Andrew Klavan dissects California’s recall fiasco, where Gavin Newsom survived by framing it as a binary choice while ignoring crises like homelessness, then pivots to Afghanistan’s chaotic withdrawal, which Hudson Institute’s Michael Duran calls a strategic blunder empowering the Taliban and China. He mocks AOC’s performative socialism—like her "tax the rich" Met Gala dress—while warning both leftist and corporate power erode liberty, from Google’s surveillance to Australia’s COVID camps. A marital infidelity case underscores his stance: therapy over resentment when children are involved, though he admits rare exceptions exist, like his own shifts on abortion. The episode ends with a jab at ideological rigidity, contrasting Klavan’s past evolutions with the myth that "no one changes their minds." [Automatically generated summary]
California voters have overwhelmingly rejected the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom, uniting under the slogan, let's finish the job of turning paradise into a hellish sewer of vagrancy, poverty, and crime.
Larry Elder tried to topple the governor, but the black talk show host was foiled by white leftists who dressed up as guerrillas and put sheets over their heads, then burned a cross on Elder's lawn to punish him for being a white supremacist.
As one white leftist put it, quote, you can tell a black man is a white supremacist when he refuses to think what I tell him to think, unquote.
In exit polls of voters exiting the state, 73% of respondents shrieked wordlessly while waving their hands in the air and running in circles as if their hair was on fire.
43% actually had their hair on fire, and 11% were trying to set their hair on fire in an attempt to fit in.
Of voters who supported Newsom, 27% were getting baked on Chem Dog while watching Dude Where's My Car for the 15th time in a row and eating their seventh box of Oreos, and 30% had been dead for years and figured things couldn't get much worse for them anyway.
Although California schools are among the worst in the nation, although Los Angeles and San Francisco are cesspits of drugs and filth, although poor management has led to droughts, forest fires, and rolling blackouts, and though California taxes are crippling to individuals and small businesses alike, voters say they are determined to keep Newsom in office until he agrees to tell them how he gets his hair to sweep back in such an attractive and fashionable way.
In a stirring speech delivered from his hot tub in the exclusive rumpus room at the Chateau Marmont, Governor Newsom told his naked waitress, quote, please fetch me another bottle of Vouve Clicot, and while you're out, inform the voters that I'll be there to stand with the working man as soon as my fingertips start to get wrinkly because I just hate when that happens.
Tell them we don't want California to turn into Texas because then all the people who move to Texas will move here and we don't have any housing for them because we've regulated the construction business into the gutter.
Speaking of which, have someone move all those homeless people out of the gutter so there's room for the construction business.
I'm sure there's still plenty of open spots for them on the sidewalks with the rest of the drug-addicted psychotics who come here from all over to enjoy our fabulous weather and lawlessness.
Oh, and tell everyone to put a mask on and stay indoors so it won't be so damn hard for me to get a dinner reservation and don't forget the Vouve Clicot, unquote.
After that rousing oration, it was obvious why voters turned out to keep Newsom in office.
They thought it would be one last really funny thing to do before moving to Florida.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Pick Your Perfect Sofa00:02:21
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Why Liberty Feels Wound00:02:59
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Last week, I got a kind of a laugh when the State Department scolded the Taliban because they said they had formed a new government and it wasn't diverse enough.
You know, they said the new government of Afghanistan isn't diverse enough.
And I could sort of picture the Taliban going, what do you mean?
You know, we have people who kill people with guns and some who kill people with bombs and some who kill people with knives.
We're really diverse.
You know, what was funny about it was it didn't seem to occur to Blinken and the State Department or anybody else that maybe diversity isn't a Taliban value.
You know, maybe they actually, you know, they're theocratic murderers.
I think, you know, their values are like one, theocracy, two, murdering.
There is no three.
There is no value of diversity.
They don't care.
I mean, it's like saying to Hitler, you know, you're kind of a racist, you know, and he'd be like, yeah, wound.
You know, I'm Hitler.
That's basically what I do.
The reason I bring this up is because I feel a little bit the same way about people on the right who are complaining that the government isn't protecting individual liberty, isn't protecting American liberty.
Clearly, that's not a value for them.
When you say you're not protecting liberty, they're like, yeah, wound?
We're the Biden administration.
We don't care.
But it's not just the Biden administration, because really, who cares about Joe Biden?
He's tottering around.
I don't know how much in charge he is, but this deep state that's there, the press that's there, all of these people are there.
And I always tell you that anger is the devil's cocaine.
And the reason I say that is because it makes you feel righteous.
And it's not, you know, you can have righteous anger, but the feeling you get of being righteous is a dodge.
It's an illusion.
And it makes you feel like you're doing something when really you're kind of just telling them what they already know.
All they have to do is lie.
And one of the reasons I don't get mired in outrage at this moment is people are afraid of what's going to happen, what's going to happen next.
It's happened already.
It has happened already.
We have a government that no longer cares about American liberty.
We have a press that no longer cares about American liberty.
We have all these companies, these transnational companies without any kind of patriotism whatsoever, any kind of anchoring system in America.
They don't care about American liberty.
And I think at this point, you know, we just have to admit this goes beyond left and right.
This has nothing to do with left and right.
In fact, people who care, who have the value of individual liberty on the left and the right are going to find very soon they have a lot to talk about.
And I'll explain that in a minute.
But I think first we have to start.
I mean, just to give you the idea of what I'm talking about, we have to start with the image that sums up our situation.
I thought it was a perfect snapshot of our situation, which is the image of Alexandria, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is backside, her ass.
Companies Without Patriotism00:08:29
I mean, I guess I can say that, you know, on the air.
It's like, and it's, and it's a nice one.
I was, you know, I saw her.
She went to the Met Gala.
This is the big, the fancy ball.
It's called Fashion's Biggest Night Out, and it supports the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is a world-class museum in New York City.
And, you know, I happened to, for some reason, to be looking at her backside, and somebody said to me, you know, there's something written on the back of her dress.
Who knew?
Who knew?
It said, tax the rich.
This is a $35,000 a ticket deal to get in.
Tables start at $200,000.
And she comes in like a queen, right?
They're carrying the train of her dress behind her.
Here's a picture.
Because you know I'm all about that, badabase, no trouble.
I'm all um vadabass, badabase, no chebble.
I'm all um badabates, badabates, no cheval.
I'm all about dabbling, face, face.
Anyway, same politics, you got to play to your base.
And the thing, the reason I make this joke is there used to be, if you were a street guy, there used to be a saying, and I'm sure they don't use this anymore.
It was probably, you know, 30, 40 years ago, there was a saying on the street that if you showed somebody your weakness, if you showed somebody what was wrong with you, you said, oh, I showed them my ass.
I showed them my ass.
And she did.
She did.
She showed us exactly what her weakness is, right?
The weakness of everybody who wants to build the world from the top down, who think they've got it figured out, and it's not going to be individual decisions that make us rise.
As Adam Smith said, each person makes a decision trying to better his lot.
And as a corollary, they're not trying to make the world better.
As a corollary, they make the world better.
Just like, you know, an artist paints because he wants to become famous and rich and win the love of women, but he also makes our lives better.
And that's how capitalism works.
Individual people do things.
It's how freedom works.
Individual people try to improve their lives.
And that actually accidentally makes everybody's life better.
But they want the credit for it.
They think they're going to do it from the top down.
But once they get the power, once they get the power, they can't let go of the power.
And this is true of human beings today.
It was true of human beings yesterday.
It was Woodrow Wilson who came in and said, no, no, now man is perfectible.
Now this thing where the government is fighting with each other, we can't do that anymore.
That's slowing us down.
It's slowing us down.
We need to give the president all the power that he needs.
You wonder why we name everything after George Washington, why there's a state and a city and a tower and a college, why all these things are named after George Washington.
He was the one guy among billions, the one man among billions, who gave away a kingdom to protect the freedom of the people, the one guy.
And in doing that, it was so amazing, such a thunderclap of virtue that it basically set the standard for America for 200 years and then we forgot.
So AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, got all this criticism.
She has these ethics complaints against her because she accepted this gift of a ticket and they're trying to pass a law that says you can't accept these gifts and all this.
And of course, she's always the victim and always the jargon comes out when she's caught doing something bad.
She says, I thought about the criticism I'd get, but honestly, I and my body have been so heavily and relentlessly policed from all corners politically since the moment I won my election that it's kind of become expected and normalized to me.
It's when women in power take the prospect of criticism and they become cautious and then they get called inauthentic and she goes on and on and on.
And she says, but we all had a conversation about taxing the rich in front of the very people who lobby against it because they don't care.
They don't care at all.
And listen, I don't know what she's talking about about policing her body.
I've been policing AOC.
She's got a great body.
She's got a terrific body.
