Ep. 841 dissects Democrats’ unraveling: Iowa’s caucus chaos—Buttigieg’s app fiasco, Sanders’ socialist baggage, and Biden’s fading momentum—while Trump’s acquittal exposes Pelosi’s theatrics and Romney’s betrayal. Bill Whittle’s The Cold War, What We Saw podcast contrasts Stalin’s 3,400 daily death warrants with Che Guevara’s cult status, warning socialism’s resurgence mirrors Kolima’s Gulag horrors where 800,000 perished. The episode ties modern leftist policies to forgotten atrocities, framing the Cold War as a moral victory now at risk. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it wasn't a good week for the Democrats, except for those Democrats who enjoy being strung up by their heels, burned with cigarettes, and then lashed with a spiked whip, which is only about six or seven of them whose names and photographs are available on request.
But for the rest of the Democrats, it was their worst week since Appomattox.
On Monday, they had the Iowa caucuses, which turned into a clown show because of a vote-counting app developed by a Hillary Clinton aide just before he committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head seven times.
The app not only failed to operate properly, but it then burst into cackling laughter and screamed, I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too, before flying away on a broomstick and landing at a wine bar.
Now, with 63.7 precincts reporting 56.5% of the votes left by 38.4% of voters, with the 0.44 voter being taken to the hospital, the results are still unclear.
Some say that Pete Buttigieg is in the lead, and some say it's Bernie Sanders, and some say it's a gigantic alien centipede who feeds on human flesh, or at least it might as well be.
And that was just Monday.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump delivered a State of the Union speech touting a spectacular economy, a reinvigorated military, and a new focus on American values and freedoms.
However, Democrats did manage to strike back when Nancy Pelosi tore the speech in half, burst into cackling laughter, and screamed, I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.
Which just seems to be something Democrat women do before they start drinking heavily.
Don't ask me why.
Then came Wednesday when Democrats' three-year effort to impeach President Trump for some damn thing or other finally reached fruition by giving Trump a popularity boost and a complete acquittal.
Now, however, it's Thursday, and Democrats hope to turn a new page when the flesh-eating alien centipede opens his campaign in New Hampshire.
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hip-sy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
What is there to say about this week besides, ha ha Really, I can't remember a worse series of debacles for Democrats or a better week for Republicans.
And it's time to start asking ourselves, why are things going so well for the GOP?
It wasn't very long ago when President Obama, with an unbroken record of incompetence and mediocrity, won over a Republican, Mitt Romney, after Romney seemed to have him on the ropes, then let him get away.
It wasn't that long ago that the GOP lost to the untried Obama because they put up cranky old man John McCain, who seemed more intent on undercutting his own running mate, Sarah Palin, than in winning the presidency.
And it wasn't that long ago that George W. Bush, a good man doing his best in difficult times, left office with one of the lowest approval ratings ever, much worse than he deserved, which surely helped Obama win the office.
Why is Trump doing so well when Romney, McCain, and W all fared so badly with the American people?
I'm sure there's more than one reason, but one reason just leaps right out at me.
Mitt Romney and John McCain were both people who thought they could win the favor of the American news media.
They're both people who want the favor of the American news media.
They didn't know how to fight Obama because there was no way to both fight Obama and keep the love of the press.
George W. Bush and his advisor Karl Rove imagined that W's honor and decency were somehow wrapped up in not fighting back against a news media that absolutely hated and excoriated him.
He thought he needed to stay above the fray to maintain his dignity.
Which brings us to Donald J. Trump.
Trump is not above the fray.
Trump kicks the news media in their collective lying, corrupted, left-wing, and did I mention lying backside every single day.
Trump's size 12s are so far up the media's kazoo that they are chewing on his shoe leather.
The news media now sleeps on its collective stomach because it's just too painful to roll over after you've been kicked that hard in the ass.
Many years ago, a very wise Republican insider who does not like for me to quote him by name said to me, We'll never win until we realize our opponent is not the Democrat Party, it's the news media.
I think it's fair to say that Trump has realized that.
Winning with Rockauto00:02:34
He has not kow-towed to them, he's not apologized, he's not been kind to them, and he's not been nice.
And not only has he gotten the job done, but he has left the opposition fully and completely exposed without their magic news media shield.
They don't know what hit him.
Remember the sign Bill Clinton put up in his campaign headquarters: it's the economy stupid.
Whatever happens next, the Republicans should put up a sign in every one of their campaign offices throughout the land and they should never take it down.
It's the news media stupid because it is and it always was.
We will talk more about this and what it means because it does have a lot of meaning.
First, though, we've got to talk about rockauto.com.
Why?
Because I love to say rockauto.com.
When your car has problems, you don't want to get in your car and drive to the auto part store because your car has problems.
And then you get there and they don't know any more than you do.
They look in the computer, they look up what you need.
You can do that at home with rockauto.com.
Plus, you get to say rockauto.com.
They have everything from engine control modules and brake parts to tail lamps, motor oil, and even new carpet.
