sports.
I never liked soccer.
I never liked any of the sports I saw in the UK.
And I just loved sports.
And when I came back, Kobe Bryant teamed up with Shaquille O'Neal and made the Lakers this great team.
I think it was three championships in a row.
And I was riveted, riveted watching these two very different, very tremendous players play the game together.
You know, just Shaq was this giant who just dominated the center, dominated under the basket.
He was wonderful to watch.
And Kobe was this up-and-coming guy who wanted to be Michael Jordan.
And I had missed Michael Jordan because he played in the 90s when I was out overseas.
And so watching a guy at this level play at this level and want it so bad and want to become the big man and not just let Shaq be the big man.
So there was tension between them.
Kobe didn't pass the ball enough because he just always wanted to score.
It was a beautiful thing to watch, a beautiful thing to watch.
And again, inspiring because your brain adopts this stuff.
And as he went on, you know, Kobe became a guy who kind of affected the whole sport.
And he talked about his daughter who also, they were traveling tragically.
It was not, it was him and eight other people who died in this chopper crash right near us up in Calabasas.
And, you know, his daughter was going to one of her games because she was a basketball player too.
And he spoke very beautifully about her on TV.
Here's a clip.
Do you think your daughter might want to play in the WNBA?
She does for sure.
She does.
I mean, this kid, man.
Wouldn't that be great?
Dude, man, I'm telling you.
The best thing that happens is when we go out and fans will come up to me and she'll be standing next to me and they'll be like, hey, you got to have a boy.
You and V got to have a boy, man.
You got somebody carry on the tradition, the legacy.
She's like, oh, I got this.
You know, boy, I got this.
Like, that's right.
Yes, you do.
You got this.
And there's great footage of him sitting with his daughter at the game, obviously explaining the technical games.
He was a guy.
Another thing that's incredibly inspiring is he himself, his father was kind of a jobbing NBA player who went to finish out his career in Italy.
And Kobe said that he was lucky to be in Italy because they focused on the basics, the footwork, footwork, footwork, how to use the ball, how to protect the ball, how to score the ball.
And he said, you know, I'm not the most athletic guy.
I'm not the most talented guy.
I'm not the best guy.
I just knew those basics.
And that's another thing.
And of course, it's inspiring to other players.
And my favorite clip of all the reactions, you know, very sentimental, painful to watch reactions, was Doc Rivers of the Clippers, the other LA team, because he was a competitor.
He was somebody who played against Kobe.
And this to me is the essence of sport, what Doc Rivers said as he was mourning this death.
Have we got that clip?
He was such a great opponent.
You know, it's what you want in sports.
He had that DNA that very few athletes can ever have.
You know, the Tiger Woods and the Michael Jordans.
You know.
It's funny.
I was getting to know him more since he retired.
Yeah, this is a tough one.
I don't.
I mean, we have to go play.
I mean, the news is just so devastating for Vanessa and his family.
And there's just so many people he touched, you know.
And, you know, it's looking at my young players and seeing how emotional they are.
They didn't even know him, you know, and it just tells you how far his reach was.
This is one of the reasons I hate this everybody gets a trophy, no-keeping score ideology that sometimes has made its way into our schools, because competing, trying to beat somebody is not something that makes you less.
It's something that makes you more.
It makes you better even when you lose.
You can honor the person who beat you, but you can also learn from that.
You learn more from losing, of course, than you do from winning.
One more thing I feel I have to talk about.
Last night, a friend of mine in New York asked me if I wanted to write something about it, and I said I didn't because I didn't feel it was right to write about Kobe without mentioning the 2003 rape case where he was accused by a young woman of rape.
And I didn't want to write about that.
You know, the guy was dead.
His daughter was dead.
His family was devastated.
The city is devastated.
But I didn't want to not write about it.
I didn't think it was right to not write about it.
And a Washington Post reporter named Felicia Sonmes was put on, suspended by the newspaper for tweeting an article about that right after his death.
And I don't think that's right.
I don't think she should be suspended.
I think it was a graceless thing to do.
But the woman who accused Kobe of rape, she didn't testify.
And so the case was thrown out of court.
But later, Kobe settled with her and said that he saw that maybe though he thought it was consensual, he could see that she hadn't and he felt really bad about this.