That's not what bothers me.
It's the fact that she's an ignoramus.
You know, I mean, most men have had the experience of being charmed by a great body.
And then you wake up in the morning and the girl starts talking to you and you think, oh my God, what have I done?
I let my body betray me and now I've got this ignoramus in my house.
And look at her.
I mean, just the truth of this, the truth of this.
This is cut 10.
She's loving this.
My God, tax the rich.
What a model, AOC.
Woohoo!
I didn't know you model as well.
Damn.
She's just having the greatest time.
She's a socialist.
We want everybody to be equal.
You know, here's another one, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney.
We just have a picture of her.
She's got equal rights for women.
And behind her, amazingly, because none of the celebrities are wearing a mask, but all of the help are wearing masks.
And behind her is this line of women.
It looks like the Taliban has lined them up against the wall, wearing these burqa, these secular burqas, wearing these masks.
They're all dressed in black.
And she's out there grinning with her equal rights for women thing.
It is amazing.
It's amazing.
That is socialism in a nutshell.
But I call it socialism, but that's not even right.
Socialism is the new fascism.
Socialism is the new capitalism, because the philosophy doesn't matter if you don't put liberty first.
The philosophy doesn't matter if you don't put liberty first, because all of these things end up being about power.
The philosophy, you want to talk about masks?
The philosophy is the mask.
This is the danger we face.
The danger we face right now and the trouble we're in is not socialism.
It's not leftism.
It's not left and right.
It's that it's what I always call a conspiracy of interests.
It's not a real, you know, it's not people in a room together conspiring.
It's all these different people who have the same interests.
Big tech, billionaire, great reset guys, often DAFOs who are going to reinvent the world.
Failed elected officials who haven't done anything in years.
They haven't taken any action in years.
All they do is they plague your outrage.
They sell you that outrage.
When I say it's the devil's cocaine, these guys sell you that outrage.
Republicans do.
Republicans are like, I'm outraged.
I'm going to do absolutely nothing about this right away.
I am so angry that I will absolutely take no action right this minute.
You know, you have, like I said before, these multinational corporations that don't care.
You have China, the CCP, because you know what CCP stands for?
It stands for corrupt clowns in power.
All of these guys, China, the big tech companies, these people in Davos, corrupt clowns in power, they all want the same thing.
They want to spy on you and they want to control you.
They want to take your privacy and then they want to take your liberty.
You know, remember that quote from C.S. Lewis, famous quote from C.S. Lewis, of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
That's the thing.
These are not like evildoers kind of saying, oh, we're going to oppress everybody.
Ha ha ha.
It's that they think that they can control the world and liberty is not a value.
The liberty doesn't come first.
And they don't start out as tyrants.
What happens is, what happens is they think, ah, just like Woodrow Wilson.
They think, oh, wow, life is now too complicated for the little man to make decisions.
I have got the big picture.
I've got the experts.
Like Obama used to say, if I could just lock myself in a room with experts and get rid of that rotten democracy, I would solve all the problems.
And then they get the power, they do it, it never works because what works is freedom.
Freedom is not just the right thing, it's not just a good thing, it's not just the moral thing, it's the thing that works.
And, you know, on backstage the other day, Matt Walsh was saying this, and I've said it too, that foolishly, conservatives always make the practical argument, and the left makes the moral argument.
We should start with liberty.
Liberty is the moral thing.
Each person deserves to be free.
So now, when they screw everything up, when everything goes wrong, they're faced with a choice.
They're faced with a choice.
Change their mind, dump their philosophy, and lose their power, or stick to their philosophy, oppress you, and silence you, and spy on you and control you, and keep their power.
And when I say George Washington is one man in billions, he is one man in billions.
The guy who turns his sword over to the civilian powers when he could have been king of a continent, that guy doesn't come along.
That's why he's on the dollar bill, folks.
That is why we think about George Washington in this elevated way that we do, because everybody else, when faced with the choice of giving up power, will keep the power.
Why They Keep Our Info00:12:57
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K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easing things.
Are you watching what's happening in Australia?
I mean, we're getting kind of like little glimpses of this, but it's unbelievable.
This is what used to be a free country, right?
It used to be a free country.
There are 25 million people in Australia.
You know how many have died of COVID?
A thousand, 1,100 people have died of COVID, okay?
1,100 people have died of the Chinese flu or the Wu flu or whatever you want to call it, the Flu Manchu.
And 35% of Australians are vaccinated.
So basically, they have locked down the country so badly that some places they have been in lockdown 200 days out of two years.
200 days out of two years.
And the saddest part of the story, the saddest part of the story, is that the people support the government.
Like 62% of the people agree with the government.
So they didn't get them vaccinated.
They've locked them down.
They think they're going to get rid of COVID.
And only now with this Delta variant are they admitting, oh, we're not going to get rid of COVID.
There's no such thing as no COVID.
So they've just totally screwed up.
This is rank, stupid incompetence.
Why?
Because they thought they were going to control the world from the top down and they just can't do it.
Nobody can stop a virus.
You know, that's why they call them viruses.
They go viral.
That's why they call them that.
Nobody can do it.
So they screw up.
Listen, here's the news from Australia.
This is clip nine.
Listen, they're now putting like it's like it's the black death.
They're now putting signs on people's doorway.
Quarantine, stay away from this person if they're sick.
And listen to the way they report it, like it's a good thing.
Nine news can reveal COVID-19 quarantine signs must now be placed on the front doors of homes in South Australia where returned travelers are isolating for two weeks.
Harvey Biggs has the exclusive details for us.
Now, Harvey, basically, authorities hope that this will add another layer of protection.
They do, Kate, and I can show you what these signs look like.
They are a clear warning to anyone that those inside are completing their 14 days of isolation and it will help mitigate the risk to potential visitors like mail and food delivery providers.
But it's also hoped to provide another layer of security because neighbours may alert authorities to anyone breaking the home isolation rules.
It's like they hunt you down here.
They've been shooting people with rubber bullets if they protest.
They've been beating children.
They've been arresting people and throwing them in jail.
If they go outside, the idea was they're an island, so they're going to shut this down.
They're going to have zero COVID.
And only now have they admitted they're wrong, their incompetence has come.
But will they leave off the power?
No, they're literally talking about, this is from the Breitbart side, I should mention, they're literally talking about building camps, building camps to quarantine people.
This is a government with 62% approval.
And here's the Premier of Queensland province.
This is a commitment by the Wagner family working with the Queensland government to say to the people of Queensland, we want to keep you safe.
And the best way to keep you safe and to keep Delta out of Queensland is to build as quickly as possible a regional quarantine facility.
I have listened to Queenslanders.
I know how much they support a regional quarantine facility to be in Queensland.
They want their community kept safe.
That's what they're saying to me and we are delivering it.
To keep you safe, so they're going to put you into camps.
And people are going, yeah, that's a good idea.
Good idea, might.
Good idea, might.
New South Wales, the province of New South Wales, the chief health officer is Dr. Kerry Chant, I guess her name is pronounced.
This is going to be CUT 12.
And she says, after they start to let people out, they said it's not going to be freedom.
We're not going to have freedom.
They actually said that.
But we are going to have contact tracing.
So they will be able to know wherever you go.
So anybody who gets sick, they're going to be able to find out who they got it from and trace you down.
If you go into a pub, they're going to track you down.
Take a look at this.
We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order.
Yes, it will be pubs and clubs and other things if we have a positive case there.
Our response may be different if we know that people are fully vaccinated.
So we're working through a number of those issues, but we will have to reflect and learn.
She says, New World Order.
It says, is this going to be in the New World Order?
And of course, people go nuts.
The clip has already had over 1 million views.
Again, this is reading from Dellingpole's column over at Breitbart.
He says, the clip has already had over 1 million views, causing Twitter to issue a Snoke-style fact-check correction headlined, unfounded claims about the New World Order conspiracy theory are shared after an Australian governmental official used the expression during a press conference on Thursday.
Twitter goes on to libsplain that there is nothing remotely dubious about this perfectly innocent phrase.
Fact checkers have regularly debunked claims connected to the conspiracy theory.
They say it.
This thing where they have the great reset.
They say, we want to have a great reset where we direct, we on the top direct where taxes go and so they can be to our shared goals, our shared goals.
That's not you and me.
That's them.
That's their shared goals.
So the woman comes out and says, yes, we're building camps and we've shut you in your home and we're having a new world order where we'll follow you all the time.
And Twitter is saying, yeah, but it's not the New World Order.
It's just following you all the time and putting you in camps.
It's not like there's some kind of world order.
And again, they don't have to conspire.
They all want the same thing.
Luckily, this will never happen here because they've told us they value our privacy so much.