You can get it for any car, old, new, doesn't matter.
The rockauto.com catalog is unique.
It's remarkably easy to navigate.
You can quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brands, specifications, and prices you prefer, all while saying rockauto.com, which is just so much fun.
It's an amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car will ever need.
Where?
You guessed it, rockauto.com.
Go to Rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck and write Clavin in their how did you hear about us box.
So they know we sent you and so they know you know how to spell Clavin because?
So here let's just repeat it in case you didn't hear it the first time.
Let us just sum up the news in a nutshell.
Here it is, two-thirds of the senators present not having pronounced him guilty.
The Senate adjudges that the respondent, Donald John Trump, president of the United States, is not guilty as charged.
We're gonna win so much.
We're gonna win at every level.
We're gonna win economically.
We're gonna win with the economy.
We're gonna win with military.
We're gonna win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
Moral Dilemmas in Politics00:14:51
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yeah!
You say please please, it's too much winning, we can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty, oh so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
You know, we haven't been able to play the Trump happiness montage because Trump has been winning so much.
There actually hasn't been time to get the happiness montage on the air because we just had to cover how much he was winning.
If you're not having fun after this week, if you are a Republican or a conservative and you are not having a good time, if you're worried about Nancy Pelosi and you're so angry about her tearing up the speech, are you hating, if you're hating on Mitt Romney and he's a traitor and he's everything that's right.
You don't know how to handle politics.
This has been one of the most fun weeks in Republican history.
And if you're not having a good time and if you're not walking around with a big stupid smile on your face, you should check your attitude because you're not doing it right.
And the thing is, everything is about the press.
Everything so much is about the press.
And this is what Trump gets.
And this is why he does so much better than other Republicans.
And remember, you know, we had a guy when Mitt Romney, and I'm going to talk about Mitt Romney and I'm not going to stomp on him, but I am going to explain what I think about him, which I think is important.
You know, when we had Mitt Romney running, this was a guy we put up against Barack Obama, who had just passed the least popular health care bill on earth.
We put up the guy who passed the same health care bill in Massachusetts, right?
That was our idea.
When they put up Obama and he was this young, untried, but very dynamic person, we put up this angry John McCain, this little guy who was just angry at everybody all the time.
And he put Sarah Palin, who actually enhanced his campaign and then did nothing but attack her and undermine her his campaign, attacking and undermining his own person.
And they all backed down because they both backed down in fighting Obama because they both love the press so much.
And the thing is, these guys who are enticed by the press, who get that strange new respect, we call it, right?
The strange new respect is when Mitt Romney is suddenly a hero in the press after they called him a murderer.
They called him every possible thing.
They let Joe Biden go out and say, he wants to put, to say to black people, he wants to put you all back in chains.
They didn't even challenge that.
They let them say that about Mitt Romney.
Now Mitt Romney is a profile and courage.
Now he's a hero.
These guys don't understand.
They don't understand that it's all relative to how much they hate the GOP.
They are only happy.
They only like you when you are standing against the GOP.
And the minute you're standing against one of theirs, and that's who it is, that's who Obama is.
He was theirs.
He was their creation.
He was their idol.
He was the thing they wanted in the office, no matter how badly he did.
The minute you're standing up against one of theirs, they will rip you to shreds.
And that's what Trump understands.
He doesn't want their favor.
He doesn't want, even I quail when he's as mean as he is, but he is only being as mean as they are to every single one of us.
And that's the secret right there.
All right, so let's talk about the impeachment.
Obviously, Trump has been acquitted, and it was dumb.
It was a dumb thing from the beginning.
I said it was dumb.
It needed to be seen in the context.
I mean, look, no matter what else you said about it, you had to see it in the context of what Obama did and what they did about what Obama did.
Obama spied on the Trump campaign.
Oh, you can't say spying.
Why not?
The press.
That was why he couldn't say spying, but that's what he did.
Carter Page, a guy who had worked for the Trump campaign, they used dirty means to get a FISA warrant against him so they could tap his phones.
Those were phones that people for Donald Trump's campaign might have been on.
We know that they were looking into the Donald Trump campaign with agents going over there and talking to people.
It was all that.
That's what Obama did.
That's what Obama did.
And remember, the Russian collusion was all on Hillary Clinton's side.
It was all her and John Brennan disseminating Russian disinformation in the steel dossier.
That's all it was.
And the Democrats, Adam Schiff, who the press is now telling us, oh, Adam Schiff, he's going to go down in history as such a noble person.
You know, Adam Schiff was the guy who was engineering this and spreading this stuff around, helping to spread it around.
All right.
So let's talk about Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney went out and he voted to acquit Trump on the questions of obstruction of Congress because Trump obviously was just exercising his due process rights and that for Adam Schiff was obstructing Congress because if Trump doesn't just lie down and die, he's doing the wrong thing as far as Adam Schiff and the Democrats are concerned.
