Andrew Klavan and Dave Rubin expose how Obama-era Democrats weaponized the media, from suppressing Flynn’s prosecution to enabling IRS targeting of conservatives, while today’s press ignores abuses like border overreach for political gain. Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Book reveals coordinated attacks on dissent—like Amazon review censorship—and traces the left’s moral collapse: Ben Affleck’s racist smear of Maher, hypocrisy over Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and "anti-racism" as a tool to silence black conservatives like David Webb. Their shift from liberalism’s principles to identity politics mirrors HUD’s nihilism, proving only faith and moral clarity—like Shane’s sacrifice—anchor meaning in a culture of relativism. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump has changed his mind about disbanding the Chinese flu task force and will instead have it evolve into a modern dance troupe or possibly a White House-based improv comedy club.
The president had said the task force would slowly shut down now that its work on the Chinese flu is over, but journalists and other useless nudges objected, saying the task force had played an important role in getting everything wrong and giving reporters a chance to ask useless gotcha questions, so it should continue throughout the summer, especially with our favorite TV shows in reruns.
Since there's not much else that can be done about the Chinese flu itself until the Jews come up with a cure, Trump says he feels doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Burks should turn to other things.
The president said, quote, perhaps they could put on a production of Romeo and Juliet.
It's really one of my favorites of the Bard's works because it hovers in that vexing shadowland between comedy and tragedy, raising fascinating and profound questions about the role of chance and coincidence, not just in theater, but in human affairs as well.
And that's not just me saying that.
Many respected people have said as much, and they tell me Shakespeare would have been amazed at the terrific job I've done as president, unquote.
Journalists also want to see the task force continue, and so does CNN's Jim.
Look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, who told his three-sided mirror, quote, the task force has done such a terrible job that we have to keep them going because they're doing such a wonderful job.
Without their briefings, I would just have to sit on the sofa in my underwear, screaming brain-dead and insulting non-questions at the television set, while the dread understanding of how badly I've wasted my life slowly settled over me like a shroud, unquote.
The task force has now been set to work studying what the task force should do now that there's no reason for there to be a task force.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Here's something I've noticed all through this Chinese flu shutdown.
There have been these two major stories running like the subject and counter-subject in a musical fugue, kind of weaving in and out of one another.
One story has been the corruption of the press, their inability to report anything without trying to fashion it to their political purposes.
They've tried to push for continued economic shutdown when even Democrat governors realize the time has come to open up.
They have covered up for China when it's an oppressive and murderous regime that clearly had a role to play in starting this catastrophe.
And they've been revealed as hypocrites in the Joe Biden story.
And of course, they've utterly wasted all of our time asking questions at briefings that are not at all geared to gathering information.
Just get Trump stuff.
The other story that is woven in and out of that story has been the misuse of power by the administration of Barack Obama, now slowly coming to light.
It now seems pretty clear that Michael Flynn was railroaded into a guilty plea for the purpose of keeping a useless investigation into Russia collusion alive.
It now seems possible that the FBI's Peter Strzzok abused his power in ways that may actually be not just wrong, but illegal.
And today, we have a story about Adam Schiff stalling the release of documents with no likely good reason other than to protect himself from being exposed as the liar he obviously is.
And just like themes in a fugue, it may be that these two stories are really all part of one story, the untold story of the Obama administration's misuse of the federal government and how it ruined the press.
The press has favored Democrats for a long time.
I mean, as long as I can remember, certainly back to the Kennedy years.
But under Obama, it became wholly an instrument of the party.
They were snakebit by the color of his skin.
They were mesmerized by his leftist politics.
They were delighted with his academic intellectual façade, and they covered an incompetent and abusive administration as if it were the second coming.
Barbara Walters said just that much.
We thought he was the second coming of the Messiah.
As he slowly came to understand that the press would not attack him no matter what he did, Obama led the Democrats into an era of Chicago-style machine politics that we don't actually usually see at the federal level.
Abusing the IRS to silence dissent, abusing the Justice Department to bully local law enforcement, abusing the FBI to investigate a rival political campaign.
The press, in failing to cover Obama honestly, essentially became complicit in that dirty politics.
And now, in order to cover up their bad behavior, possibly cover it up even from themselves, I'm not sure, the news media literally finds itself in the position of having to work to keep news from reaching the public.
We have a news media dedicated to hiding the news.
Why We Left Google00:02:15
I think that what we are seeing now is that the Obama administration, protected by the president's race and by the sick racial obsessions of the left and their media, they destroyed the press as a reliable institution.
It remains to be seen whether the press can be salvaged and reformed and whether conservatives and maybe moderate liberals are smart enough to work together to do it.