Grabian has put together a montage of American officials assuring us, this is going to be number two, American officials assuring us that they value our privacy so much that they will never have, for instance, a vaccine mandate.
We cannot require someone to be vaccinated.
That's just not what we can do.
Needless to say, the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable.
No, definitely not.
You don't want to mandate and try and force anyone to take a vaccine.
We've never done that.
Our interest is very simple from the federal government, which is Americans' privacy and rights should be protected.
It is a matter of privacy to know who is or who isn't.
We don't want to be mandating from the federal government to the general population.
It would be unenforceable and not appropriate.
Perhaps the federal government should step in and issue mandates.
And if not, are you putting the needs of unvaccinated people ahead of the needs of vaccinated people?
Well, I think the question here, one, that's not the role of the federal government.
No, I don't think it should be mandatory.
I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory.
First, we must increase vaccinations among the unvaccinated with new vaccination requirements.
That last one, until that last one, they had me fooled.
You know, I was going, whoo, good thing the New World Order isn't coming to America, might.
Good thing the New World Order, we're not going to be in camps here, might.
But suddenly that last one, that was the real stuff.
That was the stuff they do rather than the stuff they say.
And the people, see, the people on the right, the people on the left, have lost the plot of liberty.
They've lost the idea of liberty first.
So they think, oh, give the government all this power and the government will take care of us.
The government will be nice.
They don't understand there is no such thing as a state.
There's only CCP, corrupt clowns in power.
That's all there is.
But on the right, we're the same way because we think if it's a private entity, if it's a multinational corporation with more money than two-thirds of the countries on earth and they destroy your privacy, that's all right.
We don't want government regulations getting in the way of that because that would be unfair.
Remember, every human interchange is regulated.
Every human interchange is regulated.
You can make love to your wife, but if you kill her, they arrest you because every human interchange is regulated.
The question is, are those regulations supporting human liberty or not?
But because we've lost that value, we've lost the idea of putting that value first.
We've got idiots on the right talking about, oh, capitalism, we've got to leave these companies free or private enterprise, we leave these companies free.
Google, Google started out with the slogan, don't be evil.
And they ditched it, right?
Because now they're evil.
And they became evil when they started to lose investors because they weren't making any money off their search engine.
So what did they do?
They then developed a system of harvesting information from you, taking your privacy away and selling that to advertisers.
And Google always says, we never sell your information to advertisers.
They don't have to.
What they do is they deduce what you're going to do from the information they glean from your search, your searches.
They take your searches, they understand who you are, where you are, what you're doing, what you're thinking about, and then they sell the predictions they make from that information to the advertisers.
So they're effectively selling your information.
And, you know, here's a question.
If our privacy is so important that you're allowed to kill your unborn child to protect your privacy, that was the Supreme Court's idea.
You know, we have a right to privacy and therefore you can kill your unborn child.
If it's so important we get to kill children, why isn't it important enough to keep Google from stealing our privacy?
And you know, they make things so convenient.
It is convenient.
Google does a great job at what they do.
Amazon does a great job at what they do.
Why do they get our information?
Why do they get to keep our information?
It makes no sense.
And I'm getting this from a book by a Harvard professor named Shoshana Zuboff about, it's called the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
I asked her to come on.
She won't come on.
I think she's a Marxist.
I mean, she certainly quotes Marx a lot.
But she understands that this is a problem because capitalists are doing it, right?
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K-L-A-V-A-N.
So the thing about Marxism, you know how Marxism is always saying they've always got critical theory?
The reason they've got critical theory is because Marxism doesn't work as a positive thing, as a way of running an economy.
Marxism ruins everything.
Socialism ruins everything because it puts all the power at the top, just like I said.
But as a critical function, as a critical function, it sometimes sees the flaws in capitalism.
It sees ways that capitalism can become oppressive.
And so, you know, we can listen to Marxist criticism as long as we understand that what they're thinking is we're criticizing this because we want to install Marxism.
We should be saying, no, no, you can criticize it because the power of capitalists can take away your liberty too.
Capitalism is the best economic system, but people get rich and they get powerful and they forget what made them rich and powerful.
Powerful People Are the Emergency00:14:56
Why is Jeff Bezos rich?
Why is Jack Boots Dorsey rich?
Why is Mark Zuckerberg rich?
Because individuals made choices to use their platforms.
That's why.
Individuals made choices.
That's how capitalism works.
Individual made choices and they got richer and richer because they were giving individuals what they want.
And at some point, the light bulb goes off.
You get so rich, you get so powerful, you get so separated and alienated from the common man who made you rich that you think, you know what would be a good idea if I had the power to tell people what to say, if I had the power to tell them that the book shouldn't be on my platform because you're not allowed to read that idea.
You're not allowed to have that thought, right?
So they start to think, oh, we can do this from the top down.
Socialism, same thing.
They've got it all figured out, but it's all about incompetence.
I don't know if you saw this.
This actually made me choke up.
I was watching the Olympic women, these Olympic gymnasts, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee and telling them about, you've probably heard about this guy, what was his name?
Larry Nasser.
Larry Nasser was the doctor for the governing body of gymnastics, USA gymnastics.
These girls come in.
They're 13, 14, 15-year-old girls.
I'm going to choke it.
It's mostly because it makes me so angry.
They come in and they've dedicated their childhoods.
They've given their childhoods away for athletic excellence.
And you've seen these gymnasts.
They're amazing what they do.
They've given it away.
They come to the USA gymnastics, the governing body of the sport.
The guy who is like the massage therapist or the trainer or whatever he is, this guy, Dr. Larry Nasser, and he uses his authority to molest them, right?
He's a child molester.
I mean, these are little girls, essentially, and he uses them, their authority to molest them.
They finally go to the FBI, and the FBI, in conjunction with the Olympic Committee and with USAID's gymnastics, conspires to dump the case.
So I'm not going to play some of the worst testimony because some of it was really, it'll make your head spin.
The things that were done to these children.
I mean, they're not children anymore.
They're young women now, but like they were children then.
You know, it'll make you, you start to have those violent fantasies, especially men have those violent fantasies of just getting these guys alone for five minutes in a room, right?
Here's Michaela Maroney, one of the top gymnasts, explaining what happened as cut seven.
This was very clear.
Cookie cutter, pedophilia, and abuse.
And this is important because I told the FBI all of this, and they chose to falsify my report and to not only minimize my abuse, but silence me yet again.
I thought given the severity of this situation, that they would act quickly for the sake of protecting other girls.
But instead, it took them 14 months to report anything when Larry Nassar, in my opinion, should have been in jail that day.
The FBI, USOC, and USAG sat idly by as dozens of girls and women continued to be molested by Larry Nassar.
They fired none of these FBI agents.
This is James Comey, FBI, Jeff Daniels.
Remember Jeff Daniel, how honest if once you're not telling the truth, the truth is everything.
These guys were dumping this case.
One of the agents, I think his name was Jeff Abbott, was conspiring with USA Gymnastics to give him a job, so he was covering up from that.
I assume that's what happens.
They haven't fired anybody.
They got their pensions.
Some of them were let go.
Some of them were pushed out of the FBI, but they're not in prison.
They're not in prison.
I don't know why they're not in prison.
Nobody seems to be in prison except the guy, the doctor.
They got him.
So he's gone for life.
I think it's 60 years or something like that.
But you know, it's because they've lost the value of what they do.
You know, the thing is that the left wants you to be woke.
But really, if you just do what you do with excellence, with dedication, with truth, with honesty, you make the world a better place.
If you're a writer, you write as well as you can.
If you're a gymnast, you gymnast as well as you can.
If you're a doctor, you treat people with respect and take care of them.
If you're a senator, you pass laws.
None of them are doing this.
They're so busy posing.
They're so busy telling us how woke they are.
They're so busy telling us about their competence that they ruin everything.
You know why people were so sad about Norm McDonald dying?
You know, people saying he was the funniest man in the world.
You know, he was hilarious.
He was absolutely one of the top comedians of the world.
But there are other funny people in the world.
He was an artist.
He was an artist, and he put the values of his art first.
He lost jobs.
He lost fame.
He lost money.
He lost friends to create good humor, to create good jokes.
That's a beautiful thing.
He was fired from the biggest job he ever had.
He never got a bigger job than this.
He was fired from Saturday Night Live because he wouldn't stop telling the truth about O.J. Simpson.
Here's one of the jokes he told about O.J. Simpson when Simpson brought out a book called I Want to Tell You.
This is Cut 21.
In his book, O.J. Simpson says that he would have taken a bullet or stood in front of a train for Nicole.
Man, I'm going to tell you, that is some bad luck when the one guy who would have died for you kills you.
You don't get worse luck than that.
The head of the Western Division of NBC was playing golf with OJ and he wouldn't stop.
