Andrew Clavin’s A Nation Not of Laws, but of Shady Putzes skewers CNN’s Brian Stelter firing as a farce while framing it as proof of media’s decline, then pivots to Harvard/Yale law professors advocating scrapping the Constitution for progressive policies. Jack Carr’s Navy SEAL-turned-thriller-writer interview contrasts with Clavin’s moral panic over leftist "lawlessness," from debt forgiveness to abortion, while Megan Basham notes Hollywood’s shift away from "woke" mandates. The episode ends with Clavin defending capital punishment as a pragmatic deterrent—despite its flaws—while warning of civil war rhetoric and family fractures, all wrapped in ads for his books and VPN. [Automatically generated summary]
All across America, the question is being asked, what will Brian Stelter do next?
Other questions being asked include, who's Brian Stelter?
What was he doing before?
What the hell do I care what he does next?
Why are you bothering me?
And how would you like a punch in the nose?
Shortly after these questions were asked, Stelter was taken to the hospital with a broken nose where he was heard asking the attending nurses, what will Brian Stelter do next?
Thus beginning the entire conversation over again.
The questions arose after Stelter was fired from his job as a commentator at CNN when the new CNN president, Chris Licht, made the amazing discovery that the purpose of having a television network was to have people watch the network on their televisions.
Licht asked CNN staff to find out if anyone was watching Brian Stelter and the CNN staff immediately set to work making inquiries as to who Stelter was and what network he was on.
It turned out Stelter had a show on CNN called Reliable Sources, which was a show about how much Brian Stelter hated Fox News because people were watching Fox News, but no one was watching reliable sources.
Reliable sources also hated Tucker Carlson because Tucker Carlson had reliable sources, while reliable sources only had Brian Stelter hating Tucker Carlson.
After his firing, Brian Stelter asked the CNN staff, why wouldn't anyone watch reliable sources?
But they didn't answer because they were watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
The pinnacle of Brian Stelter's alleged career came during the height of the COVID pandemic when Stelter announced he had missed the deadline on his newsletter because he had to go to bed early and have a good cry, thus proving that transgender theory is correct and a man can in fact become a woman if she happens to be Brian Stelter.
Stelter's transition to womanhood may explain why of all the people fired from CNN in the last few months, Stelter is the only one who was not fired because of something he did with his penis.
Online masturbator Jeffrey Toobin, for instance, said he wished he had missed a deadline to have a good cry because then he would be a woman too and would still have a job.
Chris Cuomo said he also wished Toobin was a woman because then he could inappropriately grab Toobin's buttock, which would still get him fired, but at least he'd get to grab Toobin's buttock.
After his firing, Stelter did a final show which garnered his highest audience ever when a delayed flight from Akron to Milwaukee caused board passengers to gather under an airport television set and ask one another, hey, who's that bald woman on CNN?
In his moving final peroration, Stelter told the audience, quote, and this, as God is my witness, is a real quote by Brian Stelter, the girl who used to be on reliable sources before he got fired.
Anyway, quote, we must make sure we don't give platforms to those who are lying to our faces, unquote.
Hearing this, CNN president Chris Licht said he agreed and would therefore fire Brian Stelter.
When told he had already fired Stelter, Licht said, quote, oh, I didn't realize because I never watched the show.
What will Brian Stelter do next, unquote?
Suggestions for the next step in Brian Stelter's alleged career include him stomping up and down on the sidewalk outside Fox News, shouting about how much he hates Tucker Carlson, him stomping up and down on the sidewalk outside Tucker Carlson's house, shouting about how much he hates Fox News, and him approaching random strangers on the street to ask them, what will Brian Stelter do next until they punch him in the nose?
Meanwhile, now that Stelter has left CNN, fresh questions are swirling around the cable news network, including, which news personality no one watches will be the next one fired?
What will Jim Acosta do next?
Who is Jim Acosta?
What was he doing before?
Why are you bothering me, Jim Acosta?
And how would you like a punch in the nose?
CNN President Chris Licht said he was having a hard time deciding who to fire next because he's too busy watching Fox News.
Pre-Order Exclusive Content00:04:36
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-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Ho-ho, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back, laughing our way through the utter collapse of the Republic.
The New York Times wants to get rid of the Constitution.
We'll talk about that.
Joe Biden seems to have already gotten rid of the Constitution.
And we'll also have the terminalist author, Jack Carr, to talk to him about his book and the great TV series made out of it.
This is an excellent time right this moment to subscribe to the Andrew Clavin podcast, wherever you get your podcast.
Give us a five-star review.
It is incredibly helpful to us.
And just, you know, enjoy the fact that you'll be able to listen to this podcast all the time, which is also incredibly helpful to us.
Also, you want to go on YouTube and subscribe to my personal Andrew Clavin channel.
If you press that little bell there, someone you don't know will die.
But you will also get exclusive content that we don't put anywhere else.
Also, if you leave a comment there and the comment is sufficiently obnoxious, it really helps if it's racist and sexist as well.
We will mention it on the show because it'll just fit in with the rest of our content.
Today's comment is from Joao Silva, who says, Dear Clavin, your monologues are one of the best moments of my week.
I keep sending them to my friends, and now I don't have any friends.
But if I had any friends, I would keep sending them your monologues until I cease to have friends.
Again, this is an excellent, excellent practice.
You should all be doing this.
I'll send my monologues to your friends until you don't have any friends.
And then when you get more friends, send them the monologue until they're gone.
So an excellent, excellent comment there.
You can see, if you're watching the show, you can see my new book, what's called an ARC, an advanced reading copy of my new book, The Strange Habit, A Strange Habit of Mind, which is the sequel to When Christmas Comes, starring Cameron Winter, the detective.
You know, I keep pushing this on you, but I really do hope you will pre-order it to let the publisher know that there is demand for the book, so they'll have enough books, and maybe we can put this book on a bestseller list.
I have just finished this week.
I finished the third book in the series.
This is going to be not just a great series.
I'm telling you, it is going to be an enduring series if you pre-order the book.
If you don't, it's not going to be a series because that is how we make it into a series.
This book, the preface to this book has a quote from Rudyard Kipling, the famous white supremacist, imperialist, who says, there's neither east nor west, border, nor breed, nor birth when two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.
And the two strong men in this book are Cameron Winter, my detective, and a social media billionaire who seems to have an extraordinary way of canceling people who disagree with him.
Please go on Amazon and pre-order it.
It is incredibly important if you want there to be an enduring series that you will like, I swear.
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That's E-X, P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Clavin.
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I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking you spelled expressvpn, but how do you spell clavin?
It's k-l-a-v-a-n.
No ease in clavin.
There are no ease in 39.
Democrats, I got to say, are on a roll.
The Sexual Revolution's Impact00:15:39
They are having a good time.
They are succeeding in doing some very destructive and immoral things, the inflationary bill, the student loan cancellation by decree, and we're going to talk about those things.
But I want to begin with a cultural shift I sense happening in the culture that is actually for the better.
In my other book, my last book, The Truth and Beauty, I made the argument that the turbulent time of the late 18th and early 19th century in England was in many ways like America over the last 60 years or so.
And this is a hopeful idea because it was a radical time and a very divisive time and a revolutionary time, but it became, instead of tearing the country to pieces, it became the Victorian era, which in my mind is not just one of the greatest periods in English history, it's one of the greatest periods in world history, one of the most productive, a reform period, yet with great conservative behavior.
And it's very hopeful to think that even this very divisive revolutionary time could give way to this great imperial period, because I think the British Empire was one of the best things that ever happened to the world.
One of the similarities between our period and theirs has to do with the rise of feminism and the questioning of marriage and gender roles, which was happening back then, just as it's obviously happening now.
And there were a lot of radicals like the poets Shelley and Byron who wanted there to be what they called free love, which was exactly what it sounded like.
You can sleep with anybody you want.
Women could sleep with people just the same as men.
No difference between anybody.
And at the same time that was happening, there was a new movement of Christians who wanted to bring back old-fashioned morality.
They called themselves the evangelicals.
And they kind of had an emotional, very outspoken, very evangelical form of Christianity that we're familiar with today.
And they wanted to bring back traditional morality.
One of the really interesting things in this period was the great female author, novelist, Jane Austen, as I've always said, the only one of the great novelists, and there are only about 10 great novelists who was a woman.
And most of her letters were burned, but in some of her few surviving letters, there are a couple of references to the evangelicals.
In an early one, she says, I do not like the evangelicals.
And most people think this is because she was the daughter of a Church of England vicar.
And the Church of England was very proper and prim, and it was something you kept privately.
And she prayed every day, Jane Austen, but she did it in a private, decorous English way.
