Invasion of the Swamp Rats dissects the Mar-a-Lago raid as a DOJ power grab—Judge Bruce Reinhardt (Epstein-linked) signs a warrant for a horse-head stunt, Garland admits "bipartisan" corruption, and FBI agents mock their own raids. Legal analyst Andy McCarthy warns Trump’s indictment risks pretextual charges like "conspiracy to defraud," while the host frames it as a civil-war-level assault on democracy. Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80B IRS expansion targets small businesses, and QAnon-linked groups call for violence, exposing deepening polarization. The episode ties systemic corruption to Trump’s populist resistance, ending with dark humor about "Clavenless Week" amid spiritual and legal chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
The FBI has opened an investigation into one of America's most corrupt criminal operations, the FBI.
Speaking from his poker game at the FBI's cafeteria and social club, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's capo de tutti cappy Christopher Wray made the announcement to several of the Bureau's special agents and other made men.
Write the family sit-down he was shocked to learn how corrupt he was and that he was planning to start investigating himself immediately.
The special agents responded to the comment by chuckling darkly and then continued counting the quarters they'd stolen from local parking meters, making sure to put aside 10% for the mysterious figure known only as the big guy.
The announcement came after agents from the Federal Bureau, now known simply as the Outfit, broke into Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, executing a warrant signed by Judge Bruce Reinhardt, a former attorney for cronies of Jeffrey Epstein.
They said the warrant gave the FBI agents legal authority to leave the severed head of a horse in the former president's bed, and also to search for like documents or whatever.
Corrupt Attorney General and FBI consigliary Merrick Garland, in remarks caught on a federal wiretap, said, quote, corruption at the Department of Justice has now risen to the highest level, and believe me, I should know.
I thought when I labeled concerned parents domestic terrorists, I couldn't get any lower, but I continually surprise myself by entering ever more degrading depths of political malfeasance.
Fortunately, the public can trust me to investigate my complete dishonesty in an unprejudiced and bipartisan manner.
I've already ordered SWAT teams to raid the homes of several Republicans at 3 in the morning and issued subpoenas to Democrats in the form of those cute punch bowl invites where you click on the envelope and it opens right there on your computer screen, unquote.
White House spokeswoman Karine the Lip Jean-Pierre, whose aliases also include Mama Malarkey, The Big Lie, and Lady Orwell, said the raid on Mar-a-Lago was a joint operation carried out by all of the FBI's five families and that she'd never heard of it and had no knowledge of it and pled the Fifth Amendment and demanded to enter witness protection.
The Lip went on to say that agents were empowered by Judge Reinhart's warrant to crack open the former president's safe and make sure none of the incriminating documents they'd brought with them were discovered inside.
Then they were permitted to go into Melania's closets so they could examine her lingerie and tell Judge Reinhart what it felt like and especially how it smelled.
Commenting on the raid to the 15-year-old girl who was giving him a massage, Judge Reinhart said, quote, this warrant is one of the most despicable abuses of power I have ever committed in my long years as a defender of pimps and child molesters.
I let Trump's political opponents invade his home over some nonsense about the federal archives, whose classified documents have been missing ever since Hillary Clinton wiped her private cell phones with bleach and then destroyed them with a hammer in what then FBI boss James Comey called an act of carelessness.
I can't wait to uncover what a complete political puppet I am.
Why, if Jeffrey Epstein hadn't hanged himself in prison just at the moment when every security camera happened to be turned off and his guards happened to have wandered away, I'd probably be under indictment already.
I plan to start investigating myself just as soon as this massage has had a happy ending, unquote.
FBI spokesman Mark McCluskey, still speaking in a hoarse voice after having been shot in the throat by Michael Corleone, says the FBI has suspected itself of wrongdoing ever since they staged a phony investigation into Trump's Russian collusion based on information they knew was false and covered up the fact that President Biden is on the take by burying information they knew was true.
McCluskey said, quote, we in the FBI are in a perfect position to get to the bottom of this because we're at the bottom of this.
And to ensure fairness, we're even handing the investigation over to a special prosecutor, Hunter Biden.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Urgent Writers' Call00:04:53
All right, we are back laughing our way through the civil war brought on by the corruption of the DOJ.
I don't know.
What should we talk about?
What should we talk about?
What's going on this week?
We will talk about the most disastrous administration in memory and how they did the stupidest thing I've ever seen American politicians do.
We'll get Andy McCarthy to help us figure it all out.
This would be an excellent time for you to subscribe to this podcast.
Leave us a five-star review on Apple, wherever you get your podcast.
It was really, really helpful to the show if you do that and we appreciate it.
Also, you can subscribe to my personal YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
If you press that little bell and just keep pressing it, just keep pressing it.
Just wait.
Something really wonderful.
Just don't stop.
Just keep pressing it.
And also, leave a comment.
Leave a comment.
And if your comment is despicable, we will offer you a job with the Department of Justice or we'll read your comment on the air, depending if it's not quite that despicable, we'll read it on the air.
Today's comment is from Brian W.
He says, your writers are on a par with early on Saturday Night Live writers.
Wow, your rants are on point, funny and sad.
Now, I want to read this because I think it's time I introduced my writers, my staff of writers who are on par.
We hear this a lot.
We hear a lot that they are like Saturday Night Live when they were funny and they must have had, you know, I don't know, usually shows like that have 10 or 20 writers.
So let me introduce our writers.
Hi.
I write the show here by myself.
We don't even have engineers.
I'm just sitting here talking.
I just have to hope the microphone is working.
No, there are no writers on the show except me.
So listen, we have urgent stuff to talk about.
And I've debated with myself whether to pause and pitch my book.
And I'm going to do it.
And I'll tell you exactly why.
We on the right are always engaged in the war of the moment.
And right now we've got a real, real battle in our hands with a corrupt and desiccated administration.
They, the left, are always thinking about the future and they're always going after the culture to make sure that the future will be the way they want it to be.
Right now in publishing, you can't publish a book unless one, you're a huge bestseller already, or two, you are woke.
I have friends in the mystery business and the mystery writing business who are now making sure there is woke commentary in their mysteries because they want to get published.
They want to make sure they get published.
If you're a white writer, and I want all writers of all colors and all, and both genders, to be able to publish, but if you're a white male right now, it's very hard to get published.
My new novel, A Strange Habit of Mind, which is the sequel to When Christmas Comes, it's not a political novel.
It is an adventure novel, a crime novel, but it is also a novel that is very much about race and gender in the current world.
And you can bet that it is, woke would not begin to describe it.
It's the opposite of woke.
It is honest and true.
If you pre-order this novel, A Strange Habit of Mind, you will set up the fact that this can now be a series.
And that's important.
You know, it's going to be a top-notch crime series.
Cameron Winter is an excellent character.
This book is going to get really bad reviews if it gets reviewed at all.
It's going to be attacked.
I can promise you it will get attacked.
You're it.
You are the audience.
You are the audience for this novel.
If you buy this book, if you pre-order it, you will give courage to the publisher who will order more copies, which means we can sell more copies, which means we can start to make this into what I want it to be, which is at least a 10-book series.
So please, if you can afford it and if you like this sort of book or you think you might like it or you think you might know someone who likes it, go on Amazon right now and pre-order A Strange Habit of Mind.
It actually matters and you'll love the book.
I promise you will love the book.
You will not say, oh, I bought this book and I don't like it.
You will love it.
So I read this book last year.
It was really shocking about the way they collect information from just about everything you do online.
They collect and they sell your digital footprints and they stitch together detailed profiles, which include your browsing history, online searches and location data.
Then they sell your profile off to a company who delivers you a targeted ad, which I find incredibly creepy.
These same data brokers are also selling your information to the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS.
I don't want the tax man showing up at my door because of some search I did on my phone.
So to mask my digital footprints, I protect myself with ExpressVPN.
It is operating on my computer right now.
One of the easiest ways for brokers to aggregate data and tie it back to you is through your device's unique IP address, which also reveals information about your location.
When you're connected to ExpressVPN, your IP address is hidden.
That makes it much more difficult for data brokers to identify who you are.
Download ExpressVPN on your phone, computer, and even your Wi-Fi router to keep you protected at all times.
It just takes a second.
Make sure your online activity and data is protected with the best VPN money can buy.
Why Jail Is Politicized00:04:00
Visit expressvpn.com slash clavin right now and get three extra months free through my special link.
That's expsvpn.com slash clavin, expressvpn.com slash clavin to learn more.
And you're saying, yes, you spelled express, but how?
Oh, how?
Please tell me how.
Do you spell clavin?
It is K-L-A-V-A-N.
No Ease.
And Clavin, I just make it look this easy.
There are no easing penny backbacks.
So, executing a warrant to enter the home of a former president with guns, chase out his lawyers and search the place, is the single most reckless and stupid thing I have ever seen a political party do.
And if there's a civil war in this country, which God forbid we do not want there to be a civil war, it will have begun with this.
This is enough to start people on that road.
It could be 20 years from now, but when historians write about it, they will start with this stupid, stupid, stupid move.
It's reckless.
And let me talk about why I feel that I have a special authority to talk about this, all right?
More than once, someone has written into either the mailbag or to me personally or somehow gotten their question on the air and said, when is Hillary Clinton going to be brought to justice and sent to jail?
Hillary Clinton is a career criminal.
She has done terrible, terrible things, among them putting classified documents on her private cell phone and then destroying the evidence when the FBI investigated.
As you recall, this was called carelessness by James Comey, and he said doing the job of the Department of Justice.
He announced he was not going, there was not going to be a prosecution, even though that was not for him to decide.
Now they go in and raid.
And so people would say to me, you've written to me and said, when is she going to come to justice?
When are we going to put her in jail?
And I said repeatedly, even though some of you got mad at me, I said, we don't want that to happen.
We do not want our political opponents put in jail.
We don't want to investigate and criminalize our politics.
It is a bad, bad thing to do.
And I'll tell you why in just a minute, but it's for the exact same reason why I've condemned January 6th repeatedly.
Even though you tell me, oh, it was an FBI setup, or yes, it should have been done, or Trump didn't have anything to do with it.