And he kept selling him, you've got to stop.
And they fired him for that.
That was the kind of thing that artists do.
That's the kind of people who have values first, who put their values first.
That's what they do.
The people who put liberty first will lose their position to defend liberty.
People who put power first or think that they're going to put goodness, goodness first, they're going to solve everything.
They find out they can't and they just hang on to the power every single time.
And the answer is: listen, we've got to start to learn.
Capitalists of goodwill have to start to understand that John Galt is just as big a jerk as Barack Obama once he gets the power.
And we've got to understand, the leftists have got to understand that, yeah, there are things the government has to do, but you want to keep them from getting too much power.
You know, it's like you've got to put the liberty first.
They tell us, you know, they say, oh, climate change is an emergency.
You have to let us control the use of energy.
And then you get rolling blackouts in California.
They say, COVID, it's an emergency.
You've got to let us control where you can go and what you can wear and what medicine to take.
And the children go uneducated.
People lose their minds.
Businesses fail.
Racism, it's an emergency.
So we have to control what you say and what you think and what you can talk about and your ideas.
Racism just makes things worse.
It makes things worse.
And black people are being killed and they're doing worse off than they were before.
Because why?
Because they're the emergency.
The powerful people are the emergency.
Unbridled power is the emergency.
Detachment from the common man is, that is the emergency.
They forget it's liberty first.
The point of the enterprise, the whole point of the enterprise, is individual human liberty.
We need regulations.
We need government.
But the good people of the left and right have got to understand that these powers have got to be balanced against each other.
Government against business, government against government, business against business.
You can't have a business get so big that there's no more competition.
There has got to be competition.
There's got to be breaks on government because there's only one George Washington.
There is only one guy.
There is only one guy who will give away a kingdom to preserve human liberty because he put liberty first.
And that's it.
You only get one George Washington.
Everybody else just has to imitate him.
Everybody else has to be held to his standard.
This is no longer, it really is no longer a question of left and right.
It's a question of fear and freedom.
It's a question of power and lack of power.
And if the people do not have the power, they're trying to take away our power to vote.
They're trying to take away our Supreme Court.
They're trying to take away the Electoral College, which protects the powers of the state so state powers can be at odds with one another.
They want to centralize the power.
That is the point of what they do.
Left and right.
It's the point of what they do.
It is only those people, those rare, rare people who put liberty first who can make people free.
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So those of you in America who are sentient are looking at the failure of the recall of Gavin Newsom and thinking, what?
What the hell just happened?
So I wanted to bring on my pal, Owen Brennan, because he's one of the better political observers out there.
And this is about pure politics we're going to be talking about.
Owen was the speechwriter for Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
He was a producer at Fox News.
He now runs Madison McQueen, which is one of the best producers of political videos for candidates.
They also made No Safe Spaces with Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager.
Owen, are you there?
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Lord Claymaster of the Multiverse.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
That's I keep wanting to get that printed on my card.
I forget.
So you're in California.
You just watched Gavin Newsom, worst governor ever, except for maybe Gavin Newsom.
And he wins this by a landslide.
It's no small thing.
What happened?
Well, he wins it running away.
Really, you know, if you look back in August, the polls were really tight within the margin of error of getting rid of Gavin Newsom.
People were really supporting the recall.
There was not a Republican recall.
There was a lot of Hispanic support for the recall, Hispanic male support for the recall.
There were 25% of Democrats were disapproving of Gavin Newsom's record.
And then there was more than 60% of independents.
You got to remember, like California, this is going to be a big surprise to you, but California is not America, right?
Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one.
There's 25% of this state is registered as a GOP voter.
50% of the state is registered as Democrats, and the rest are independent or some crazy party.
So in order for the recall to pass, you needed to do a couple of things.
One, you didn't want to energize and anger Democrats or scare them to come out to the vote.
Because again, we ship out ballots to every single registered voter, right?
We make voting really easy in this state, which is when you make things easy or cheaper, I don't know, like look at all the great products that we get from China.
Maybe it isn't a good idea.
So it's very easy to vote.
It's very easy to just check the box on your ballot and send it back in through the mail.
And people were really angry at Governor Gavin Newsom and his track record.
I mean, if you look at the number one issue besides his handling of COVID was homelessness, you look up and down this state, it's not just San Francisco.
It's not just Los Angeles.
It is Bakersfield and Fresno.
You know, there are cities all over the state with tent cities all around.
And people just, it's not a Democrat or Republican thing to want your sidewalks to be clean.
So people were rightly enraged on both left, right, and center.
And they were getting ready to come out.
And what happened in August was that Larry Elder jumped in.
And Larry Elder had a very, very specific strategy.
You know, President Trump won about 6 million voters in 2020 in California.
Joe Biden won 11 million voters.
So it was like a 30-point shellacking of Trump out here.
But Larry said, hey, what if we go after the most activist core of the Trump voters?
Find them on Facebook.
Get them energized.
Gin them up.
And we will, you know, we'll be able to really get out there.
Unfortunately, by doing that, when he put his name in the ring, Gavin Newsom really just was like, he was going to make this entire election about Larry Elder.
And Larry Elder replied.
He went out there and just, you know, he was on Fox News all day long.
He did not participate in any of the debates we had in this state, debates that had, you know, the other contenders were in it.
The other top-tier contenders were in those debates.
He had one kind of disastrous interview with the only statewide political show we have in California.
But our friends around the country were saying, hey, we see Larry Elder on TV every day.
It's like, well, if you're watching local news in California, you're not seeing Larry Elder talking to you.
So he had a very strange sort of national strategy to sort of go after, again, strong Trump supporters, maybe 3 million or so from California who are on social media, whip them up.
That helps you get your message out to people who look just like them in other places on social media.
And he raised $18 million.
I mean, that's a lot of money.
He was making as much money every day as other candidates were making in a month or bringing in through donations.
So, you know, was that a strategy for being elected governor of California?
I don't think so.
That's not a strategy.
Perhaps he's got his eyes on Iowa.
So, you know, with this much money in a war chest, he certainly didn't spend it all.
He spent a lot of money.
He spent a lot of money on TV.
He's made a lot of consultants, not me, wealthy.
But, you know, he's going to have a little bit of a war chest after here.
And, you know, I think if he's honest with himself, he looks at the state, he's like, I can't get elected here.
I can't get elected.
You have to go to the mayor's race up in Los Angeles.
Can he get there?
No, I think the numbers are even harder against him than they are statewide.
So he's too conservative, basically, for California.
Is there that the New York Times, other leftist outlets are basically saying this is a warning to Republicans, and this shows that we're not doing as badly as the polls say we are, and we can keep the House and we can defend our Senate majority.
Good News Cycle Strategy00:04:14
Are they right?
Or is this very specific to California?
Or is there something we should learn from this?
Well, I think that this is an extinction-level event for Gavin Newsom, right?
And I think he is probably learning the wrong lesson.
The only people who are out defending Gavin Newsom on California Airways, believe it or not, were Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Who thinks that those people are going to be like, those are going to really help defend Gavin Newsom?
But it wasn't until post-Larry getting in that you saw Kamala come out here and Kamala, right, come out here and get involved in the campaign.
And Biden came out here.
Now, those two people, they want to be part of a good news cycle.
They knew the cake was baked by the time they supported Gavin.
And so they would just want to be part of a good news cycle.
So everybody's going to look and see that, oh, maybe Gavin Newsom sort of going left and having those sort of, you know, those most left people sort of in the country, their elected leaders, coming out and defending him.
That's where we have to go.
So I think the left may be the ones that learn the wrong lesson from this election.
So, I mean, obviously, these guys are going to be, it seems, first of all, it seems that they feel that Newsom won because people like his COVID strategies, A, and they feel that he won by running essentially against Donald Trump.
Are those things that are going to work at the national level?
And Gavin Newsom's favorable, unfavorables on election day were the same that they were in June and July when the recall got on the ballot.
Like none of his advertising, $30 million in advertising, didn't make his favorables move, right?
People just said, Larry Elder, we can't have him be our governor of California.
So that, I mean, so it's frustrating for some conservatives because they feel that they're always being stuck with rhinos or with Jeb exclamation point because the Republican Party is always trying to avoid this kind of situation.
Is there a way?
I mean, maybe not in California, but is there a way to run a conservative so that he can win?
Yeah, I mean, if you look at what happened in the 90s with New York City, Mayor Giuliani ran against David Dinkins the first time, lost by 50,000 votes.
The city continued to get worse.
The city, you know, sort of just plummeted.
You know, it looked like LA does today.
And four years later, Rudy Giuliani was able to win by 50,000 votes.
He was able to flip 100,000 votes.
Now, out here, those numbers are a lot more challenging and daunting.
I mean, we've got millions and millions of voters.