But Mitt Romney did vote to oust the president to convict the president on the charge that he had abused his power by asking Ukraine to investigate corruption among that corruption, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, and had delayed aid, though they obviously got the aid on time.
Here is Mitt Romney explaining in the Senate why he did this.
The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor.
Yes, he did.
The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.
The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.
The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.
The president's purpose was personal and political.
Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.
Now, Mitt Romney, here's the two things that are happening, right?
The one thing that's happening is people who are Trump partisans are on Twitter screaming, Mitt Romney is the devil and he's a traitor and he's be thrown out of Congress.
He's thrown out of the GOP caucus and all this stuff.
And on the other hand, Mitt Romney is saying, I believe in God.
That's why I did this.
I'm a very religious person and I took an oath before God in whom I believe to uphold the Constitution.
Now, if we just clear the fog of politics away for a minute, you have to think this is not a good move politically for Mitt Romney.
So I think we can take him at his word that this is, he was acting on conscience.
He was acting as he thought he should act to do the moral thing.
I believe that that was a major, major moral mistake.
I believe that he was acting foolishly.
I believe he has always acted foolishly.
And I don't think it's a question of him being a bad person or anything like this.
I think it's a question of being foolish, of not really understanding where morality lay.
I remember a long time ago when Ted Cruz showed up and basically attacked Donald Trump at the Republican convention.
And I said, no, that's not the right thing to do.
And I supported Cruz for president.
I still think Ted Cruz is one of the best people in Washington.
I think he's a great guy.
I think he's a brilliant guy.
I thought he did the wrong thing.
We all do the wrong thing sometimes.
And I explained why I thought he did the wrong thing.
And I was attacked for weeks about that.
But I was right.
And you can tell I was right because Ted Cruz, who's a good man, figured it out and is now supporting Trump.
I'm not going to guess.
I would hate to guess what Ted Cruz thinks in his secret heart about Donald Trump, but he supports him because it's good for the country.
The moral situation that Mitt Romney was in.
See, the thing is when you act morally, remember AOC said all these people, all they care about is facts, but they don't care about morality.
But you can't know morality until you know the facts because you have to act in a situation.
Morality may be absolute, but ethics, which is the application of morality in a situation, is always situational.
You have to know what situation you're in.
An example, somebody takes your kid hostage.
Would you lie to get that to the hostage taker to get your kid back?
You bet your life you would.
You wouldn't sit there and go, I believe in God and God doesn't want us to lie, so I can't lie.
That would be stupid.
That would not be a fair application of morality.
The other day when John Bolton wrote a book that seemed to condemn Trump and the Trumpers went after John Bolton, they passed around this video of John Bolton saying, you know, I would lie to protect national security.
And they said, see, see, Bolton's a liar.
And I didn't play that video because I thought that was garbage.
Of course, Bolton would lie to protect national security.
We should all be willing to lie to protect our country, obviously.
I mean, that's a silly thing.
That is a silly way to apply morality.
And it was the wrong thing for the Trumpers to do to go after Bolton in that way, as I said at the time, right?
What is the situation Mitt Romney is in?
He can't possibly be in the situation where he is honestly being asked by honest people to judge Trump's behavior within the Constitution.
He can't be because we know these are the people who covered up for Barack Obama.
They didn't just fail to accuse Barack Obama of what he did when his administration spied on the Trump campaign.
They didn't just fail to accuse him.
They covered up for him.
They ran interference for him.
So it cannot be, it cannot possibly be that this was presented to him in all honesty and all fairness to a judge whether Trump violated the Constitution.
It was a political act in the midst of a political season.
That's what it was.
That was the situation that Mitt Romney was in.
He had to act morally within that situation.
So what did they want?
They wanted the Senate.
They want to make the Senate weaker.
Mitt Romney helped them do that.
Mitt Romney helped the Democrats make the Republican hold on the Senate weaker because now they can say, look, it wasn't just us who voted to convict their own people.
It was a bipartisan vote to convict him.
That's what they will say.
And Mitt Romney helped them do that.
And what did he achieve?
Zero.
He achieved nothing.
So, you know, it's fair to say that his, I believe that his moral sense was twisted by his bitterness.
And this is something that one of his former campaign people said, that he's bitter and he's envious.
I believe it may have twisted his moral sense.
You cannot just think, this was always the hit on John McCain, that he always thought of his honor first, but he didn't think of what the effects of his acting on his honor would be.
And that's what I think Mitt Romney was doing.
Part of a moral decision is the effect that it will have.
What is the only effect this would have?
And the only effect Mitt Romney knew it would have when he took it was to give the Democrats a talking point.
Compare this attitude to Mitch McConnell.
Mitch McConnell afterwards gave a press conference.
After Trump was acquitted, he gave a press conference.
And they asked him if Mitt Romney was going to be put in the doghouse for what he did.
How long is this Senator Romney going to be in the doghouse?
We don't have any doghouses here.
The most important vote is the next vote.
The most important vote is the next vote.