No, Trump didn't announce it, and I've condemned it repeatedly.
Why?
I condemned it because it made us look like exactly what the left, the operatives on the left, say we are.
This is not, okay?
This is not whether we like it or not.
Remember, politics is about things that happen whether we like them or not.
Politics works in a certain way, just like the economy.
The left wants to say, oh, we're going to do the economy this way, but the economy doesn't work that way, so they always ruin the economy.
We have to understand politics is the same way.
It works in certain ways, whether we like it or not.
This is not a country with one side in it.
This is a country with two sides in it, divided down the middle.
There are radicals on both sides and sensible people in the middle on both sides, but it's divided down the middle, right and left.
A reasonable respect for our opponents, our fellow citizens who disagree with us, who aren't radicals, who aren't Nancy Pelosi, who aren't AOC, who aren't corrupt politicians, but are just people who vote Democrat because that's how their fathers voted, or they think it's nicer than voting Republican, why ever they do it, but they're honest, decent, hardworking American people who happen to vote for the other party.
A decent respect for that for them makes it necessary for us to behave in such a way that they don't believe the far left people like Nancy Pelosi and AOC who are telling them that we're monsters and Nazis and fascists and racists and all those things.
I know you think that everybody is like that on the left, but it's not true.
The majority of people on the left are normal people who vote Democrat for the same reason normal people on the right vote Republican, all kinds of different reasons.
I'm a reasonable person.
And when I see the DOJ charge in to the house of a former president, a duly elected president, he was duly elected by the laws of this country.
The Beating of a Hideous Heart00:08:29
There is no excuse for saying he was not the president or that Hillary Clinton secretly won or that Russia colluded with him.
It's all nonsense.
He was a duly elected president.
And when they go in to his house, when they didn't go in to Hillary Clinton's house, when she bleached her phones with bleach bit, a program that wipes her phones and hammered them so that you couldn't get any information, they didn't go in with him.
And then they send armed men to search his house.
Unless he's hiding a literal militia in there, unless he's training a militia to organize the overthrow of the government.
Now they're leaking stuff to the press, which is making Trump laugh.
Oh, he had nuclear papers in there.
Unless he had an actual bomb in there.
This has not been done in the 232 years of this republic.
They shouldn't have done it now.
And I want to make it clear, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
You know, I have problems with him, but I also love some of the stuff he did.
I don't care about Donald Trump.
This has nothing to do with him to do something this reckless, this stupid, this inherently violent in a country so divided and so on edge.
It's an admission, not just of failure, but of utter failure, a desperation to hold on to power long after the justification of your holding that power is way, way gone.
There is a famous Edgar Allan Poe story.
I don't know if people read Poe anymore.
He was a wonderful, wonderful writer, wonderful poet, wonderful short story writer.
And he wrote a very frightening story called The Telltale Heart.
It's a great story.
Here's what it's about.
The narrator is a madman.
He's had an illness, he's gone insane, and he works for as a private secretary, or he somehow lives with this old man.
And this old man has a weird eye.
He has a bulging, a filmy eye.
And the madman, the narrator of this thing, is so terrified of this eye that he decides he's going to kill the old man.
And one day, he sees this guy's eye in the middle of the night, and he smothers the old man and kills him, dismembers his body, and hides it under the floorboards.
Well, the old man screams once before he can kill him, and the neighbors call the police and the police come over.
And the police are interviewing the narrator, the murderer, and the murderer is as cool as he can possibly be.
And he's fooling the police, and the police are totally fooled when suddenly he begins to hear thump, He hears the dead man's heart beating under the floorboards.
And the thump, thump gets louder and louder and louder, thump, thump, thump, thump, until he believes the cops must hear it too.
And they're just making fun of him, pretending to believe him.
And he finally confesses and he tears up the floorboards and he takes out the heart and he says, here it is.
Here is the beating of this hideous heart.
And now, people read this horror story by Edgar Allan Poe and they always say, well, the heartbeat is the sound of his guilt.
And yes, that's true.
But you have to remember, he killed this guy because of that eye staring at him.
So just the fact that he was being seen ignited enough guilt for him to do the murder in the first place.
Something about himself, he hated himself so much that just the prospect of this eye looking at him.
This is Donald Trump is a perfect metaphor for this.
Donald Trump has many flaws.
He made many mistakes, especially in that last year of the presidency when he let Fauci take over and he shut down the economy.
Many mistakes.
He was not a perfect guy, but that's not why he drove the Democrats insane.
He drove the Democrats insane because of the fearlessness with which he pointed out their corruption and their malfeasance when he talked about the things that they did.
Remember, just like the eye staring at this guy and driving him mad, they went mad before Trump had ever done anything.
The steel dossier, the phony dossier that they used to launch that stupid fake hoax investigation into Russian collusion was gathered during the campaign, not afterwards.
He already had driven them insane.
Comey went and briefed him about the steel dossier and all that, the P-tape and all that stuff, all that fake stuff, so that the information could be leaked to the press before Trump took office.
They already knew, before Trump did anything, they already knew that a man like this who said whatever he wanted, who had no break on his tongue, who had no discipline, no political discipline, and wasn't one of them, was going to expose them for what they are, the incredible failures, the incredible creeping state that has taken over our freedoms and essentially nullified our Constitution.
They knew the minute they saw him that he was trouble for them and was getting in the way of that slow, blob-like spread of the deep state.
You know, I have this thesis that I talk about a lot, that a lot of our troubles in this moment are due to the internet, right?
The internet has brought about the spread of information, the democratization of information, so that we can see in front of us how bad our leaders are, how self-interested they are, how unwedded to the Constitution that they've sworn to protect.
They are.
We can see them now.
We can see their failures.
We can see all the bad things they've done.
And they want it to stop.
They want to censor us on Twitter, on Facebook, everything.
They want the control of information back so we can't see what they were doing.
And Trump was the end of that.
Trump just said, I'm going to say everything.
The press is corrupt.
I'm not going to pretend they're not corrupt.
I'm not going to pretend that they're not left-wingers, left-wing activists pretending to be journalists.
I'm going to say what has to be said.
The great society that the Democrats love and they feed off, they feed off those welfare programs and that money, it has failed to elevate the underclass.
And now when they call us racist, we say, no, no, it's you.
You did this.
You destroyed the black family.
You addicted people to welfare.
You're the people who keep people down if they don't have the natural get up and go to work their way out of poverty.
You are the ones who have crushed them over your crappy welfare programs that you feed off of, that you buy votes with.
You're the ones who addicted them to this.
Not just black people, white people too.
Poor whites too are also have had their families destroyed by this stuff.
When you close the schools because you were kowtowing to your corrupt teachers unions, parents could actually watch those same corrupt teachers corrupting their children with their sexual perversion.
And when they complained about it, those same corrupt unions complained to the DOJ and instantly, instantly, Merrick Garland said, oh yeah, we'll investigate them and see if they're terrorists, see if mom and dad are terrorists.
We've seen Anthony Fauci lie in real time.
It's all right there.
And they want that hideous eye that is watching them to go away.
And now that they have chased Trump out of power, now that they have gotten Trump out of power, he is like the sound of the telltale heart.
They hear him coming back.
They're so afraid of him.
They see the people he's endorsing rising and they want him to stop.
It's like, you know, the story is thump, thump, thump, thump.
It's Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
That's all they hear.
And they've made this terrible, terrible mistake that something would happen in Argentina, something that would happen in a two-bit dictatorship where one party raids the other party.
And again, remember, when you said, oh, they should do this to Hillary Clinton, I said, no, that is not how we operate.
We have our arguments at the ballot box and we settle them by voting, not by criminalizing the police.
But the Democrats can't stand it because they fail at everything and we can see them.
And Trump says that they fail and he says that they lie and they cannot stand the beating of that hideous heart, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
They can't stand it.
Trump, of course, seized on this immediately for a fundraiser.
And here is a video he put out talking about what he felt about the country.
This is cut seven.
We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil.
We're a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers and American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.
We are a nation that allowed Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and it will only get worse.
We're a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before.
We've never seen anything like this.
We're a nation that no longer has a free and fair press.
Fake news is about all you get.
We're a nation where free speech is no longer allowed, where crime is rampant like never before, where the economy has been collapsing, where more people died of COVID in 2021 than in 2020.
Now you can say anything you want about that ad.
Why We Lost Our Press Freedom00:15:30
You can say it's cynical.
You can say he's raising money.
You can say he's being opportunistic.
But there's one thing you can't say about that ad.
You can't say it's untrue.
It is all true.
These guys have ruined everything they touch.
They have abused their power.
They've abused it in the press.
The press is full of liars.
The press is just as corrupt as the administration is.
The internet has exposed them and they feel themselves losing their grasp on power.
This is an aging, sclerotic regime that feels its power slipping away.
And all they hear when they look at Donald Trump is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
He's coming to get them.
And now they have made a stupid, stupid, reckless, violent mistake.
This is a dumb thing to do.
And again, I don't care what Trump has done.
I don't care whether he's broken the law.
I don't care whether he has classified papers.
This is not the way we deal with this in this country, but it is now.
And that's on them.
So I had a great vacation this summer.
I know a lot of people are vacationing because I see them pouring into the airports.
The airports are packed.
When you travel, you want to be able to rest easy, and you can do that with the protection of Ring Alarm.
Ring Alarm is an award-winning home security system with available professional monitoring when you subscribe.
Easy to install.
You can do it yourself.
And Ring has further changed the home security game with Ring Alarm Pro.
When you go pro, you get full home security.
And all you have to do is subscribe to Ring Protect Pro to get that professional monitoring.
Ring Alarm Pro combines a security system with a fast Euro Wi-Fi 6 router for home security and network security in one device.
This summer, whether you're across the country or across town, you'll know everything at home is protected and connected and it will stay that way with a Ring Protect Pro subscription.
It's an amazing deal.
You get that professional monitoring for the ultimate peace of mind.
This busy summer season, protect your home, GoPro with Ring Alarm Pro.
Learn more at ring.com forward slash clavin.
That's ring.com forward slash clavin.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, how do you spell clavin?