We don't know what happened.
You know, the woman was in the hotel room with a guy.
She said she was kissing him.
We just don't know what happened.
But that woman was a person too.
That woman was somebody's daughter too.
And that's part of Kobe's story.
And it's not wrong to tweet it out.
And there may be people who say, I don't care how many balls he put through how many baskets.
This is part of the story that means more to me than his sports achievements.
And that is perfectly legitimate and a perfectly legitimate thing to say.
Again, I think it was graceless timing, but that's not a sin.
That doesn't make it wrong.
And I don't think she should be suspended.
This is part of his story.
But all in all, an amazing, inspiring story by one of the greatest athletes of our time, gone too soon, obviously, and a terrible tragedy.
but just an amazing reach that people have when they do things so very, very well.
All right, let us move on to politics.
Sanders On Impeachment Timing00:15:38
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What were you saying?
See, see, this is what you mean.
You don't want these people, people like this, listening to what you're doing.
All right, let's talk about impeachment.
The impeachment trial, the defense is now on the floor talking about defending Donald Trump.
So a draft of a forthcoming book from former National Security Advisor John Bolton alleges that President Trump told Bolton in August that he wanted to keep aid to Ukraine frozen until the country aided investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.
According to the paper, the development threatened to throw into turmoil the careful choreography of the Senate impeachment trial of Mr. Trump because his defenders say there was no quid pro quo.
Trump tweeted out, I never told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.
In fact, says Trump, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination.
If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.
So let me be really clear.
I don't care.
I'm just telling you the God-honest truth.
If it comes out, if there's video of Donald Trump grabbing the president of Ukraine by the shirt front and saying, give me Joe Biden's head on a platter, or I'm not giving you the aid, I don't care.
I mean, Barack Obama on camera told the president of Russia to tell Vladimir Putin, the incoming president of Russia for life, the incoming dictator of Russia, to tell him that after the next election, he'd have more flexibility in getting rid of America's defenses.
Okay.
And that's not a problem.
And on CNN, when they bring that up, the CNN reporter is like, I never heard that.
I never saw that.
Because they're living in the iron lung.
If that's not a problem, if Barack Obama spied on the campaign of Donald Trump, actually tapped phones that Donald Trump might have been speaking in, and that's not a problem.
I don't care about Ukraine.
How dare you?
I truly do not care.
Also, the timing of this release, and I don't like people attacking John Bolton.
You know, John Bolton, I think, has always struck me as a pretty straight-arrow guy.
You know, I don't know whether he's telling the truth or not, but it is a little bit, you know, the manuscript of his book was not supposed to be released.
It's a little bit telling that it comes out just as the defense is starting.
There have been a lot of suspiciously timed leaks in this.
The New York Times got this story.
The New York Times has basically acted as a conduit for the Democrats.
The New York Times at this point, you know, I think I've said this before, but it looks like a wall in a bad neighborhood where teenagers are writing anti-Trump graffiti.
That's what the front page of the New York Times looks like.
The whole thing, you know, all of this stuff is so meaningless, especially after two and a half years of the nonsense of the Russia investigation, which turned out to be nonsense.
And Adam Schiff is still selling it as if Trump was, you know, working with the Russians to scotch the election.
Just total, it's utter nonsense.
Shifty Schiff!
Is that guy the worst?
It never, it never.
I don't know.
I have these voices in my head.
But it never made sense.
That story never ever made sense because Vladimir Putin could not know any more than anybody else knew that Trump would win the election.
He knew, just like everybody knew, that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.
So if he was doing anything, it was just causing chaos.
And the Democrats have worked with him to do exactly that.
Now, this guy, Lev Parnas, this hanger-on of Rudy Giuliani's, has released a tape that they tried to make a big fuss over this, of Trump saying he wanted to fire Ukrainian ambassador Maria Yovanovich, which actually happened.
Do we have that?
The biggest problem there, I think, where you need to start is we've got to get rid of the ambassador.
She's still left over from the Clinton administration.
Were the ambassador were Ukraine?
Yeah, and she's basically walking around telling everybody, wait, he's going to get impeached.
Just wait.
I mean, it's incredible.
Here we go tomorrow.