And these evangelicals were very noisy and emotional and loud and preached their gospels to people and she didn't like that.
But later on, in a later letter, she also says, I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be evangelicals.
And I am at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling must be happiest and safest.
She seems to have changed her mind.
And in fact, a lot of women, as this regency period became the Victorian era, a lot of the women started to feel the same way.
Mary Shelley, who was the wife of the poet Shelley, who believed in free love, became much more conservative after Shelley died.
And as she became older, and in her later novels, she obviously wrote Frankenstein during her period with Shelley.
But later on, her novels emphasized the domestic role of women and they emphasized evangelical-like morality.
Her sister-in-law, her stepsister, Claire, who had a very difficult affair with Byron, later said that free love was a terrible thing.
As she became a Victorian, she said the worshippers of free love not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves, turning their existence into a perfect hell.
Under the influence of the doctrine of free love, I saw the first two poets of England, meaning Shelley and Byron, become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty, and treachery.
And these are the kinds of changes in opinion, the shifts in cultural ideas led by women, but also including men, that actually led to the Victorian period, which wasn't a period of sexual propriety, but also of great reforms, you know, extending the vote and also ending slavery, ending the slave trade in England, which was brought about by the evangelicals, like Wilberforce.
It was the evangelicals, just like here, the abolitionists were all devout Christians.
That is where the force for ending slavery came from.
It came through Christianity.
Well, I can't help but notice that there are certain strains of this change in sexual attitudes beginning to be expressed by women in America today.
According to surveys, unhappiness has been on the rise since the sexual revolution began.
We don't know that's the cause, but I think feminism and the sexual revolution are one of the reasons people have becoming, or two of the reasons people have been becoming more and more unhappy.
A nonpartisan general social survey recently found that the sharp spike in unhappiness that was caused by the pandemic was far less sharp among married and religious people who tended to recover faster.
So people like me who are religious and married are just happier, as you can usually tell by looking at me.
And there's a new book now by a woman named Louise Perry.
I've asked her to come on the show.
I think she will.
It's called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, which comes hard on the heels of a similar book by Christine Emba called Rethinking Sex.
And Perry points out that in a free love culture, women get abused because women profit from intimacy and are made more depressed and ill by promiscuity than most men are.
Bridget Fetesy, who's a pal, I bump into her at parties from time to time, she was inspired by this book to write a touching article called I Regret Being a Slot, in which she writes, quote, a lifetime of allowing myself to be the other woman taken for granted or treated like a doormat under the false pretense of being empowered left her unhappy.
She's now a happily married lady, but that was her life earlier on.
All of this may be the first whiff of a coming change for the better, and I believe that it is.
I really think this shift, I've predicted this shift for a long time.
I think it is actually coming now.
I haven't read Louise's book, the Sexual Revolution book, but I did read a big excerpt of it in the Wall Street Journal, and I noticed that both in her excerpt and in Bridget's piece, three words are conspicuously missing.
Three words that you are simply not allowed to say and remain a cool, hip, relevant spokesman in the culture.
Those three words are, conservatives were right.
Bridget goes out of her way in her piece to say, I'm not suggesting we return to some Victorian era notion of sex or some 1950s era ideal about gender roles, but I wish I could go back in time and have a talk with my young self.
And this is what I tell her.
If you know your value, you're less likely to sleep with someone who doesn't value you.
Cherish yourself and you will be cherished.
And I couldn't help but think, yes, that's probably exactly what a Victorian mother would have told her daughter.
I know for a fact it's what a 1950s or early 1960s mother would have told her daughter.
Maybe we shouldn't be afraid to say that there was good in those times, that there was something about those times that we missed, that actually conservatives got it right.
But we never can say that.
Three words you cannot say and remain relevant.
The journal piece, the excerpt from the book, Louise Perry's book about the sexual revolution, talks about everything in materialist and evolutionary terms.
She says, women can produce offspring at a maximum rate of about one pregnancy a year.
Promiscuous men can theoretically produce offspring every time they orgasm.
So in general, natural selection has favored women who are choosy about their mates.
Well, maybe that's possible.
We don't know.
These evolutionary stories are just so stories.
We don't know that they're true.
It seems to me that evolution would really produce women who were in harems to the strongest male.
That would be the wisest thing.
And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that that is what evolution did produce, because that's what most civilizations had.
One man, the king, the king or whoever it was, with a harem.
That was what most civilizations had.
But in fact, women are not just meat puppets who are evolved through materialist means.
They're human beings.
And maybe the truth is that the evolutionary story doesn't cover it.
Maybe women like being having intimacy because that fits morally with who they are as spiritual people who happen to be women.
Maybe, in other words, conservatives were right when they said at the sexual revolution, you know, we shouldn't do this.
This is immoral.
Maybe they were right.
Why is it so hard for people to say conservatives were right?
Well, I think for one thing, they want to be hip, they want to be relevant, they don't want to seem like old fogies.
Everybody likes the new thing.
They like the cutting edge, even if the cutting edge is cutting us off from our humanity.
But here are two other things.
People are corrupt and wicked, all of us.
I'm not singling anyone out.
We're all corrupt and wicked.
And appeals to virtue and self-disciplined liberty, which are at the heart of conservatism, are never as attractive as appeals to unbridled lust and free money.
Instead of asking, shouldn't I be moral?
People like to ask, what's in this for me?
Does this make me richer, happy, or better?
Many conservatives also, that's one reason, and many conservatives also are belligerent and insensitive.
And I've mentioned this before, and people always write me angry letters when I say it, but it's just true.
We believe that if we're right, we get to treat people like garbage.
And that is not true.
Appeals to virtue and self-discipline freedom are already unpopular.
They're even more unpopular when you make them in a rude, angry, condemnatory tone.
The British of the Radical Regents era feared that the revolution in France was going to come to England, but instead it led to England's greatest age.
I think the same may happen here, but it will only happen here if we begin to realize that conservatives were right.
And conservatives have to start making the case for virtue and liberty in terms of love and joy so that people can realize we're right and accept it.
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But you have to know how to spell Clavin.
Do you?
Do you?
Really?
Really?
Because it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Klavan.
One of the reasons I think that people are so eager to dissociate themselves from conservatism, even as they accept the things that conservatives are saying, is because of that Christian underpinning that kind of put Jane Austen off.
even though she was, I believe, a devout Christian.
that it puts them off because it says things about us that we don't like to hear.
It says that our fleshly desires lead us into sin.
It's not just lust.
We always think of lust first, but greed is also a fleshly desire.
Envy is something that you feel in your flesh.
How many times have you said to yourself, well, you know, I don't really want my friend to fail, but something in me wants my friend to fail.
You know, that envy is something that we feel in our flesh, and maybe it is evolutionary, that kind of competitive envy, but it's not necessarily conducive to a good, happy spiritual life.
And so conservatives are always acting shocked that when leftists who are materialism, materialists, materialism is inherent in leftism, when they start offering people stuff, free money, or when they start saying things like, oh, we'll only tax people who make over $400,000.
And everybody goes, yeah, over $4,000, you know, they're playing to our worst self.
And so of course they're going to succeed more easily because that is the way the world works.
The world is driven by sin, what Christians call sin.
And nobody likes to talk about that.
We like to talk about other, we try to put it in other kind of terms, but that is exactly what it is.
Sin comes from a word in Greek meaning missing the target.
It doesn't mean you're a bad boy.
It means you're not getting to the person that you were made to be.
That is the target.
The target is God made you a certain person.
The fulfillment of that person is the act of becoming that is the meaning, purpose, and direction of your life, the telos of your life.
But if you miss that target, that's hamartiya, that's sin.
And that's the kind of sin that I'm talking about, not like you're a bad boy or a naughty boy.
So Joe Biden has canceled student debt for like 40 million people or so.
This is going to cost something, could cost upward of $600 billion.
And he's done this in a completely lawless way.
He has done it by saying, you know, I do it.
I do this thing.
You know, he's used some law that says that there's an agency that can do this in a case of an emergency and we're in a COVID emergency, which is just ridiculous.
The question is, even though it's a completely lawless thing, there may be no one withstanding to sue and bring it before the courts.
So it's going to be an open question whether it can be stopped, okay?
But still, it's lawless.
And that in itself is a bad thing.
I'm very in favor, by the way, of canceling this debt.
I have two sons-in-law who are both highly paid attorneys with student debt, and I'm looking forward to Uber drivers paying off their debt.
I think that's a great thing.
You know, I'm going to vote Democrats.
I can stick it to the working class and behave in favor of the rich.
No, obviously, I'm obviously joking.