All right, we're all stuck in our houses.
Our moms are stuck in their houses.
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And you know, B-O-U-Q-S is short for bouquets, but K-L-A-V-A-N is short.
What is that short for?
Oh, it's just, that's my name.
It's Clavin.
That's her.
That's right.
I just make it look, I'm not sure I'm actually making it look easy today.
So we have to begin with this because it's just too much fun not to start with.
Everyone has been enjoying the spectacle of Trump's new spokeslady, Kaylee McInanney, I think it's pronounced, taking this guy, Jeff Mason, from Reuters to Pieces.
Defending Trump's Spokeslady00:14:49
Jeff Mason asked this question at a briefing and Kaylee just destroys him.
He made a comment, I believe, on Fox, in which he said, President Trump will not allow the coronavirus to come to this country.
Given what has happened since then, obviously, would you like to take that back?
I guess I would turn the question back on the media and ask similar questions.
Does Vox want to take back that they proclaimed that the coronavirus would not be a deadly pandemic?
Does the Washington Post want to take back that they told Americans to get a grip the flu is bigger than the coronavirus?
Does the Washington Post likewise want to take back that our brains are causing us to exaggerate the threat of the coronavirus?
I'll leave you with those questions and maybe you'll have some answers.
This is basically the story of this period of time is the press getting hit in the face with its own hypocrisy, leaving it and the left virtually helpless to stop anything that's happening.
You know, we reported that story yesterday about the lady in Dallas, Shelley Luther, who opened her salon and the judge threw her in jail, not for opening the salon.
He threw her in jail for contempt of court because she refused to apologize and basically say, oh, yes, government, you know, you rule everything.
And I didn't take the judge down.
You will remember yesterday.
A lot of people were calling him names.
He was certainly wrong to send her to jail.
There's jail and a $7,000 fine.
And he was certainly wrong to do that.
There was an abuse of the rule of law, but I understand a judge standing up for the rule of law.
But how can the press attack him?
How can the press attack the people who were opposed to him when they have not been standing up for the rule of law at the border?
Everything they do points to their own hypocrisy.
Well, now the Texas Supreme Court has ordered her released.
There was a crowdfunding effort to defend her.
It raised over half a million dollars.
The governor came out and said that he changed the rules to erase the thing that she was charged under.
That would not alone have gotten her released because she was in there for contempt of court.
But still now the court has said she should be released and she probably will be.
But how can the press take any point of view when they have already sold their souls to defend the Obama administration, to defend leftism in general?
They can't.
They're helpless.
We'll take a look at more of that because it's really happening all over.
You know, it's really interesting that this thing about the task force, Trump says, I'm going to slowly disband the task force because basically we've done what we can do.
And this is the thing.
That's true.
You know, the thing, it's not obviously this is not over.
We are now dealing with the kind of psychic blowback of having been lied to and maybe lied to ourselves to some degree about what we were doing.
When we were sheltering in place, when we were closing down, we were trying to keep the curve from going so high that it hurt, that it overwhelmed our hospitals.
You have to keep that in mind.
I have to keep saying it because it was never true.
It was never true that the people weren't going to get the disease eventually, that people, the same number of people weren't going to be exposed to the disease eventually.
We have to go back to work and we're going to walk out into the same plague as always.
This was always the case.
It was always true.
Not me, of course, because we have to save the clavin.
And that's, you know, obviously that's the most, I mean, I think you can picture our country as kind of a solar system revolving around that fact.
But immediately, immediately, everybody jumped on Trump.
All we've heard about is how bad a job Trump is doing.
Trump and the administration, all he's done is what the task force told him to do.
He's followed the experts right down the line.
And all we've heard is what a terrible job he's doing.
What a terrible job he's doing.
He's like, I'm shutting down the task force.
It's like, wait, you can't shut down the task force.
They're doing such a wonderful job.
Every word out of the press's mouth, because every word out of the press's mouth is for the Democrats, has just become hypocrisy.
And in some ways, there's no point in my even separating the press from the Democrats because of Obama, they are now completely in the Democrats' pockets.
And because if they get out of the Democrats' pockets, they will be confronted with their own malfeasance during the Obama administration.
They can't get out.
They're trapped in their own corruption.
It really is kind of this wonderful miltonic thing where they are trapped in hell everywhere they go.
It's hell.
So Trump says, well, all right, I'm going to take back what I said.
I'm not going to disband the, I'm not going to disband the task force.
Let's just play what he says there.
I thought we could wind it down sooner, but I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday.
When I started talking about winding it down, I'd get calls from very respected people saying, I think it would be better to keep it going.