But the one thing you can't do is anger the left when you run a candidate.
And because they are able to get all of their people out.
If this election had been a turnout of maybe 8 million, there's possibility that a candidate like Larry can get out there and get elected.
But we already have 10 million part of 10 million ballots counted.
Larry has about 25% of them were votes for Larry.
And that's, you know, I had a conversation in August, and I told you that's where his ceiling was.
And that's where it stayed the entire time.
You did.
You saw it coming down the pike.
Oh, and Brennan, the company is Madison McQueen.
Let me just say to any candidates out there who are looking to not lose elections, you might want to go to Madison McQueen and get some of your strategy because obviously it doesn't work too well when you go other places.
Oh, and it's great to see you.
And I really appreciate it.
And I'm sorry you have to continue living in California.
It's wonderful without you.
At least I improved.
I improved the state somehow.
All right.
I'll talk to you soon.
Thank you.
Thanks.
So one of the great things about moving east is that now there's actually an autumn.
I can see the leaves change.
And the way you want to spend a beautiful autumn day, nice crisp autumn day, is you want to get in your car that's not working because it's missing a part.
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Jesus And The Samaritan Woman00:14:53
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So we were talking about liberty and putting liberty first.
And the reason people have stopped putting liberty first is because they've lost the underlying values that created the idea that one puts liberty first, which come from Christianity.
So I want to return to what I was talking about last week.
Remember, last week I was answering, talking about the reason Jesus says, judge not lest you be judged.
And I want to continue that segment just to remind you.
This is like the sequel, Judge Not Two.
This time it's personal.
The basic point I was making is that not judging, forgiving, loving your enemies, they're all methods of helping us see the world as God sees it.
As Jesus says, this will help you be children of your Father in heaven.
He causes his Son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
And elsewhere, he says God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
So he wants you to be like God is so that you will see the world as God sees the world.
So when we lay aside judgment, vengeance, hatred, you know, that's what begins to happen.
And this, I'm just reiterating what I said last week.
This leads to the kingdom of heaven within us, which is this small thing inside us that grows into a big thing.
It's like the yeast and bread, or it's like a tiny mustard seed that becomes a gigantic tree.
So part two of this conversation is to ask, what does the world look like when you see it this way?
Why does that help?
You see the world as God sees it.
And I want to just reiterate, I said this last week.
I'm not a pastor.
I'm not a theologian.
I am just a detective story writer.
I'm just a big foot teller of tales.
But I do believe in the gospels and the gospels have given me this incredible joy of life and serenity of life.
I mean, it was weeks after, a couple of weeks after I was baptized that my wife just turned to me and said, you've really totally changed.
You've become much more serene, much more happy.
And so I'm just sharing what I have seen and what's happened to me and the path that I've traveled.
And you can make up your own mind whether you want to follow that path or part of that path or whatever.
So to talk about what the world looks like, I want to talk about two verses from the Gospels.
One is the famous one from the Gospel of John, very near the top of the Gospel of John.
The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
And the word in this is a translation from the Greek for the word logos, which is one of these kind of complicated er words that has so many meanings that any translation of it is going to be questionable.
Any translation I give it, people are going to protest and say that's not what it means.
But it's my show, so I'm going to give you my translation.
For me, the logos means the mind of God, who God is, right?
How God sees the world.
The verses in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through him, and without him, nothing was made that was made.
This is the logos he's talking about.
The logos is the word.
And so you know what that means.
Like, you have a way of seeing things.
If you have a friend, you know what he's like.
You know, he may be a mathematician.
He sees everything from mathematical, in mathematical, logical terms.
Or she may be like a very emotional, passionate, caring person.
And you always know what she's going to do if she sees somebody in trouble.
If an artist has a nature, that nature comes out in his work.
So Picasso paints things one way.
Michelangelo paints things the right way.
But they have a different way of expressing it because that's the mind of themselves.
So if you're God, that's the logos.
That's the mind that creates everything, that puts everything into the world.
So now we know from this verse, an interesting thing, that the logos, the mind of God, the self of God, can be represented in human form, can be made into flesh.
And that's a big idea.
That means that a human being can represent the mind of God.
And it means that other human beings, all the other human beings, can represent a part of that mind.
They can be the mini-logos.
They can be part of the logos.
And that means that, and I'll get back to that.
I may have to do one more segment on this.
But that means that word is a good translation for logos because it's like the flesh becomes a language to speak the mind of God.
Matter becomes a language that speaks the mind of God.
And just like language, it sort of brings to mind, it instantiates, it makes manifest, it makes clear before you what the mind of God is, because you can't see the mind of God, but you can experience it in the flesh and matter.
So this brings me to my second verse, right?
Remember what we're saying here is that God can be made flesh and that therefore people who are made in the image of God, men and women are made in the image of God, they are a mini-logos.
They can be a little bit of God.
So the second verse is one of the parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan.
I have to tell you this funny story.
I've got this book coming out next year called The Truth and Beauty, brilliant title.
It's called The Truth and Beauty, and it's about some of these issues seen through the eye of some of the great poets of the English language.
But it's about this kind of gospel, this kind of reading of the gospel.
And in this book, I said, we don't hear what a weird, weird parable the parable of the Good Samaritan is.
We don't hear it.
And I've never been able to convince anybody why it's weird because they're so used to hearing it, they don't think it's weird.
They think it's just a normal parable.
And it's not.
And my editor said, I don't see why it's weird either.
And we went back and forth and back and forth.
And he said, I just don't see it.
And finally, I said to him, look, it's possible that everyone else on earth is right and I'm wrong.
But I don't think so.
So just to defend myself, the other night I had a cigar with my son, Spencer Claven, No Relation, and he said that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German, he's like a Lutheran saint, basically.
He agreed with me.
He writes about this.
I did not know that.
But so here it is.
A lawyer comes up to Jesus and he says, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
How should I find this kingdom of heaven you're always talking about?
And Jesus says, well, what do you think?
And the lawyer says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.
In other words, these are the two commandments that Jesus says are the basic commandments.
This is what everything else is meant to get you to.
This is the whole point of all the books of the Bible, is to get you to the point where you love God and love your neighbor.
And Jesus says these two commandments are related.
And of course, the reason they're related is for the reason I said, that just as God can be manifest in human form in Jesus, he can be a part of God.
A part of the Logos can be manifest in other people.
So he says, love your neighbor as yourself.
Now the lawyer, being a lawyer, says to him, who is my neighbor?
And then Jesus tells the famous story of the Good Samaritan.
A guy gets mugged going from Jerusalem to Jericho.
He's lying by the side of the road.
A priest goes by and leaves him there, you know, bleeding, doesn't do a thing for him.
A Levite, who's from the family of the righteous, of the holy in Israel, goes by, doesn't do anything.
A Samaritan, who was a guy that the Jews didn't like the Samaritans for all kinds of reasons that don't matter.
But the Samaritans, so they had bigotry against the Samaritans.
But the Samaritan goes by and takes care of the guy who was mugged, takes him to an inn, helps him with bandages, gives him food, gives the innkeeper money, says, take care of this guy.
When I come back, I'll give you more money to finish taking care of him.
Jesus tells this whole story and says to the lawyer, who was this man's neighbor?
Who was the mugged guy's neighbor?
And of course, the lawyer says, the Samaritan, the one who showed mercy on him.
And Jesus says, go and do likewise.
Do like the Samaritan.
So let me see if I can explain why that's weird.
You say to somebody, somebody says to you, love your neighbor, and you say, who is my neighbor?
And he says, here's the story.
The Samaritan is your neighbor.
The moral of that story is, love the Samaritan, right?
Love your neighbor.
Who is my neighbor?
The Samaritan is your neighbor.
Love the Samaritan.
That should be the moral of the story.
The moral of the story would be, in that case, love your neighbor, even if he's a nasty Samaritan, even if he's a different race from you, a race you don't happen to like, love him if he treats you like your neighbor.
But Jesus doesn't say that.
He says, love your neighbor.
The lawyer says, who's my neighbor?
Jesus says, the Samaritan, therefore, be the Samaritan.
That doesn't make any sense, right?
The next line, you know, he's basically saying, be the neighbor.
Be the neighbor that you would love, okay?
Now, the other day in this new church I found that I'm just loving, I'm really loving this church, the priest solved this riddle for me.
He said, the lawyer wants to make the neighbor the object, but Jesus forces him to see the neighbor as the subject.
In other words, love your neighbor, be the neighbor.
It's not going to change the guy.
The mugged guy may be a jerk.
He may not be any nicer for being helped.
He may be a terrible person.
Jesus doesn't care.
He wants you to love him.
Why?
Why does he want you to love him?
Why does that change anything?
