Andrew Clavin’s Make America Hilarious Again skewers Biden-Xi diplomacy with absurdity—Biden quizzed on Jakarta while Xi gifts him a respiratory infection—before pivoting to midterm fallout, where once-dismissed Trump/FBI conspiracy theories now dominate headlines. The episode dissects Trump’s 2024 pivot from "Stop the Steal" to unity, questioning his discipline amid GOP infighting and Herschel Walker’s Georgia gamble, while contrasting DeSantis’ disciplined rise. War becomes the thread: Clavin critiques Hollywood’s anti-war hypocrisy, warns of Ukraine’s murky stakes, and interviews Nelson DeMille on defying "woke" censorship in fiction, capping with a listener’s violent rage—met with calls for conservative therapy over political fury. The takeaway? Satire masks sharp warnings: politics demands pragmatism, war needs scrutiny, and culture wars risk eroding sanity. [Automatically generated summary]
President and venal house plant Joe Biden met with make-believe president but really murderous dictator Xi Jinping this week in an effort to improve relations between China and the part of China that used to be the United States.
Before the meeting, House Plant Biden told reporters he planned to ask Dictator Xi some hard questions like, what is the capital of Indonesia?
And how do you get the fortune inside the cookie without breaking the cookie?
Or do you roll the fortune into the raw dough?
But then, why doesn't the fortune catch fire when you cook the dough?
And is it really a fortune if it doesn't tell the future?
And if it does tell the future, how do Chinese people know what the future is?
Also, what does Mugu Gai Pan mean?
Biden said if Xi could answer any four of these questions correctly, he would win the risk home game so he could play a taking over the world as a relaxing break from taking over the world.
President Xi said he would be asking tough questions of President Biden as well, like, what's that behind you?
Then when Biden turned around to look, he would steal his watch.
The meeting between Xi and Biden lasted three hours, although that included Biden's two-hour nap, during which Xi had a listening device surgically implanted in one of the president's liver spots so he could record Biden's conversations in the Oval Office and play the results on Chinese TV as a hilarious situation comedy entitled,
Si Tai Pao, which roughly translates as silly old man, says meaningless things to administration underlings, who nod with serious looks on their faces and then run the country however they want, while media lickspittles pretend everything's fine, after which the price of gas goes up another dollar.
The show will be aired Tuesdays at 8 p.m.
Followed by old reruns of Three's Company or, as it's called in Chinese, Si Tai PAO.
After the meeting, President Biden strode confidently from the conference room into a broom closet where he addressed a collection of mops he mistook for American journalists until they reported the story accurately, whereupon he realized they must have been somebody else.
Biden said quote, you know, it's only when you look in a man's eyes and speak to him directly that you can start to understand his point of view.
For instance, I always thought torturing Uyghurs was a bad thing, but now that I've had a chance to discuss it with President Xi the next time I meet a Uyghur well, watch out.
I also had a chance to ask the president for assurances that he would not invade Taiwan, and he guaranteed me he would no more invade Taiwan than he would implant a listening device in one of my liver spots.
Plus, he says he'll continue to send TikTok to America to convince gullible young girls to cut off their breasts and confuse boys to have themselves castrated.
So we're both on the same page there.
All in all, I was glad to extend the hand of friendship to President Xi, though I do wonder what the hell happened to my watch unquote.
Meanwhile, as the Secret Service debated whether to get President Biden out of the broom closet or just leave him there where he'd be safe President, not to mention murderous dictator for life, Xi addressed a group of American journalists whom he mistook for mops until they swabbed the floor with soapy water and then squeezed the dirt out into a bucket, whereupon he realized they were actually American journalists.
Xi said, quote, It was a great honor to sit down for a talk with your blithering idiot.
Future Vassal Biden had many things to say, and I look forward to having them translated into English so I can understand them.
Clearly, you have wisely elected a man we Chinese can work with, given that our work is to destroy your economy, enslave your people, and invade your Chinese restaurants so we can find out what the hell Mugu Gai Pan is.
I was also pleased to be able to present the president with the most sacred symbol of Chinese friendship, a highly communicable respiratory infection.
We all very much look forward to hearing more from President Biden Tuesdays at 8 p.m., followed by reruns of Three's Company.
Unquote.
She said he hoped the leaders would build on the progress of this first meeting and then meet next time on Chinese soil, assuming Biden can find his way to Taiwan.
Trigger morning, 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 dipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right.
The vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavanon continues.
I actually got through more of that opening than I thought I was going to, so I'll have to take the win on that.
This is the last show before Thanksgiving, so suck up as much Clavin-y goodness as you can.
We're going to be talking about the aftermath of the midterms, where we can find out that all our conspiracy theories turned out to be true.
Nancy's gone, Donald's back, and we'll talk to Nelson DeMille, one of America's greatest thriller writers.
Speaking of America's greatest thriller writers, I just handed in the new Cameron Winter novel to my publisher.
Yesterday, I sent in the manuscript.
Ring Security Products00:02:05
It's called The House of Love and Death.
So I want you all to celebrate by going out and buying a strange habit of mind and maybe even the first one when Christmas comes.
You really will love them.
Christmas is coming.
You can get them for presents.
By my calculation, there are still hundreds of thousands of you who have not bought a strange habit of mind.
And so don't complain about the culture war when you lose it.
Also, you should be subscribing to my personal Andrew Clavin YouTube channel because you will get exclusive content there.
And also, if you leave a comment and the comment is absolutely morally disgusting, we will include it on the show with all the rest of the morally disgusting things we say.
George Moshe Murray sent in his comment this week.
He says, I briefly play my phone in my locker at the gym while I'm getting dressed before I put on my headphones.
This morning, playing your intro, an annoyed guy said, sir, not everyone wants to hear that and left.
I think you ruined his morning.
My work here is done.
The holidays are coming.
In fact, the holidays are basically here.
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FBI And January 6th00:11:12
So we've got a lot of political news to talk about this week, obviously, in the aftermath of the midterms.
And so I want to just remind you of what I often say, that if you can't pay attention to politics without getting enraged, you shouldn't pay attention to politics.
It's just not worth ruining your life over.
And one of the reasons people get enraged is because they let themselves get mentally wrapped up in crazy right-wing conspiracy theories.
They say, oh, you know, the left supports abortion and homosexuality and transgenderism because they want to destroy our families and keep us from reproducing so they can replace us with illegal immigrants who don't have our traditions of freedom.
And it's crazy stuff.
And I think we should all pause a moment and listen to these words of wisdom from Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer.
This cut 12.
Now more than ever, we're short of workers.
We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to.
The only way we're going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the DREAMers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the DREAMers, but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here.
Now, I know what you're saying.
You're saying, that's what I was trying to tell you.
It's all true.
It's all true.
It actually turns out to all be true.