It's done such a good job.
It's a respected task force.
I knew it myself.
I didn't know whether or not it was appreciated by the public, but it is appreciated by the public.
That is really wonderful.
Now, I just want to play Chuck Todd's reaction.
Chuck Todd doesn't know what to condemn next.
He doesn't know how to spin this thing.
This is on MSNBC, but Todd goes back and forth between MSNBC and NBC.
And so there's really no point in making any distinction.
Not many people watch him.
He's a real problem.
He's a real thorn on their side because he has no ratings and he's a terrible, terrible, he's bad at what he does.
But here's Chuck Todd reacting to Trump in general and trying to find a way to spin this narrative so he's doing something wrong.
We begin tonight with a difficult question, which must be asked.
Is the federal government, led by President Trump, considering, for lack of a better word, surrendering to this virus?
With more than 70,000 Americans dead, the president is telling the public that the country must reopen, even if it means more death.
But he doesn't have a plan for doing that.
A range of administration officials, including the president and the vice president, spent the day telling reporters yesterday that they were winding down the coronavirus task force as early as Memorial Day that the vice president hinted at.
But then he told reporters this afternoon that a lot of people apparently told him how bad of an idea that would be.
The uncertainty surrounding the White House's strategy, which we seem to utter about on a daily basis, comes amid numerous warning signs that we're not anywhere near ready to safely reopen the country from a public health standpoint or a consumer confidence standpoint.
Those 70,000-plus deaths I mentioned have happened in just 67 days, and the death toll is projected to basically double over the next 90 days based on current statewide plans to ease restrictions.
You can't fix stupid.
It's like watching a guy dance when you shoot bullets at his feet because he doesn't know where to go.
If Trump opens up, he's surrendering to the virus.
If he closes down the task force, they're doing such a great job he can't do it.
If he keeps the task force, the administration is doing a terrible job.
The task force is doing the job.
It is doing the job.
They are the people who have been in charge of what's going on.
So which is it?
Do we have to keep them because they're doing such a great job?
Or do we phase them out because the job is over?
Or is that surrender?
I mean, it's incredible.
It is incredible, the hypocrisy.
And you know, you know, I keep going back to this Biden story, and I keep telling you the Biden-Tara Reid story is not about Biden or Tara Reid.
It's about the press.
And I think that that's an important distinction to make because it may be, she may be exposed as, I don't know what's going to happen.
She may be exposed as a liar.
She may not.
It may all be true.
Who knows?
But just watch this for a minute.
It's almost beautiful.
It is almost beautiful the way the moral world works because the moral world is there.
It is real.
And it does throw people back on themselves.
And if you do certain things, it will come back and get you.
It's like karma, except it's just actually based on the interaction between the human soul and reality.
So in the New York Times, Linda Hirschman, a crusader against sexual malfeasance, right, writes an op-ed, I believe, this is from Knucklehead Row, our favorite place, the op-ed page of the New York Times, a former newspaper.
She writes, I believe, Tara Reid, I'm voting for Joe Biden anyway.
She says, all major Democrat Party figures have indicated that they're not budging on the presumptive nominee and the transaction costs of replacing him would be suicidal, barring some miracle.
It's going to be Mr. Biden.
So what is the greatest good or the greatest harm?
She says she's a utilitarian, which is a completely exploded philosophy, but never mind about that.
Mr. Biden and the Democrats, he may carry with him into government, are likely to do more good for women and the nation than his competition, the worst president in the history of the republic, for some reason.
Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do, the cost of dismissing Tara Reid and worse, weakening the voices of future survivors is worth it.
And don't call me an amoral realist.
Utilitarianism is not a moral abdication.
it is a moral stance.
Well, no, it's not.
First of all, utilitarianism is never really a moral stance.
It may happen to coincide with a moral stance, but to say, I'm going to do the wrong thing to achieve the right thing is always a very, very difficult calculation.
It might be right.
I mean, sometimes it's right.
I think it's right to torture a suspect if you are going to save a thousand lives, if you know the guy is guilty.
I think that's that.
I suppose you could call that utilitarian, but I just think that's doing the right thing in a difficult situation where there is no right thing.
So what she is saying is, I'm abandoning all my principles to get what I want politically.
And listen, I understand.
That's fine.
But now listen to this, all right?
Yesterday, the Department of Education, run by Betsy DeVos, revised the Obama-era guidance for colleges on how to deal with sexual charges, right?
And Obama wrote this letter.
The Obama administration wrote this letter to colleges saying, basically, you better take the women seriously and believe them and give the men no rights or we will withdraw federal funding.
It threatened that.
It didn't actually say it out loud, but that's essentially what it was doing.
So Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, held all these hearings, listened to all these people.
The Obama administration never listened to anybody.
They didn't get any advice from anybody, but Betsy DeVos actually did listen to this and basically say, no, you have to have the rule of law.
It's a common sense reform.
Everybody has to be able to testify.
You have to hear from both sides.
Both the men and the women have to be informed about what is going on.
And this is what's going on.
So who comes out against this?
One guess.
Joe Biden, right?
In his down in his cellar, the guy, you know, at this point, I think his wife is just watering him to make sure he's still alive for the convention, you know, maybe just throwing plant food on the guy.
But he comes out and he says, I'll repeal this instantly.
Under the old rules, under the old rules, Joe Biden is guilty.
Under the old rules that his administration, the Biden-Obama administration, the Obama-Biden administration supported for colleges, Biden would now be out, right?
Because they did not give the man a chance to defend himself.
So what he is essentially saying, what the left is now openly saying in this, and a lot of leftists attack these new rules, these new fair rules, what they are essentially saying is due process for me, but not for thee.
Due process when we need Joe Biden, even when we believe the woman, due process, don't believe the woman.
If we believe the woman, never mind.
But when the situation is reversed and it's a Republican, then it's okay.
They're now openly saying this.
I mean, right in front of us, they're openly saying it.
So at what point does a person who says, yeah, we're not going to play fair, we're going to destroy you.
Whenever something comes up, we're going to break the rules.
The rules are different for you than they are for me.
At what point do we just basically tell them to blow off?
It seems to me at this point, every moral word that comes out of a Democrat's mouth and out of the press's mouth can be safely ignored.
And so the news about the flu can be ignored.
We don't know what they're saying.
We only know that they operate on this principle of due process for me, but not for thee.
And since we know that, we can ignore them.
All right, let us talk for a minute.
I forgot to mention, we got Dave Rubin coming up.
He's got a new book, and we're going to have him come on.
I always like talking to Dave.
His new book is called Don't Burn This Book.
He will be coming up in just a moment, and we won't burn the book, though it would be entertaining.
But meanwhile, let's talk about keeping your hair.
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That's K-E-E-P-S dot com slash Claven.
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Do you spell Clavin?
All right, guys, have we got Dave?
Well, Dave is on the line.
I'm anyway.
All right, that's what I wanted to hear.
Dave Rubin, you know him, you love him.
He's the creator and host of one of the most watched political talk shows on the internet, the Rubin Report.
His new book is titled Don't Burn This Book, Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason.
It is a terrific read and it's out now and it's already hit the New York Times bestseller list.
I did not know that.
Dave, how you doing?
Clavin, I'm doing well.
We hit it last night and I have no doubt that there were many meetings on Zoom.
They normally do them in stuffy boardrooms in Midtown Manhattan, but they must have had Zoom meetings with a lot of disgruntled lefties going, oh, we can't put it on.
We can't, we can't, we can't.
And what I truly think happened is we just crushed it on the sales side to the point that they had no choice.
But I will tell you this, you're well aware because you've written several books.
Crushing Sales Amid Discontent00:13:10
The whole list is nonsense in many ways.
They don't do it by actual sales.
They do it by political persuasion and a whole bunch of other stuff.
And I have to tell you, 100% honestly, when I got the call, I felt relief.
I actually didn't feel joy.
I felt relief because I have a team of people and my publicists and all of my guys that work for Rubin Report and everything else that have busted their butts so hard to make this launch successful.
And literally the president of Penguin called me and he has said, we have never had a better team to work through a sale of a book.
You guys have been just absolute pros.
And I wanted my guys to get that cred.
Honestly, for me, it's like, I'm like you.
I rail against the New York Times all the time.
They've called me alt-right and the rest of it.
So the idea that I wanted, the idea that I wanted approval from something that I don't approve of myself, and I get it that the book list is separate than the editorial page and all that kind of stuff.
But it's a weird thing in life when you want something you don't really want and everything else.
Yet here we are and it's all good.
And more importantly, you know, people are digging the book.
And that's the important thing.
People are really digging the book, but people are actually crusading to give it bad reviews on Amazon.
Isn't that right?
I mean, they actually, it's called Don't Burn This Book, but people are actually trying to essentially digitally burn the book.
Yeah, well, I didn't expect we were going to be in 1941 Germany and there was going to be a bonfire and people were throwing the books in there.
Although with the way the world's going, that's actually very possible.
But what I did sort of expect was exactly what's happening.
There's a massive coordinated attack on some of these underground websites.
It's not even worth going into.
And we know it and Amazon knows it.