But this is what they're going to do: they're going to ultimately transfer money from the two-thirds of the country who don't go to college to the third of the country who tends to be more wealthy who do go to college, and then they're going to tax those people with the $80 billion they're pouring into the IRS.
They keep saying we're going to tax the rich, but most people think if you're making $400,000 a year, you're rich.
That's not what rich is.
Bezos is not going to pay a dime in taxes, and every dime that he does pay is going to be charged to you when you order on Amazon.
So he's not going to pay a dime.
The rich aren't worried.
It's the middle class and the upper middle class who may look rich to people below them, but aren't, who are going to be taxed.
And so ultimately, what socialism does is it gets rid of that middle class, and there's only the poor, and then there's the rich on whom the poor depend.
And that's how the rich stay rich, by the poor coming and saying, please, sir, may I have some gas for my car?
No, I must fly off in my private jet to discuss global warming, my friend.
I'm sorry, my little friend, but you'll just have to eat bugs and call me later.
That's the world that socialism produces, not one time, not two times, but every time it comes into power.
And you can see it coming.
The taxes from the money going into the IRS will be used to bleed the upper middle class and these kinds of transfers of wealth to Joe Biden.
Most of the guys who are going to profit from this, a lot of them are in Joe Biden's staff, these college kids with a lot of debt.
But a lot of people can talk about the economics better than I can.
But what bothers me about it is the morality.
And when we talk about morality, immediately people get their backs up.
Government Betrayal00:08:14
What are you some kind of Christian?
Yes, I am some kind of Christian.
And I am concerned about morality because when we become immoral, everything falls apart.
Our freedoms fall apart.
When John Adams said our Constitution is for a moral and religious people, he was not kidding around.
When you make a deal with somebody, that is a sacred thing in a free country.
In a free country, when you and I agree to something, I'm going to pay you this, or you're going to loan me this at this interest, or we're going to get married, that is a contract, and that contract is sacred between us because it's part of our freedom.
It's part of what makes us individuals capable of making arrangements between ourselves.
When the government comes along and says, well, you agreed to get married, but there's no fault divorce.
So if your wife suddenly says, I don't want to be married to you anymore, she can just say it.
That is the government breaking that sacred bond between people so that we can no longer trust one another and no longer feel that our work and our agreement and our word is good.
Our word is no longer good because government is destroying our contracts.
These people borrowed money.
They weren't cheated.
They weren't lied to.
They knew what they were doing.
They borrowed money from us.
The money is money they take from the government.
It's our money.
It's not the government's money.
The government took it from us, paid it to them, gave it to them with an agreement that they would pay it back.
Now they're saying you can have your money back, and if you already paid— well, here's Elizabeth Warren explaining what happens if you've already paid your money.
Cut 12.
I just want to ask one question.
My daughter's getting out of school.
I've saved all my money.
She doesn't have any school.
Am I going to get my money back?
Of course.
So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money.
And those of us who did the right thing get screwed.
No, it's not even got screwed.
Of course we did.
My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations.
I saved my money.
He made more than I did.
But I worked a double shift, worked the extra money.
Darn works and just kidding.
So you're laughing.
Yeah, that's exactly what you're doing.
We did the right thing, and we get screwed.
I appreciate that.
It's just the disdain, the disdain.
Oh, you worked, you worked hard.
Well, guess what?
Screw you.
They don't want you to work hard.
They want you dependent.
They want the poor dependent on the powerful.
That is socialism.
The poor dependent on the powerful because the powerful have the power to distribute the wealth.
That is what it's all about.
That's why they're sitting around in Davos saying, we must get rid of ownership.
What is this ownership?
They do not like, that's one of the reasons they want to get rid of Christianity, too.
They don't like anything that takes the ordinary guy and says, you know what, you matter.
You have a right to make decisions about your own life.
Your decisions are better than the decisions of the experts.
That is what they don't want because they are the expert class.
The other thing that it does that really infuriates me is it basically finances through the government this credentialism that college has created.
You remember when they were selling, Obama was selling this stupid Iran deal that allows Iran to get nuclear weapons over time?
And one of his guys, Ben Rhodes, went to the New York Times and says, yeah, we sold it to you because you guys don't know anything.
You're stupid.
You're kids.
You've never covered the international scene.
He was talking about credentialism.
He may not have known it, but the people working at the New York Times are 25 years old.
They went to the best colleges in the country.
They don't know jack diddly squat about anything.
But when they go marching in to the editor-in-chief's office and say, you offended me by running an op-ed that I disagree with, they have to listen to him because they need to hire people from the New York Times.
It used to be reporters were lower-class guys, smart guys who couldn't go to college, but they had a talent to write, and they were smart, and they were literate, and they hated the powerful.
They didn't care if you were Republican-powerful or Democrat-powerful.
They just wanted to bring down the powerful.
Now they are aspiring to the power class.
They're credentialed elites aspiring to the powered class.
So if that you're part of the power, namely the Democrats, who are going to help the powerful, they're going to be on your side.
This thing is also utterly lawless is another immoral thing about it.
And, you know, this is one of the things.
Well, let's say, you know, Pelosi, a year ago, she said so.
This is cut nine.
People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness.
He does not.
He can postpone.
He can delay.
But he does not have that power.
That has to be an act of Congress.
Not everybody realizes that.
But the president can only postpone delay but not forgive.
So that was then, of course, when Biden did this, she said, what a bold move.
This is a great thing.
She tweeted that out.
Biden himself said it was pretty questionable whether he could do it.
And ultimately, you get people who have the big credentials, but who don't believe in the law and don't believe in morality, which is enough to make you think the conservatives are right and the people at the top do not support our system of government, the very things that made us great.
I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you rap scallion.
No one, you know, you think people are trying to destroy the Constitution, where would you get an idea like that?
Well, I got this idea from the New York Times, a former newspaper, on the op-ed page, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
So on Knucklehead Row, an article called The Constitution is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed, and it is by Ryan Dorfler and Samuel Moyne who teach law at Harvard and Yale.
When liberals lose in the Supreme Court, as they increasingly have, they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong, but struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end.
The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.
Constitutions inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now.
It's difficult to find a constitutional basis for abortion or labor unions in a document written largely by affluent men more than two centuries ago.
Far better if liberal legislators could simply make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to bother with the Constitution.
Congress could simply pass a Congress Act, reorganizing our legislature in ways that are more fairly representative of where people actually live and vote.
In other words, in cities.
In so doing, Congress would be pretty openly defying the Constitution to get to more democratic order, and for that reason would need to insulate the law from judicial review.
We don't need no stinking justices.
We don't need no stinking justices telling us what we can do.
A politics of the American future like this would make clear our ability to engage in the constant reinvention of our society under our own power without the illusion that the past stands in our way.
This is the argument of an adolescent.
You know, everything you do is bad, Daddy.
I don't want to do that anymore.
What do you know?
You don't know what I'm like.
You don't know what I want.
It's the argument of an adolescent.
But it's an adolescent who teaches at Harvard and Yale.
You know, I don't like the far right any more than I like the far left, but I fear the far left more because, you know, the far right is wanted by the FBI, but the far left works for the FBI.
The far right may sometimes be too hard on the news media, but the far left is the news media.
The far right may hate the government sometimes, but the far left is the government.
I'm afraid of the people with the most power.
Why?
Because I know people are sinful and wicked and will do the things that give them the power that they want.
You know, these shady putzers who write things like this in the New York Times, who think the Constitution, who think the past, people in the past didn't know anything, that they're smarter because they live now, daddy.
I live now, and I don't have to listen to what you said back in the olden days, Mr. James Madison, Mr. Thomas Jefferson, Mr. George Washington.
Why are you telling me what to do with your stinky Constitution?
These guys, you know, these are the credentialed elite.
These are the elite.
Why Are You Telling Me?00:02:18
And this is the reason why it's important to say, you know, maybe those Christians had a point.
Like with Jane Austen, maybe those evangelicals had a point when they said people are sinful.
Maybe they had a point when they said if we let people free, they will just use their power to get what they want, even if it's killing babies.
What is it about this concept?
We can't find a right.
The guys honestly said we can't find a right to abortion in the Constitution.
So they're saying Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, but what they're saying was the Constitution itself was wrongly decided.
You know, it is funny.
One thing, one thing that Christians know, and they knew it from the beginning, and we forgot it because we had a good time in this country.
Christians had a good time in this country for a while and they forgot the central truth of Christianity was that if you tell people that they are sinful and if you try to live in a way that is not sinful, if you try to hit the target of your best self, of your spiritual self, ultimately, those who preach against sinfulness will be demonized by the sinful.