So many of the things that we are accused of saying on the right that we're called conspiracy theorists turn out to be true once the press can report them without damaging the Democrats' chances of getting elected.
So now that the midterms are over and they did well, suddenly our corrupt media is reporting all this stuff that they've been keeping secret that we've been saying was true.
So here's the New York Times, a former newspaper.
They now report this right after the election is over.
The FBI had as many as eight informants inside the far-right Proud Boys in the months surrounding the storming of the Capitol on January 6th.
Recent court papers indicate raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack both before and after it took place.
The existence of the informants, get this, came to light over the past few days.
They don't say how many days because they don't want to point out that they didn't report this before the election.
Came to light over the past few days in a flurry of veiled court filings by defense lawyers for five members of the Proud Boys who are set to go on trial next month.
So the defense says there is exculpatory evidence in these papers that show that there were as many as eight informants.
Now, we don't know whether these informants were FBI employees, but we know that they were informing the FBI.
And of course, you know, Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, says these guys did not in any way incite the Proud Boys to go into the Capitol.
Here's cut five of Ray Under Questioning.
Did the FBI have confidential human sources embedded within the January 6th protesters on January 6th of 2021?
Well, Congressman, as I'm sure you can appreciate, I have to be very careful about what I can say about when...
Even now, because that's what you told us two years ago.
May I finish about when we do and do not and where we have and have not used confidential human sources.
But to the extent that there's a suggestion, for example, that the FBI's confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated January 6th, that's categorically false.
Did you have confidential human sources dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol on January the 6th prior to the doors being opened?
Again, I had to be very careful.
It should be a no.
Can you not tell the American people no?
Hey, if you can't believe Christopher Wray, who can you believe?
You know, the thing about this is you got to use your imagination.
Let's, you know, it's possible these weren't FBI employees.
You know, hello, my fellow Trump supporters.
But even if they were just informants, you know, these guys are charged with seditious conspiracy.
The conspiracy is a plot.
In order to plot, you have to discuss things.
So of all these people, I don't even know how many proud boys there are.
Nine?
Ten?
Eight of them.
Eight of them were FBI informants.
So you've got the FBI informants.
And if they know that there is a seditious plot, a conspiracy for sedition, aren't they calling the FBI and saying, these guys are plotting, plotting to charge into the government?
And, you know, poor AOC, she's hiding under her desk.
She's afraid for her virtue.
You know, this is a terrible, terrible thing.
They don't stop them.
They don't stop them.
And when they're plotting, do these FBI informants, who of course don't work for the FBI, of course, did they say, you know, yeah, let's do that.
In which case, it's entrapment.
The whole thing is baloney.
But this only comes out after the midterms.
This is true, by the way, in this Oath Keepers trial.
They had another guy, they had an informant, an informant in the Oath Keepers who was not called by the prosecution to bring information.
He was called by the defense to bring information.
But on the way to the trial, he had a heart attack.
The guy was 40.
He's 40 years old, but suddenly he had a heart attack.
So I just want to point out one thing.
All through the Russian collusion hoax, the FBI had a million secret anonymous sources in the FBI.
The New York Times had all these sources in the FBI calling them.
None of them called with this information before.
They couldn't have called all those sources, those wonderful anonymous sources.
Maybe they were anonymous, so the New York Times didn't know how to get in touch with them.
I call him, but I don't know his name because he was anonymous.
So maybe they couldn't find out.
But suddenly, after the election, and not only that, here's another one from the Washington Post.
Right after the election, the Washington Post reports this.
And the Washington Post also has a lot of anonymous sources.
Maybe it's just a guy named Anonymous who's constantly calling these people.
Federal agents, this is from the Post, where Democracy Dies in Darkness, if they have anything to say about it, federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe former President Donald Trump's motive for allegedly taking and keeping classified documents was largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos, according to people familiar with the matter.
Now, think back on this.
Remember that when they went in and they raided Mar-a-Lago, they said Trump had nuclear codes.
Remember this?
They were saying he may have the nuclear codes.
He's going to call up with a disguised voice and say, I'm calling in to set off a nuclear war.
Remember all this stuff that he had, how can we allow this to happen?
He was keeping souvenirs, just like all the other presidents.
This was Trump when he announced that he was going to run again.
And we'll talk about that in a minute.
Here's one of the things he said about that.
This is a CUP 21.
And then they hired somebody, Temchenko, for $200,000 a year to focus on Trump and to get Trump and other things, including the raid of a very beautiful house that sits right here.
The raid of Mar-a-Lago, think of it.
And I say, why didn't you raid Bush's place?
Why didn't you raid Clinton?
32,000 emails.
Why didn't you raid Clinton's place?
Why didn't you do Obama, who took a lot of things with him?
We will dismantle the deep state and restore government by the people.
So kind of a good argument if, in fact, he was just keeping souvenirs like all of the presidents.
They've all done it.
They've all walked off with classified documents and all this stuff.
But with Trump, it was the nuclear codes, except now we find out it was like whatever.
It was nothing.
And of course, this Hunter Biden's laptop.
Remember how Twitter knocked the New York Post off Twitter for reporting on that?
By the way, if you're following Elon Musk's journey on Twitter, everybody is quitting, like 90% of the staff is quitting because they're so afraid that Elon Musk is going to take away the censorship.
There's a report from Jonathan Turley, I believe, that Hillary Clinton or Hillary Clinton associates have induced sponsors to threaten to walk out on Twitter if he doesn't continue censoring.
This is how, because they're conspiring, they're so afraid of their conspiracies becoming known that they actually have to threaten Twitter because they do not want this information coming out.
That's why they're against free speech, because of this stuff that they're doing.
And now we're finding out, I mean, this is kind of interesting now that the House has been taken over by a Republican majority, Representative James Comer of the House Oversight Committee says they're going to start looking into that Hunter Biden laptop, which you'll remember, 50 or 51 former intelligence officers, very high-ranking, some of them leaders of the CIA, said, oh no, this is Russian, this laptop thing, this is Russian misinformation.
Turns out not so much.
It was all extremely, completely accurate.
And now James Comer says they are going to start investigating that.
It's CUP 22.
Committee Republicans have identified over 50 countries the Biden family sought businesses in.
On the international side of the Biden family, business, the deals were often led by Hunter Biden.
And that map there behind Clay shows all the countries where the Bidens had a footprint in international business dealings.
The investigation reveals a family that engaged with some of America's most powerful adversaries, planning to sell one of the largest sources of cobalt for electric vehicles in the world to the Chinese, for example.
The Bidens flourished and became millionaires by simply offering access to the family.
Among the dozens of shell companies the Biden set up, there were millions of dollars of wire transfers, flights on Air Force 2 to conduct personal business, and meetings with heads of state, all while Joe Biden was aware of what was happening.
No wonder they got to shut down Twitter if he saw that.