Like they're tracking all of this stuff where they just send thousands of people with fake accounts and they all like each other and they none of them read the book.
They all attack me personally or they copy and paste something, the rest of it.
And not that any of it matters except that it actually proves the thesis of the book.
Because you're right, this is a modern book burning of sorts.
Why do you burn a book?
Why did the Nazis burn books?
Well, they didn't want people knowing the information that's in there.
Now, the irony, the irony of this book right here is that all I lay out is what I believe are common sense principles.
And at the same time, I say in the book, you don't have to agree with me.
And Andrew, I know you and I have some disagreements.
And it's like on the conservative side of things, people don't care about the disagreements.
I'm finding that, and I'll say this as we now, we actually revel in them.
We relish them.
And, you know, I heard what you were talking about a moment ago about the Title IX thing and everything else.
And it's like, yeah, these people have just lost all of their credibility.
Show me anyone on the left that is remotely close to intellectually honest.
And it is almost impossible to find.
I would say Bill Maher is sort of like the last mini oasis in the desert and he's trying the best he can.
But I think, you know, it's, as I keep telling all the Daily Wire guys or a lot of Star Wars people, it's like, this is the Jedi after Order 66.
They've been slaughtered.
There's a couple throughout the galaxy, but they don't know where anybody is.
Yoda's on Dagobah and Obi-Wan is on Tatooine.
And it's like, is there anyone else out here?
That's the way that I felt.
And yet I've been embraced by you guys.
So here we are.
Well, tell me what you think has happened.
I mean, you're absolutely right about this on the right.
And one of the reasons I'm on the right is because they love conversation and argument.
And that's what I love.
I love talking about my ideas and hearing other ideas.
I love being challenged in my ideas.
I mean, what did they invent whiskey and cigars for if not to have great conversations?
What happened to the left?
I mean, you were on the left.
I was on the left, but it was now a long time ago.
You were on the left fairly recently.
How did they lose their way so badly?
I actually think it's very clear.
And if I can impart anything on people, this is what I want people to understand.
That what happened to the left was that liberals innately, when people say you're liberal, what they're sort of saying is you're open-minded.
And when conservatives criticize liberals, they mean you're so open-minded that your brain fell out of your head.
But there is a version of liberalism.
There is a version of being open-minded that is good.
You know, the founders, in effect, I think, were classical liberals, meaning they wanted a pluralistic, open society based on individual rights.
But then they also talked about God-given rights and the light touch of government.
Okay.
What happened was, I would say about five years ago, but I think some people could argue it was a little bit before that, when this new wave of angry socialist, progressive, Bernie, AOC, identity politics-driven lefties came in.
They said, well, how do we get into the system?
In the system, we have liberals, you know, sort of Democrats and conservatives, Republicans.
How do we get into the system?
Well, to break into the conservative side of that is very hard because conservatives, although they don't always live up to it, have sort of foundational principles.
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, individual rights.
These are things that it doesn't mean conservatives do them right all the time, but it's a foundational set of principles that it's hard to break into.
Liberals, because of the open-mindedness of liberalism, which I think is actually a good thing, liberals will kind of let any idea in there.
So if you say that there are no biological differences from men and women, which of course we know that there are, men have penises, women have vaginas.
Sorry that I'm asked to bring out the controversial stuff with you, Clavin.
But suddenly liberals, liberals will go, oh, it's a social construct.
Like, let's think about it.
And that's because of the openness of the liberal mind.
And then what happens is the progressives saw that.
They saw the liberals who don't want people to be racist.
And then they, so then they started finding racism everywhere.
And the progressives really calculatingly, and part because of their endless hysteria and over-emotion and all of that stuff, if you're young and you don't know exactly what you think yet, it sounds good, man.
Everybody else is a racist.
Everyone's a greedy capitalist pig.
And what are you?
You're a good, moral, decent person.
And because it's 2020 now, you're also evolved and you have technology and your parents and grandparents were either idiots or racists or buffoons.
And everything that came before you was somehow backwards and ridiculous.
In essence, I think that's why this happened.
The good, I don't know, and this is a very depressing conclusion for me to come to.
I don't know that liberalism in and of itself can stand.
And I think this is where conservatives actually, this is where conservatives actually figured out some of the right things.
And I know we talked about it a little bit the other day on my show.
But this is also where one of the things that Jordan Peterson really moved me on was the importance of belief outside of yourself and religious stories, because this is what conservatives turn to when times get tough.
And what liberals turn to is the secular world completely.
But the secular world doesn't have the underpinnings to stop craziness.
And I think that's exactly what we're seeing right now.
Yeah, I mean, we don't always know what the truth is, but we know there is a truth.