Here's what you do.
Take your ring doorbell.
When somebody comes to the door, say, how do you spell clavin?
if they know, set off the alarm.
So corrupt Attorney General Merrick Garland obviously did this pressured by the left.
base.
The president says, oh, I had nothing to do with this.
He did.
That's a lie.
For a while, they were leaking that Merrick Garland didn't know anything himself didn't know anything about it.
But then Garland came out and he made this play because people are genuinely upset.
Half the country is looking at this and saying, hold on here.
What are you talking about?
What could he have done?
Michael Knowles tweeted, if he has severed heads in his refrigerator, maybe it's justified.
Maybe, maybe.
But this leak, this stupid leak they put to the Washington Post, well, he might have nuclear weapons.
So Merrick Garland made this play, I guess it was last night, Thursday night, where he said, yes, he knew about it, and here's what he had to say, Cut 14.
Just now, the Justice Department has filed a motion in the Southern District of Florida to unseal a search warrant and property receipt relating to a court-approved search that the FBI conducted earlier this week.
That search was a premises located in Florida belonging to the former president.
The department did not make any public statements on the day of the search.
The former president publicly confirmed the search that evening, as is his right.
The department filed the motion to make public the warrant and receipt in light of the former president's public confirmation of the search, the surrounding circumstances, and the substantial public interest in this matter.
I personally approve the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter.
So this is a political move by Merrick Garland because he's come in under heat, right?
So you can have a warrant, a warrant's like an indictment.
An indictment, they say you can indict a ham sandwich.
An indictment, you can charge somebody with anything you want.
With a warrant, you can say, I'm searching for anything you want.
You may have to get a judge to sign off on it, but that doesn't mean the Department of Justice can't find a judge to do that.
So they can say, we're looking for a body.
So what they were obviously hoping here was that Trump would say, no, I don't want to release the warrant because I don't want people to see what I've got stored away at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump, of course, was too smart for that, said, release it, please.
I demand that you release it right away.
Garland kind of said, took issue with the fact that people were calling the DOGJ corrupt or political, but we know they are.
We know they are.
I mean, we know the FBI filed fake FISA information to get a warrant to tap Carter Page's phone.
We know that they pushed the Russian collusion.
We know that they buried Hunter Biden information so it was harder to investigate, harder to classify it.
We know this thing with the unions, the teachers' unions basically demanded that they investigate the mom and dad for saying, hey, could you not queer our children, please?
And they did it like that within hours.
They said, oh, yeah, we'll investigate them as terrorists.
We know they're corrupt.
We know that DOJ that Garland is a bad guy.
I mean, it's not like we suspect him.
We know that he is a political puppet.
He is a political instrument and is willing to use the Department of Justice for his own political goals.
Anybody who says that we're being nasty, I saw in Fox, I can't remember who they were interviewing.
Somebody said, well, I thought Republicans were supposed to back the blue.
We don't back corrupt cops.
I mean, we don't, yeah, we don't bad cops.
That's the whole point.
We believe most cops are really good.
We're the first people to say, no, this cop stepped out of line.
We don't support cops blindly.
It's a stupid question.
And the FBI has just covered itself in shame these last six years.
I mean, it has been now six years of the FBI.
And you know, for a long time, I've been saying it's not the rank and file, it's the brass.
I'm sure that's mostly true, but I don't see a lot of rank and file quitting or resigning in protest either.
So I don't know how deep this goes, but this is really bad.
All right.
Now, the Republicans are calling for answers.
They're calling for an investigation.
But this is all kinds of Republicans.
This is not just radical Republicans.
Dan Henninger, I like to joke about Dan Henninger.
He's a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
And I like to joke about him that he is the avatar of the establishment.
It's like if you were, they used to say the Episcopal Church was the Republican Party at prayer.
He would be the avatar of that.
He would be the incarnation of that.
He's an establishment Republican.
You know, that's kind of where he stands.
He wrote a column yesterday saying, forgive me for not spending more than a moment on the legal niceties of this event, the applicability of the Presidential Records Act, that it had to be about something big, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They're all beside the point.
You can hate Donald Trump until your eyes pop out, but let us be clear, he was elected the 45th president of the U.S.
No former president who was disliked by many, not Clinton, not Reagan, not FDR, had his home invaded by a squad of FBI agents.
This should never happen in the U.S. End of discussion.
That is a Wall Street Journal columnist, not a radical, okay?
So half the country is feeling pretty much this way, at least.
And wise Democrats should feel this way too.
I don't know if they do, but they should.
Now, here is how the press is reporting Republican objections.
This is cut to sources tell ABC News there's been a strong reaction to the raid on extremist and QAnon-related forums.
Sources say there's been a strong reaction to the raid on extremist and QAnon-related forums.
Sources also telling ABC News there's been a strong reaction from some extreme groups online, including QAnon and other groups.
There has been a strong reaction to the raid on extremist and QAnon-related forums, including those that were active before January 6th.
Including those that were active prior to January 6th.
Including those that were active prior to January 6th.
Involved in the January 6th insurrections.
Including those that were active prior to the January 6th riot.
Some have been calling for violence and even a civil war.
Some of them include calls for violence and even a civil war.
Some of them include calls for violence in online forums and even civil war.
This was the top comment on this search on the pro-Trump site, McDonald, last night.
Quote, lock and load with references to a civil war.
Talking very violently about civil war.
Searches for civil war.
Spikes.
They're talking about civil war.
Civil war.
Silver war.
Civil war.
It's Pravda.
It's provided.
It's regime media.
It's regime media.
That's what it is.
I mean, it is unbelievable that these guys haven't got the self-respect to look at that leak and say, oh, we're being used.
I mean, just a simple self-respect to look in the mirror and say, I'm not going to be used by the DOJ.
That's ridiculous.
I'm not going to demonize half my country.
I'm not going to demonize half my country by calling them violent and associating them with QAnon and militias and all that stuff.
I mean, that's essentially what they're saying.
You know, it's amazing, it's amazing that they haven't got the simple journalistic self-respect, say, I'm not going to be used that way or to make fun of it or just throw it away.
I mean, it's a fake leak.
The Washington Post leaking this nuclear codes story, which is utterly absurd.
Even Trump is making fun of that.
You know, so now you're a violent radical criminal if you think that for the first time in 232 years, the DOJ raids a former president's home when we've had a lot of former presidents.
Some of them have been dishonest, some of them have been despised.
It's never happened before.
And you're some kind of radical.
Have you agreed with Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal that this should never, ever, ever, ever happen?
Who do they think trusts the DOJ and the FBI at this point?
Well, I'll tell you one person who does, Stephen Colbert.
Stephen Colbert, you want to see the quality of stupidity.
You know, this actually, this clip says a lot.
Here's Stephen Colbert's reaction on CBS.
It may be hot outside, but in here, it's Christmas.
Because yesterday, we all got the present we wanted.
FBI agents rated Mar-Lago.
Oh!
Oh!
Woo!
That's the most beautiful sentence America has ever produced.
It's right up there with we put cheese inside the crusts.
So this wicked, stupid, abusive little man, right, who makes millions of dollars and tells you you should be buying a Tesla like he does if you're complaining about high gas prices.
That's literally what he says, right?
This is the guy who told us that Halloween was like socialism because you have candy and the kids want the candy, so they come and you give them some candy.
It's just like socialism.
They left out the guns that the socialists come with.
This little twisted punk has a fantasy.
What's his fantasy?
What does he think is going to happen?
What does he think is going to happen if in fact violence does result?
If in fact half the country is alienated now from the Department of Justice, what does he think is going to happen?
Oh, we'll just arrest him.
That'll be great.
We'll just criminalize half the country.
What does he think that's going to actually look like?
Is he so rich that he thinks he won't be touched by that?
Is he so rich that he doesn't care about this country anymore?
I mean, a little respect.
You know, I've said a million times, you've heard me say a million times, that the activists are not the people.
The gay activists aren't the gays, the black activists aren't the blacks.
The leftist activists aren't the Democrats.
There are plenty of decent people on the left, on the leftist center, who are not AOC.
You've heard me say it again and again because I have a respect for my fellow citizens in the greatest country on earth that has ever been on earth, but not Stephen Colbert.
And here's why this is important.
Stephen Colbert's ratings are basically even with Greg Guttfeld's on Fox.
Fox is a cable channel.
CBS is a network.
The networks have like 10 times the ratings of a cable, 10 times the capability of getting ratings than a cable station, even Fox, a powerful cable station.
Greg Guttfeld is competing with Stephen Colbert because that's how low Stephen Colbert is, because he doesn't give a damn about anybody but his own corporate interests, his own rich boy interests, his own rich little white man interests with his Tesla.
He doesn't care about anybody else.
And CBS says, well, that's our audience then.
That's our audience.
We don't care about the other people.
They're deplorable anyway.
You know, it's a basket of deplorables.
Why would we play to them?
That is the kind of solidity, the monoculture that goes from the deep state to the elected officials below them to the corporate powers that be to Hollywood, to the publishing industry, to all these people that you hear me saying, you know, like that people like me are the counterculture, that people like me are having a hard time breaking through that if you don't show up for us, there's nobody there for us because this is how powerful they are.
All of those guys, they don't care about you.
They do not care.
They don't care you're not going to watch CBS.
Oh, we get the same ratings as Fox, Greg Gutphel and Fox, Stephen Colbert.
We don't care because we're the power.
We are the power.
We serve the powerful.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
They hate you because you see them and they know they failed.
You know, inflation rose, I guess, at 8.5% in July, which is a little better than it was.
It was down from like 9.1% a month before.
So it's trending.
That was a good thing.
It's still hugely high, but it's no longer at a 40-year high, okay?
Now, that means that they can parse it by saying, well, it's 0% inflation because if you balance out the different price points, but you're still paying a ton for gas.
Gas has dropped a little bit.
You're still paying a ton for food.
You're still having to, you know, curtail your activities.
This is how Biden announced this 8.5% price increases, cut 10.
I just want to say a number.
Zero.
Today, we received news that our economy had 0% inflation in the month of July.