What do they have that they have that part of Twitter, that department and Twitter calls something that says this Orwellian name, like trust and safety, which is trust us and we will keep the Democrats safe, I think is what that means.
It is now so clear that so many of our conspiracy theories turned out to be simply the literal truth that even Alexandria Ecazio-Cortez is admitting that we get everything right.
Here she is saying that right-wingers are just right again and again and again.
It's cut three.
The same folks who tell us and told us that COVID's just a flu, that climate change isn't real, that January 6th was nothing but a tourist visit, are the same, are now trying to tell us that transgender people are not real.
So she admits it.
We get everything right.
Everything we say turns out to be true.
You know, to look on the positive side of this, if seeing that there are conspiracy theories that the press refuses to report makes you angry and you're walking around in a rage all the time.
And now it turns out that it's all true, that they're pushing homosexuality and transgenderism and abortion because they don't want us to reproduce so they can replace us with people who do not have our traditions of freedom, right?
We can solve both of these problems at one time, right?
Here's what we do.
There's an article by Arthur Brooks today.
Helix Mattresses for Sleep Happiness00:02:42
I can't remember where it was.
I saw it on RCP.
An article by Arthur Brooks.
He teaches a happiness class.
He used to run AEI, very bright guy.
I saw his first speech at AEI.
He's a real brilliant guy.
He now teaches a class on happiness at Harvard University.
And he writes about how happiness has been going down in America at the same time that marriage rates, religion, childbearing, and work have been declining.
Those are the things that give life meaning and give you love and give you happiness.
And they're all declining with happiness.
So here's what you do.
Here's how we solve both Chuck Schumer's problem and our problem with anger, right?
Find a spouse.
Find someone of the opposite sex.
Now, that's a little complicated because there's so many sexes.
There's lots and lots of censors.
There's men, and then there's women.
Actually, that's it.
So that's not so complicated.
So find someone of the opposite sex, go to church, right?
Solves that problem.
You go to church, get married, solves that problem.
If you're the girl in this relationship, because there's only two things you can be, if you happen to be the woman, get pregnant.
If you're the guy, get a job and support your wife while she takes care of your children.
Now we're reproducing and we have all the things, we can send the illegals home and we have all the things that make us happy.
Problem solved.
Now we can move on and talk about politics.
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Ron's Political Take00:15:58
All right, lots of politics to talk about.
And some of this is really fun.
I like talking about politics.
The GOP finally clinched the house.
I think they have one person, you know, the red wave turned out to be one guy named Fred Wave or something like that.
But that's a positive thing.
You know, the funny thing is, if you think about it in the right way, right, things are better than they were.
They're just worse than what we hoped they'd be.
But since they were never how we hoped they'd be, but they were how they were, in real life, things are just better.
I mean, we could say things have actually gotten better.
So that's a happy idea.
Nancy Pelosi is not going to retire from Congress, but she did announce she was stepping down from leadership.
Here's her speech, CUT 19.
Oh, my world!
My world!
All right, that wasn't Nancy Pelosi.
That was Gretchen Whitmer.
Here's Nancy Pelosi.
There is no greater official honor for me than to stand on this floor and to speak for the people of San Francisco.
This I will continue to do as a member of the House, speaking for the people of San Francisco, serving the great state of California, and defending our Constitution.
And with great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek re-election to Democratic leadership in the next Congress.
For me, the hours come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect.
And I'm grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility.
So, you know, a lot of people, Pelosi was great at her job.
I think it was her daughter who said something like, she'll cut your throat and you'll never even know she did it or she'll cut your head off and you'll never, that's what you want your child to say about you, by the way.
Yeah, she's a murder.
Oh my God, she's a murderous.
She'll just rip you to pieces.
But a lot of people admire her.
Politics is a tough game.
It ain't beanbag.
And so she has been a very tough politician.
And a lot of people are saying, well, you know, our speakers, our leaders are so weak.
We have guys like Paul Ryan who's pointing at, you know, charts and things, but he can't really get everybody together.
We have the cynics like John Boehner.
I met Boehner.
I was one of the most depressing experiences of my life.
You know, just drinking his wave.
Yeah, I'm not a big man.
I'm just a little man with a big job.
You know, that kind of hail fellow well met.
But they can't get their guys in line.
But, you know, the thing about Pelosi is she had a vision in the service of which she was willing to sacrifice anybody else, right?
I mean, this was the thing about her.
When she came in, when they were trying to put together Obamacare, she kept saying, you got to go big, you got to go big, you know, really like she basically wanted socialized medicine.
And then when it came in and the American people didn't want it, she still got all the votes she needed.
She got all these votes together.
And what happened after they voted for her is they all got voted out of office.
So all these people that she had brought in basically as conservative, you know, she's got them to win in conservative districts by pretending that they were more conservative because it doesn't matter how conservative they are if they all vote with Nancy Pelosi.
She got them to vote.
Then their careers were over.
She ended their careers.
And she said, she said, I have no regrets.
Why?
Because it wasn't her career, A, and B, it ended her career, but we're still stuck with Obamacare.
That's how politics is played.
And that's why when I say to you something like, oh, you know, Donald Trump shouldn't have insulted John McCain because that stuck us with Obamacare.
And everybody says, no, McCain is a bad guy.
Politics ain't beanbag.
You play it smart.
You play to win.
And she played to win.
The problem is, though, the problem is Democrats have a true advantage.
To say that we shouldn't have guys like John Boehner, we shouldn't have guys like Ryan is to misunderstand the difference between Republicans and Democrats.
The vision that Democrats have is socialism.
And people basically like socialism because it sounds like free money right up until the moment you're impoverished and enslaved.
Right up until the moment you're standing on a breadline and realize you can't speak your mind anymore and you have no freedom anymore.
Right up until that moment, it's like, oh, that guy's going to earn the money, but I'm going to get the money.
It's going to be great.
But the right-wing vision, when you have a visionary right-wing, it becomes fascist.
And that's just some angry guy pounding on a podium while 30% of the country say, yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
And that's kind of scary and it's not that attractive.
And I don't like it either, right?
The good right-wingers, the real right-wingers, the real American conservatives are for freedom.
They are for the republic.
They're for the Constitution.
And most people do not like freedom.
They like free stuff.
They don't want to be free.
They want to get things free.
You know, that's just human nature.
It's just the way it is.
People who love freedom are never in the majority, never, ever.
And that's why people who love freedom have to team up with people who have other agenda that fit with our agenda.
And that's how we get in trouble.
That's good Lord Acton philosophy fising.
And it's just true.
So don't expect too much from the Republican majority.
They're going to do a lot of investigations.
Hopefully they can stop the stuff they find out on the investigations.
It won't be reported in the news, but it might be, we'll tell you about it here at the Daily Wire.
Brett Bayer may tell you about it over at Fox.