Why, you know, it kind of collapses the subject and object, because in the sentence, love your neighbor as yourself, the subject is you, right?
You love your neighbor as yourself, and the object is the neighbor, but the neighbor you love as yourself.
So they both become one thing.
When you love a person, you see them as God sees them.
You see them as they really are.
You see them as a piece of this amazing logos.
You know, recently, I'm sure everybody's had some experience where you've lost somebody.
And recently, I had to go say goodbye to a good friend who has gotten a bad diagnosis.
And it's inexpressibly sad.
It is inexpressibly sad to say farewell forever to someone you love.
It's just a terrible sadness.
But it's a beautiful sadness.
You can feel it if you think about it.
It is a beautiful sadness because it means you saw him as he was.
You saw him in the fullness of his humanity.
And when that doesn't happen to somebody, when you don't see somebody, his humanity is kind of trapped inside him.
Remember the last scene of a Christmas carol, or not the last scene, but one of the last scenes of a Christmas carol where Scrooge, who's been this mean old man all his life, is shown his grave.
And that's what changes him.
That's what changes him.
Here's just a glimpse of that from the Alistair Simm version.
Tell me I'm not already dead.
And I used to think, well, why does that change him?
He knows he's going to die.
He's been told he's going to be punished for dying.
All this guy, if he dies as a miser, but all that he's seen now is that he dies without anybody caring about him.
He dies without anybody giving a damn that he's dead.
And so nobody has seen him as he is.
His humanity is trapped inside him.
When you see somebody as he is, you confer humanity on him.
You know, one last personal story.
When I wrote one of my first thrillers, Don't Say a Word, I had this great idea, which was to set a big scene on Heart Island, which is New York's Potters Field.
It's where they bury the dead who nobody has claimed.
And they don't let you onto Pottersfield.
So I asked a friend of mine who was a reporter at the time.
Now he's a big news industry muck-a-muck, but at the time he was just a street reporter.
And I said, would you please do a story about Pottersfield, Heart Island, and take me along pretending to be your producer?
And he agreed.
He was a great guy, still a great guy.
And he invited me on, and we went out on this ship with all these coffins.
And the coffins were made, of course, of cheap pine, and they had knot holes in them and they had gaps between the boards.
And you could look through and you could see the bodies of these people wrapped in plastic.
You could see the bodies of these people whom no one had claimed, who no one cared about, who no one knew they were human.
Nobody knew, nobody loved them.
Nobody said, oh yes, this is a part of the Logos.
This is a part of God.
So no one saw them as they really are.
No one saw them as they really are.
So think about that for a minute.
Think about those.
I mean, it was just plains of bodies, just an island with literal ditches filled with these boxes of people no one knew were there.
So think about those people for a minute.
Just think about them.
And then look around you at the people around you.
If you're at work, look around you at the people at work.
If you're in your car, look at the people driving past you in other cars.
If you're at the gym, look at the people at the gym.
If you're sitting alone, look at the pictures on your phone or on your mantelpiece of your family and see the difference.
See the difference in what you see.
And you begin to understand what Jesus is telling you to see when you put your judgments away, when you put your vengeance away, when you put your envy away, when you put all those things away and see the reality of what other people are.
And think of the difference in you that makes.
See, this is the thing.
People are always saying Jesus cares about the poor.
Jesus cares about this.
He cares about you.
That's it.
That's it.
He cares about you.
And he wants you to see these things.
You know, when people stand before the throne of God, Jesus says this.
He says to them, you know, you will have eternal life because you took care of me.
You took care of me.
And the people say, I don't remember ever meeting you.
I don't remember taking care of you.
And he says, well, when you fed the poor, you were taking care of me.
When you gave a man who needed help, help, you were taking care of me.
The people who get into heaven don't even know that they were serving God.
They don't even know they were serving God.
All they knew is that they saw people as they are.
And when you see people as they are, you see the logos in them and it changes everything.
That's what Jesus is trying to do.
He's not trying to make the world a better place.
He says the poor you will always have with you.
He's not trying to make the poor go away.
He's not trying to make the world fair.
He tells you the world is going to suck.
He tells it to people again and again.
He's trying to get you to live into the logos by seeing the logos in other people that is in yourself.
That is what he's trying to do.
What I'm going to do, I just want to do one more segment on this next week on how you practice that.
Why We Left Afghanistan00:15:11
How do you get to that place?
Because it obviously is not something that's really easy to do.
And we'll talk about that next week.
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For this, Daily Wire could face up to $14,000 for each violation.
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Americans have been far too willing to cede their freedoms to authoritarian bureaucrats in the name of public health, and enough is enough.
Please stand with us and The Daily Wire and most importantly, the rights of all American citizens.
So as you know, occasionally on the show to break up the usual thing, we like to bring people on who actually know things.
And Michael Duran is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.
He specializes in Middle East security issues.
He has a really original way at looking at things.
So I wanted to bring Mike on to talk about what's happening in the Middle East and basically what's happening in our foreign policy generally.
Mike, you there?
I'm here.
Great to be here, Drew.
It's good to see you.
It's good to see you.
You know, obviously this Afghanistan thing is an utter disaster, but where do you stand on whether we should have been there or not or gotten out or not?
Well, I'm kind of in the mushy middle on this because what's always bothered me about Afghanistan is not that we were there, but that the mission was very unclear and the mission kept shifting.
You know, I used to work in the Defense Department, and I remember one time I was sitting at a table with a bunch of generals.
They were talking about Afghanistan, and it occurred to me that if we went around to each one of them and said, who are we fighting?
What are we fighting about?
What does victory look like?
And how do we achieve it?
There would have been as many answers as there were people around the table, even maybe even more answers than there were people around the table.
It was totally unclear.
And that's not just a mistake or primarily a mistake of the military.
That's also a mistake of the political echelon from the beginning.
It wasn't really, the mission was never clearly defined.
So once you have that undefined mission, it means that a lot of extraneous forces can go to work and there's no way to, you know, you can get mission creep.
But it also means that the American public then starts to lose interest, to lose the confidence.
And that's what I think bothers me the most.
I think the American public will support these kinds of things when it's very clearly defined, why we're there and what we need to do.
But when it keeps shifting and then we start saying we're going to make Afghanistan into a democracy, which is frankly, I think, ridiculous.
Now, I can say that now.
I've always had doubts about this democracy promotion agenda.
But for a long time, it wasn't acceptable to express it.
So now that we've done this and we've done it in such a bad way, you're looking at the Middle East in general.
What's the situation?
Where are we going from here, in your opinion, in the Middle East?
Well, just to be clear, I totally agree with you.
The way this withdrawal was handled was the worst possible thing that you could do.
Once you want to get out, we got out in such a way that we damaged ourselves.
I don't think the damage is total.
By which I mean, I think if you're Taiwan and you have doubts about the United States, which you probably do if you're Taiwan, I don't think they were really that significantly changed by what we did in Afghanistan.
I mean, or if you're Japan, because the boundaries of the spectrum of U.S. commitment and ambiguity, I think is pretty clear in East Asia to those actors.
In the Middle East, I think it's a different thing.
I think every leader in the Middle East now, both allies and enemies, they can now clearly imagine a post-American Middle East.
I'm not saying that we're going to get that, but I'm saying that the leaders can all imagine it very clearly.
And that has real world effects because it means that people start, people are hedging anyway.
It's natural in the Middle East to hedge for all kinds of reasons.
But I think that the hedging behavior is going to increase.
And when you add that, sorry, if you add to that the fact that I think we are empowering the worst actors in the Middle East right now, just like we're empowering the Taliban, that's going to make things worse.
So was the whole idea of the war on terror a mistake?
I mean, aside from the mission creep and the changing missions, there was this big idea from the very beginning that somehow we were going to reform Islam.
Is that a ridiculous idea?
Is Islam going to, I mean, Islam has been what it is for thousands of years, or for more than a thousand years.
Is it going to continue to be what it is?
I think the thing that was most wrong was that we elevated the war on terror, the fighting terror groups and Islamism and radical Islam and so forth to a first-tier strategic goal.
And that was the mistake, I think.
That was the big mistake.
Because our job is to create an international order that protects our interests and the interests of our major allies.
And that is a game between states.
What has always bothered me from 9-11 on is the way we started talking about fighting terror groups, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and so on, as the number one priority without any thought about the international order, the balance of power between states as a kind of secondary or tertiary consideration.
So that's the sort of big picture.
That's a little bit abstract.
That's the problem.
With respect to this fighting radical Islam, the idea that we're going to reform all of Islam, I think, was unwise, yes.
And I think that, but I do think that we can carry out policies that will elevate certain actors in Islam over others.
We can do that.
But the best way we do that is, first of all, pursuing our own, how would I put it, staying true to our own values at home in the United States and in Europe?