0%.
Here's what that means.
While the price of some things go up, went up last month.
The price of other things went down by the same amount.
The result, zero inflation last month.
But people are still hurting with zero inflation last month.
8.5% inflation.
He says zero inflation.
Real hourly earnings are down 3% in the past year because your inflation goes up.
You don't just get a raise.
You don't just get a cost of living raise.
So your earnings have gone down 3%.
Since a year ago, that's a 3.6% drop in real weekly pay for the average American.
Here's Biden on that.
13.
First, the economic plan is working.
Second, it's building an economy that will reward work.
Wages are up this month, provide opportunity, help the middle class, and still have work to do, but we're on track.
See, all of this works because if ABC is lying to you about, you know, just publishing any leak the DOJ wants to put out, just publishing anything, it all works if Stephen Colbert is the only TV guy in the country.
But because of the internet, we've eaten away at that.
So of course they got to shut us down.
Don't say a man can't be a woman on Twitter.
Emergency Food Prep00:02:23
Then you're a hateful.
Don't say groomer just because we're grooming children sexually.
Don't say, don't call us groomers just because we're groomers.
If they can just keep shutting you down.
Ultimately, this didn't work when they invented the printing press and the Catholic Church tried to shut down the spread of information that was causing the Reformation.
Didn't work then.
It's not going to work now, but it can cause a lot of bloodshed in between.
These guys know you see them.
They know you see them.
And Donald Trump is the ultimate proof that you see them because we wouldn't vote for a man like Donald Trump if anybody else were willing to tell the truth openly and stand up to the press the way he does.
You know, we would get a much more statesmanlike person if anybody else on the Republican side were fighting the fights that Donald Trump is fighting.
Of course they're afraid of him.
They've made a terrible, terrible mistake.
You know, it's just, and it's embarrassing.
It's embarrassing.
But we see them.
We see them and they've got to make that stop.
So we're living in a moment when some of the craziest scenarios seem to becoming very, very realistic.
The food supply chain is hampered.
An article that just came out from Business Insider says we're in a global food crisis that will wreak havoc on local economies and trigger civil unrest.
You know, you don't need actually that kind of terrible emergency.
Even just a flood or a storm can make it so you need to get your own food.
That's a reason to stock up on emergency food, which is why I'm happy about a deal I've made with my Patriot Supply.
You save $250 on their ready hour three-month emergency food kit when you go to preparewithclavin.com.
This ready-hour food kit from MyPatriot Supply is specially packaged to stay fresh for up to 25 years and it gives you over 2,000 calories a day.
These kits are in stock.
They ship fast with free shipping.
When you're ready for real preparedness, make sure to look for ready hour foods from my Patriot supply.
Go to preparewithclavin.com and save $250, the emergency food kit you're going to need.
PrepareWithClavin.com.
And in an emergency, one thing you have to know is how you spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no ways in Freddy.
So you've probably heard me say many times that Andy McCarthy, Andrew McCarthy, is the gold standard when it comes to legal commentary.
And the reason I keep saying that is because Andrew McCarthy is the gold standard when it comes to legal commentary.
Indicted And Lied00:15:26
His take on what is going on in the legal world is always incredibly incisive and fair right down the middle.
He is a former federal prosecutor and a contributing editor at National Review and a terrific writer.
Andy, thank you so much for coming on.
It's really good to talk to you.
Drew, it's my pleasure.
Great to be with you.
So I can't help noticing that for 230 some odd years, nobody raided the home of a former president or sent armed officers in to search the home of a former president, and then they did.
What the hell is going on?
Well, I guess we have a little more clarity because we've seen now that there's reporting that we're going to get this warrant if we haven't gotten it already, as we're speaking now.
It's been described in the media.
It looks like there's a good bit of classified information that was, or at least whether it's still classified is going to be a big issue, obviously, because we're dealing, as it would come to my attention if I were trying to prosecute this case, we're dealing with the one, my suspect happens to be the one official in the United States government who can declassify anything he wants to declassify.
So whether it's in fact classified information or not is an issue.
But, you know, I've gotten in trouble, Drew, with using the word pretextual.
Apparently, there's a whole glossary of things we're not allowed to say.
We can't say raid.
We can't say spy.
So pretextual, I'm learning, is another one of these loaded words.
I think that they are mainly trying to make a case on Trump related to January 6th.
And I think if you look at the timeline of what they've done in the six weeks in which this Mar-a-Lago search is included, that becomes clear.
But when I say they have a closet agenda that's more important than what they're ostensibly doing, that does not mean I'm saying that they either lied to the court or that the classified information is unimportant to them.
I just think they wanted a reason to get into Trump's residence and root around for things that might be helpful to them while they're frenetically trying to make a January 6th case.
So if the judge says, yes, classified information justifies a search, and they go in looking and have a list of classified documents, they can also look at Melania's underwear and anything else they want.
Well, you know, everybody does hide evidence of crime in Melania's underwear.
You hadn't heard.
So here's the way the law works.
What you have to have in order to lawfully enter somebody's premises is probable cause of a crime and probable cause that evidence of the crime will be in the place you seek to search.
That's what you need to get a warrant to enter somebody's home.
So if you have evidence of a crime and evidence that the evidence, I'm sorry, probable cause of the crime and that the evidence will be there, that gets you in the door.
Then what the law says is if law enforcement people are legitimately on the premises conducting a search and they see other information that is obviously criminal, even though it is outside the parameters, the four corners of the warrant's permission, you know, what the judges said you could look for, they're not required to turn a blind eye to it.
They can grab it and seize it.
So My best example of this, Drew, is let's say I have a notorious robbery that's been committed in my jurisdiction, and I have a suspect in mind.
I'm not sure if he did it, but I'm dead certain that he's a small-time drug dealer.
I write a warrant for narcotics trafficking because I know if the agents go in and they find a gun and a screwdriver and a mask all wrapped up in a bag, they can take that because it's obvious evidence of a crime.
Whereas, by the way, if I wrote the warrant and I guessed that I would find the robbery tools in there, and it turned out the agents didn't find them, then I'd have to sit in court during the trial and hear a defense lawyer say, isn't it a fact that you told the court you were going to find all this evidence of burglary?
And what happened?
You didn't find anything, right?
So that's the rule.
Basically, if they're in the place legitimately and they see something that's obviously criminal, they can take it.
But, you know, it's got to be obviously criminal.
And not everything is.
You know, it's one thing to say if you find a gun with an obliterated serial number or you find a pile of heroin on the table.
That's, you know, pretty obvious.
Documents are another matter.
And I think that's probably why we've heard so much about this Presidential Records Act, which is kind of enmeshed in the public discussion of the classified information.
But I think it's important that we separate it out because the way the media has covered this, I think people don't realize this.
The Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute.
You can't get a search warrant for a violation of the Presidential Records Act because to get a search warrant, you need probable cause of a crime.
You know, in our system, we don't think it's important enough to use the intrusive method of a search warrant unless you've actually done something so serious that we punish it under the criminal law.
So your theory is that what they're really looking for is not classified documents, is something to do with January 6th.
What could they find that would be important to them about January 6th?
Yeah, just to be clear, I have no doubt that they're interested in taking back the classified information, but I think they're going to have some time proving that Trump didn't declassify it.
But putting that on the side, it seems to me that watching the 9-11, the, not the 9-11 committee, the January 6th committee, watching them do their Docudrama series this summer, got the left very agitated that Attorney General Garland wasn't doing enough and being aggressive enough on the Trump prosecution,
which they don't understand why Trump hasn't been drawn and quartered yesterday.
So they don't understand why Garland hasn't indicted him yet.
And what the January 6th committee is homing in on, which I can tell now that the Justice Department is homing in on, is this theory, Drew, that Trump and those around him were engaged in two conspiracies.
One to obstruct the congressional count of electoral votes.
And the second one, which is a really kind of insidious statute, is conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Now, when you hear the word defraud, I think when Congress first eons ago enacted this statute, what they meant was what we ordinarily think of as fraud, which is stealing money.
But in the 20th century, the Supreme Court put a lot of elasticity in this statute.
And it basically allows you to prosecute any scheme or any deceptive scheme that would frustrate the government from performing one of its proper tasks, which is a lot of room for prosecutors to criminalize stuff that, frankly, Congress hasn't gotten around to criminalizing, right?
So I think what they're going to articulate as a conspiracy against the United States is a scheme to undermine the state certification of electoral votes and therefore frustrate Congress's ability to count state-certified electoral votes.
Wow.
I mean, that to me, you know, the fact that this has never been done before seems to me to raise the bar.
Let me ask you this.
You've always been really circumspect about your comments of people, the actual people in the DOJ and the FBI.
You've worked with a lot of people.
You've known a lot of these people, and you've always sort of given them the benefit of the doubt.
At this point, the FBI seems to have run a case, an investigation of Donald Trump based on information from the Steele dossier they knew was false.
They seem to have covered up Hunter Biden information that they knew was true.
At least some of them have done that.
They lied to the FISA court to get a warrant to tap Carter Page's phone.
They investigated the PTA.
I mean, they investigated parents as if they were domestic terrorists because they don't want their kids taught that they're the wrong gender.
At this point, do you look at this DOJ and think that the people are justified in at least feeling suspect that it's a political arm of the administration?
Oh, yeah, I think they've lost the benefit of the doubt.
I've argued that I think the National Security Mission should be taken away from them, foreign counterintelligence mission, because I think it's changed the culture of the Bureau, which was a pretty good law enforcement outfit.
But I think the culture of things got changed.
I don't think anybody meant to do this, but I think when we had the wave of jihadism starting in the 90s, the Bureau and the Justice Department derivatively became more like an intelligence agency than a police force.
And they're not only different skills, they're different protocols.
I mean, this, you know, the thing with FISA is a good example.
You go to get a FISA warrant like the Carter Page warrant that you just talked about.
If you lie to the court, no one's ever going to find out about that.
If the court doesn't catch you, that's all classified.
It's never going to, you know, you're not like trying to build a criminal case.
You're just trying to monitor, right?