And then of course, you know, they can stop, hopefully, the rest of Build Back Better if they have the guts, which is always with the Republicans, a big question.
So that was one side, but we do have the majority.
The Republicans do have the majority in the House.
That is better than it was before.
And yes, it's not as good as what we hoped it would be.
But as I say, things were never the way we hoped they would be.
They were the way they were, and now they are better than they were.
And then, of course, we have Trump.
And Trump is a big deal.
He made his announcement that he is going to run for president for a third time down at Mar-a-Lago.
This is part of that announcement, cut six.
You and all of those watching are the heart and soul of this incredible movement and the greatest country in the history of the world.
It's very simple.
There has never been anything like it.
This great movement of ours.
Never been anything like it, and perhaps there will never be anything like it again.
There's never been anything to compete with what we have all done.
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, and my fellow citizens, America's comeback starts right now.
That's a good speech.
People said it was low energy.
He was reading, went on for quite a long time.
As often with Trump, the best part of his announcing that he was going to run again was the reaction from the left.
The New York Times, a former newspaper on Knucklehead Row, which is their op-ed section.
I'm not making this up, so help me.
I'm just going to read you the headlines from this is the one day after his announcement.
His announcement, I believe, was Tuesday.
This is the Wednesday morning, Knucklehead Row of the New York Times.
I'm just reading you the headlines, all right?
Has Donald Trump lost his grip on the Republican Party?
Trump's announcement is a sign of weakness.
Donald Trump is finally finished.
The chaos inside Donald Trump's mind.
This one day.
Don't buy into the Trump DeSantis SmackDown.
America deserves better than Donald Trump.
And then my favorite, the icing on the cake.
How is it possible that we're still talking about this man?
Trump is lucky that there is rent control in New York or the amount of rent he would be paying to live in these people's heads would be exorbitant.
You know, just they can't let him go.
Now, listen, you can't let your enemies define you.
Just because they're angry doesn't mean that, you know, you support Trump, but it is delicious.
It is wonderful, wonderful to watch.
It always has been with Trump.
Just watching them go insane is half the fun.
Now, look, here's the people.
Here's the thing.
Some people like Donald Trump, and they think he's the best candidate.
They think he can win.
They think it was stolen from him last time, but even if they don't think that, they may think he can win.
Some people, like me, I've been really honest about where I stand.
I voted for Trump twice.
I would vote for him again if I had to, but I prefer some of the excellent new generation of Republicans who he created.
He helped create guys like Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia.
They wouldn't be the kind of Republicans they are if he hadn't set an example.
Now, you know, that Trump loves to remind them of that.
I created, you couldn't have won without me.
But that's really, you know, not the point.
I mean, you know, I created my children, but at some point, you stand back and you let them do their thing.
It might be the graceful thing for Trump to say, okay, you know, I set the tone.
I showed you where the votes are.
I showed you where the issues are.
Go thou forth, thou statesman, and, you know, do it the way it's supposed to be done.
Obviously, that's not in Trump's character.
He's not going to do that.
Joint discomfort.
It stinks.
It keeps you from doing the things you enjoy.
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I support somebody else.
I think somebody else has a chance of winning, which is the most important thing to me at this point.
But I could be wrong.
It's politics.
No, everybody talks.
I know you've noticed this.
I love the way people in politics say, well, this is going to happen.
And then four years later, that'll happen.
And then another eight years.
And nobody even knows on the evening of an election what's going to happen.
Nobody knows the future.
That's why they call it the future, right?
Because nobody knows what it was.
What it is.
So I may be wrong.
I may be wrong in my guesses about Trump.
You know, those of you who love Trump think he's the best bet.
You may be right.
Here's the thing.
I'm not going to hate you for disagreeing with me.
I don't think you should hate me for disagreeing, agreeing with you.
This is politics.
These are not saints.
These are not angels.
None of them is a visionary descendant from heaven.
None of them is chosen by God.
God has got much better things to do than worry about that.
These are ambitious men vying for power.
We have to choose the one we think will win and will serve us best because we are the people and we're the people who matter.
The country is what matters, not whether Donald Trump gets what he wants or Ron DeSantis or Glenn Young or anybody else.
So we shouldn't tear each other apart.
And when one of them wins the primary, we should all get in line and support him, even if it hurts, because that's the way you win.
If we don't do it, it's not going to win.
Now, there are a lot of interesting things about Trump's speech.
So I'm just going to talk about it.
You know where I stand.
I'm not trying to fool anybody.
But I just thought it was interesting politically because I love politics and politics can be really fascinating if you don't let it drive you insane.
First of all, why did he declare so early?
You know, he's declaring it a moment of weakness, but I don't think he thought it was going to be a moment of weakness.
It's a moment of weakness because it looks to a lot of people, including me, that he cost the red wave, that he was one of the reasons why the red wave didn't materialize.
And a lot of people have said, well, most of the candidates, he said it, Trump during his speech said it, most of the candidates he backed won, but that's actually not a good argument.
The thing is, major candidates who would have made the difference that he backed, who only had Stop the Steel as their agenda.
I said this last week.
You know, those are the people who lost and made the difference.
So, you know, of course, a lot of people, he just said, yeah, I choose this guy over that guy.
They won, but that's not the point.
Key players, key players who he chose largely because they agreed that the election had been stolen from him, lost.
And that, you know, Mehmed Az, Doug Mastriano, Don Baldick, Blake Masters, Adam Laxalt, Kerry Lake, Scott Jensen, Tudor Dixon.
I mean, all these people who he chose because they suited his ego and his narrative, they lost.
So he's in a moment of weakness, but he probably didn't think he was going to be in a moment of weakness.
And so that's an important point.
I mean, maybe that's what he was thinking.
You know, there's other stuff, though.
I mean, it's just like some people are saying, oh, he wanted to avoid an indictment, that this would make it harder for them to indict him.
The DOJ has announced that they're going to get a special prosecutor to determine whether he should be indicted.
That sounds like they won't indict him.
That way they can slough it off on somebody else.
But who knows what they'll do?
But there are all these other people, the AG in New York State, who are after him.
And it's going to be very, it's hard to think that they won't come after him.
And some of those are difficult cases, tax cases that could really make him look bad.
What is interesting though to me also is that if you remember what if you were listening last week and I said you know he had emptied out MAGA of everything but himself, his speech, he sounded like he was listening to me because not once, I don't think, unless I missed it, I don't think once did he mention stop the steal.
So he sent all those candidates out to support stop the steal and now when he becomes a candidate, it's gone because it must have been obvious to him that that was not a winning pitch.
You know, it's not a winning pitch.
People get tired of hearing the last election was no good.
They're looking forward.
They have their kids to worry about.
They have their lives, their jobs, their families to worry about.
They don't care whether Donald Trump's ego is hurt.
They just don't care.
And if he can't prove it, what's going to change?