Yeah.
What's your history?
I don't remember his name.
I don't remember his name.
So one of the things that will be, now that we have a Secretary of State that's been supporting...
Get rid of him.
Hooray.
One of the first things.
Get her out tomorrow.
I don't care.
Get her out tomorrow.
Take her out.
Okay?
Excellent.
So the ambassador is saying the president should be impeached, and he says, get rid of her.
And that's supposed to be a scandal.
I mean, who does he think he is?
The president of the United States.
She's an ambassador.
She works for him.
He can fire her anytime because he doesn't like her shoes.
He can fire her.
But to fire her because he's saying that her boss should be impeached?
Absolutely.
So this whole, I mean, everything about this is like this to me.
I mean, Jerry Nadler, and I'm going to go easy on Jerry Nadler today.
He's announced that his wife has pancreatic cancer, which is a disaster.
He's gone to be with her.
You know, and I don't want to attack him personally, but he is representative of the way this thing has been put forward to the people and through the press, because the press echoes this.
Do we have what he said on the floor?
This is last week.
President Trump is an outlier.
He's the first and only president ever to declare himself unaccountable and to ignore subpoenas backed by the Constitution's impeachment power.
This is a determination by President Trump that he wants to be all-powerful.
He does not have to respect the Congress.
He does not have to respect the representatives of the people.
Only his will goes.
He is a dictator.
Now, if he is a dictator, right?
The next scene would have been two guys picking Nadler up under the arms and just carrying him away, never to be seen again.
But in fact, the courts have tied Trump up and he always obeys the courts, even though most of the courts tying him up have been shown to be illegitimate and have been overturned.
Most of those decisions have been overturned.
The press has called him every name in the book.
Where are the press people being taken off to the gulags, which we know from Bernie Sanders campaign organizers, we know that gulags weren't so bad, but still, still the press is talking.
Where is, and he can't even stop the leaks coming out of his administration.
Where is dictator Donald Trump?
It is all taking place in the Democrats' imagination, which they hope will be your imagination because the press echoes them.
They know the press echoes them, so they know they can lie, so they know you will hear the lie if you are not paying attention, and a lot of people aren't.
Almost nobody's paying attention to this.
Nobody cares about this at all.
So the president's lawyers took to the stand.
It's kind of unfair, I thought, that they had to go on Saturday when nobody was paying attention.
But the guy, Mike Purpura, his name is, this is the second Cut 16, where he talks about the fact that he says everything they have is assumed.
And then he says whenever they had real information, it showed that Trump was innocent.
The two people in the House record who asked President Trump about whether there was any linkage between security assistance and investigations were told in no uncertain terms that there's no connection between the two.
When Ambassador of the European Union Gordon Sondland asked the president in approximately the September 9 timeframe, the president told him, I want nothing, I want nothing, I want no quid pro quo.
Even earlier, on August 31, Senator Ron Johnson asked the president if there was any connection between security assistance and investigations.
The president answered, no way.
I would never do that.
Who told you that?
Just don't have anything on him.
It really, all they have is hearsay.
All they have is assumptions.
All they have is presumptions.
Interestingly, one of the prosecutors, one of the House managers, Zoe Lofgren, was talking to Jake Tapper and accidentally said the quiet thing out loud.
This is cut number eight.
Congresswoman, you told senators this week, quote, don't surrender to the president's stonewalling, unquote.
Right.
But what do you say to those who say that's exactly what the House Democrats did by not going to court to try to force subpoenas and force witnesses?
We did go to court, as you know.
You didn't pursue it in court.
You ultimately withdrew the cases and we realized we had the evidence we were going to get and that it was sufficient to prove our case.
But didn't you surrender to the president's stonewalling in that sense?
Well, I guess in that sense we did, because if we had waited for three or four years, the election would be over.
The issue would be almost moot.
If he is committing a high crime and misdemeanor now and continuing to do it, we need to act.
That is the problem with this whole thing.
You know, you talk about making sense.
You talk about making sense.
I mean, first you have to ask the question, is this some kind of massive violation of the law that puts our form of government, our freedoms, in danger?
Like it wasn't endangering when Obama offered to basically sell our missile defenses to Vladimir Putin for fun.