Whereupon Mitch McConnell turned on his heels, walked back into the Senate, and started filing closure on more, I think, five more Trump judges, because that's what Mitch McConnell is doing.
Mitch McConnell is doing what is right for the country because he's a politician doing political stuff.
Mitt Romney is not a saint amidst the lions.
He's a politician doing political stuff, and he acted wrongly, I think, in that political instance.
He did not do the right thing in that political instance.
If he believed, if he believed that Donald Trump was actually endangering our Constitution, even if the Democrats had accused him of it for political reasons, if he believed our Constitution was genuinely in danger, and if Trump got away with this, the whole structure of American democracy was going to collapse, then that would have been a different thing.
But of course, he couldn't possibly believe that.
He knew if he stepped back and thought about it and thought less about himself and less about his own moral stance, if he had stepped back and seen what the situation was, he would have realized this is a political situation with political ramifications.
The results will be political.
I have to act in a moral, political way.
That's what Mitch McConnell did.
That's what I think the rest of the Congress did, and they did the right thing.
It really is interesting to watch all this stuff.
You know, I want to take a look at Iowa.
I want to pause before we go back to what's the craziness happening in Iowa.
Let's take a look at the latest thing that's happening.
Donald Trump, even as I speak, is giving a press conference where he is just lambasting these guys, but he's doing it in a kind of funny way.
But he was at the national prayer breakfast where I've seen him speak twice, and he really went after them.
This is what he said.
I don't like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong.
Nor do I like people who say, I pray for you when they know that that's not so.
So many people have been hurt.
And we can't let that go on.
Nancy Pelosi is sitting one, two, three, four, five seats down from him while he's making that speech.
And she's the one who says, I pray for you.
And here's her response at a news conference afterwards.
I extended the hand of friendship to him to welcome him as the President of the United States to the people's house was also an act of kindness because he looked to me like he was a little sedated.
He looked that way last year, too.
But he didn't want to shake hands.
That meant nothing to me.
It had nothing to do with my tearing up.
That came much later.
She's become a crazed lunate.
That's just trash.
He's calling him sedated.
You know, that is absolute trash.
He didn't shake her hand, and it's hard to believe that he didn't see it.
I watched it in slow motion.
I just couldn't tell.
But he didn't shake her hand.
But that was also after she didn't properly introduce him.
You're supposed to say it's a great personal privilege and an honor to introduce the president of the United States.
He was like, here's the president.
So there's clearly no love lost.
But she just looks like somebody who is back on her heels.
She looks like somebody who is on the defensive.
That thing of tearing the speech, it did draw attention away from Trump's terrific speech.
But even drawing attention away from his speech with such an ugly and petty gesture drew attention to the fact that she had to draw attention away from his speech, which was such a terrific speech and celebrating such a terrific state of the union.
The thing that is really telling is what's happening in Iowa.
Not just the fact now, I think they've got something like 97% of the precincts counted, and Perez, the head of the DNC, is calling for a recount because he's saying this is enough is enough.
She Looks Defensive00:06:22
This is ridiculous.
There are a lot of things you can say about this.
It looks now like Biden has the lead over Budige, like I'm sorry, like Bernie has the lead over Budijej.
But, you know, it's such a close thing.
It doesn't matter.
It's a big victory for both Bernie and for people.
Crazy Bernie.
Crazy Bernie.
One crazy dude.
And it does show this one thing that I said.
I always say these things, and everybody tells me I'm wrong.
And I'm constantly right about this stuff.
You are listening to tomorrow's news today when you listen to this program.
I told you that Biden, this idea that Biden was going to come back in South Carolina, it's never a good strategy to count on the future because it's always the present that is so powerful to people.
It's so present to people.
It is always seeing what is happening in the moment that makes you feel good or bad about a candidate.
Here is Joe Biden, cut number 10 in his reaction to his, he came in like fourth in Iowa.
24 hours later, they're still trying to figure out what happened in Iowa.
At this rate, New Hampshire will be the first in the country to get the vote.
I am not going to sugarcoat it.
We took a gut punch in Iowa.
The whole process took a gut punch.
So, you know, it's a gut punch.
It makes him look, this is what I said originally.
I've said this months and months, if not over a year ago, that his whole thing is that he's the one who can beat Trump.
And anytime he loses, anytime it looks like he's not invulnerable, that's bad for him.
So now you've got Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, okay?
And I talked about Pete Buttigieg a little bit yesterday.
The fact that he is gay is not going to be a nothing.
The press has declared it a nothing by not talking about it.
The press has declared that we're not allowed to talk about this, that the ancient Christian idea that homosexuality is wrong is simply off the table now.
We're not dealing with it.
That's not the way voting works.
See, the press doesn't get, this is why the press is so important.
The press doesn't get to declare what we care about.
It doesn't get to declare, oh, this is evil, so therefore you can't say it.
They tried it with abortion.
It didn't work, right?
They told us, oh, we hated women.
It was a war on women.
Anybody's doing this, women helped.