So the only due process a person ever gets is does the FBI and the Justice Department tell the truth to the court?
And if they get it by the court, then they can do whatever they want, right?
In the criminal justice system, we hope we get honorable people as prosecutors and police, but we don't bank on it.
So what keeps people honest is the fact that you know your work is going to be checked.
Like when I go for a criminal search warrant, if I lie to the court, I have to turn that over in discovery once I bring a case.
So I know the defense lawyers are going to be poring over it and the defense investigators are going to be pouring over it.
And if I have done a shoddy job or if I've lied to the court, that's going to be found out.
And when people know that they're going to be caught when they do bad stuff, they tend to not do bad stuff.
Whereas, you know, in the Pfizer system, that's not how it works.
So, you know, I think in this national security stuff where everything is classified, you start to get this way of thinking that your efforts to protect the country are much more important than those little rules that we deal with in the criminal justice system, you know, the constitutional protection, because I'm here to protect the country.
I'm here to, you know, to save mankind.
And I do think that is not a healthy mindset to be in on the police side.
So if I could do, you know, you always, it's easy to describe these problems.
And by the way, Drew, it's not just you and me describing it, right?
The Justice Department's Inspector General has written hundreds of pages of reports on FISA abuse by the FBI.
The FISA court has condemned the FBI for systematic abuse of FISA.
So this is not just like, you know, right-wing guys railing about the FBI.
Actually, the FBI used to be a lot more popular among the right-wing than it was among the other side.
But I think that I don't think anyone intended for this to happen.
You know, we all thought that terrorism was the most important thing we were dealing with because it was in that point in time.
And we thought a lot about how wise is it from a national security standpoint to treat terrorism as a criminal problem.
But what I don't think we spent enough time thinking about was what does treating terrorism as a criminal problem do to the quality of justice in the criminal justice system?
And I think that 30-year experiment, unfortunately, has not turned out well.
There's a really interesting point.
You know, when you talk about finding evidence that Trump wanted to overturn the election, I mean, you could just ask him, he'd tell you that.
It seems to me that when you send armed men into a former president's home, it really does stink of like a tinpot dictatorship.
What is the idea?
I mean, wouldn't they have to find something of incredibly grotesque illegality to soothe the minds of the half of the electorate that voted for Donald Trump, that made him president of the United States?
I mean, what could their, in their imaginations, in Merrick Garland's imagination, what could he possibly be thinking could be a good outcome of this?
I mean, it seems to me like he's throwing a match into a tinderbox.
Yeah, but you know, I wonder how much people think what's a good come, Drew, because I knew Merrick Garland in the 90s when I was doing terrorism cases.
I thought he was a really good guy.
I mean, I thought he was like the adult in the room in the Clinton Justice Department.
He was a real strong law enforcement guy.
He's a leftist center guy, but as far as law and order was concerned, that stuff doesn't generally matter.
And I thought he was a very solid institutionalist as far as the Justice Department was concerned.
So the reason I say that is the Merrick Garland I know, if an agent or a prosecutor came into him and said, you know what I think we ought to do?
I think we ought to send the FBI out to investigate America's parents because this whole thing of dissenting about the woke stuff in the curricula, I think they seem like domestic terrorists to me.
The Merrick Garland I used to know would have looked at that person like he had three heads and said, what are you crazy?
Are you nuts?
And yet the Merrick Garland, who runs the Justice Department, did it.
So to my mind, there's what they know is a good or a bad idea, and then there's what they do because they're under pressure from the Democratic base.
And what I keep hoping is that a lot of this stuff that Garland is doing is as bad as I think it is, is mainly theatrical, and that when push comes to shove, they won't actually file these charges, which would take the country, I think, to a not good place.
But if you ask me, you know, do I think that Trump's going to be indicted?
I would say seven chances in 10, he's going to be indicted.
Really?
And I don't think it's over.
And I don't think it's over the, I mean, they may add classified information charges now that they've done this, but I think they are gunning to get him and Eastman.
And I don't like saying this because I know a lot of these guys, but they're trying to make a case on these guys on January 6th.
Three Year Penalty Disqualification00:02:05
Does that prevent Trump from running for office?
Because I think it would get him elected.
Nope.
It doesn't.
No.
In fact, one of the more hilarious things that came up this week is they think, in one of these classified information statutes, which is a three-year penalty, one of the provisions in the penalty section is disqualification from holding future office.
Now, that can't apply to Trump because the qualifications for the presidency are set forth in the Constitution.
And by the way, the disqualification for the presidency is set forth in the Constitution too.
To be qualified, you have to be over 35 and a natural-born citizen.
They're very minimal qualifications.
And to be disqualified, you have to be impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted by the Senate.
And disqualification is part of the penalty.
So the black letter law here is that when the Constitution sets forth the conditions, they can't be amended or changed by statute.
You have to amend the Constitution.
But just think about how loopy it would be if you said, you know, if you commit seditious conspiracy or you're a multiple murderer, you're still qualified to be president.
But if you violate this three-year mishandling classified information statute, why we've got you now.
So the whole, I think the whole discussion of it was ridiculous.
So the short answer, now that I've given the long-winded answer, the short answer is Trump can run for president.
He could run for president from prison.
I don't know that people would elect him, but he's not disqualified as a matter of law, although they keep trying to come up with theories why he should be disqualified as a matter of law.
So for someone who has never been in the Justice Department, for someone who's never been in the legal business, for ordinary American, basically, looking at this, there's something truly terrifying about this as they spend $80 billion to increase an IRS and give IRS agents guns, which I love the idea of accountants with guns.
Winning Back The Midterms00:15:28
That's what we need.
You know, it's terrifying.
But it's terrifying.
Are you terrified?
Or do you think like this is a bad turn in the road, but it can be turned back?
I think it's going to take a long time and a lot of commitment to turn it back.
And the reason is, and I think, Drew, this is just like one iteration of something on our side that we have dealt with with progressives for a long time, which is that progressives,
they obviously like to have people who are progressives in power, but what they really like is the instrumentalities of government to further their cause, whatever instrumentality they control at the moment and is ready to hand.
And it's hard to imagine a more powerful instrumentality than the legal system.
So I think, you know, on our side, we would like to see a more robust Bill of Rights and a more robust commitment to liberty.
But we're dealing with people who not only think that they know it all and know what the good is, they are more than willing to push the envelope as far as it can be pushed with the procedural levers of government and not just in the criminal justice system,
in every single place where they run an administrative agency of any kind, which is why I think the only way you can really reverse this is you have to strip down the administrative state to something that's much more modest than what we have now.
Wow.
Andy McCarthy writes at National Review, former federal prosecutor, the best legal writing in the country for my money.
Andy, it's great talking to you and thank you very much.
Really interesting.
Drew, hope to see you soon.
Yeah, likewise.
Some states now have laws that say as early as the 2030 model year, new vehicles will have to be electric in order to be registered.
Cars with internal combustion engines will only be able to get license plates if they are built before the end of 2020.
So, what people are going to do is they're going to keep repairing their cars and getting new parts for old cars.
Now, you may say, I don't care about this.
I just want to get a date.
Well, happily, the answer to both problems is the same.
Just say rockauto.com.
First of all, the minute you talk like that, women will come flocking.
And also, you will be able to keep repairing your car for low prices, getting great parts online.
That's why women are so impressed when you say rockauto.com.
It means you know where to go to get the car parts you need online without pretending to drive your broken car to a store that doesn't even exist.
You can get them online with reliably low prices in a very, very easy-to-use catalog.
Go to rockauto.com.
You can get brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, any part you need, and make sure to write Claven in there.
How did you hear about us, Boxer?
They know I sent you, and they know you're just that macho because you say clavinrockauto.com.
To show you how frightened the Democrats are, how unnerved they are by Trump, And again, it's not Trump, it's not Trump personally, it is what he represents.
You know, there's always been, I've always said there are two Donald Trumps: there's Donald Trump the man who is a problematical guy in a lot of ways, and there's Donald Trump the voice of the people, the people who for 50 years have been told their country stinks, they're racist, they're sexist, they're homophobic, their religion stinks, there's no God, they're superstitious.
They've been told that for 50 years by all these guys in suits sitting in air-conditioned offices in New York, talking on microphones that are paid for by corporations.
They've been told this again and again and again.
Trump was their voice, he was the voice of the people saying, You know what?
You actually in Davos saying there shouldn't be, you billionaire sitting in Davos, flying to Davos in your private jets and saying there shouldn't be any ownership so that way people won't be able to vote in a Volkswagen and use up all that gas that we need for our private jets.
You know, nobody was saying that.
Mitt Romney wasn't saying it.
John McCain wasn't saying it.
Trump said it.
He finally came out and said it.
And finally, some people on the right started to understand.
And again, it's not about Trump.
It's about the voice of the people.
That's the voice that's frightening him.
But to show how frightened they are, the Democrats, until this stupid, reckless move, they had a good week.
They had a good week.
They got Joe Manchin.
They bought Joe Manchin and he went over to vote for their stupid anti-inflation bill that is going to, of course, just cause inflation.
But you always know it's each bill on both sides is the opposite of what they call it.
But that was for them a good week.
They could tout, yes, we have ruined the economy, the economy even more.
Things are going to cost more.
We're going to tax you more.
They were going to pump $80 billion, $80 billion into the IRS to hire agents who are supposed to be trained with guns.
They're advertisements, they're wanted advertisements for the guys they're going to hire.
So you have to be able to use deadly force on your fellow Americans.
That's what it really says there.
They're hiring people.
And they're going to be auditing many, many, many more people.
And raising taxes on corporations.
Here's Tim Scott commenting on the effect of this Cut 11.
The CBO, a nonpartisan organization, Congressional Budget Office, says that 90% of the revenue generated from these new IRS agents will come from people making less than $200,000.
Under $200,000 represents 90% of the revenue generated, and the revenue generated is around $300 plus billion dollars.
As a former small business owner, Dana, the one thing I cannot do is be the human resource department, my own legal department, and sell whatever it is I'm trying to sell.
This is a burden that will be headwinds for job growth and for reinvesting in your small business.