And we know we have to be grounded in that.
And I think faith is an important part of that.
Was there a moment for you, I mean, you talk about your debate with Larry Elder at one point in the book and Don't Burn This Book.
Was there a specific point when you started to think, uh-oh, you know, I'm on the wrong side?
I mean, there were a bunch of things.
I lay out three specific examples in the book that were the sort of like one after the other smash me over the head kind of wake-up calls.
One of them that I've told a million times is when Ben Affleck and Sam Harris got into that famous debate on Bill Maher where they couldn't separate ideas and people.
And then Affleck called Bill Maher and Sam Harris gross and racist.
And then suddenly everyone on the left was calling Bill Maher racist.
And it was like, wait a minute, this is your guy.
This is the guy who's been fighting from the liberal lefty position for 30 years more than anyone else.
And now he's thrown out because Batman overly emoted.
I mean, so that was one because it's because also because it was an A-list actor, you know, and it was like, it was so, it was such a perfect example, red in the face, pounding the table, you're racist.
It was just like all of it at once.
The two others that I lay out, I'll just, one of them was my final straw actually was Charlie Hebdo, because I saw lefties basically saying, oh, we can't draw cartoons of things in effect and stop being mean to those people.
And it's like, well, wait a minute.
First off, I only heard people on the right being mean to the people who committed the murder, not all Muslim people.
I heard nobody saying that, but which of course is the way it should be.
But this idea that, oh, we shouldn't draw cartoons because some people get upset by that.
It's like, well, those same people get upset by having a gay bar in town, but you're supposed to be for gay people too.
So should we not have gay bars?
Because that upsets them.
Or the litany of other intellectual inconsistencies.
The one that you might find most interesting, I'm guessing you're familiar with David Webb on SiriusXM.
Do you know David Webb on the Patriot channel?
So he's a great guy.
And years ago, when I was on The Young Turks, we were playing a clip.
He was guest hosting, I think, for Hannity, if I'm not mistaken on Fox News.
And I'm sitting with my tolerant, lefty liberal co-host.
And David's just saying some conservative stuff that he believes.
And they're calling him an Uncle Tom and a sellout and a self-hating black man and just the litany of awful things.
And suddenly, what happened was they didn't realize that I knew David Webb.
We were friends because I used to have a show on SiriusXM.
And I met him in the hallway one day.
And I was a big lefty, a birdie supporting lefty.
And he was on the right, but we struck up a conversation.
I used to go on a show every week.
We'd debate stuff and then we'd go downstairs and we'd have whiskey and a steak and we were good.
And suddenly what happened was I saw these tolerant liberals, mostly white, and I'm only using it because this is their language, seeing a black man who doesn't behave the way they want him to behave.
And suddenly they feel that can give them license to call him all of the worst things in the book.
And because I knew him personally and know, I mean, he's a dear friend of mine to this day.
And it's like, I know he believes what he says.
And it is not easy to take that position.
I mean, Larry Elder, Thomas Soule, so many of these people, it's not easy to take the conservative position when you're black because of the way the left will treat you.
It's like being a gay person that's a conservative or at least say right-leaning in some way.
And once I saw it, because it was a person I knew and I saw what I realized was that this, this is the new pernicious racism of the left.
It's not, oh, you can't go to that water fountain.
It's something much worse, actually, because that's an easy racism to call out, right?
Like, I know you.
You would, of course, you would call out that racism.
It's obvious every conservative would call out that racism.
But this new racism, it comes guised as anti-racism.
And because of that, people have a really hard time understanding what it is.
So it was those three things that really snapped the back of this thing for me.
And then actually, one other thing is that then I started meeting you guys.
And that really is the truth.
I started meeting you, you and Ben and Michael and Glenn Beck and Dennis Prager and Larry Elder and the litany of all of you guys.
And every single one of you was welcoming and nice and actually shocked that I was being nice to you.
And that really struck me.
That really, all of you, the first time I met all of you, one way or another, you said some version of, I don't get it.
How are you a liberal?
You're being nice to me.
And that sort of thing kind of rubbed off on me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it is that that was a shock to me, too.
I thought intellectual conservative was an oxymoron.
And I found this incredible collection of very, very bright, very kind, very open-minded people.
It's terrific.
Don't burn this book is the name of the book.
Dave Rubin.
Burn it if you want to burn.
Congratulations.
Congratulations on getting on the Times list.
And it's a terrific read.
Thanks for coming on, Dave.
It's good to see you.
Clavin, one other thing.
You know, I heard you do the keeps ad right before you brought me on.
And you said, if you don't want to look like me, and I just want to say, Clavin, if it ever goes, I want to look like Andrew Clayman.