And people kept, you know, it took a long time, but people kept saying, you know, I'm listening to these arguments.
And the argument against abortion is better than the argument for abortion.
The press only has so much power because reality also has a voice.
And the thing is, again, this is not me.
You know, would I vote for a gay guy for president?
Yeah, I would.
I would.
Not beat Buttigieg because I think he's a schnook, but I would.
But I think a lot of people wouldn't, and I think they wouldn't, not out of hatred, but out of true principle and their true beliefs and their true reading of scripture, just like I'm acting out of true principle and my true beliefs and my true reading of scripture.
You have to respect that.
If you don't respect that, then you don't respect your country, you don't respect your countrymen, and you don't respect the freedoms that the whole point of the exercise is to defend.
You have to respect the people in order to respect the people's freedom.
So that's why I think Budigej is just a bad thing.
But Bernie Sanders is much more to the point, okay?
Bernie Sanders is an old communist.
Now, that means that there are two things about him that represent the Democrat Party.
There's no saying that it was unrepresentative of Iowa to vote for Bernie Sanders.
He has been the most exciting candidate they have had for two election cycles now.
He was the most exciting candidate when Hillary ran against him and they wrong-footed him and sabotaged his campaign.
He's the most exciting candidate they've got now.
By which I mean he's the one who causes the most excitement.
I think of communism when I think of Bernie.
And that is the thing.
He's a communist and he's old.
And both of those things represent the Democrat Party.
When I say old, I just don't, I don't just mean an old age.
I mean that communism is an old philosophy.
It is a disproved philosophy.
It's a failed philosophy, and he hasn't changed his mind at all.
He may have changed what he says about it, but deep down, the guy is still a communist.
And you can tell by the communists who are working for him out in the field, as revealed by Project Veritas, who are out there saying, yeah, we want to put people in gulags and the gulags weren't so bad, but we're going to use them.
And then you'll find out how bad they were, but they weren't so bad.
That is the group that is supporting Bernie Sanders because they know who he is.
Here's the thing.
Conservatives, Republicans, do not pay attention.
When I say they don't pay attention to the culture, I don't just mean they don't pay attention to what's on TV and they don't have movie studios, which they should.
They don't have women's magazines, which they should.
They don't pay attention to what's on TV.
Because, you know, the younger Republicans, they watch TV and they talk about it and all this stuff, but they just don't make efforts.
People with money in the Conservative Party do not make efforts to support and build infrastructure for people like me who are writing art that actually has a conservative bent and they're too small-minded to allow art to do what it does, which is to show all the world, not just the moral world, not just representing your principles.
You show all the world because that is God's world and you want to show it as it is.
But they also don't pay attention to the philosophies that work their way up through the universities.
Everything that we're seeing now, the stuff about, oh, a man is a woman, a woman is a man, you know, this is, well, if I say I'm a woman, I'm suddenly a woman, poof, a woman, all that stuff is postmodernist philosophy that's being taught in college since I was a kid.
It first started to filter into college when I was a kid.
It is based on Marxist philosophy.
It is based on this idea that everything you see and everything that's before you is actually kind of an illusion created by language and power structures.
These are very complex and interesting philosophies that happen to be wrong, but they don't happen to be entirely wrong.
So there's always something to them, right?
And this is where all this stuff comes from.
It's all the stuff that no, you know, this stuff, it looks like everything's great, but everything is secretly bad, right?
Everything is secretly bad.
It looks like, you know, you may think you're a woman because you, oh, you happen to have a vagina when you look down and, you know, finally, this funny thing happens to you after you have sex that suddenly a baby, you know, appears out of nowhere.
That may make you think you're a woman, but actually your womanhood is a construct of language created in order to maintain power structures.
These are actual, like real theories.
People have written books and books and books about them, but it's only when they percolate to the top and suddenly somebody says, oh, you have to let my son into your daughter's bathroom.
It's only then that suddenly we go, what?
Cold War Collectivism00:11:57
Wait a minute.
That's a terrible thing because we weren't paying attention.
I was once on a panel discussion where they asked me what a Christian artist should do, what our mission was.
And I said I would be happy if I could convince intellectuals that there was such a thing as objective truth.
And the Christian artist next to me went off and he started yelling at me.
He said, there's only one truth and it's Jesus Christ.
And we have to tell people Jesus Christ and Jesus.
And I thought, you know, I thought, really?
Because that's not going to work.
That is not going to help anybody.
You know, you have got to let people know at the highest intellectual level that what they are talking about in the fashion of the time is wrong.
And you have to fight them in the universities.
You have to fight them in the places where artists gather.
You have to fight them in the cafes.
That's where this stuff percolates up from.
And we do not do it.
Bernie Sanders is there because the philosophy he represents is taking over the Democrat Party.
It's taking over the Democrat Party because it took over the intellectual world of the left.
And the intellectual world of the left passed it on like a virus through the universities.
And now it has risen up to the voting booth.
And we weren't paying attention.
And that's the way that always works.