There shouldn't be in Europe no-go zones for Muslims, whether that's Malmo in Sweden, or whether it's a total no-go zone where the authorities can't come in, or it's a kind of a cultural no-go zone where we don't demand of Muslims to respect Western law, to respect rights of women, and so forth.
Most of the Muslims who've come to the West want to live in Western culture.
That's what they want.
For them, there's no contradiction.
But when you start allowing multiple marriage, marriage to multiple women, there's a way that multiculturalism, particularly in Europe, but increasingly in the United States, multiculturalism has the effect of empowering the worst actors in the Muslim world and creating a kind of monoculture in Muslim communities.
So in Western culture, we should be thinking about this issue of Islamism very much.
I mean, it should be at the forefront of our thought, but we fight it by just being true to our own values.
When it comes to the Middle East, if we start dividing up states in the region by we like this one, we don't like that one on the basis of ideology, we get lost, I think.
Well, it's really interesting.
To broaden the discussion out just a little bit, or actually a lot, when we left Vietnam in such a disastrous way, basically our foreign policy virtually collapsed for at least a decade, and we saw the Soviet Union expanding in Africa and in South America.
Is the American order we've had since the end of World War II, we've had this kind of American world order in conjunction with this Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Is that world order collapsing?
Are we basically losing control of our allies and our domain?
I don't think it's collapsing, but I think it is threatened in a way that we haven't known in our lifetimes.
And I mean you and me.
Well, and anybody younger than us.
But the threat is coming now primarily from China.
That's the issue.
And that's what we need to focus on is the balance of power with China.
In that regard, I think that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is not a good thing, but I don't think it's absolutely debilitating.
But it does raise questions about our ability to think straight and to go the course in certain arenas where it is actually going to matter with respect to China.
Why are we so bad at this?
I mean, you know, we helped beat the Nazis.
We beat the Soviet Union in a Cold War.
Why are we so bad at these little kind of imperial border wars that we are sucked into from time to time?
Why can't we focus on them?
And why do the is there something inherent about being American that makes the public just say, throw up their hands and say, let's get out?
No, I think, look, I think part of it is that we are, I don't know if this is the whole answer, but we are unique in the world, I think, in that we can make foreign policy on the basis of our fantasies, our fantasies of what the world is.
We don't have any nasty actors on our borders.
We have two oceans on our borders and then Mexico and those horrible people, the Canadians.
And then so you have that.
We have nobody threatening us on our borders.
And then we are by far the strongest power on earth.
So we can make ourselves the dominant military actor in any conflict in the world.
If we choose to do that, if we say we want to be the dominant actor, we can do it, including in what's contested now in East Asia in the balance of power with China.
I think we still can be the dominant military actor, although they're getting to a point where they're actually our peers.
But everywhere else in the world, if we insert ourselves, we're dominant.
And if we insert ourselves directly, we don't necessarily need allies.
But what that means is we can go into a place like Afghanistan and all of a sudden we become top dog and we start building an order there on the basis of our fantasies.
And we create an American bubble in Kabul where you can be, you know, where LGBTQI rights are respected and women are equal with men and it's going to be a democracy.
And we're pouring in so much money and we have so much power that every Afghan who's working with this will reflect back to us our fantasy because they know it very well.
And so we have native informants telling us that the Afghanistan of our dreams is actually the Afghanistan we're working in.
And then one day we decide to pick up and leave and then that bubble that we created just evaporates.
Most countries can't behave like no other country can behave like this.
If you're a Ukrainian, you have this problem.
Russia is trying to gobble you up.
So everything you do, your mind is always focused on the fact that these Russians are going to gobble you up.
So everybody you talk to, you ask, can you help me with the Russians?
Can you not help me with the Russians?
And you put together your foreign policy based on the reality that the Ukraine can gobble you up.
We go off on these flights of fantasy.
So then the debate in Washington about Afghanistan becomes the Republican fantasy versus the Democratic fantasy.
And we start talking about this country that doesn't actually exist.
That's an amazing analysis.
That really is.
It's incredibly true.
And it seems to me that it's gotten truer as after the Cold War, after the Soviet Union collapsed, that marvelous self-defining threat was gone.
We didn't know what we were against anymore.
And we just had this idea that we were sort of the new thing and the end of history had arrived.
So that makes me feel like, in some ways, in this kind of horrible, morbid way, that the rise of China may help bring us back online as a realistic power.
Rise of China: Realigning Power Dynamics00:07:09
Do you think there's any chance of that?
Well, I'm hoping so for my kids.
I'm hoping.
I'm also hoping that we won't get tested too badly, too much in that regard.
I think in the end, there are a lot of things that make me nervous.
I mean, the Chinese have made huge inroads into our universities.
Did you see just recently, 177 Stanford professors called on the FBI to stop looking for Chinese spies in academia?
I didn't hear that.
It's a letter.
It's a letter to the Justice Department saying, please stop looking for Chinese spies because it's racist to do this.
And there's more in there than that.
But the thing that's really troubling about it is most of these 177 professors are not from the English department, the philosophy department, the American Studies Department.
They're from chemistry and physics and engineering.
I mean, things on which our national power is really based, right?
So it's shocking to me.
So, you know, Wall Street, the universities, Hollywood, as you well know, the big sports, they're all, I don't know if I want to say, you know, they're dependent.
They're highly dependent on China.
And we didn't have anything like that when we were fighting the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union had a, they were communists.
They couldn't get into our economic system and penetrate it the way the Chinese have.
That's the worrying thing.
So I have a couple of questions about this.
First of all, just as a guess, obviously, you know, nobody knows the future.
You think Taiwan is gone?
Boy, I sure hope not.
I sure hope not.
But that is the number one question now.
That's the number one question in foreign policy.
And that's where everything would, you know, everything that we do in foreign policy should be designed in one way or another to dissuade the Chinese from trying.
And we should also be thinking hard about why Taiwan matters.
You know, it's a key to controlling the first island chain, because if Taiwan goes, then Japan is extremely vulnerable.
And also, there's this whole question of the semiconductors, the actual physical chips.
Taiwan is the country that makes them.
We don't do that, which is kind of ridiculous.
But it's not easy to do.
They do it.
It's the absolute, it's of great strategic importance for all of those technologies that are going to drive next generation economic growth, next generation military growth.
The Chinese want to get their hands on that capability, and it resides on the island of Taiwan.
So we should be offshoring that as soon as possible.
Now, we should also at the same time be protecting Taiwan, but we should make sure that the Chinese understand that if they get Taiwan, they're not going to get that capability.
Are the clowns in Washington thinking about this, or are you the only person in Washington thinking about this?
I'm definitely not the only person in Washington thinking about it.
And I suspect that those whom you are referring to as clowns, meaning my colleagues in the Biden, my friends and colleagues in the Biden administration, whom I respect greatly, I expect that they are thinking about this too.
But like I said, the Chinese have penetrated our universities, our high culture, Wall Street.
And the Democratic Party is the party of all of those elements.
So I think there are voices in the Democratic Party that are always saying, oh, let's tread softly.
Let's not worry too much about this.
I think we should, the alarm bells should all be ringing by now about the Chinese, and we should be thinking very clearly about a lot of these things.
So if your treasured colleagues were to drive their Volkswagen and come pouring out and invite you to give your opinion, Mike, what do we do about China?
What's the strategy, the overall strategy?
What would you say?
First of all, thank you for suggesting that they want to hear anything that I have to say.
I, of course, want to believe that myself.
No, I would, well, the thing that I'm, because I work primarily on the Middle East.
Right.
And the thing that, so what I would say to them is your Iran policy is 100% wrong.
Their Iran policy is based on the notion that we can come to a kind of strategic understanding with Iran, almost a partnership.
What they have in their mind is what they're trying to do with the Taliban.
You notice how the Taliban suddenly went from being our enemy to being the country that we have to have, the element that we have to have a deal with in order to stabilize Afghanistan.
And all of a sudden, they're fighting the global jihad.
They're fighting against the global jihad rather than supporting it against us and so on.
This is what they think.
They think they're going to flip Iran in the same way.
And they also think that the United States and China, or at least they speak this way, when Secretary Blink and Secretary State Blinken met with his Chinese counterpart in Anchorage, he told him out loud, I mean, in public, he said, you and we have nearly identical interests with respect to Iran.
This is false.
The Chinese are building up Iran quietly, helping it economically and now increasingly with intelligence and in military cooperation in order to have the power to fight the American order in the Middle East.
And the Chinese are doing this because they want to pin down American resources in the event of a war with Taiwan.
Because if there's a, you know, if you remember a year and a half ago or so, when the Iranians attacked the Obcake refinery in Saudi Arabia, when they were also attacking tankers after Trump imposed the maximum pressure, we have to bring a carrier group into the Persian Gulf to threaten them.