I can't think of something less popular than the three letters IRS showing up in your mailbox.
Ridiculous.
So, you know, this is a big win.
It is.
It's a big political win for the Democrats.
They finally put forward their build back better, destroy the economy, wipe out the middle class bill.
And this is what they'll be bragging about.
If they thought you were going to love it, if they thought Donald Trump wasn't going to call it out for what it was, they would not have been raiding Donald Trump's home.
They would not have been doing that if they thought that they could get away with this without being called out.
If there were no internet, if they could count on ABC and NBC and CBS to be the only voices you heard, believe me, they would just be banging the drum saying how wonderful this bill is.
This bill actually includes a 15% minimum tax on corporations.
So those stupid, you know, it's unbelievable how stupid socialists are.
We'll sit around going, yeah, well, tax 15%, tax the corporations 15%.
How come my iPhone costs 15% more?
I don't understand.
Because corporations don't pay taxes.
You pay the taxes when you buy their products whose prices have gone up, adding to inflation.
That's what's going to happen, but still a win for the Democrats.
They could have lived with it if they didn't know we were going to expose it on the internet, which they hate.
If they didn't think that was there, if they thought they could have silenced Trump by just excluding him like they did at Twitter and Facebook, if they thought they could keep him down and keep him quiet, they would not be raiding his home at all.
Believe me, they wouldn't have to.
So the midterms are coming, and there are two takes on this.
One is that we're going to wipe the floor with them.
The other is there are people who are sounding a warning sign.
I want to read you two different takes about the upcoming midterms.
First, there was Democrat pollster, Mark Penn.
He's a Democrat.
Whether you can trust his polls or not, I have no idea.
But he is saying that Biden's job approval is at a historic low, but the Democrats still get 50% of the generic congressional ballot.
So in other words, people are willing to vote for their Democrat congressmen, even though they hate Joe Biden.
He says 18% disapprove of Mr. Biden's performance, yet plan to vote Democratic in November.
And a closer look at this group could prove useful to both parties in the election.
Now, so he's saying the midterms are still up for grabs.
And there are a lot of people saying this, actually.
The Wall Street Journal is taking the tack that the fact that Donald Trump is endorsing and helping to victory in the primaries untried candidates.
And he's choosing them by whether or not they agree that the election was stolen, whether they will back him in his claim that the election is stolen.
And they say that this is increasing the chances that Republicans will lose because these are inexperienced people with what to the Wall Street Journal are far out beliefs, namely the belief that the election was stolen.
He says, in Arizona, current Governor Doug Doocy would have been the strongest GOP Senate candidate, but Mr. Trump vowed to defeat Mr. Dooshi if he ran after the government refused to help overturn the former president's 2020 defeat in the state.
Governors Larry Hogan in Maryland and Chris Sununu in New Hampshire would also have had to navigate Mr. Trump's vendetta politics, and they also chose not to run despite entreaties from current GOP Senate leaders.
The Republican Senate winner in Arizona was venture capitalist Blake Masters, a novice candidate who won Mr. Trump's endorsement after he backed the former president's stolen election claims.
This backward-looking focus won't help with swing voters in November.
Now, I've interviewed Blake Masters and I liked him.
I was impressed by him, but I'm just reading you their point.
Mr. Masters is now the underdog to Democratic Senator Mark Kelly.
This follows the pattern of other Trump-blessed Senate nominees who are struggling since their primary victories.
Mehmet Oz is trailing badly in Pennsylvania after a brutal primary campaign, even though Democrat John Fetterman is still recuperating from a stroke.
Republican voters haven't united behind Mr. Oz's candidacy, and defeat would cost the seat now held by retiring Senator Pat Toomey.
In Georgia, Mr. Trump helped to clear the GOP field for Herschel Walker, the football great, but Mr. Walker has never been vetted during a political campaign.
He's trailing incumbent Raphael Warnock in the polls in a state that should be ripe for a GOP sweep this year.
They put out some hate ads, some campaign ads saying he beat his wife or something like this.
Now, I should note, by the way, the Democrats are also pouring money into Trump-backed candidates.
The Democrats are backing them because they think they're too crazy to win.
Here, on the other hand, is my friend Kurt Schlichter.
He was supposed to be on the show today.
I don't know, he got run over by a cement mixer.
He got such a weakling he can't stop, but he'll come back.
He will come back on.
He couldn't come today.
But he wrote this piece saying, don't believe the media senate psych out.
We will win big.
He says, now that most of the Senate races are set, expect the regime media to start up with its newest narrative that we can't win and that the red wave will peter out into flaccid humiliation like a bulwark staffer in the back seat on prom night.
But it's all a lie.
This November, we're going to mop the floor with these losers.
Yes, the Democrats' Zillioneur Corps is flooding the lib candidates' coffers with money.
No, some of our GOP candidates do not meet the exacting standard of the mainstream media and the unsatisfied liberal wine women who watch it, but none is outright awful and money isn't everything.
The 400th head Dr. Oz lived in New Jersey, Fetterman ad is going to cost a fortune to air, but will make no improvement from the 399th to Heart Attack Shrek's chance.
You will hear nothing from the regime media for the next 100 days until the general election, except how the GOP is doomed, dying, and done for.
It's a psyop and a cheesy one, but it's all they've got.
The Democrats know that unless they can disillusion and demoralize us into giving up, they're on the way to the electoral wood chipper.
So Kurt saying all this talk about bad Trump-backed candidates is a psyop.
Don't pay any attention to it.
One last take that I should add, because this is the one closest to mine.
But before I say that, let me say this.
One of these people is right.
Either the journal editorialists are right or Kurt is right.
One of them is right.
And not both.
Trump's candidates may lose because they're too far out, because nobody cares about the last election, because they're too loyal to Trump, because people don't like Trump, or they may win.
We should pay attention to that, and we shouldn't fall away.
If they lose, we shouldn't say, oh, the election was stolen, because then you never learn anything.
This is the way you learn things.
You learn about politics by results.
Results matter.
They matter.
They're like the market.
They're the information that you get that help you do better next time.
And if you're constantly saying, oh, they stole it from me, like the Democrats are constantly saying we stole that election.
Trump stole the election.
Now Trump is saying they stole the election from him.
You never learn what works and what doesn't.
But the one thing that I have to say is true is Gerard Baker wrote this column.
He said, one of the more intriguing themes in this fall's midterm elections pits the appeal of outsider candidates against that of professional politicians.
The question is, how much political experience do you need to lose wars, trigger financial collapses, start recessions, or preside over a civilizational decline?
As Trump said to black people, to black voters, what have we got to lose?
I have to say, I feel that way.
I think bringing in new blood, getting rid of the deep state, bringing in Trumpers can only help if they can win.
If they can win, I think it would be a good thing to get the people who are in there now out where they belong.
All right.
In the old days, I used to advertise Harry's razors.
And I would say to you, hey, millions of listeners, I love Harry's.
Go out and buy one.
But I don't do that anymore because I don't love Harry's.
I hate Harry's.
You know why?
Harry's, when Harry's was advertising on our show, someone, some evil, bigoted, horrible person named Michael Knowles said, boys are boys and girls are girls.
Oh, what a horrible, horrifying.
I was frankly horrified and shocked that anybody would say such a thing.
They said Harry's Razors said to us, they pulled their ads.
They said, this is values misalignment.
We don't believe in that.
Well, we're not going to promote products that hate. our values or hate your values.
So we did the only thing that makes sense.
We launched our own razor company, Jeremy's Razors.
Every Jeremy's Razors kit comes with a premium razor, two sets of blades, shaving cream, an aftershave bomb.
It's what I use when I'm shaving Claven, and it's a beautiful thing.
Over 70,000 kits have shipped already.
Instead of telling you I'm a big fan of Harry's, I'm here to tell you about the thousands of ex-Harry's fans who have literally thrown their razors in the trash and switched to Jeremy's.
Go to ihateHarry's.com and get your Jeremy's Razors founder kit.
He needs the money.
He's living on the street.
And okay, it's a nice street and there's a mansion on it and he's living in the mansion, but still, it's on the street.
So it's time to stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you.
Give it to Jeremy instead.
So this is the part of the show where I usually stop talking about politics and start talking about the arts or religion, the culture, things that actually matter.
And I want to do that now because I think it's in moments like this when there's a lot of political stress.
I think this is the most important time to stop.
This is the most important time to take care of your spiritual health so that you do not let politics chew you up.
You don't get manipulated in your anger.
I always tell you anger is the devil's cocaine.
Politicians on both sides, this is not one side or the other, politicians on both sides are only too willing to manipulate your emotions.
That's why you have to be contained within yourselves.
So I was going to call this segment, how to Christian.
Stop Talking, Start Processing00:15:15
That's a little arrogant, but I couldn't help myself.
But it was inspired by two letters in last week's mailbag that I didn't get a chance to answer.
The first was from John, who says he's a Christian who struggles with alcoholism.
I know drunkenness is a sin.
I hate that I do it, even though I know it's an offense to God.
I've asked my Father in heaven through the Lord Jesus to take this desire from me.
I can go two or three days, but I always slip back into these behaviors.
I know that God works in his own ways in his own time, and prayer delayed is not necessarily prayer denied, but I'm frustrated.
I don't want to be resentful towards God because I don't understand his plan for me, but I'm just so tired.
I'm stuck between the faith versus works understanding, but I can't help but feel I'm not trying hard enough, and Satan is using that to trap me in my sins.
He says, I know you can't give me all the details.
Whatever advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.
That was one thing that I didn't get to answer.
And the other was from Dan, who said in one of your recent episodes, you talked about your experience in the Anglican church.
He says, I grew up in a non-denominational church where the Lord's Supper is a symbolic remembrance only and not the actual flesh and blood.
I feel a bit uneasy about the concept of eating the actual flesh of Jesus.
I know it's largely a mysterious sacrament, but could you explain more about it or correct me if I'm mischaracterizing?
So both of these letters have to do with something that's called the praxis, P-R-A-X-I-S, which is the practice of something as opposed to the theory or the knowledge of something.
And what I'm about to say are my personal thoughts.