All right, we got to take a break from Facebook and YouTube.
But first, a quick message about this show.
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In just a minute, we're going to be talking to the great Bill Whittle.
You remember last year I told you about his show, Apollo 11, what we saw.
And this year he is doing a new podcast about the Cold War, right?
What we saw in the Cold War.
It captures what it was like to live through major events like the Berlin airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the space race.
The story ties all of these milestones together in a tapestry that illustrates the apocalypse that never happened.
The story is so well told.
Bill is so good at this stuff.
The setting is so brilliantly descriptive.
And as you go through these events, you start to understand the battle, not only for capitalism, but for civilization itself.
And I would know because I'm old enough to have seen most of what happened.
The first two episodes in this 12-part podcast are available for you right now.
This is a perfect time to listen as the 2020 election starts to heat up.
Now we can see where the left has gone full-blown communists in so many of their policies and their language too, as I was just talking about.
Go to dailywire.com/slash cold war, start listening to this incredibly important story.
That's dailywire.com/slash cold war.
And just a minute, we're going to be talking to Bill Whittle right here at dailywire.com.
Come on over and listen.
You know, Bill Whittle, conservative commentator, podcaster, a good friend.
His new show, The Cold War, What We Saw is out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever else you get your podcast.
We did an interview with him about the show.
It's really good.
But first, here's a trailer advertising the show itself.
By the time the Cold War had finally ended, it had consumed one-fifth of the nation's existence.
For 43 years, the United States and the Soviet Union stared at each other across the nuclear abyss.
The Berlin airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space River, Vietnam, Détente, Reagan, Solidarity, Gorbachev.
Tear down this.
In 12 epic installments, we will walk ourselves forward through World War III.
I'm Bill Whittle, and this is the Cold War, what we saw.
All right, so this, after your huge success with your moonshot podcast, which was great.
Thank you.
Terrific.
Why the Cold War?
Well, you know, Bernie is getting traction and socialism is getting traction.
Everybody's talking about socialism.
And the further we get away from that Cold War victory, the further we get away from just how horrific that system was.
And I thought it was time to remind people that this was a 42-year-long struggle.
And the aspect of it that I always thought was most interesting was the moral aspect, which is the aspect nobody ever talks about.
You listen to historians talk about the Cold War, it's like Koch versus Pepsi.
One superpower, another superpower, team red, team blue, you know, as if they were equal, as if it was just some big misunderstanding.
You know, if we'd only had a chance to straighten stuff out.
But at the beginning, you know, in the early years of the Cold War, Joseph Stalin signed 3,400 death warrants in one day.
He didn't sign most of them, but he personally signed hundreds of thousands of them.
And Eisenhower once got so angry that he threw a golf club while he was on a golf course in the general direction of an aid.
And if you think that these two things are equal, then there's something fundamentally wrong with you.
Fundamentally wrong with you.
Let me ask you about this, because people walk around with Shea Guevara.
Sure.
Why not Himmler?
They don't walk around with Himmler t-shirts because people would beat the living crap out of them.
I've always thought that the reason for this is that underneath communism, there's this Christian idea, an idea we recognize, that people, the poor, should have bread, basically, and that we should treat people equally.
Why is it that communism always ends up with such a high body count?
Well, it's an end product of communism, and I'll get to that in a second.
But the main reason that people can wear a Che t-shirt is because there's no pictures.
We have pictures from the death camps.
You know, those were liberated by Western forces as well as the Russians and so on.
And we have photographs of bodies being bulldozed into pits, and we have pictures of it.
What happened in the Gulags, for example, there's a camp in the far northeast of Russia, much further than Siberia, called Kolima.
Kolima was one of 430 camps in the Gulag archipelago.
But it was a work camp.
It's a work camp.
Okay, so it's not as bad as a death camp.
It was a work camp where your life expectancy was less than a year.
And if you were working in the gold mines, it was four months.
And so 800,000 people died at that one camp in the 400 camps plus of the Gulag archipelago.
And 800,000 people at Kolima puts it, it's not the deadliest place in human history, but it makes the podium, Drew.
It's third.
It's Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Kolima.
And nobody's ever heard of it, and nobody says a thing about it.
But in Koloma, you would have doctors, mathematicians, scientists, musicians out there breaking rocks 40 degrees below zero, which coincidentally is the same temperature at Fahrenheit and Celsius.
It's the only place where those two temperatures meet.
40 degrees below zero, three to four month life expectancy.
And some of the stories that come out of there are just so heartbreaking.
And my favorite one is in a book called Koloma Tales.
There's a story of a guy who was out there breaking rocks in the cold.
And he'd been living on 200, 300 calories a day like most of them.
And as he came back in, the guards came in and they separated him and pulled him out.
And he knew he was going to be taken out to shot.
He knew it.
That's what happened at the end of the day when they pulled you.
And just as he was going out the door, he said, you know, if I'd known they were going to come and kill me today, I wouldn't have gone to work.