You know, it doesn't danger our freedom, definitely, for a Democrat president's administration, the investigators, to investigate a Republican opponent.
That definitely is dangerous to our freedom.
Does Trump being a big mouth, and Trump is a big, we all know he's a big mouth.
Does Trump being a big mouth, does that endanger anything?
Does it endanger anything?
He hasn't even been charged with a crime.
There is no crime.
If he said something untoward, and mentioning Joe Biden was untoward.
It's not the sort of thing, it's the sort of thing I wish he hadn't done.
But come on.
I mean, really, it's amazing to me that they have gotten this far with this and they don't stop.
It's for their base, but they believe that they can enwrap your imagination in their imagination through the vehicle of the press, which has been relentlessly anti-Trump, relentlessly unfair.
And that's why they are such dangers to our polity right now.
They are the biggest danger, I think, to the First Amendment is the way the Trump is the way the press is behaving.
They're so dishonest because they think they can rule the narrative in your mind.
All right.
You know, we were talking, we began by talking about abortion.
We may come back to this and talk about it again, but we have to talk about the fact that since the passing of Roe v. Wade, over 60 million pre-born children have been killed in the womb.
That's an amazing statistic, especially when you think the world can go on quite easily without anybody noticing if we don't notice.
That's 60 million children who never had a chance to give the world their love, their personalities, their experience.
When Ben Shapiro streamed his podcast live from the March for Life in D.C. last year, our advertisers were targeted by left-wing media watchdogs.
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Not just for that, but more importantly, I mean, more important than human life is our leftist tears tumbler.
going to want that as well.
So speaking of things that don't make sense, there are new polls that show Bernie Sanders just like skyrocketing into a lead.
Some polls show him skyrocketing into a lead in Iowa, which I guess is only a week away, right?
It's like eight days.
And Sanders now holds leads in several polls over Joe Biden.
And, you know, I wrote a piece about this over the weekend, a column on Daily Wire, saying that Bernie Sanders has had three scandals in the last week and a half, as opposed to Trump's fake scandal that is making so much news.
But, you know, we've played those videos that Project Veritas put out of field organizers for Bernie saying these horrifying things about putting people in gulags and the gulags weren't so bad and the Soviet Union was so great and all this stuff.
And the reason that I talk about that is three scandals.
The first scandal is those guys are representative of Bernie Sanders.
Sanders has been a, you know, he says, oh, I'm a democratic socialist, but he's been a communist and being a democratic socialist means nothing.
As Ayn Rand once said, it's the difference between murder and suicide.
You still wind up with your freedom gone.
He has said all these things about dictators like Castro and the guys in Nicaragua supporting them.
He honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
The guy's a stone communist.
And these people saying these horrible things about doing violence to our country in the name of communism, they represent something in Bernie Sanders, quite fairly.
They really do.
The second scandal of this is that the press didn't cover the first scandal.
The fact that our press is so, even though the press wants to destroy Bernie Sanders, they don't want to destroy his leftism.
They want to destroy Bernie Sanders because they think he'll lose.
But they don't want to destroy his leftism.
He is selling what they're selling.
The press is selling socialism.
They don't know what it is.
They're so stupid at this point and so sequestered from any common sense and from anybody who disagrees with them.
They really don't know what they're talking about, but they're still selling it, so they will not cover this Project Veritas, a legitimate scandal.
Not everything Project Veritas gets is good.
They're gadflies.
They're out there making trouble, which is great, but this is a genuine scandal.
But the third scandal is that young people love Bernie.
He got more young people's votes than Trump and Hillary combined in the last election.
If young people are not as strong for him this time, it's only because other candidates among the Democrats have followed his lead and gone as far left as he is.
Screwing College Students00:06:47
Elizabeth Warren, who Pocahontas?
I didn't mention her name, but the kids have gone off to be with them, to follow them as well.
And that's a scandal because it means our universities are teaching them trash.
They are teaching them trash.
They're teaching them to hate the greatest country on earth.
They're teaching them to hate their own freedom.
They are training them into slavery.
Nora O'Donnell, obviously the press is no friend to Bernie at this point.
They want to undermine him too because they don't think he can win.
So Nora O'Donnell, who is basically a left-wing hack, like most of the people on the networks at this point, is interviewing Bernie.