And the fact of the matter is the way the military thinks, there's no such thing as one carrier group.
If you're actually committing one carrier group, you're committing two because you have to have the backup in order to protect the one in case there's a counterattack.
So if you're sitting in Beijing and you're watching this, you think this little piddly third world country, Iran, with its little nasty capabilities, is capable of pinning down two American carrier groups.
That's quite valuable if I'm going to have a contest with the Americans against Taiwan.
Committing Carrier Groups00:09:52
Wow, I hope other people think about this.
Michael Durant of the Hudson Institute, thank you so much for coming on.
It's really interesting talking to you.
I'll talk to you again.
Thank you.
Take care.
Take care.
All right.
That sad time has come.
I know you love your problems.
Everybody loves their problems.
That's why they hang on to them.
But we're going to get rid of them all with the mailbag.
OJ Simpson's lawyers stopped feuding this week, finally.
The dream team, F. Lee Bailey and Robert Shapiro, were able to put aside their differences and express their admiration for each other after OJ threatened to cut their heads off.
Oh man, he will be missed.
All right, from Alex.
From Alex.
I've been rolling a question around in my head for a while and realize it would probably be better to ask someone more experienced than I than to try to solve it myself.
It goes like this.
If technology were to be created that could alter a person's DNA and organ structure such that any feasible test would come back as the gender of their choice, would a transgender person then be viable?
Would then a man be able to become a woman?
Well, I oppose the thought of such a procedure.
I thought it would be nice to get a point of view other than my own on the end product.
Well, I mean, the question is a tautology.
You're asking if you could change a man into a woman, could you change a man into a woman?
And yes, you could.
If you could do that, if you could change the DNA, change the, you know, the chromosomes and all the organs and all that, and the brain, the brain shape and the brain size, all those things that are different in men and women, you would have turned a man into a woman.
And there's no reason to think that in the future that won't be possible.
Would it be a good thing?
And here's the thing.
I actually think it would be a terrible thing, but only if it was misused.
And of course, since human beings would be doing it, it would be misused.
I think the great danger we face is the death of femininity.
Not the death of women, the death of femininity.
And the reason I think that that is a—and only women, by my definition of femininity, only women can be feminine.
Men can be effeminate, but they can't be feminine.
Only women can be feminine.
And femininity can take many different shapes and forms and all that.
But in general, it is a way of looking at the world that is not entirely in service to the economy and not entirely in service to material needs.
Men build stuff and they destroy stuff.
That's their job.
And they do that mostly to defend women and children, to make a world in which women and children can safely live.
But it's also in men's interest to some degree to get rid of women, to make sure that women don't get pregnant when they have sex with them or they kill their babies when they have sex with them.
That makes it much easier on men because then they don't have to do the things that they have to do, like risk their lives to protect women and children because there are no children.
So femininity is something that scientists actually try to solve.
In my book, The Truth and Beauty, coming out next year, I have a chapter about Frankenstein and talk about the fact that that's what it's about.
It's about making a man without a woman.
So I think it would be a bad thing.
When they had abortions, when you could only have one child in China, they started to run out of women.
They had a big shortage of women because people killed the women because men make money.
Men are suited to a world that is based on materialism.
And feminine women are not, by nature, materialistic.
They are actually humanistic.
They actually are attached to human beings.
It's a generalization, but it's truth that men like things and women like people.
And that's the truth about them.
That makes women in some ways less useful to the economy, but more useful to humanity, more useful to the things that actually matter in life.
I mean, women, I think, are the creative center of life, obviously.
And I think that if we could suddenly get rid of them and just have men producing money and building things and making stuff, there might be a temptation to do that.
And we might lose the most important asset that human beings have, which is women, which is mothers and wives and people who commit themselves to other human beings.
And I think it would be a terrible, terrible thing.
But technically, if you could turn a man into a woman, the man would become a woman.
From Anonymous, I'm writing to you with such a heavy heart.
My husband and I have been married for 14 years and have five beautiful children, with our youngest being only nine months old.
I was unfaithful to my husband 10 years ago.
I regretted it then, have felt extreme guilt and shame for my actions ever since.
I have not been able to show him how much I value him.
My husband has become bitter and resentful toward me throughout these past 10 years.
I've tried to show him that I'm sorry by being a good wife.
So now my husband wants a divorce.
They got into an argument about a co-worker flirting with him on Facebook.
I know that getting divorced will devastate our children, even if it's completely amicable.
I'm editing this out.
And she basically wants to know what to do.
So now I realize when I listen to this, I'm only hearing one side of the story.
And that's very important because in a divorce or in a separation, in any marriage, there are two sides to the story.
So I'm only can only look at this from your point of view.
But there's one thing that leaps out at me that you say he's getting bitter and he wants a divorce and it's 10 years since you committed this infidelity and it's made him angry at you and all this.
But he wasn't so angry that he stopped fathering children on you during that time.
And that creates a major, major obligation in him for him to keep this marriage together.
The marriage is no longer about the two of you.
The marriage is now about the children.
And whatever his bitterness, I mean, somehow it didn't keep him out of your bed.
It didn't keep him from getting you pregnant.
And it didn't keep him from producing these children.
I mean, what did you say?
The youngest is nine months old.
So this is just nine months ago that he fathered a child and, you know, nine months plus nine months that he fathered a child.
So he has a real obligation to try very hard to put this, to keep this marriage together.
You know, I'm always hesitant.
I know I do it from time to time, and I do it when I think it's necessary.
I'm always hesitant to recommend therapy because it just seems like putting the onus on the next person.
But in this case, where you have had an infidelity, infidelities are just devastating.
They devastate people.
You know, you'd think like, oh, it didn't mean anything to me.
It was just a night.
It was a mistake.
I got drunk.
Whatever the excuse is.
They are devastating.
They undercut, you know, whether men or women commit them.
They undercut the other person's sense of self and sense of worth and sense of importance and commitment to such a degree, and they cause so much anger and so much bitterness that really you have got to go and get somebody to help you acknowledge what you've done,
which I think is really important because you're the one who committed the infidelity, but also for him to be able to access his anger and express his anger and say what he has to say, but realize too that he has got a responsibility because he, you know, whatever he feels about this, he did father these children.
And that creates a major, major responsibility on him to keep this marriage together if he can.
From Slater, I come to you today in this stuffy mail sack to ask you about something you said last week.
You said that no one changes their minds, that people grow up in their cultures and they have their ideas and they stick to them even when they're proven wrong.
Why do you think this when your own life story has shown otherwise?
You said you once believed in abortion and even though it took a long time, you realized that you were wrong.
After an argument with a friend, your stance on the truth of Christianity changed.
I myself have experienced similar changes in my own life.
What about your statement of no one changes their bad ideas?
Did I not understand?
Yeah, no, the only, you were taking me literally.
What I said is people don't change their minds.
I was generalizing.
It does happen.
People do change.
It is quite, quite rare.
It is quite rare that people turn.
It's not rare that people fall away from religion.
It's not rare that people lose their childhood beliefs as they come into themselves and become themselves.
What is rare is that people will dedicate their lives to something for 20 years and then say, oh, this isn't working.
I'm going to have to walk away from it unless they're forced to do that.
I'm talking in the same way I was talking before about George Washington was one in a billion who gave up power for liberty.
That doesn't mean there aren't other people who will commit themselves to liberty, but I'm just saying it's not the common thing.
I'm talking about the common thing that people do.
They hold on to their ideas even after their ideas have kicked them in the head.
If you have ever tried to give a self-destructive person advice, which is most of us are self-destructive in some way, and if you've ever tried to say to people, you know, you're driving that car into a wall, you might want to point it somewhere else.
You'll always get the same response.
Well, I can't do that, but how else can I avoid a collision?
You go, no, if you're driving into the wall, you're going to collide with the wall.
You've got to stop doing it.
Well, no, I don't like that solution.
I'm going to keep doing this because this is what I'm doing.
But maybe you can give me some other suggestion of how I can drive into the wall without hitting the wall.
And, you know, it's like if you've ever seen that YouTube video of the woman with the nail in her head, you know, I don't want to take the nail out of my head, but how do I get rid of this headache?
So I was generalizing, but still, the point remains, it's very, very difficult for people to change their minds and to change their lives and to change the things they're doing, especially those things that are destroying them.
I got to stop there, which means, speaking of destruction, it is now upon you.
It has now come down on you like a black wave, a wave of emptiness, which we call the Clavenless Week, will now sweep you out into a sea of emptiness and the chance of your ever getting back to shore, minimal.
Difficult Paths to Change00:01:19
But if you do, I will be here next Friday and we will talk again.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show, and I'm Andrew Klavan.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon, supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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