I wouldn't have gone out there and done that.
I would have just sat here and waited for me to be pulled.
Now, people forget that back then, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of big thinkers were saying, I've seen the future and it works.
This is going to be the thing.
What is it they're missing?
When people work for Bernie now and they say, oh, you know, this is the good socialism.
This is the nice socialism.
This is not going to be bad.
What are they missing about socialism that leads to this stuff?
Well, some of them aren't missing anything.
No, seriously, we've seen in the last couple of weeks with our friend James O'Keefe and this Project Paritas Things, where Bernie supporters, not just Bernie's supporters, Bernie campaign people are talking about, yeah, when we get into power, we're going to have to send those Republicans away.
One of them had the audacity to not only defend the gulags, but also to defend the Balmoral Canal, the White Sea Canal, where everybody came together and worked together to make this canal.
Okay.
In the mid-1930s, in order to make the four-year plan, the leader of the Soviet secret police, Gingrich Yagoda, decided to impress Stalin by creating this canal from the Baltic to the White Sea.
And he used 120,000 prisoners as slave laborers, and 25,000 of them died.
They all got together and died.
Yeah, exactly.
It was this kind of nice communal thing where everybody came together from all parts of the country, under shackles, in freight cars, and died.
And if you take a look at the mileage that was achieved in that canal, it's 177 individual human lives per mile to make this canal that this clown is talking about is a big achievement of all of us working together.
And it was done so fast in order to make the five-year plan that it wasn't deep enough for any ships to use.
So when you hear somebody saying, oh, no, no, the White Sea Canal, I'm convinced that that particular guy doesn't know the true history of the White Sea Canal.
But he should.
Yeah.
You know, he should.
They call it the Cold War.
Was this a war?
Oh, hell yes, it was a war.
It was the war.
It was the end of the war.
One of the problems with the Cold War series was for me to try and pick up a beginning of it.
The end of it's pretty clear when the Soviet Union finally collapsed on Christmas Day, the Soviet flag comes down, Russian flag comes up, over.
Yeah, amazing.
Nobody knew that was going to happen.
No, one guy.
No, my final episode is called a Pizza Hut parade because we didn't get a chance.
We fought a war for 42 years, and all we got as a parade is Mikhail Gorbachev in a Pizza Hut commercial.
You know, if we'd lost, it would have been Ronald Reagan freezing to death at a column of mine.
But the win is Gorbachev selling pizzas.
But it was an absolute war.
While it's almost impossible, there's one, certainly when they shot down Francis Gary Powers, one of the very few instances during the entire 42-year period where Russians actually shot at Americans or vice versa.
But 100,000 people, 100,000 Americans died in the Cold War because Korea was Cold War, Vietnam was the Cold War.
These were proxy wars fought over 40 years between these two ideologies.
And if you want to make it nice and simple and peel off all of the advertising terms and who was a liberal, who was a conservative, forget it.
It's the collectivists versus the individualists.
Collectivism has been here since the dawn of time.
And individualism just sailed in on the Normandy beaches in 1944.
And these two forces met at the end of World War II.
At the end of World War II, Stalin had five, six million men under arms.
He had 10,000 tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces.
World War II ended in Germany, in Europe, ended where the Western forces and the Eastern forces met.
But everybody agrees that Stalin thought this might be a year or two, maybe, because he knew that the West didn't have the stomach for another fight.
And he had all of these conventional forces, and he's going to push communism to the Atlantic.
And just as he's got all this sitting pretty, all of a sudden there's two little flashes of light over Japan.
And now all of the equation has completely changed.
Now, he can't simply kill millions more of his people to get what he wants.
Kirk Douglas: A Legendary Actor00:07:05
Now, if he decides to try this, he's going in a big flash.
And if you really want to know whether or not this was an equivalent moral issue, you can have the satisfaction of knowing that of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who tried to go from one system to another, several hundreds of them succeeded and several thousands didn't.
Not one of them, not a single person ever got killed trying to get to the free health care and socialism.
Not once.
I got to stop you there.
Bill, if this is anywhere near as good as the moon one, it'll be terrific.
Thank you.
No one better to do it than you.
Thank you.
And it's great to see you.
Good to see you too, Paul.
No one ever got caught swimming from America to Cuba.
It's absolutely true.
All right, a final reflection.
You know, I've told the story before, but it's worth telling again.
I used to go out sometimes with my son when he was little.
I'd take him out to lunch on Saturdays, and we'd go to this little cafe up in Santa Barbara.
It's actually down Carpenter Rio.
We lived in Santa Barbara.
And it was this working man's cafe.
It was just a hamburger joint, and people would gather in there of a Saturday.
And one day I was driving there, and a car pulled out in front of me, and I said, oh, you know, there's Kirk Douglas, the great movie star in the back of the car.
I could see who it was, and I knew he lived up there.
I knew he had a home up there.
And we were following him as we went along just on this road to this cafe.
And he kept taking the same turns we were taking, which really surprised me.