Listen to this.
You are a self-proclaimed socialist.
Democratic, put it in there, please.
Thank you.
Your agenda has promised free health care for everybody, free college tuition, and to pay off people's college loans.
The price tag for that is estimated to be $60 trillion over 10 years, correct?
Well, look, we have political opponents.
You don't know.
Nobody knows.
This is impossible.
You're going to propose a plan to the American people and you're not going to tell them how much it costs?
Of course I will.
But he never does.
He not only does, he not only never does, he doesn't really propose plans that you can follow, that you can calculate what he's talking about, because he knows that it's all imaginary.
He knows that it does.
That's how Elizabeth Warren screwed herself.
That is how Elizabeth Warren screwed herself.
She didn't screw herself by lying about being Pocahontas.
She didn't screw herself by lying about her parents or lying about why she got fired from a job.
That didn't stop her.
What stopped her was when she told the truth about what her policy actually was and how it was going to be paid for because it made no sense.
Look at her cheekbones.
Bernie never, man, look at Bernie's cheekbones.
He never makes that mistake.
Bernie never makes the mistake of being specific because socialism always destroys everything and he's not talking about how much it'll cost because it would, I mean, it's like the Green New Deal.
It would basically send us back to the Stone Age.
It's a scandal that's Michael Moore got up and gave a speech at a Bernie rally.
And it is a scandal that people cheer for this kind of open garbage, okay?
Listen to Michael Moore.
I am sick and tired of hearing this that we live in the land of the free.
That this is a democracy.
First of all, do you have any friends in another country or even Canada where you try to explain to them?
Where you try to explain to them that the person who gets the most votes in the democracy doesn't necessarily win?
Nobody understands that.
No, for this to be, we need to make so many changes because it's not just enough for it to be a political democracy.
When we get that part of it fixed, the Electoral College gone.
Look, look, here's the deal.
Get your word straight, Jack.
He's talking about getting rid of the Electoral College.
We're not a democracy, A. We're a republic.
We're a democratic republic.
We are a federation of states, the United States.
We don't want, we never wanted ever our country to be controlled by Washington, D.C.
We want it controlled in localities where people have greater control over the levers of power.
That was the whole point of the country.
The whole point of the country is your freedom.
Not Michael Moore's freedom to make his stupid movies that have made him a multi-multi-millionaire who treats the workers around him like trash.
Not that freedom, your freedom to do and say what you want.
It is not New York and LA who runs this country, which is what would happen if we had a democracy.
The founders were terrified of democracy because they'd read Plato and Aristotle and they knew that democracies inevitably devolve into tyranny.
That is why they were afraid.
Michael Moore, who hasn't even read the newspaper, doesn't know why that is.
And it's a shame.
It is a scandal that our children are so ignorant.
They have been made ignorant.
They have been created.
Their ignorance has been created in the universities that they sit and they applaud for this nonsense when they talk about it.
Making sense is not something Democrats do.
Liz Warren was confronted by, Liz Warren, who has offered to pay, says all of your student loans should be paid.
She was confronted by a father who says, well, wait a minute, what about the fact that I worked enslaved and saved to pay my student loan?
Are you going to go back and pay that as well?
My daughter's getting out of school.
I've saved all my money.
She doesn't have any schedule.
Am I going to get my money back?
Of course not.
So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money.
And those of us that did the right thing get screwed.
No, it's not everybody got screwed.
Of course we did.
My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations.
I saved my money.
He made more than I did.
But I worked a double shift, worked the extra.
My daughter worked, she just can't.
So you're laughing.
Yeah, that's exactly what you're doing.
We did the right thing, and we get screwed.
This is the thing.
Like, you know, she wasn't laughing at him.
I don't think that's fair.
But she is talking nonsense.
She's talking nonsense.
If people take out loans and pay them back, they are getting screwed.
And she was confronted about this on TV and she said, well, you know, it's like then I could never do anything because, well, well, play the video where she's confronted about this.
What's your response?
Look, we build a future going forward by making it better.
By that same logic, what would we have done?
Not started Social Security because we didn't start it last week for you or last month for you?
Think of it this way.
When I was growing up, I wanted to be a public school teacher.