And that's what I'm going to talk about next.
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How do you spell Clavin?
Ben Shapiro's Presence Causes Harm00:10:22
I'm glad you asked.
All you do is use your ring doorbell.
And if somebody comes, you say, how do you spell Clavin?
if he knows, set off the alarm.
So a judge has said that they have to release the warrant.
They can redact it.
They have to release the warrant.
That's going to come out after the show is over today, after I finish recording the show today, so I won't know exactly what's on it.
But we can look forward to Morning Joe coming on and saying, oh, my goodness, you know, he was telling the National Archives that they had to wait a moment.
You know, this was, as I've said, this raid on Mar-a-Lago for Trump's papers, whether he took them wrongly or not, whether he was wrong or not, was just an incredibly reckless, incredibly dangerous thing to do.
And of course, they keep saying, I love hearing the left praise the FBI and say how terrible that people on the right are against the FBI.
I mean, this is the FBI that spied on Martin Luther King, that killed the Black Panthers, and they've been screaming about this.
This is the FBI where J. Edgar Hoover was supposedly dressing up as a girl, which now is fine.
Now they say, wow, that J. Edgar Hoover is a hero.
But back in the day, there was the left saying, see, we told you that guy was weird.
We told you he was a bad guy because he was dressing up as a woman.
That was back when dressing up as a woman was looked on as a little offbeat for a guy to do.
But, you know, the FBI does not deserve our trust.
I mean, obviously, there are great agents in the FBI, and for a while, it was a great law agency.
But we're talking about the people at the top, and they've clearly become corrupted.
We know this because of the Russian collusion hoax.
We know it because they lied on the Pfizer warrant to get a warrant to tap the phones of American citizens.
We know it because they agreed instantaneously to investigate parents who were concerned about their children because during the pandemic they saw their children being basically groomed for disordered sex by their weird teachers, and suddenly they're going to be investigated.
Ron Johnson, Senator Ron Johnson, who actually is from Wisconsin last time I said that Cheney was from Wisconsin, meaning Wyoming, all you guys out in those flyover states with W's in them.
But Ron Johnson, who actually is from Wisconsin, says that FBI officials told agents not to investigate first son Hunter Biden's infamous laptop for months.
Mark Zuckerberg is telling Joe Rogan that the FBI made him, not made him, but suggested that he take down Hunter Biden news off Facebook, and he did.
So we know all this stuff is bad news.
These guys, the people on the left know that they are appealing to our worst selves.
When they say they're going to tax people only if they make over 400, they know they're appealing to envy.
They know they're doing that.
When they say, oh, I'm just going to forgive the debt, they know they're acting lawlessly.
We heard Nancy Pelosi say so.
We've heard Joe Biden say so.
They know they're doing the wrong thing.
When they come in and butcher children and cut the breasts off healthy young girls, and now we've had people who say they're going to perform hysterectomies on healthy young girls.
I mean, they know they're doing wrong.
But you have to understand that this is who people are.
And I mean you and me.
I mean everybody.
It's simply whether they decide not to follow those earthly desires, those fleshly desires, and follow the spirit of the person they were born to be.
We all know who that person is.
We all know we've fallen short of that person.
Every single one of us, every man jack of us, knows we're supposed to be better than we are and we've fallen short.
And some of us accept that, ask God for forgiveness and move forward, and some of us don't.
Some of us say, we're going to continue to be that person because I can't stand the shame.
And those people, those people, have to demonize the people who make them feel bad about themselves.
There is a hilarious story, Podcast Movement, which is a podcast trade organization.
They had an expo, I think it was in Dallas, and Daily Wire was there.
They invited us to be there.
And Ben dropped in.
Ben dropped in, and we will show pictures of him greeting people, and people are thanking him.
And he's doing what Ben does very well, which is greet his loving fans and welcome them and thank them for their support and all this stuff.
And some of the snowflakes complain to podcast movement, and podcast movement puts out an apology.
Now, this is very funny, and I was laughing about it on Twitter.
It actually did crack me up.
But it's actually, it's also not so funny.
Here's the apology.
Hi, folks.
We owe you an apology before sessions kick off for the day.
Yesterday afternoon, Ben Shapiro briefly visited the PM22 Expo area near the Daily Wire booth.
Though he was not registered or expected, we take full responsibility for the harm done by his presence.
The harm done by Ben Shapiro's presence.
Now, you know, I have to tell you something.
I love to make fun of the other hosts on the Daily Wire because we do it to each other behind the scenes.
Why shouldn't I do it on the air?
But Ben is actually, I've seen a lot of people become famous and wealthy and have been, in fact, famous and wealthy.
Ben is one of the very few people I've ever seen become famous and wealthy without becoming a jackass, without becoming a jerk.
He's still kind to the people who work for him.
He's still kind to everybody around.
He is a genuinely decent fellow, and sometimes he and I disagree.
We've had massive arguments that have lasted for hours.
And obviously the people at this expo, some of them disagreed.
What children, what children they are.
But to say that somebody's presence has caused harm, his existence has caused harm, and especially a guy like Ben, who's a family man and a good bloke and a guy who's just making his way in the world like everybody else.
This is an amazing thing.
It is an amazing mindset that is just his presence, his existence, his existence caused harm, which means the answer is he has to not exist.
I mean, that is essentially the answer.
And I can't help feeling that there is at least a movement on the left that is hoping this is the result of reckless actions like the Mar-a-Lago raid, of reckless actions like closing down the economy.
They're hoping people get so angry that they act in violence as some people did on January 6th and that they can then demonize people and start this civil war that people keep talking about.
On MSNBC, Tiffany Cross is on, and she, you know, there was one or two guys who attacked a FBI, you know, outlet, an FBI headquarters in, I think it was in Milwaukee, and said this was her reaction to this is a cut for.
You have millions of people tuning into a propaganda network every night.
And then as if that were not bad enough, that's an extremist network itself, you have these fringe pop-up outlets, you know, from own to Newsmax.
Then you have the social media component.
That train has left the station.
There is no, let's deal with the rhetoric.
At this point, I do think we have to have serious conversations around preparing for actual violence.
People keep saying a civil war is coming.
I would say a civil war is here.
And I don't mean to be hyperbolic.
We can look at what has happened just in the past week alone since all this has happened.
We've had two people try to declare war with FBI field offices.
I don't think at this point we're going to all pack up our bags and go home and sing Kumbaya.
So she doesn't want to be hyperbolic, but two people in a country of 350 million people are nutcases and overreacted to the FBI.
And she declares we're in a civil war.
I mean, they're yearning for this.
I don't think it's going to turn out quite as well as they think it's going to turn out.
And I think the bloodshed and what follows would be awful.
But look, if Christianity is right, and if the conservatism that grows out of Christianity is right, those who stand up for the spirit in a fleshly world will be demonized and ultimately crucified.
That is the absolute message of the gospels.
Ben Shapiro's presence causes harm.
Some clown on 4chan is now the civil war.
You know, there's nothing we can do about this.
We can't stop women like that from talking.
We can't stop people from demonizing us and all their stuff.
But I think that we can speak the truth of conservatism and the truth of Christianity with respect to our fellow people.
You know, when you start to say that we have to become the left in order to beat the left, when you start to say that we should be rude because these people are rude or these people are angry, then we simply become them.
I know it's frustrating.
It's hard to be the good guy.
It is hard to be the good guys.
You can't shoot people on the back.
You can't violate your principles.
Have to act in a certain way.
It doesn't mean we can't fight hard, but that fighting hard depends on courage.
It depends on the courage to speak the truths, to speak the truth about the nature of humanity, to speak the truth about the reasons for the Constitution, to know the history and the reasons behind the Constitution.
So when adolescents at the New York Times, who know nothing but have the big credentials, tell us we should get rid of the Constitution, we can explain to people why that isn't so.
You know, this is what Christians have been telling us for 2,000 years.
It's what conservatives have been telling us in 1776.
Power must be controlled because people are sinful.
And we need to convince those who will be convinced that those conservatives were right.
Now, we in right-wing media love to terrify you about coming catastrophes and tell you you should stock off on food and guns and have a shelter in your home.
And obviously that could never happen.
I mean, for instance, Business Insider magazine just recently wrote, we're in a global food crisis that will wreak havoc on local economies and trigger civil unrest.
What?
Civil unrest?
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You say prepare with, how do you spell that?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Critics and Creative Challenges00:06:46
All right, you have heard me talk about the terminal list, how much I liked both the novel and the show.
I read the novel when it came out and thought it was just great action stuff.
The terminal list on Amazon Prime was a terrific series.