I think about praxis a lot, but these are my personal thoughts.
It's not to be confused with Orthodox Christian doctrine.
But it's based on the fact that I've noticed that we often talk about what Jesus tells us we should do, love our neighbors, love God, but we almost never talk about how he says we should do it, the method, the praxis of how you get to the point where you feel that you are being Christian, that you are doing Christianity.
I mean, what if you don't like your neighbor?
What if you're not feeling the existence of God?
How do you get to that point where you are doing the things that Jesus wants you to do?
Now, the first thing about this, I would have to say, is that Jesus was willing to die to say these things, and most unpleasantly, if I may say so.
So we have to imagine that for the king of the universe to take human form and suffer a humiliating and painful torture and death, the thing that he's trying to tell you is not an easy thing.
It's a hard thing.
It's something, it's not your ordinary life.
It is an extraordinary life.
And I'm always, it's not business as usual, you know.
And I'm always amazed how many Christians write to me and explain away some of the hard things that Jesus said.
One I talk about most is judge not.
When he said, you know, judge not, people write to me and say, no, no, what he meant by that is don't judge hypocritically.
But that's ordinary.
We all judge people and we try not to be hypocritical about it.
You know, and he said, love your neighbor.
And they say, well, I love my neighbor, but I hate his sin.
I love the sinner, but I hate the sin.
And therefore, I'm going to burn him at the stake.
It's the best thing I can do for him.
I'm going to throw him out of my family.
I'm going to reject him.
I'm going to spit on him.
I'm going to put pictures of him up on Twitter and say that he sickens me.
And that'll be my way of loving him, you know, because it helps get rid of the sin.
We always talk about, and what I always think when I hear that is, what's the difference between your Christianity and ordinary life?
We all hate people who do things with dislike.
We all judge people, find a way to judge people.
What if when Jesus said judge not, he meant stop, stop doing that?
What if he said, when he said, love your neighbor, he didn't mean love him, set him on fire or insult him or talk about how awful he is.
He just meant love it.
What about that?
That seems to me the harder thing, the harder thing to do.
And I'm not passing judgment on the people who write me those things.
I'm just saying it doesn't work for me.
It doesn't elevate me.
It doesn't bring me joy, which is what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for an extraordinary life in Christ, not an ordinary one, a joyful life, and not an angry one.
I don't want to be angry all the time.
I think it's a waste of my life, which, you know, this is on earth.
This is the only life you get.
So, I mean, you want it to be a good one.
You want it to be a joyful one.
And I want to have a hopeful but realistic life.
I don't want to choose between happy talk, nonsense about how blessed I'm blessed.
I'm blessed.
You know, it's a blessing, even though I'm in despair.
And I don't want to be in despair at the unbelievable levels of injustice and evil in the world.
Jesus promised me joy.
The joy that was in him would be in me and an abundant life in the midst of horrible reality.
He said, the world will give you trouble, but I have overcome the world.
I want to collect on that promise.
I want to know how that's done.
So this letter from the alcoholic Christian reminds me a little bit, and I'm not making fun of him.
Alcoholism is a terrible thing.
I've dealt with a lot of it in my life.
I'm a writer, so I've known a lot of alcoholics.
I have to work very hard to keep my drinking under control because I love booze.
So I have to work hard at it myself.
I'm not making fun of it.
But there is an old joke that I was reminded of of a boxer who gets into the ring to start a fight and he crosses himself.
And one sports fan in the audience turns to another and says, what does that mean when he crosses himself?
And the other one says, not a damn thing if he doesn't know how to fight.
And the thing is that I'm glad this man, John, is praying over his alcoholism, but it doesn't help if you don't stop drinking, right?
And the ways you stop drinking are not by asking God to take the desire from you.
You have the desire.
That's already there.
It's not going to just go away.
God doesn't just come and pluck things out of your personality for you.
That would be a violation of your life in a lot of ways.
You have to do something.
So you have to go to Alcoholics Anonymous.
You have to maybe get some therapy.
You have to do that.
Maybe you have to go into reapp.
You have to do the things that people do, the best methods we have, whatever you think they are, whatever you think that best method is, to stop drinking.
And then when you fall off the wagon, you have to start again and start from day one and do it again.
And it probably does take AAA.
It probably does take other people.
Very few people can do this alone.
Many of the people I know who have stopped drinking alone are still alcoholics.
They just don't drink anymore.
It is the people who have found something to replace it, namely God that AA teaches you how to do that.
You know, you have to go and do that.
Now, a lot of people say, well, how is that Christian?
This reminds me of people who say that Christmas isn't really a Christian holiday.
It's really pagan rites that are Christianized.
Now, only some of that is true.
But even if it's true, to me, that's a feature, not a bug.
Christianity should Christianize everything.
Why get rid of a beautiful festival that happens in December 25th?
Why stop decorating a tree?
If decorating your tree is a beautiful thing, why not just decorate it in honor of Christ instead?
That is a beautiful thing.
That's a good thing.
So Go AA is a very Christian religious organization in a lot of ways.
But I don't care what you do.
Go to therapy, do yoga, whatever it is.
You know, you will make it about Christ if you do it in Christ, if you do it through Christ.
And we'll be talking about that in just a second.
But you have to do stuff.
You can't just say, oh, I'm a Christian, so God take away my alcoholism.
It doesn't work that way.
You have to do the thing that needs to be done.
And most of the time, this has to do with what's called processing.
You have to process your pain.
You have to process your history.
You have to process your life and find out more about it.
Now, in every age, human beings refer to their minds using the highest technology that's available.
So Plato used the chariot.
He would talk about the driver of the chariot was the reason, you know, guiding the passions, who were the horses, because that was the best technology they had.
A chariot was the best technology they had.
If you look at Sigmund Freud and his version of the mind with its repression, things get repressed and then the pressure from the repression, well, it's a steam engine.
That was the highest technology they had.
He based his idea of the mind on the steam engine and talked about repression and pressure and exposing what releasing the tensions and things like that.
We talk about processing because our biggest machine is the computer.
That's the most complex machine we have.
And so we talk about processing.
That's what computers do with information.
What does it mean when I say process your pain?
You've got to process your grief.
You've got to process the things that were done to you when you were a child, so that you don't drink them away.
You don't say, no, I feel great.
I feel great.
Give me 10 more drinks.
I'm going to feel perfect.
I'm going to feel absolutely perfect.
I'm not going to worry about the fact that my father cheated on my mother or my mother beat me with a battle.
I'm not going to worry about any of that stuff because I'm going to be so drunk it's not going to matter.
To process something by my lights means first and foremost and above all to pay attention to it, to pay attention to it, to say it is there.
That pain is there.
Those memories are there.
That anger is there.
It doesn't go away because I pretend I'm blessed and I talk happy and I smile and say Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
It doesn't go away.
It is right there and I'm going to bring it out to the surface and look at it and find out where it comes from.
And that's why Jesus tells you not to judge not.
He says so.
He says, don't look at the moat in your brother's eye, in your neighbor's eye.
Get that plank out of your own eye.
Pay attention to yourself.
The one thing you are not doing when you're talking about someone else's sin is looking at your own problems.
And that's paying attention, which is the center of all processing information, all getting rid of the things that are bothering you.
And, you know, sometimes you have to talk to other people to do that.
You know, Shakespeare in Julius Caesar has Brutus say, the eye sees not itself but by reflection.
You can't look in your own eyes.
You have to look into a mirror.
And sometimes people, a therapist, a pastor, a friend who is really on your side, can act as that mirror and help you pay attention to yourself.
And that reflects you back on yourself.
So you can see, just to give you an example, let's say you're a lady and you lost your temper with your husband because he forgot to gas up the car.
And you speak sharply to him.
So here is the partner of your life.
Here is the father of your children.
Here is the man who maybe puts you through school or maybe puts a roof over your head or maybe makes sure you have enough to eat, who takes care of the bills or maybe mows the lawn or whatever, all the invisible things that spouses do for one another, he does.
And you're yelling at him and making him feel bad because he forgot to fill up the gas.
And you always do that, damn it.
You're always, you're just so careless.
You're so reckless.
That anger, when you put it in that context, and that's the context it really is in, is irrational.
And you have to look at why you spoke to the husband of your life, the partner of your life, and men and women do this both.
This is just an example.
Why you spoke to him that way in such an ungrateful, cruel, and disrespectful way, right?
I mean, people ask me, you know, my marriage has been an extraordinary one.
And people ask me how.
And I say, well, one thing is, you know, we're nice to each other.
We're polite to one another.
But when you think about it, when somebody helps you to pay attention to that, you find, oh, I felt like I wasn't being taken care of.
Like I felt when my mom didn't come home from work or when my dad neglected me, when he walked out, I've always felt afraid of being, and so I'm taking that out on my husband.
When you start to realize those things, when they're open, you gain control of them.
That's processing, processing information.
And that can help you to stop drinking as well.
You're drinking to kill something.
It's not a disease.
They say it's a disease like you catch it.
No, it's an addiction.
And you have an addiction instead of something else.
You have an addiction to prevent pain that's coming to you from somewhere else.
So how is that Christian?
Well, it's only the start of being Christian.
This whole thing about that Jesus, when Jesus was asked, how do I live in the kingdom of heaven?
He would say, well, don't commit adultery.
Don't commit murder.
You know, honor your father and mother.
Don't do this.
Don't do that.
And you think, well, is that what I have to do?
No, that's the beginning of what you have to do.
He said that.
That's the process of what you have to do.
That's getting stuff out of the way so you can begin to pay attention to your life.
So what are you trying to achieve?
What are you trying to achieve by doing those things, by going to a therapist, by going to your pastor, by going to AA, by getting rid of your bad habits?
You're trying to achieve what Jesus said.
He said, I, Jesus, am the vine, you are the branch.
And Paul said, I am no longer alive, but Christ lives in me.
You're trying to replace that ego, that desire, that flesh, that flesh that envies your neighbor, says, I want what he has, even though I don't want what he has, or it says, I want to sleep with that woman even though it would ruin my life.