And as I keep saying, you know, if it were the other way around, if it were the Democrats saying, yeah, we're going to reverse the election without proving it.
And they do say it.
They do say it too.
We would hear it for what it is.
It doesn't matter if he can't prove it in court.
So he realized it didn't sell.
And suddenly, he dumped the attacks on Ron the Sanctimonious.
He dumped that thing.
There was none of that.
He dumped the absurd attack on Glenn Young.
That was one of the worst.
He says he tweeted something like, Young Kin.
Now, that's an interesting take.
Sounds Chinese, doesn't it?
He couldn't have won without me.
You know, listen, I agree with him.
I think that Youngkin won when he embraced Trump-like.
He embraced the issues that were going on in Virginia schools.
And that was something I don't think he would have done.
That was not his instinct.
He wouldn't have done it except that he had seen how Trump won.
But suddenly, Trump himself was not talking about the election.
He was talking about his vision.
And that is how politicians get elected.
It's not just the things you're against, inflation and crime and the lawlessness at the border.
It's also the vision that those issues fit into.
And here's what Trump said about that.
This cut seven.
We need everyone involved.
We need everyone's help.
We need to look out for one another.
We need to be friends.
And we need every patriot on board because this is not just a campaign.
This is a quest to save our country.
Talking about saving our country.
Okay, so that's the thing, make America great and glorious.
He added glorious to our greatness.
You know, basically, he was obviously listening to this show and cleaned up his act a little bit.
Now, of course, what we all have to think about is his discipline.
Save Our Country00:05:06
Because will he stick to that?
Will he stop with the, you know, Ron the Sanctimonious and all that?
Or will he just go back to it?
Will he go back to the anger, back to the stop the steal, which is just not, it's just not a winning formula.
And again, it's politics.
It ain't about morals.
It ain't about ethics.
It's not about principle.
It's about winning first so you can do the moral principled thing, right?
You got to first, you got to win.
A lot of donors have dumped him.
Mike Pence came out.
He was on Brett Bayer, I think, and he said, I'm not going to vote for him.
I think we need new leadership.
Obviously, Pence wants to run.
I think it's pretty obvious that he wants to run.
A lot of people who are in his administration were not in Mar-a-Lago for this announcement.
You know, a lot of people who you would have thought might show up did not show up.
And meanwhile, DeSantis, I think, undeniably has handled himself exceptionally well.
He didn't even respond to the attacks on him, this sanctimonious stuff.
But finally, he was asked.
He had to say something.
And here's what he said.
There's cut nine.
I would like to know what you think about Trump's big announcement and some of the less than flattering comments he has made about you.
Well, you know, one of the things I've learned, like and learned in this job is when you're doing, when you're leading, when you're getting things done, yeah, you take incoming fire.
That's just the nature of it.
I roll out of bed in the morning.
I've got corporate media outlets that have a spasm, just the fact that I'm getting up in the morning and it's constantly attacking.
And this is just what's happened.
I don't think any governor got attacked more, particularly by corporate media, than me over my four-year term.
And yet, I think what you learn is all that's just noise.
And really what matters is, are you leading?
Are you getting in front of issues?
Are you delivering results for people?
And are you standing up for folks?
And if you do that, then none of that stuff matters.
So that's very cool.
You know, you got to hand it to him.
I mean, he's a professional politician.
Being a politician is a job.
You know, we always like Trump in a way because he's not a politician, but being a politician is a job.
And that's why I say that I like the fact that he's inspired a new generation of politicians.
He's shown them the way.
He's put some steel in their spine.
He's shown them that you can fight the press, that you have to fight the press.
This is a big deal.
I mean, people, political insiders were telling me this 10, 15 years ago.
We cannot win unless we fight the press because we're running against the press.
The press is corrupt.
They're corporate.
They serve the corporate interests.
The corporate interests are globalist.
They do not like American nationalism.
They do not like American exceptionalism.
They don't like American freedom.
They want you to be a consumer.
They don't want you to be a Catholic or a Protestant or have things that you believe in and are willing to die for and are willing to boycott their stores for they don't want any of that stuff.
So the people who work for those corporations, it's not that they're probably not dishonest a lot of journalists.
They just hire the people who are going to serve the corporation's turn.
I think we're going to have to watch a couple of things.
We're going to have to watch, first of all, does Trump have any discipline?
He never has before.
He's a little old to start developing new habits, but it does happen.
And we'll see it.
You know where we'll see it?
We'll see it right away in this runoff in Georgia with Herschel Walker.
Will he put his own ego aside and start to dedicate himself to getting Herschel Walker elected?
If Herschel Walker gets elected, it will be 50-50 in the Senate, just like it was before.
If not, it'll be 51-49.
That's a big difference.
That means Kamala doesn't have to come down and vote.
It makes a big difference whether you have an actual majority in the Senate or you're split 50-50.
Will Trump go, remember, this was my complaint last time with Georgia, that he didn't pay attention to Georgia.
He was so busy with his ego.
He was so busy with Stop the Steal, he let Georgia slip away, and that's how it got to be 50-50.
Will he go and actually put his ego aside and dedicate the next three weeks?
I think that's when the runoff is dedicate the next three weeks to getting Herschel Walker into the Senate if he can.
The Democrats on their side are making a bet, okay?
They know the more they hate Trump, the more we like Trump.
But that's only about 30 to maybe 40% of the voters, 40% at the very, very high watermark.
The more they hate Trump, the more the base says, yeah, well, if you hate him, he must be great.
If you hate him, he must be great.
However, however, if they play their cards right and if they do what they mean to do, if they emphasize his undiscipline, if they emphasize his aspects, his affect, because he doesn't care how he looks.
He doesn't care if he looks scary.
He doesn't care if women don't like him or upper-class white voters don't like him.
He doesn't care about any of that.
He just wants to do what he wants to do and he can only be Trump.
They're betting that that will alienate enough people so that the people who love him because they hate him and who love him because they love him simply won't be enough to outvote the hate they inspire for him.
This is why, you know, a lot of people get ticked off at me for this, but politics is just politics.
Anti-War Propaganda in Hollywood00:09:55
That's all it is.
It's just a matter of winning so you can get the things done that you want done.
It's a matter of collaborating with people you don't like.
I love my friend Sebastian Gorka.
He's a wonderful, wonderful guy, but I'm always saying to him, he's always talking about the rhinos, the rhinos.
And I say a lot of the people of the Republican Party are rhinos.
We need those people to vote with us.
We cannot alienate them.
It may feel good to alienate them.
It might feel good to insult them.
It may give you this feeling of, yeah, I'm the real deal.
But if they don't vote for you, you lose and then you don't feel good at all.
And then you have to start in, well, it was stolen from us, you know, because that's not being stolen.
That is not paying attention to how politics works.
People like Nancy Pelosi thrive because they're cynical, they are unethical, they are dishonest, but they have a vision.