Jack Carr is the author of that book and I think five, soon to be six more novels.
He's a former Navy SEAL who put that expertise into telling the story of James Rees.
The first book is the terminal list and the show was great.
Jack, it's great to see you.
It's great to meet you.
Thanks for coming on.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
This is fantastic.
To begin with, I have to ask you, because I've had books made into movies and it's quite an experience.
Did you like the show as much as I did?
I did.
I was fortunate enough to be involved with the process.
And most of the time, they like to get rid of the author right away in Hollywood.
They give you a little bit of something just to make you semi-happy and off you go.
Just so you're not on set saying, you ruined my vision, you've ruined my book.
I was very fortunate that both Antoine Fuqua and Chris Pratt and the showrunner David DiGilio, they all want to be involved from the very beginning.
So for me, it was an education.
And I got to see this thing, work on the pilot with the showrunner, see him and Chris Pratt and Antoine take it around at Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and all these different places, see the Amazon deal come to fruition and then see the writer's room come together.
And that was interesting because now you have, I think it was 12 people that came together, that read the book and then put their kind of spin on each of their episodes.
And then they go on to other projects.
And then that reverts to me and Chris and Antoine and the showrunner.
And then we get to get back in there and fiddle.
And then you start casting and then you start production and go all the way through that.
And of course, all these scripts that were written in nice air-conditioned offices, kind of like a plan in the military when you're just doing it, you think you're just brilliant looking at on a sand table in a nice air-conditioned space.
And then you get out there and realize the enemy has a vote.
Same thing with scripts.
Get out there and you look around and say, Oh, this does not work anymore based on location and terrain or what some of these actors have brought to the role in episodes one, two, and three really changes what happens in four, five, six, seven, and eight.
So, I got to see all that, be involved in all those changes, and then go through post-production and right into seeing it hit screen.
So, I was very fortunate.
And I knew there was going to be changes.
That's just how it goes.
I knew that you're telling a story visually now, but to have each of those changes kind of rooted in the realities of modern combat and in the foundation of the novel that hey, you can't, you can't get much more than that once you turn something over to a group in Hollywood.
That's a pretty good deal.
Did they let you?
I mean, since you are an AV SEAL, we're a Navy SEAL, did they let you teach the actors how to behave and how to move?
Did you feel it was kind of accurate?
Well, if I lived in Los Angeles, I would have been on set every day, but because we're out here in Park City, Utah, and I had another book to write, I would go back and forth.
But I was so fortunate that I had three guys on the set every single day that had served.
And it's Max Adams, who's a former Army Ranger, who was one of the writers, Jared Shaw, who was a SEAL with me and gave the book to Chris Pratt and is the reason the whole thing came to be in the first place.
And Raymond Oza, another SEAL buddy of mine from War Office Productions, who's a technical advisor.
Those three guys were on there every day.
And because of our friendship, they really wanted this thing to be authentic.
They were invested in it, much more so than just professionally.
They were personally invested in this thing.
So I think without those three guys on set every day, it would have been a much different series.
You know, I like the book so much that I was drawn to the series.
But before I watched it, I tested, looked at the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and then was convinced because the critics were much less enthusiastic than the people, which I always know means it's a good show.
What do you think?
What were the critics complaining about?
Well, it's we knew from the outset when we sat down with that pilot episode that when we wrote the pilot episode, and by we, I mean the showrunner, and I was just really learning and advising a tiny bit.
But we knew that we weren't making this thing for critics.
And we knew because you can look at shows and you can say, oh, they made this for critics.
And you can kind of, and there's a, there's a reason for that.
You want to work on somebody's career resume type of a thing for another project or whatever it might be.
There's a lot of strategy that goes into that sort of thing.
But we were very mindful of the fact that we wanted to make this for the men and women who went downrange over the last 20 years.
We wanted to capture really that mindset of a modern warrior.
So when someone sat down and cracked a beer to watch this show, they would know, hey, we made this for them.
We didn't make this for critics.
We made it for them and we made something special.
So that was the guiding principle this whole time.
It wasn't like, oh, we should probably do this for critics or we should probably do this for so-and-so.
No, it was always for that person that's going to sit down on the couch, crack that beer, watch it and say, oh, these guys made something.
They put in the effort at least.
And of course, there's a couple of Hollywood things here and there.
It's Hollywood.
But we really put in the effort to get it right, capturing that mindset of a modern warrior.
Is there something particular that you see in Hollywood movies about war or about the military that drives you insane that makes you think like the minute you see it, you think, oh, they didn't know what they were talking about?
Yeah, I try not to watch it with that eye because that's just a miserable way to go through life if you're always looking for the negative.
So you can choose.
You can look for the good in things or you can just wait and look for the bad and then have it drive you nuts and then tell everybody about it on your, for your two Twitter followers or whatever it might be.
But that's a really rough way to go through life, I think.
Sometimes it's unavoidable and you see it and you see something and you see people talking and use language that you wouldn't use in the military or you call something by a name that you wouldn't because there's an acronym or that and it's tough.
So I try to be as forgiving as possible.
But now after going through this process, I'm even more forgiving because I realize how many opportunities there are for things to completely go off the rails.
There's so many people working on these things.
350 people on set every day, multiple executive producers, multiple directors, multiple executives in the Amazon chain of command in this particular case.
And so there are so many opportunities for people to come in and mess things up.
So now when I sit down and watch something, I am just so appreciative of all the effort that went in because no matter how horrible it is, a lot of effort went into that.
And a lot of people devoted a year, two years of their lives, three years in some cases, getting things out there.
And now I'm just, I just appreciate how much work went into it.
But yeah, there are a few things here and there, just weapons handling for the most part, tactics, gear.
If you see something that someone would never use, that had the background of that character, or they're handling weapons in a way that that character with their background would never handle a way like those sort of things stand out.
But I try to enjoy the story, appreciate it for what it is and not just zero in on the negative.
Cash Back Bonanza00:08:53
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Don't panic, because I know you're panicking.
You're thinking I don't even know how to spell clavin.
It's k-l-a-v-a-n-One of the things I noticed.
I mean you're, you're.
You were a navy seal, so obviously you believe in being the the tip of the spear of of this country.
But all the villains in that James Rees is facing are not in fact, except in the beginning.
He's not in in fact facing the uh, foreign enemies of America.
He's facing the enemies within, and some of those people are business people who have put profit above lives and and political people have put power above lives.
Why that's?
That's an interesting choice to have made.
Why did you make James Rees's enemies uh, Americans?
Basically, I think it was very natural and very therapeutic.
Um, and I started writing in uh, december of 2014, so I had about a year left in in the military.
My job Became to get out of this gigantic bureaucracy that is the military at that point, going to medical and dental and going to get read out of secret programs, turning gear.
But before you do any of that, because it's the military, you have to stand in line to make your appointment to then get back in line to come back and do it again.
So, point being, you have a lot of time on your hands.
So, I started writing and really got into the meat of it in 2015.
But that's almost 15 years at war.
And I was in the military for all of that time.
So, you got to see decisions made at the strategic level that really impacted people at the tactical level who stood up to serve their country.
And now they're out there and they're put in.
And we saw it, obviously, we're recording this on the 26th when Abby Gate happened during the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And so, you see those strategic level decisions by people in Washington in nice air-conditioned offices affect that E1, E2, E3, E4 soldier, sailor, airman, and marine at that tactical level.
And so, I think it was very therapeutic to write this book.
And you can read it at a few different levels.
You can just say, grab it off the shelf on your way to the beach or on your way, your plane flight, and say, oh, there's a great story about revenge, which it was.
And I had a yellow sticky that said revenge right on my computer as I was writing so that everything either directly or indirectly had to come back to that theme.
But really, it's about somebody who is becoming an insurgent.
And I show that in a few different ways.
His beard grows throughout the series in Amazon and in the show.
Hair gets longer.
He raids the armory of what is now his enemy, his armory in the book.
And so you can read it as that as well.
Someone becoming what they'd been fighting, becoming essentially becoming the monster that they'd been fighting.
And then also it is someone, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing those wars home to the front doors of people who have been sending young men and women to their deaths for 20 years plus now.
But at the time, I wrote it, 14, 15, 16 years.
So you can really read it on a few different levels.
But I think that was really, and I didn't consciously come up with that.
It was just a subconscious thing that became very natural as I started outlining this and then writing the narrative.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
You know, one of the things that's really interesting about you that I, when I was preparing to talk to you, I only found it out then was that you have a literary background.
You're not a guy who just sat down and said, I'm going to write a book.
And I've read a lot of books like that that aren't very good.
I mean, that was one of the things that grabbed me about the terminal list.