My family had no money.
Are you saying tough to these people?
No, what I'm saying is there was a $50 a semester option for me.
I was able to go to college and become a public school teacher because America had invested in a $50 a semester option for me.
Today that's not available.
And our kids have taken on a trillion and a half dollars in student loan debt.
We have got to back that up.
Well, screw you then.
You know, that argument makes no sense because if she had said, tomorrow we're going to start a $50 college option, that guy wouldn't be complaining.
He wouldn't be complaining, saying it wasn't there for me.
He would just be saying, okay, so that's a new thing.
What he is talking about is people who did what his kid did, which is took out loans.
You want to solve the debt problem?
Fire every dean of diversity.
Fire every middle manager in colleges.
That's where the new money has come from.
That is why the colleges are so expensive.
They have not been made more expensive by better teaching.
They haven't been made more expensive by more professors.
They have been made more expensive by this deep state within the universities of people who are paid to find problems that aren't there.
Nobody in our universities is oppressed.
Anybody who's in our university is in the top third of Americans.
They are privileged people.
If they're complaining, if they're protesting, they should be tossed out and let somebody else get that opportunity.
The Democrats have made no sense.
Brilliant Horror Investigation00:03:26
They really don't.
The things they say, they just don't comply with reality.
And that's why you have people in the Republican Party now who would have been Democrats 20 years ago easily.
They easily would have been Democrats 20 years ago.
And now they're becoming over the Republicans because Republicans are having a debate between two sides of our party, both of whom are trying to find a way forward and both of whom make sense.
And that is really, it's an important thing.
It is because reality makes sense.
Politicians should make sense.
You cannot ask us to live in our imaginations.
You can't promise us everything and then tell us it's not going to cost anything.
You just can't do it because it don't make no sense.
All right, a final reflection.
I have been watching, I usually don't review things until they're over because I want to make sure they're good, but I have been watching the Stephen King show, mini-series on HBO based on the Stephen King novel, The Outsider.
And I've just really, really been enjoying it.
And the reason I'm enjoying it, it's got this guy, Ben Mendelson, who's doing a great job playing a detective.
But it's about an impossible case.
And this is the reason I'm enjoying it.
And it really fits in with the theme of what I've been talking about.
Instead of making it a horror show, it's a Stephen King story, so it's got this element of horror in it.
It's just about the investigation into a case that doesn't make sense because a supernatural evil is involved, which is just a brilliant, brilliant idea.
Now, for some people who want the big shocks, who want things jumping out at you, who want like things with fangs flying out at you, it doesn't have any of that.
It is just about the fact that there is a terrible, horrific murder of a child and a good person is arrested for it and the police have all the proof they need to prove he's guilty.
And yet, there's also proof that he can't possibly be guilty.
So both things are there.
And this good cop who wants to do the right thing, played by Ben Mendelson, this good cop who wants to do the right thing says, well, wait a minute, we had the proof, we had what we needed, and yet it doesn't make any sense.
And it's a brilliant thing because it's just showing you, and it's got this whole religious kind of aspect to it because it is showing you that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of than your philosophy.
And if you don't take those things into account, you are not making sense.
That the world makes sense, but it doesn't necessarily make materialist sense because there is a spiritual level to human life.
And that is a really wonderful thing in such a clever way.
I haven't read the book.
You know, it's funny, I was about to start it and I didn't, and the show came on, so I watched that instead, which is not a good thing, but I couldn't help myself.
But it is just a brilliant, brilliant idea to take a supernatural horror story from the point of view of the people investigating it and trying to make it fit in with their typical and normal idea of the world.
Wonderful show, The Outsider, on HBO.
I got to stop there, but we'll be back again tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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Production Credits00:00:55
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Nearly 100,000 pro-lifers descend on Washington, D.C. for the 47th annual March for Life, just one week after 10,000 shrieking leftists took to the nation's capital for the fourth annual Women's March.
We will examine what the two back-to-back marches tell us about the stark difference between the modern left and right.
Then Bernie surges to the top of the polls just days before the Iowa caucuses.
We will analyze how a decrepit communist became the future of the Democratic Party.
Finally, in sad news, basketball superstar Kobe Bryant and his young daughter die in a helicopter crash.