We have a vision too, but it's not a popular vision.
You know, it's like wisdom.
Wisdom doesn't sell very well.
Neither does freedom.
Neither does freedom.
But you have to package it so it sells.
You have to put it in a package that will sell.
You have to give it to people who know how to sell it.
And then maybe, maybe you can start to get some power in order to move the ball back toward constitutional freedom.
If we hate each other, if we hate each other, we're going to lose.
If we divide each other, we're going to lose.
If we leave the party behind, we're going to lose.
We have to play it smart, and that means we have to stay cool.
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No ease in Clavin.
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So on a cultural subject, I had a really interesting experience over the last couple of weeks.
A few years back, it's been years, Shapiro recommended that I see the HBO series Band of Brothers about Easy Company, an American Army company that was in D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge.
Very interesting, exciting war story from a book by Stephen Ambrose, an excellent historian.
This was put together by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
And it just took me a long time to get to it.
There's so much new content I wanted to look at, and I missed it the first time it came out.
I had thought I was in England, but it actually came out in 2001 after I'd come back, but I'd just come back and I just didn't pick it up.
And I was watching it, and here's the reason it was fascinating to me.
One of the reasons my Hollywood career came to an end, maybe the central reason my Hollywood came to an end, was because of my vociferous, loud attack on Hollywood for making anti-war movies while our soldiers were in the field.
Didn't bother me that people were anti-war.
Didn't bother me that they thought the Afghanistan war was wrong or the Iraq war was wrong.
All of those things are your American right to make those decisions, very important decisions that citizens have to make.
But never before, never before had the American movie industry made movies depicting our soldiers in a bad way while our soldiers were in the field.
If you go back and look at all of the movies against Vietnam, they all came out after the war was over.
So I started to look at this and I started to yell about it.
And finally, I wrote a big survey of old Hollywood movies called The Lost Art of War for City Journal.
And here is how it began.
This was after all these anti-war movies were coming out.
I said, Hollywood has gone back to war, and this time it's appalling.
All autumn long, the film industry released movies about America's battle against global jihad, with one exception, The Competent Actioner of the Kingdom.
Each of these movies distorted an urgent ongoing historical enterprise through the lens of a filmmaker's unthinking leftism.
Redacted, rendition, in the Valley of Elah, and Lions for Lambs characterize our soldiers and government agents as rapists, madmen, murderers, torturers of the innocent, or simply victims caught up in a venal and bloodthirsty American foreign policy.
All this at the very moment when our real life soldiers and agents are risking and sometimes losing their lives fighting the most hateful and cancerous worldview since Nazism, by which I meant radical Islam.
So you wonder why my phone stopped ringing.
I was selling a lot of scripts.
I was making a lot of money.
Suddenly my phone stopped ringing.
And while I was watching these movies, one of them, I believe it was the movie They Were Expendable, which had John Wayne in it, but it was also directed by John Ford and Robert Montgomery was in it.
And a lot of the actors in it had been in World War II so that they, in the titles, it would say Robert Montgomery and then whatever his rank was in the Navy.
So they were telling you this is these Hollywood actors had been fighting for America, something that I don't think would happen very much today, right?
There's not a lot of them who have been in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
This was another thing that was bothering me.
Oliver Stone made a lot of movies attacking the Vietnam War.
Oliver Stone was a grunt in the Vietnam War, had a right to say anything he wanted to say, where these guys were sitting around in the Cafe Marmont on Sunset Boulevard and saying, oh yes, I hate this George W. Bush.
He's such a woo.
I'll have another cafe latte, half calf.
So I was watching this one about They Were Expendable when it came to me that if I wanted to write about these things, I basically had to go and have myself embedded with the troops.
And I went over for a very brief period of time, was embedded with the troops in Afghanistan at Fort Fob, Kalagouch, forward operating base Kalagouche, which later became a central part of the action, but at the time was not very active, although I just got there a day after they'd been fired upon.
And then I wrote an article about that called Five Days at the End of the World, talking about the fact that these movies were hurting our troops.
And again and again, it was not the opinions.
It was the fact that they were making propaganda for the enemy while our sons essentially were in harm's way.
Now, one of the things that has happened in this period of time since all that is that my attitude toward war has changed.
I have become more horrified by war.
And my point about war was never that it was good.
I never would have said that.
It was that people are bad.
People are bad and they do bad things and they don't like freedom and they will attack you and they will kill you and some of them are poor and have nothing and so they will come after the things that you have and that the arguments against war don't make any sense.
You know, one of the most famous anti-war poems ever written is by Wilfrid Owen is called Dolce Decorum Est.
It was written during World War I.
And there were a lot of, for some reason, they were almost all gay.
There were a lot of gay poets who came out of World War I and were very anti-war.
And World War I was one of the most useless and brutal and bloody wars in history, just one of the worst mistakes ever made.
But Dolce de Cormest is just a description of a guy dying horribly from poison gas.
And at the end, he says, I wish you could have seen this.
He said, If in some smothering dream, if you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in and watch the white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face like a devil sick of sin, if you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, my friend,
you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie.
Dulce et decorum est propatria mori, which means sweet and fitting is it to die for one's country.
And I've always felt that this is a dishonest poem.
It's a beautiful poem.
It's a well, beautifully written poem, but I felt it was a dishonest poem in the same way I felt about Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise, where the guy is ardent to go to war and then gets shot and paralyzed and then becomes an anti-war activist.
Essentially, you're saying, oh, I got blown up.
I got killed horribly, and therefore war is bad.
But that's what makes people brave, is that they risk that.
We understand that.
We understand that war is awful, that we should avoid war at all costs, that we should never fight a war that doesn't absolutely have to be fought.
But the courage is what you're facing.
And nowadays as old, that's not just mechanized war, which is particularly bad, but that's as old as Homer's Iliad.
Read Homer's Iliad and you will see the description of people being butchered is just awful.
So some people say their favorite politician is their spirit animal or something like that.
My spirit animal is coffee.
Courage in Conflict00:10:43
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So I watched this Band of Brothers, which is terrific.
I mean, it's the acting and the direction and the techniques for depicting battle, which Spielberg, who was once called the best second unit director who ever lived, which means that he's a great action director.
The second unit guy is the guy who goes off and does the action scene while the real director is directing the actors and doing the drama and all that.
And Spielberg has been called the best second unit director ever because his action sequences are so great.
It's kind of a bitchy thing to say about him because it means that his ideas aren't that great.
And I agree with that.
I don't think his ideas are good at all.
But anyway, it's got this wonderful cast of young guys, Damian Lewis, Donnie Wahlberg, Michael Fassbender, and they're just terrific.
And it's the true story of these guys who parachute into Normandy, fought on D-Day, and then we're in the famous Battle of the Bulge at Bastogne.