I thought, oh, here's a guy who not only knows all of this information about fighting, but he actually knows how to put an English sentence together.
Where did that come from?
Right.
So my mom was a librarian, still is.
So I grew up with books and a love of reading.
I knew I wanted to serve my country from a very early age.
My grandfather was killed in World War II off Okinawa in 1945.
He was a Corsair pilot, which is a plane that had the gold wings that would fold up like that, Pappy Boynton's plane.
So I knew I was going to serve.
And when I was seven, I found out about SEALs.
And my mom, being a librarian, took me down to the local library to also teach me how to research.
And back in the early 80s, as you remember, if you wanted to research something on special operations, you could pretty much read everything in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half if you're a slow reader.
There wasn't that much out there about special operations in particular.
But what I did start learning when I got to about age 10, fifth grade, that's when Hunt for Red October came out.
And for sick, by sixth grade, for sure, I was reading the same books my parents were reading.
But back in those days and all the way through the 90s, a lot of the protagonists in those stories had backgrounds I wanted in real life one day.
So they had backgrounds as Navy SEALs, as Army Special Forces, as Marine snipers, as CIA paramilitary officers in Vietnam.
That was kind of the background of the 80s and 90s action hero protagonist in these novels by Tom Clancy and Nelson DeMille and A.J. Quinnell and J.C. Pollock and Mark Olden and David Morrell and all these guys that I read growing up, Stephen Hunter.
And so I was really, and I didn't realize it at the time, but I was giving myself an education in the art of storytelling from the masters in the genre that I was going to write in one day.
So I made a very conscious decision way back then that one day I would serve my country specifically as a SEAL.
And then I would write thrillers in this genre that I was enjoying so much because there was so much magic in those pages.
And for my kids today, I feel bad because there's so many distractions.
And I try to do my best as a parent, you know, to get that iPad or iPhone.
There's just so many more inputs coming in.
Back when we grew up, there was the Atari 2600.
And you could only spend a certain amount of time playing that Atari 2600.
You couldn't spend days doing that.
So I escaped into these pages of these books and it was just magic.
And then also my mom introduced me to Joseph Campbell through a series of interviews he did with Bill Moyers in 1988 called The Power of Death.
And she sat me down and we watched that and I was enthralled by that.
I read Hero with a Thousand Faces.
And then I think everything I read or watched from that point on, I kind of filtered through the hero's journey.
And whether it was conscious or subconscious, I was taking notes what was working, what was not working in these novels or in these films or in these series.
And that really laid a foundation for me as I got out of the military because I didn't wake up one day and say, hey, you know what?
I'm going to give this writing thing a try.
What should I have been reading for the last 35 years?
I'd done that reading already.
I had that foundation.
So I didn't have to start from scratch.
And then I started writing, got it to Simon ⁇ Schuster.
And I think that's really what stood out to them as well is that I had this foundation.
And also I brought in these feelings and emotions from my time downrange.
So I didn't have to interview a sniper from Ramadi in 2006 and then ask him questions and have his answers filter through other interviews that I had done, books that I read, movies that I've seen, preconceived notions I may have, and then put it into a fictional narrative.
No, it all comes from my heart and soul directly onto the page.
So I think that stood out to Simon ⁇ Schuster and has stood out to readers as well.
That's really interesting.
I loved Campbell.
I read everything Campbell wrote, and it's a very good thing to have in your head when you're telling stories.
What happens now?
What's the latest book called?
Well, it hasn't been released yet.
But the latest one that just came out is In the Blood came out in May, hit all the number one New York Times things, which is amazing.
And I really thank everybody who took a risk on me as a new author and told a friend because that's how this happened.
But the one I'm writing right now, I'm in book six.
So as soon as we're done here, I go right back to writing book six.
I think we announced the title in the next few weeks for that one.
But I'm in the middle of that.
Should come out in the spring.
And I just want every single book to be better than the last one.
And that's something I take very seriously because people are trusting me with their time.
They're never getting that time back.
And they don't know if they have five minutes left on this planet, five years, 10 years, 20 years.
We don't know.
But they're not getting any of the time back they spend in these pages.
People Trusting Me With Their Time00:02:23
And that's something I take very seriously.
They're trusting me with that time.
So all my energy and effort goes into making the best product possible.
Will there be another series?
I haven't heard about it being picked up for a second.
We shall see.
We shall see.
I hope so.
But you never know.
But right now, I hope so.
But if there's not, I'm just thrilled.
We got one season out of it.
And I could not be more thankful for the friendships that I made there.
That's what stands out more than anything else.
And then what I learned as well about storytelling, about visual storytelling, about production.
It was really an education over these last few years.
And everything that I learned really does end up in future projects.
Yeah.
Jack Carr, the author of The Terminalist, a terrific book.
It really is.
And it's really nice talking to you.
And I'm really happy that you had such a great experience with Hollywood.
It doesn't always happen.
Thank you, Sam.
Thanks for it.
I appreciate it.
Thanks very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Take care.
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Shifts in Movie Policy00:16:25
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So every month we like to talk to Megan Basham, who is just a terrific cultural reporter.
She does a great job.
If you're not reading her, you are really missing out on some of the best reporting in the business.
Megan, it's always great to see you.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you, Drew?
It's great to be here.
I always enjoy talking to you.
You actually bring news and information into the entertainment world, which is a pretty rare commodity.
You know, I started out the show joking about Brian Stelter, the sad, sad firing of Brian Stelter.
And I know all of us are so moved.
And, you know, he's the only guy who's been fired from CNN who wasn't chasing women around the room.
I mean, he was actually fired for the fact that nobody was watching his show.
And there's a lot of talk going on.
Is this guy, Chris Lick, coming in to make CNN less of an opinion network, more of a news network?
Are you hearing anything about this?
Yeah, you know, so there is a lot of chatter about that.
And, you know, you have to say there's a lot of hand-wringing about that.
I've probably read maybe three or four long think pieces on what the fate of Brian Stelter means to the news media.
You know, a lot of weeping, gnashing of teeth going on out there.
And a part of it is, look, the reality is the guy who, the billionaire who took over at Warner Brothers Discovery, he's sort of a less known Rupert Murdoch figure.
He is a libertarian, a man named John Malone.
And he certainly is far more conservative than the other media owners.
And he is someone who is known to give money to the Trump campaign.
He is definitely just more on the conservative side of things.
And so I think in one sense, he made it clear that he had a problem with how CNN was approaching news.
He made some very pointed comments about how he would like to see real journalism at CNN.
But he's also a businessman.
And I think that, you know, look, their ratings have been in the toilet.
They haven't done well.
They've often lost even against MSNBC.
So they've been the bottom of the barrel.
So you look at a businessman like this and you go, there are just straight up business concerns here.
There are economics at play.
And, you know, Ryan Stelter's show wasn't the worst rated, but he was fairly highly paid.
And it wasn't the best rated for the salary that he was earning.
So I think that's part of what people were looking at.
But then there's also some personal, possibly animus at play here.
Everyone else, certainly Don Lemon is very liberal.
Jim Maca is very liberal, openly so.
They're both still there.
But Brian Stelter was a little bit defiant when the takeover happened.
He directly called out John Malone by name and he sent out this, yes, media newsletter where he said, you know, John Malone thinks that, and I'm paraphrasing, if he thinks there's not real news and journalism happening at CNN, then he must not be watching CNN.
Well, look, you've got some big egos at play here, and maybe that wasn't the best thing to directly call him out by name.
So it's not really that surprising that Brian Stelter is the first head on the chopping block, but we do expect there to be more.
So that, well, that's what I was wondering about because, you know, I've always had a pretty good sense of where the culture was going.
And I just smell a shift in the air.
Maybe part of it is just money, but also part of it is this kind of, it's been like an orgy of bashing right-wingers, of bashing conservatives, but also just bashing ordinary Americans who love the country and don't think it's the most racist place on earth and think it's actually a good thing that there's an America.
Are you hearing anything about guys like Acosta and Don Lemon?
Because I hear people on the left saying this was just personal between Malone and Stelter and is not political or not at least programming oriented.
Yeah, no, so I agree with you on that.
Here's the other reality is that the extremely woke, the people who want to see things like diversity requirements, who cheer things like what we're seeing in the Minneapolis school district, where they're, of course, you know, I'm sure your audience has heard, where they are firing based on skin color rather than seniority, which is sort of mind-blowing.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that boomers don't really cotton on to.
It's not the sort of thing that Gen X is behind.
There's a very specific age group that is that extreme.
And that age group does not watch cable news.
They're not getting their news from cable.
They're not getting their news from television at all.