And then he pulled into the same cafe, which also surprised me.
So my son and I got out, and Kirk Douglas and his lady who was taking care of him got out.
He had suffered a stroke, so he wasn't doing all that well.
This isn't that long ago.
And Kirk Douglas walked in front of us into this cafe.
And he walked into this cafe filled mostly with just, you know, like I said, working people, ordinary people, local people.
The cafe went dead silent.
Everybody just stood up.
Everybody got to their feet.
And there was a moment of silence.
And then one guy at the counter said, Spartacus, great film.
And I thought, that's a movie star.
That's what a movie star is.
That's a guy who has left his mark, put himself and his images and the things that he has done and the characters he's played into the imagination of the American public.
I never got to meet Kirk Douglas.
I did work a little bit with Michael Douglas, his incredibly talented son.
And one of the things I just loved about Kirk Douglas, he died.
I should mention he was 103, I believe, and he's passed away.
And one of the things I always loved about Kirk Douglas is he was not afraid to play a bad guy.
He was not afraid.
And his son, Michael Douglas, followed that in movies like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction.
He was not afraid to play people who did the wrong thing.
And he always said, I just looked at the script, and if I liked it, I took it.
Some of my films didn't do that well, but I didn't care if they were good.
And that's an amazing thing, and it just shows the honesty of the actor.
A couple of films.
Everybody knows Spartacus.
Everybody knows Paths of Glory.
If you've never seen Paths of Glory, it's one of Stanley Kubrick's early films.
Absolutely terrific film about World War I.
But there are some films that he made that he liked and that he loved that never made it that weren't that successful.
One of them was a film called Lonely of the Brave.
And Lonely of the Brave is a wonderful film because it's about a cowboy in the modern world who's kind of out past his sell-by date.
And Kirk was a big liberal, and it was about illegal immigration back in the day, right?
It was about illegal immigration.
But it was a wonderful argument for illegal immigration because it was about the fact that this cowboy didn't want any borders.
He thought the wilderness should still be out there.
And of course, the story is about the fact that the wilderness is gone and the cowboy life is gone and he can't come to terms with that.
So it was an honest liberal story.
It was saying he wanted something that was gone.
It was past that time.
Another great picture, and since we started out this show talking about the press, I want to end by talking about the press, is Ace in the Hole, in which he plays a completely scurrilous, unscrupulous newspaper man who uses a mine collapse to get himself back into the big time.
He's been thrown out of every newspaper in the country, and he goes back, he goes into this small town, I guess it's Albuquerque at the time, it was a small town, and he covers a mine disaster, people trapped in this mine, and turns it into a circus.
And it's a literal circus.
And if you want to see a guy who can play a bad guy and just make it cool, here's a scene where one of the miner who is trapped in the hole, his wife is now making a living selling stuff at this big carnival.
I think another name of the film is the big carnival.
And she's selling stuff.
She's making a living, and she's falling in love with Kirk Douglas, who is this handsome, dynamic evildoer.
And he wants her to play the part of the sad wife because he's the press and he wants to tell a lie because that's what the press does.
And here's just one quick glimpse of Kirk Douglas at his very nasty best.
Look, Mrs. Minoza, your husband's stuck under a mountain.
You're worried sick.
That's the way the story goes.
I get the smile off your face.
It's been a nice day, Chuck.
I feel like smiling.
You heard me.
Get it off.
Hate me.
That's more like it.
Don't wipe those tears.
That's the way you're supposed to look.
Put on your wedding ring.
Go on back and peddle your hamburgers.
One of the great, great movie stars of the second wave of great movie stars, right?
It was after the Gable era.
It was after the Bogart era.
It was really in the Paul Newman era.
And just a terrific actor because he was not afraid to play the truth.
He was not afraid to represent people as they are, including their flaws, including in a moment like that, their brutality, and yet make it, you know, somehow just riveting, just riveting, a terrific actor, a real loss.
Been a tough, tough few days in terms of losing people.
Kobe Bryant, hearing that Rush Limbaugh is sick, and now Kirk Douglas, but he had a great long life guy.
If you've never read his biography, his autobiography, The Ragman's Son, the son of a Jewish ragman who had nothing in the world, he tells an incredibly heartbreaking story of how when Kirk Douglas played Champion, another great film in which he plays a kind of unscrupulous boxer fighting his way to the top.
And there's a very famous scene where he just takes a tremendous beating and his father was in the in the, his name was Isar Danilovich or something like this.
His father was in the movie theater watching.
His father could barely speak English and he was watching his son get beat up in this boxing scene.
His father leapt to his feet and shouted, hit him, Izzy, hit him.
And I just, it's a heartbreaking tale.
And it's a tale of a guy who really came from nothing and became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
Rest in peace.
My condolences to Michael and just a terrific star.
And it's really worth going back and watching his films.
That's it for me.
The Clavenless Weekend is upon you.
Survivors will gather here on Monday.
Heartwarming Tale of Michael Douglas00:01:14
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