They were called the battered bastards of Bastogne.
And one of the things that struck me about this movie was that aside from the fact that the technology was so great that it really looked real, you could see what it was like to be in battle.
It was terrifying.
It was very much like old war movies that I grew up watching.
You know, I grew up watching them on TV.
They were older than me.
They were before I was born.
They were made before I was born.
But I grew up watching them on TV, and they make fun of them now for being patriotic and for being kind of gung-ho.
The most famous of them is called The Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne.
It's one of John Wayne's most famous, probably his most famous picture that he made where he wasn't a cowboy.
And he plays Sergeant Stryker, who's the tough sergeant who just everybody hates.
All the soldiers hate him, but they don't realize that his toughness, his cruelty, his brutality in training them is getting them ready for an absolutely inhuman situation, which is the Battle on Iwo Jima, where they finally raise the flag and it was just a brutal, brutal battle, these island-to-island fights.
And the scenes in Band of Brothers, which are real scenes, there is a true story, are almost exactly, they mirror the scenes that are in Sands of Iwo Jima, the tough training that turns out to be worthwhile, the tough leaders who don't let you do things.
The fact that you have to do things that are inhuman in Sands of Iwo Jima, one of the most difficult scenes to watch is a scene where one of the company gets shot and is dying and is calling for help.
And John Wayne will not let his soldiers, I think he's a top sergeant, and he won't let his soldiers go out and rescue the man because if he does, they'll all be killed.
Here's a cut of that scene.
Stryker!
Get down and stay down.
You had your orders.
Don't move.
There's somebody wounded out there.
Quiet.
Let's go over and get him.
Stay down.
Maybe an old Jap trick.
They bullet plenty on a canal.
It doesn't sound like a Jap to me.
I don't care what it sounds like to you.
You stick your head up and you'll tip our position.
Stryker!
It's Bass.
How many Japs know your name, Stryker?
It's Bass.
You know his voice.
Shut up.
Aren't you human at all?
Don't you realize a friend of yours may be dying?
Knock it off.
This is what my father taught you.
Be a great Marine.
Be tough.
Or you can sit here and be tough if you want to, but I'm going out there and get that guy.
And the only way you can stop me is to kill me.
That's just what I'll do.
So you think, well, John Wayne is inhuman, but of course he's saving the life of his entire company by not letting this clown, this sensitive, nice, poetical clown, go save this guy and thereby expose their position and get them all killed.
The exact same scene is in Band of Brothers when one of the guys gets wounded and they're trying to reach him and they're just pinned down and they have to retreat and it's heartbreaking.
This cut 15.
Don't move!
Stop moving!
Stop moving!
Stop!
Pull back!
We're gonna pull back!
Hell out of here!
Let's go, let's go!
Go!
Take him down to get it just hold on!
Go!
They leave him there and he dies.
And one of the things, I mean, that got me about this got me about saving Private Ryan, too.
I didn't like saving Private Ryan.
The first half hour of saving Private Ryan is epoch-making.
Spielberg, with his genius for filming action, changed the way that war scenes are filmed forever.
Every war scene that comes before saving Private Ryan looks dated because of Private Ryan.
Every scene that comes after it copies Private Ryan because it was just so brilliant.
The rest of the movie is sentimental, and it's as if this little wimpy guy suddenly realized, oh, sometimes you have to fight a war, you know, sometimes you have to do this.
Like he suddenly discovered it.
And that also plays into Band of Brothers to a little degree.
In a way, it's more sentimental than a John Wayne movie.
There's one episode toward the end called Why We Fight, in which the soldiers stumble upon a prison camp, a Jewish concentration camp.
And the episode is called Why We Fight, but that's not why we fought.
We didn't fight to save the Jews.
We didn't fight because the Nazis were gassing people, innocent people.
That's not why we fought.
We fought because of the geopolitical situation.
It was the wisest thing to do.
We stayed out of it as long as we could because people didn't want to go to war.
They'd seen World War I and how useless that was.
They didn't want to go back and fight for Europe.
Europe was none of our business.
A lot of the same feeling that a lot of people have about Ukraine.
I'm not saying they're wrong.
I'm just saying in World War II, they were wrong, it turned out, because Hitler could not be stopped and he had to be stopped.
And so that's not why we fought.
And the idea that it is why is just sentimental.
But there's a part at the very end of that episode that really struck me.
And this is the scene that really got me at the end of Why We Fight.
Hitler's dead.
Holy shit.
Shot himself in Berlin.
Is the war over, sir?
No.
We have orders to back this guy, and we're going to move out in one hour.
Why?
The man's not home.
Should have killed himself three years ago.
Saved us a lot of trouble.
Yeah, he should have.
But he didn't.
And that's what struck me.
That's why we fight.
We fight because leaders do terrible, terrible things, and people elect leaders who do terrible, terrible things.
And, you know, there's a famous story about Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo when a sniper had Napoleon in his sights and Wellington came up to him and says, you can't do that.
That's dishonorable to kill Napoleon.
And I kind of thought like, oh, go ahead, kill Napoleon, put this to an end.
You know, I really have come to the conclusion that before we send anybody, any soldier to war, we ought to be under threat.
We should be under threat and not under threat if this happens and then that happens and then this happens because we don't know the future, but we should be under threat.
These soldiers are so brave.
The people who go into these places are so brave and the injuries they can suffer are so horrific and they're so young and the amount of life lost is so terrible that all I can think at this point is that we should look at our leaders really, really carefully, whether they're Republicans or Democrats.
And before we put Ukrainian flags on our houses, before we start to march in line and pound our fists and say, you know, and wave our flags, we should really, really question whether the United States of America has a dog in this fight because war is genuinely hell.
The old expression, war is hell, but men are brave, is correct.
But before we save brave men to die in war, we should really make sure these leaders know what they're doing.
I have to say, as I've gotten older, I have just begun to see how horrible it is.
And I just think that testosterone burst that men have that makes them want to go and want to be in the fight and want to be heroic has got to be countered by older heads who don't believe in glory, who just believe that war must be fought when it must.
We saw, we saw the horrible, horrible way the Biden administration pulled out of Afghanistan, disgusting, absolutely disrespectful of all those lives that were lost.
Before we let that happen again, we ought to be very, very, very careful before we get our dander up and before we send men to war.
If you're the sort of person who listens to this show, odds are you put a lot of stock in how you raise your kids.
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Corey's Editorial Dilemma00:15:37
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So I'm thrilled to bring on Nelson DeMille today.
If you don't read Nelson DeMille, you should get ready and get started.
He is a New York Times best-selling author of 21 novels, six of which were number one New York Times bestseller.
He's a combat decorated U.S. Army veteran.
And his new book is The Maze.
It's the latest installment of his mystery thriller series following detective John Corey.
He is one of the best in the business.
Nelson, it's great to see you.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Andrew.
Good to be with you.