I appreciate that.
All right, but try to keep it if you can, pal.
I'm trying.
I'm trying.
All right, be good, my friends.
Good to see you.
You too.
Bye-bye.
All right.
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HUD: Based on a Small Novella00:11:53
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All right.
You know, we've been talking a lot over this lockdown period, which I hope hopefully is starting to come apart a little bit and we're starting to come out.
But talking about stuff to watch and think about.
And one of the things I've always wanted to talk about, I've been trying to look at things that are short to read.
And then you can watch the movie after you read them.
And one of them is just a book I've recommended a number of times.
I found my childhood copy of it, Shane, by Jack Schaefer.
Shane is a Western novel published in 1949.
It is a terrific novel.
It's a famous movie, but the novel is great, and it's a really, really quick read.
And I would say if you've got kids, especially little boys over 12 probably, could read it with a lot of fun about a mysterious rider who comes into a family's life out in Wyoming.
I believe it's Wyoming.
But anyway, what he comes to is a bunch of settlers, and they have been given land essentially by the government.
And the people who were out there who claimed the land and are running cattle and need all this territory, they want to run these, what they called, homesteaders off the land.
And this mysterious rider comes in and becomes part of this family, a father, mother, and a son.
And it became, you've probably heard the old thing, come back, Shane, which is one of those lines.
It's actually not in the movie.
But in the movie, Shane was played by Alan Ladd.
It's taken from being a very small novella, really, to being a tremendous big Technicolor Western.
Alan Ladd plays Shane, and Gene Arthur plays the mom.
She's very beautiful.
Van Heflin plays the dad.
And the son, the little boy, is played by Brandon DeWilde.
And DeWilde died very young, I believe, in a car accident, but he was in just a couple of movies.
And I want to take a look at two of them for a really interesting reason.
What Shane is about, Shane is about a boy seen two, he tells the story.
He remembers the story in the novel.
And the movie is filmed kind of from his point of view.
And it's basically, he has two father figures.
He has the steadfast, strong, powerful father figure who is holding his home together, who loves his mom, who is building a life out on the prairie.
And then it has this mysterious guy who's great with a gun.
And he is obviously kind of a bad guy, but also kind of a good bad guy.
And somebody says at one point, the mother says, is he dangerous?
And the father says he's dangerous, but not to us.
And I think that that the story is both the boy and the woman have to choose between what kind of man they're going to love because there's a very, very faint touch of attraction between Shane and the mother.
And it's just remarkable.
And at one point, there's this very moving scene that I think all conservatives will love where Shane takes the little boy out, Brandon DeWilde, and teaches him how to use a gun.
And the mother says, I do not want his life to be about guns.
I want him to be a good man who builds a family.
And this is Shane's response.
Let's play this little clip from the movie.
Remember now.
When your hand comes up, you still have room to clear your holster.
Shane.
Hello, Mrs. Star.
I was just teaching Joey how to build a little shooting.
I don't want a little shooting.
You ought to see Shane shoot, man.
I did, Joey.
He's teaching me to shoot.
Yes, I know, dear.
Now, you run along, get ready for the party.
Oh, Ma!
How aren't Joey?
Guns aren't going to be my boy's life.
Why do you always have to spoil everything?
Time.
Bang!
A gun is a tool, Miriam.
No better, no worse than any other tool.
An axe, a shovel, or anything.
A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it.
Obviously, a piece of wisdom that meaning, morality come from us.
They don't come from anything else.
Beauty, truth, all of it comes from us.
It doesn't, I mean, obviously it comes from God ultimately, but here on earth, the only people who know anything about this stuff are human beings.
You know, dogs don't have good and bad.
We don't know if animals have beauty, but they don't know what beauty is.
They don't have the word beauty, and so they don't know what it is.
And what he's saying here is a gun is just a piece of metal.
It's just an object, but it gets meaning from the way it's used and by the person who uses it.
And that is a central point of the world that they're in, that they're going to need these guns to remain to keep a household.
They're going to need to fight to keep what they have.
But it's going to be about what you're fighting for and who you are when you use these things.
You know, for those of you who like the film Logan, Shane is a Christ story.
It's a story about someone who descends into this valley and saves the valley and then goes away.
And Shane is a Christ figure.
And it's really interesting in Logan, Shane becomes a touch point of the story.
And what I think James Mangold was saying, I wrote a review of it at the time, and Mangold actually thanked me for the review because it's a very intelligent superhero movie.
As what Mangold is saying is that superheroes are the new Western, and Westerns were a way of conveying Christian values.
And that is cemented in the movie when a cross falls over and becomes an X for the X-Men.