All the things that your flesh is telling you, you want to replace that ego, that monster, that monkey inside with Christ, with God.
And you do that by seeing the world differently, even if you do it only for a second a day, even if you do it for one second a day.
And that brings me back to this other email, this other mailbag question about what the Mass means.
The Mass is a praxis, a practice that helps you see the holiness of the world, that helps you see that you're not just looking at water, you're looking at water.
It's amazing.
It breeds life.
Other planets don't have that.
It's not something we get everywhere.
It's this amazing thing.
When you look at an ant and you look at a stone, the difference between those two things is a miracle.
How do you see that, really see it all the time?
The Mass is one of the ways you do that.
The communion is one of the ways you do that.
One of the reasons I say one of the most unpopular things I say that people get angry at me about is the transubstantiation, the Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine actually turn into the body and blood of Christ and symbolism are exactly the same thing.
The reality of the world exists in our minds.
The way that humans experience the world exists in human minds.
If through ritual and paying attention and meditation, you can see and feel and experience the symbolism of bread and wine becoming God, you have caused transubstantiation.
That is transubstantiation.
There ain't no difference.
It's transmogrifying, it's changing the substance of the thing.
It's not changing the bread or the wine into something else.
That's not what Catholics believe.
They believe the substance of it.
And that happens in your heart and in your mind.
When you do that, you start to see that the world is holy, that your husband, when he forgets to bring in the, to gas up the car, is holy.
Your relationship to him is holy.
The water is holy.
The wine, the food you eat, the love you feel, and most especially the love.
And that's what you're trying to get to.
You're trying to get to that love that God will put in you if you let him live in you.
It's a practice.
It's supposed to be a little bit of work.
It's not supposed to happen.
You're not supposed to pray for it and have it magically happen.
It's supposed to be something you do by paying attention, processing your pain, giving up your sins, and moving forward to let yourself open to be filled with God.
It is something you have to do.
Now, you heard me talking about letting God into your life, and many of you, of course, are saying, what's the point?
The Clavenless Week is almost upon us.
And you're right.
So I take it all back.
No, I don't.
I'm just joking.
But the Clavenless Week is coming.
You do not want to go in.
You have to get rid of your problems if you're going to endure, endure this incredible darkness of the Clavenless Week.
That's why we have the mailbag.
God, a little dark humor there.
All right, from Justin.
Do It Yourself00:08:31
Just wanted your thoughts on women in the church.
I have friends who see this differently.
One friend is a pastor who says, according to the Bible, women are not to hold senior pastor roles in the church.
These roles are for men because men lead the church, while the other friend claims this to be a misinterpretation.
Please help clarify.
There is a line about women not preaching to men.
It was felt to be a bad idea.
That is in one of the epistles.
I'm saying this from memory.
Others argue, of course, that all of the disciples were men.
The apostles were men, and therefore women should not have leadership roles.
Here's my answer to this.
It's a little wishy-washy.
Philosophically, philosophically, I'm not convinced that women shouldn't preach.
In practice, I have almost never seen women as an addition.
That didn't mean they weren't smart.
It didn't mean they weren't good.
It meant the effect of having female leadership in churches, in my experience, my limited experience, has been negative.
Female leadership, not female participation.
Women can be just as holy.
In Jesus' ministry, women were very prominent.
In Jesus' ministry, it was women who first experienced the resurrection.
Women are very much at a, in terms of status, at an equal level in Christianity.
In terms of status, they are at an equal level in Christianity.
In terms of roles they play in the church, they are traditionally not.
I go to a church where women don't preach.
And I don't do that.
That's not why I go to that church.
I go to the church for other reasons, but they don't preach there, and it has been better.
I mean, I've heard women say things many, several times where they say, well, this is what the gospel says, but by golly, I say something.
I heard a woman give a sermon once where she started who can say the worth of a virtuous woman, her price is far above rubies.
And she said, well, who says a woman has to be virtuous?
You know, this kind of self-affirming thing that women are prone to.
Men have their flaws.
And one of women's flaws is that self-affirmation routine.
And it has ruined their relationship with the church.
Have I had bad male preachers?
Yes, but the best preachers I've had have also been male.
So all I can tell you is this.
Philosophically and theologically, I'm not sure I'm not as committed to keeping women out of leadership roles and out of preacher roles.
That they don't preach in my church has been a relief to me.
And so that's my wishy-washy answer to you.
But I don't, you know, the theological argument can be made in both ways.
The fact that the apostles were not women is not conclusive, and one line in an epistle is not necessarily conclusive.
Jesus definitely respected and elevated women, and that is why our society respects and elevates women at its best.
And it did until we lost our Christianity, and now we believe that men can be women, and it's a totally different thing.
From Rebecca, I'm a born-again Christian.
I struggle with my friendships.
Currently, my best friend's a non-believer.
She knows my positions and respects them.
The problem is she makes horrible life decisions.
I give her my faith-based advice, but she just doesn't take it as much as I love her.
Being her friend is actually emotionally painful.
I'm watching someone I love destroy themselves slowly.
We're about to move to a different state.
My question is, when making friends in this new place, should I avoid getting this close to a non-Christian again?
I feel like that sounds horrible, but I just don't know ultimately what the right thing to do is.
I would appreciate your advice before facing another clavenless week.
Well, my advice is this.
Ask yourself if you get something out of your friend's destructive behavior.
Do you like the drama?
Do you like having authority over her?
Do you like being the good one, the good person, the wise person?
Is that giving you some sort of pleasure?
Because it's not just non-Christians who destroy themselves.
Christians do it too.
And it's not just Christians who act well.
I would say you should choose friends who act well simply because you want them to have a good influence on you as well as you having a good influence on them.
You don't want a friendship where one of you is morally superior to the other all the time.
That's just ridiculous.
You want a friend who can give you good advice, just like you give them good advice, and who can enjoy the things that you enjoy.
That can be a Jewish person.
Plenty of Jewish religious people behave well.
It can even be someone who is not religious, though I understand why that would make it harder for you to communicate.
What I would think about is the behavior of your friends, not the religion of your friends.
And I would think also about what you are getting out of this relationship so that you don't keep repeating it.
That happens a lot.
It's happened to me where I have repeatedly made friends with people who were not good for me and had to realize, well, what's the, you know, pay attention to that.
I had to realize, what's the source of that?
What am I repeating?
What trauma am I repeating in my life?
And if that's true of you and you're repeatedly making friends with people who behave badly, you want to find out why you're doing that, think it through, think what you're getting out of it, and then stop.
Stop doing that.
But it doesn't have to be according to religion.
From Joe, I'm one of your Australian listeners.
I was having a discussion with a couple of friends around book piracy.
I always buy hard copies of books because I like the tactile feel of physical books, but also because the author deserves payment.
One of my friends, a smart guy, says he pirates books if the author is deceased since he doesn't want to support the author's estate.
That's ridiculous.
It's stealing.
It's stealing.
I write a book.
I have done a job.
You pay me for that labor.
I know a lot of young people who know how to work the internet, who can steal books.
But no, you should pay me.
And your copyright only lasts for a certain number of years after your death.
And in that time, my family should be able to inherit the work I did just like they can inherit my money.
And then that copyright runs out and it becomes public property.
And then you don't have to pay for it anymore.
But those are good laws.
Laws that protect intellectual property encourage intellectual property, right?
We know this.
The more you pay people for their work, the more they want to do that work.
And it's just stealing.
It's just stealing.
It is stealing work to download books that you haven't paid for.
Somebody did the work to print that book.
Somebody did the work to write it.
Those people should be paid and their descendants should be paid for a certain period of time.
I think the laws on this are good and I think intellectual property law should be strengthened, not weakened, and you shouldn't steal.
From Nathan, I'm a Christian, husband and father of two young boys.
A little over a year ago, I became disabled due to a medical issue and I'm bedridden most of the time.
I'm at peace with my own situation, but would love to hear your advice on how to teach my boys to become men given my limitations.
We don't know how long I'll be like this, but I would like to do the best I can given the situation.
I have a couple, there are two things I think you should do.
One, I think you should get better.
Now, I'm not saying that lightly.
I know that there are diseases that can be crippling.
But make sure you're really crippled before you're crippled.
If you can get up, if you can get better, if you can improve, do it.
Do not let this thing beat you.
Do not let your children see it beat you.
Do not think like, well, it's kind of easier than going to work.
And I know a lot of people who do this, so I'm not picking on you.
I'm just saying, if you're sitting around going, well, you know, I still kind of feel bad, so maybe I shouldn't get up.
Get up.
Get off your butt and actually show your kids what courage looks like.
If you can't show them what that kind of courage and determination looks like, at least show them what stoic suffering looks like.
All that said, then there is the day-to-day of it.
And of course, you should be there for your child.
You should be part of your wife's disciplinary measures when those are needed.
You shouldn't just sit there and let your wife carry out the discipline, even if you can't do it yourself.
You should make sure you are a participant in it and that you support your wife in it.
You can play lots and lots of things.
If you can wrestle on the bed, you can wrestle on the bed.
You can play video games.
It shouldn't all be video games, but that's one of the things you could do.
You can still participate in your children's life, and you can do it by showing them what it looks like to suffer illness and pain gracefully, if that is possible.
If you can do that, you know, I just, when you say you're at peace with your own situation, don't be.
Don't be at peace with being bedridden.
Rage against the dying of the light.
Stand up for your own wellness and try to get better and work at getting better and work at proving the doctors wrong if they say you can't get better.
Show them what that looks like as well and then participate in their lives.
Don't stop.
Make them want to see you.
Make sure they want to see you by being a participating and fun and interesting dad.
I got to stop.
The Clavenless Week is here.
It's over.
It's over.
The darkness descends.
Fire, flame, screaming, broken glass, crawling over broken glass, stepping on broken glass, swallowing broken glass, wailing, gnashing of teeth.
Rage Against the Dying Light00:01:01
But, but for the two or three of you who survive, we will be back next Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Clayton.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode and want to spread the word, give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe too.
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, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Production Manager Pavel Wadowski.
Editor and Associate Producer Danny D'AMICO.
Our audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Hart.
Our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.