So they're really targeting, they have been in these past few years, an extremely woke, small slice of the television watching demographic who are drifting away from television anyway.
So I think that there is a sense that, and I've sort of described it to people this way, that they have their foot caught in a trap and they're now trying to gnaw it off and figure out how do we get out of this.
So I think you have a lot of bosses who were terrified of their own young staffers.
They were terrified of, you know, hashtag activism in their newsrooms.
And I think they're learning that you cannot be beholden to this and be successful.
So yes, I feel what you're feeling, Drew.
And I think that there are a lot of cooler heads starting to prevail who are saying, if you don't like it here at CNN, we're seeing this with John Malone and the person he hired to run CNN now, a guy named Chris Licht, not known as a conservative figure, but I do think they're starting to go, we cannot let the inmates run the asylum here.
You know, I think this happened at Netflix.
We've talked about this a little.
I mean, I was watching Netflix for a while and I was complaining that Netflix was turning me into a bigot because I like stories about anybody and I especially like American stories and we're all different colors here and different religions and different things and whatever it is, I think there's an American experience that comes across in these stories.
But there started to be this thing called the Black Lives Matter collection.
And I consider Black Lives Matter to be a Maoist, anti-American, anti-family organization.
And I'm not going to watch a Black Lives Matter collection.
And one day I just glanced down and I thought, oh, this is a Denzel Washington movie.
Denzel Washington is one of my favorite actors, but I'm not watching this because it's in this Black Lives Matter collection.
One of the things I have noticed is that A, a lot of the pictures that I was being told were the top pictures on Netflix, and I knew they weren't, were out of that collection.
And now those pictures have disappeared.
That has actually changed.
But the other thing is a lot of people got fired.
And according to what I read in the papers anyway, that some of them were the exact people who were complaining about Dave Chappelle.
They canceled Ibrun Kendi's.
I want to nitwit that guy, but they canceled his show about racism.
So is something happening at Netflix too, where they're just saying, as you say, they're gnawing their foot off to get out of the woke trap?
Yeah.
And I think that's a really good connection to draw because yes, I think that's exactly what's happening.
And you are seeing it also now at Netflix.
And one of the ways you're seeing it is: okay, so yes, Ted Sarandos, who is the co-CEO at Netflix, put out this memo basically saying, okay, party time is over, woke parade, party time is over.
If you don't like it here, if you don't like the content that we're going to put out for a very diverse audience with a diverse range of views, then you can leave.
And he also made it clear that this is not your safe space.
He said, essentially, we are not a family.
You should look at us as a winning team.
So this idea that we're going to coddle and comfort you the way your mother would, that's over.
So you can leave if you don't like it.
And I look, Ted Sarandos is not a conservative guy.
Reed Hastings, the other CEO, is not a conservative guy, but they are, again, businessmen who want to make money.
And I think what you saw was that a lot of these very niche BLM properties, a lot of art house content that they had funneled a lot of money into for trans audiences, stories about teenagers who are exploring their sexuality.
It did not draw an audience the way that they wanted.
So they have announced a shift in policy.
It's not just happening with here's how we're going to treat staffers.
It's also happening with here's the kind of content we're going to put out.
So they have announced that we are not going to be buying up all of these very niche art house woke productions anymore.
We're going to be funneling money into big, fewer, expensive productions that people really want to watch.
And that has meant, for example, traditional muscular, masculine movies like Gray Man is one of the very popular pieces of entertainment right now that are on the site.
So if you're a guy, you've probably watched Gray Man.
It's a spy flick, stars Chris Evans, Ryan Gosling.
But here's the other interesting one that is actually the number one movie right now on Netflix.
It's a movie called Purple Hearts.
And it's kind of this Hallmark-y romantic drama, you know, has very unrealistic premise about a young woman who's a singer who has diabetes and she marries a conservative soldier.
I think he's in the army.
And he's, you know, he's very conservative.
He's MAGA, he's red.
And it's this romantic story about how they get married just so she can have health benefits because she has diabetes.
And the woke media minders lost their minds.
If you go out and search Purple Hearts controversy, you're going to find just dozens of articles where they're wringing their hands about how dare you portray this soldier, this conservative, red-blooded Trump supporting soldier in a positive light.
But here's the reality: nobody cares.
This movie is the number one most popular movie on Netflix right now.
If you're Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings, at this point, you have to be realizing, okay, so all the people who are these low-level staffers who think they get to storm the boardroom and tell us what we're putting out, these are the people who are making a lot of noise about movies like this.
And in the meantime, normal viewers are turning in in droves or tuning in in droves because they want to see this.
You can see it also with Top Gun Maverick breaking all of these records, just doing absolute gangbusters business.
The reality is this, the free market does work and people are seeing a hole even in streaming and they're going, we want to be in the business of actually getting people to watch our movies and not just receiving awards for our movies.
So yeah, it's been really interesting to watch the evolution at Netflix where they're going, yeah, it turns out our stock's in the toilet.
We've got a lot of subscribers, but there's also a lot of churn.
And if we want to keep those subscribers, we actually have to give them content they want to watch.
You know, it's funny when you had not heard about this show when almost immediately after Trump was elected, I called my agent and said, why don't we do a love story between a MA guy and a blue girl?
And he called me back and said, I nosed around about that.
He said, nobody will do a pro, a sympathetic description of a MAGA character.
He said, just not, it's not a thing.
It's not going to happen.
So that is a big change.
That is a big change.
It is a huge change.
And for me, I didn't think it was that great of a movie.
I would have preferred to see what you would have done with that story.
Oh, it would have been much, much better, of course.
But even that's, I mean, that tells you something.
Even sort of mediocre productions in this space, people are starving for it.
So yeah, they're dying to see it and driving it to the very top of the Netflix charts.
Because it's happening in their family.
It's happening, you know, it's a thing that actually they know about and they see it.
You know, I noticed that this story, one of your stories you were reporting is that California wants to add a diversity requirement to its 330 million tax incentive for film and TV production.
That's an interesting story because, first of all, nobody does any TV production in LA anymore because it's too expensive.
They all go to Arkansas and do it there or to Hungary or something like that.
But also just in the rule of biblical exegesis, they always say if there's a law against something, it's because people were doing it.
So when it says thou shalt not do something, it's because people were doing it.
So this seems to me to mean that the industry is not really that interested in the diversity requirement, that maybe they want to shove this down the industry's throat.
Is that a fair interpretation, you think?
Well, look, I think the industry is interested in putting out press releases about their diversity and then figuring out ways to say that, oh, look, we did it.
Look, it's sort of like tax cheating, right?
They're finding these creative ways to say that we did it.
But in the meantime, yes, you're absolutely right.
They're moving their productions to Canada.
They're moving their productions to Georgia, to Tennessee.
And I'm glad that you brought that up because it also points out that in the past, and this is just another example of how they're trying to get out of this woke spiral, every time a red state where they were filming productions would say, okay, we're going to pass a voter integrity law.
Immediately the next thing was all of these studios would put out their statement saying, we're not going to do business there anymore.
You'll notice that you're not hearing that anymore.
And I think part of the reason is things like this Gavin Newsom-backed legislation to have diversity requirements.
Suddenly they've gone very quiet, even in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
You're not seeing studios, all of the studios who made noise about Georgia's abortion law a couple of years ago, that I think it was six-week heartbeat abortion law.
In the wake of Dobbs, they are all silent.
they're saying nothing because they're realizing they are driving themselves out of business and they're costing themselves millions and millions of dollars.
So, you know, they have all signed on to the premise of these diversity requirements before this legislation came up.
They all said, look, we want to have anywhere between 30 to 50% of our production teams be BIPOC.
So the Black, Indigenous, people of color.
And what's interesting is if Gavin Newsom's backed legislation goes through, which a lot of people think that it will, though it's obviously going to face some legal challenges because it is not constitutional and it violates civil rights law, what we're going to see is that it may actually, what it requires is that you have a reflection of the demographic of the state in your production.
Well, what that could actually mean is that because these studios have made such an effort to hire BIPOC, they might actually be able to have a less diverse staff if you were looking at the breakdown of demographics within California.
So, I mean, if you look at it nationally, the black population is about 13%.
Well, they're saying we want anywhere from, you know, 30 to 50% of our team to be diverse.
You wouldn't necessarily get 13%.
You're probably going to get more than 13% of a black staff then.
So in a way, Gavin Newsom's campaigning on this, but it would actually give the studios a little bit of an out.
So it'll be interesting to see what they do.
But the reality is this, you don't want the red tape.
You don't want the legislation.
So I noticed that they're just being really quiet about it and they're just not going to film there.