He's basically saying this story is the Christian story, is the Western story, is the superhero story.
It's all one story of sacrifice and decency.
What's really interesting is that the other really big movie that Brandon DeWilde was in, he played almost the same character growing up, a boy caught between two versions of men.
And this was HUD.
HUD is based on a book, a very small novella, worth reading, good read.
It's not a great novel like Shane, but it's really good by Larry McMurtry, who you know.
He wrote Lonesome Dove, Brokeback Mountain, Terms of Endearment was based on one of his books.
And HUD is about a young man who admires HUD, who is this cowhand in a modern cattle ranch.
And HU is just a guy, a troubled guy who's starting trouble, but he's romantic and he's charming, and he's got a lot going for him.
And Brandon DeWilde plays the young man who's caught between him and his grandfather played by Melvin Douglas.
And here's a scene where HUD DeWilde get into a big drunken brawl and they just have a tremendously great time.
This is the first of the two cuts from HUD.
And the grandfather catches him.
All right, he's got your drunk.
What else has he given you a taste for?
All we have is a couple of drinks, that's all.
I don't remember you being a teetotaler.
I drink.
I don't object to his having whistles.
Yeah, something seems to be eating away at your liver.
You, HUD.
Like always.
Hey, what are you climbing on HUD for?
You think a lot of HUD, do you?
You think he's a real man while you're being tucked in?
You listen to Abonjo.
He's my daddy, and he knows.
I know you.
You're smart.
You got your share of guts.
You can talk a man into trusting you and a woman into wanting you.
Then I got it made, ain't I?
To hear you tell it.
Why don't you get it off your chest?
I've been griping you all this time is what I've done to Norman.
You were drunk and careless of your brother.
You had 15 years to get over it.
That's half of my life.
That's not our quarrel and never has been.
What a hell it isn't.
No, boy.
I was sick of you a long time before that.
That, of course, is the great Paul Newman as HUD.
And if you don't know Paul Newman, because sometimes people haven't watched him, I guess they've seen the gangster movie he was in at the very end.
But if you don't know his early work, HUD and Cool Hand Luke and just some absolutely a hustler, absolutely terrific films.
He was a really, really good movie star and a good actor, good solid actor as well.
But in this two is one of the things that's really interesting about HUD is that HUD is an attractive character.
And as you saw there, Melvin Douglas, the old man, who's a much more caring, much more moral person, is not as attractive.
He's an old crank.
He's a curmudgeon.
He's not what the young boy wants to be, the young boy wants to be somebody like HUD.
And it takes a long time for the boy to see that there is something to what this old man is saying, that HUD is empty.
He doesn't care about people.
He doesn't bring, he doesn't bring values into the world.
And I just want to end by playing a famous scene from Macbeth.
This is Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth.
At the end of Macbeth, he is told that his wife is dead, and he makes one of the famous nihilist scenes.
And I'll tell you why I link this to these two pictures.
But a walking shadow.
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
And then he's heard no more.
Here's a tale.
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying.
Nothing.
So Macbeth is about a story about a man who basically links into evil, who becomes evil in order to achieve the things he wants.
And he ends up making that fabulous nihilistic speech saying that life is meaningless.
And the point here that I'm trying to get at is that what Shane understands is that meaning comes from a meeting of the man's heart with the moral world, right?
That is what makes the gun just a tool is because the man has a heart in the moral world.
What the old man yells at HUD in the movie is that you're attractive, you got charm, you got style, people like you, young people look up to you, girls want to sleep with you, but you don't care.
You've detached yourself from the moral world, and that makes you nothing.
And what Shakespeare explained, and this is just one of the great truths of life, is you can live like that.
You can live like HUD.
You can win through.
You can become a billionaire living like that.
You can become a successful person, but life loses its meaning.
Detach yourself from the moral world and life becomes empty.
Macbeth doesn't see the world as nothing because the world is nothing.
He doesn't see life as being worthless because life is worthless.
He sees it as being worthless because he has lost the worth of it by acting outside the moral universe.
This wedding between people's hearts and the moral world is where all meaning lies.
It's where all joy lies.
It's where all salvation lies.
And that's why Shane is a Christ story because it's a story of a man who brings that meaning into a valley and saves it.
And that's what we're looking for when we look for faith.
We're looking for a link to that moral world that will give our lives the meaning and joy that it's supposed to have that the Bible calls life in abundance.
All right, I got to stop there, but that means that, you know, talking about meaninglessness, it's the Clavenless weekend.
And so off you go into a world of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Survivors will gather here on Monday.
The Andrew Clavin Show00:01:19
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is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.