I'm glad they're dealing with BIPOCs.
I had BIPOCs for a while and I'm glad I got over it.
Capital Punishment Debate00:09:33
Megan, it's always great to see you.
Megan Bashram is writing great stuff for the Daily Wire.
We'll talk to you again in September.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks, Drew.
Thank you.
All right.
That's that thunder you hear is the clavininless week approaching.
But before you go into that present darkness, you want to solve all your problems.
And that's why we have the mailbag.
Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Ron DeSantis on Fau Chi from Aaron.
I love watching your show.
Appreciate you taking the time to read my question.
I'm a mom of three kids, all of whom my husband and I have adopted.
I'm staunchly pro-life.
I've lost several friends over the last few years due to it.
You said once you changed your mind after a long talk, argument with a friend.
So my question is this.
What changed your mind, Hart?
What can I do or say around my friends if he gets brought up to change their minds and not lose my friends?
Usually they just shut down and get angry with me and won't even listen when I say we shouldn't murder children.
Anywho, thanks for all you do.
Aaron, yeah, here's the thing, Aaron.
I got in a long argument with a friend of mine whom I love dearly.
We both like arguing.
We both openly discuss things.
We discuss religion.
We discuss politics.
It was a long time ago and we're still good friends.
You know, that's a very specific situation.
That's a situation of trust.
It's a situation where we knew we were in an argument.
What changed my mind was he won the argument.
I went to bed that night at like two o'clock in the morning and I thought like, no, he made really good points.
It took me years, decades to accept the fact that he had won the argument.
It was basically an argument based on time and basically saying that, you know, you don't kill someone just because he can't function at a certain human level in that moment if he's going to be able to.
We all live in time.
But that's not the point.
The point is it was a situation of deep trust, a situation by two men who enjoyed arguing, who were willing to change their minds, willing to listen to what the other person was saying.
You know, just because somebody is your friend doesn't mean that that's the role you have in their lives.
So when you say to somebody, we shouldn't murder children, you might not know that they had an abortion or somebody they love had an abortion or something, and that's a very harsh thing to say.
What I tend to do is either avoid arguments that I don't think are going to change anybody's heart, because why have them, just to make me feel that I've said something, that I've put forward an idea that doesn't make any sense to me.
I either avoid the argument or I'll simply say, well, you know, I'm on the other side of this, and if we can't talk about it, let's talk about something else.
You know, that way, if they draw you out, if they draw you out into an argument, you can say what you have to say invited by them.
But basically, if you are in that situation with someone you deeply trust, who's not going to get angry with you, who's not going to end their friendship over it, then you don't talk about murdering children.
You talk about, for me, the entire question hinges on whether this is a human life.
And I feel that there's no question that it is a human life.
And I don't feel we should take human life to solve our problems.
I understand the terrible situations people can get in.
And I understand how we can be convinced to do that, but I don't think we should.
And I just think, you know, to be very aggressive about something that somebody might have done without your knowing it is sure to turn people off and not going to push, get the result that you want to get.
And a lot of this is about results.
From Nate, I think your listeners need to understand what civil war is when they see it.
What are some precedents and forms for civil war that are analogous to our times?
What might be the actual front lines in our country?
What could be happening right before our eyes?
And yet we don't understand it as war.
In our post-Christian society, I'm not sure we still have the intellectual tools, clear vision, and honesty to understand real oppression as it occurs, nor the integrity and imagination to formulate the grounds for just war in response to it.
Thanks, Andrew.
Love your stuff.
Well, hey, well, thanks very much for that.
But I disagree with you on this, Nate.
You know, the people at Gettysburg weren't confused about what a civil war looks like, and we won't be confused about it either.
It looks bad.
It is not this.
This is not a civil war.
This is an argument.
This is a very divided country.
It's an argument that can still be settled at the ballot box if we're lucky.
And we should not let our metaphors become reality.
If we want to say this is like unto an intellectual civil war, that's one thing.
But no, this is not a civil war, and we should not try and pretend that it is to just make things to express how dramatically we feel we're divided.
From Ethan, hey, Andrew, my name's Ethan, big fan, but I'll get right to the point.
My family needs help.
Part are Republicans, some are Democrats.
We've struggled with that before, but I recently had a political argument with a close relative of mine I truly love and admire, which quickly transformed into how could you ever support a man-who type scenario about Trump?
It doesn't matter what we believe.
What matters is that this relative stated that if Trump wins in 2024, then this family is done.
We'll split in two.
That's how much trouble my family is in.
We have a faction that's on the brink of disowning us due to our political convictions.
What can we do?
What side should give in?
Should we just split?
Any advice on how this family could move forward would be greatly appreciated.
I hope to share your answer with my family, so I guess you're addressing us all, haha.
You know, I wouldn't do that necessarily.
They may be put off by me.
What I would do in your situation, if I saw it coming, and I do have this situation in parts of my family where people won't talk to me anymore.
But what I would do if you see this coming is if you have social media that all your family is on, I might put forward a modest, humble, and polite manifesto that says simply this.
You know, I know we're divided about politics in this family, and I know that elections can bring those divisions to the surface.
I want you to know that I love you all, and I'm not going to abandon anybody over politics.
So if you feel you have to abandon me, it'll break my heart.
But anytime you want to come back, please come back because I love you and politics is, you know, people disagree about politics.
Good people have very different opinions about politics and I'm not going to be part of a family feud over that and I hope you guys won't either and just leave it at that and say what you have to say and hope that it doesn't come to a break because it is wrong.
It's just ridiculous that people break over stuff like this.
From Morgan, I was listening to your last episode and you were talking about the death penalty.
I can't seem to get my head around why Christians endorse the death penalty because I can't see Jesus being in favor of it, especially because of the way he interrupted the woman about to be put to death by stoning, saying that who is without sin, throw the first stone.
I don't see why we have the right to take a defenseless person's life.
I hear Knowles and Walsh talking about how they think it's a good thing and just figured that's Knowles and Walsh.
Of course they would believe that, but when I heard you talking about it, I figured there must be something I'm missing since I'm young and you are so wise and powerful, just wondering if you could explain why you think the death penalty is a Christian thing.
I don't think it's a Christian thing.
I don't really think any particular political system is a Christian thing.
I think there may be political systems that are un-Christian, like oppressing people and enslaving people, I think, is un-Christian.
But I don't think one political system that allows people freedom and dignity is any more Christian than another one.
And I don't necessarily think that Democrats are more or less Christian than Republicans.
Those arguments are really not what Christianity is about, I'm afraid.
Obviously, there are some things like abortion where I think the Christian point is very clear, what a Christian standpoint is very clear.
Here, what I said is that I think that there is a way to do capital punishment that would be moral.
Not Christian, moral.
And that I think that, you know, I talked about it last week.
I won't go into it again.
And I think that if that could be shown to reduce murders, to save lives, and maybe bring peace to the people who have suffered so greatly at the hands of murderers, I would be for it.
As I said then, I will repeat now, it's not something that I'm eager about or, you know, like, yes, we have to, you know, let's bring on old Sparky or anything like that.
I simply think what we're doing now is cruel and unusual punishment and that it hasn't, we really haven't done a fair study to see whether capital punishment saves lives.
If it does save lives and if it does bring peace to the people who have been harmed by murder, I think it could be a moral thing.
Whether it's a Christian thing or not, that I'm not willing to argue.
I would say if it's a moral thing, that would be good enough for me.
I do not think that Christianity is anywhere near as pacifist as people think it is.
I don't think pacifism is a moral point of view because all pacifism means is that someone else is doing the fighting for you because if he weren't doing the fighting for you, you wouldn't be here because there are always evil people willing to take your life, take everything you have, and destroy you.
So I don't think Turn the Other Cheek is in favor of pacifism.
I think it's a strike against honor culture, the idea that I have to take revenge for every wrong that's been done to me, that I can't be shown to lose in any way, shape, or form.
And it is a call to patience and mercy and forgiveness, which I think I very much believe in.
But somebody who has committed certain kinds of murders, maybe the only way to stop that from happening or lessen it from happening is capital punishment.
I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but I can definitely see a kind of capital punishment that would be a moral choice for a government.
Again, not Christian.
Friday Still Here00:00:26
All right, we are going to stop there.
For those of you who don't subscribe, the Clavinless Week is here.
There is darkness, there's wailing, there's gnashing of teeth, fire, broken glass, you're crawling across that broken glass.
No hope of really getting to next Friday.
If you do get to next Friday, we will still be here.
If you're a subscriber, there's still content left to be had on the Andrew Clavin Show.
But if not, sorry, so long.
And we will see you next week on the Andrew Clavin Show.