So let's start with the book.
What is The Maze about?
Oh, The Maze.
It's a murder mystery.
John Corey's NYPD, retired from homicide, medically retired.
He's not an old guy, but he was shot in the line of duty.
Now he's acting as a private eye.
Here on Long Island, we have the Gilgal Beach murders.
They had some national attention.
There's been some documentaries made.
And there was actually a kind of a dramatization made of the Gilgo Beach murders.
And what that was was 10 prostitutes, or as we call them today, sex workers, were found on Gilgo Beach, but not on the beach, but in the Brambles at different times.
And they'd all been strangled, apparently strangled, and left there.
And wait for the first one's found, you know, Gadavidogs found more.
Gilgo Beach is near the Hamptons.
It's near Fire Island.
It's kind of an upscale area.
So a lot of speculation about who did this.
Was it the mob?
Was it some crazy rich guy from the Hamptons who strangles prostitutes?
Is this little man with Jack the Ripper?
And it's been like 10 years, it's 11 years now since the first body was found.
And I've been reading about it because I'm here on Long Island.
I've been reading about it for 11 years.
And then, you know, when you're searching for an idea, sometimes it's right in front of you.
And I said, let's fictionalize the Gilgal Beach murders.
which I did.
And it's difficult to fictionalize something that really happened.
And I called them the Fire Island Murders to kind of get it away from the weeds of these 11 years of investigation.
And I introduced my inserted my character of John Corey.
This is his eighth book.
And if the Suffolk County police can't find the murderer, I think John Corey maybe can.
You know, I have just started for the first time in a long career.
I've just started a series, which I've never done before.
This is your, what did you say?
It's the sixth, seventh book?
This is the eighth book.
Do you find it difficult to keep John Corey fresh or do you enjoy coming back to him?
Yeah, really good question.
You know, the first John Corey book was called Plum Island.
Plum Island's a real place off Long Island.
It's the agricultural disease center, but known to dabble in biological warfare and that type of thing.
It was meant to be a standalone book.
If you read it, you see it's a standalone.
I had never done a series before.
And I'm with you.
You know, it was like a challenge.
I like Siri.
I like to read them.
I like Sherlock Holmes, like Agatha Christie and Krill Perot, but I had never done one and I didn't want to do it.
But Plum Island was, it just went gangbusters.
It was like 18 weeks on the New York Times.
Great book.
It's a great book.
It debuted.
Oh, thank you.
And then, you know, so the agent came to me and the publisher came to me, we want you to at least do a sequel, maybe a series.
I said, no, I don't do that.
I'm just not comfortable with the series.
But then they showed me the royalty statement.
So they said, well, we can talk about a series.
We did the second John Corey.
Now, we're on the eighth right now.
But, you know, the baggage, you're going to see the baggage starts to build up.
As the series goes on, you've got backstory, backstory, backstory.
And the author has to decide how much he wants to put in.
And the editor decides how much he wants to take out.
So, you know, you're doing two things at the same time.
You're trying to move that book forward that you're working on, but also looking back.
And it has become a challenge after eight books.
Does the character stay fresh?
I try to, you know, I mean, you know, Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes.
He was sick of him.
And he pushed him off Reichenbach Falls.
He had Professor Moriarty do it, but then he had to bring Holmes back because his public was outraged.
I'm not going to kill John Corey off.
I mean, the guy pays the rent, you know.
But it's going to be a while before, at least another book before I do Corey again.
Yeah.
You know, I noticed on, I think it is on this book on the maze that you have a blurb from Jesse Waters over at Fox.
You're on my show, so you're obviously not afraid of being canceled.
You have the courage to be.
Why aren't you?
Let me ask you the first question.
Why aren't you afraid of being canceled?
At my age, I'm not afraid of anything, first of all.
And second of all, I spent a year in Vietnam getting shot at.
And, you know, what am I afraid of?
But you raise an interesting point.
I had a lot of editorial problems with this book because of the language, because of the ostensible sexism of John Corey and the whole idea of an alpha male.
And, you know, I just used the word sex sex workers before.
I was using the word prostitutes in the book, and the editor came to me and said, You know, we kind of use the word sex workers now rather than prostitutes.
I said, Well, you know, it sounds dirtier than prostitutes, but I'll, you know, I'll give you a little bit.
But we have some real editorial issues, and I had to get another editor.
We could not work together.
And I actually switched publishers.
I was at Simon and Schuster, but within the same house as my new publisher, Scribner.
I just moved laterally.
But, you know, that was, you know, kind of a shock to me to see that this book had been, you know, read for sensitivity and for, you know, triggering, triggering microaggressions or whatever.
You know, and I, you know, I want my editor to be a partner and say, you know, and to read it for, you know, grammar, punctuation, spelling, plot, and pacing.
And all of a sudden, I'm getting an all-Welkian read on the book about what I'm saying.
And I said, this is, and they said, you know, Nelson, we want you to broaden your audience.
I said, no, no, I already have my audience.
I'm a number one bestseller.
Don't let me worry about that.
I'm going to lose my audience if I listen to you guys.
And I said, it's going to go the way I want it to go.
This is, I know who I'm writing for.
I know who my readers are.
And we don't need to broaden the audience because, you know, if you don't want to read the book, don't read it.
If you don't know who Nelson DeMille is or John Corey, he's not going to pick up the book anyway.
And I kind of won most of the battles, but I was just, I realized that, you know, middleist authors, he's asking, why do I not care?
Middle East authors, younger guys, younger women, are going to either self-censor, or they're going to listen to the editor and kind of back off from some of these things.
Or they're going to say the wrong thing and it gets passed to the editor and somebody gets upset that somebody said something wrong, racially or whatever.
So, you know, it is the business has changed, and you're seeing it too, I'm sure.
You're not getting grammar punctuation and spelling anymore.
You're getting like the words you want to use and the people you want to create.
And one of the characters in my book, one of the bad guys, used a derogatory word for Chinese people.
I don't mind saying it, Ching, you know, and this is a bad guy.
He said this.
We want to make him a bad guy, but they didn't want.
They said, we can absolutely cannot put this word in the book.
Wow.
I said, you want to whitewash the bad guys.
They sound okay.
I mean, there's a logic here.
He is a bad guy.
He's using a racial epithet because he's a bad guy.
They didn't even want to see the racial epithet.
So I said, well, maybe, you know, the bad guy was kind of uneducated.
He could use East Asian people, you know, something.
Made no sense.
It made no sense.
They're running scared too, I think.
This is the other part of it.
The editors and the junior editors are afraid of their junior editors.
Books have been canceled.
I mean, my publisher, Simon Schuster, published Pence's book.
And the junior editor, a lot of junior editors got together, signed a statement saying they would not work on the book.
But the publisher had the courage to publish the Pence book.
And Pence is kind of a middle-of-the-road guy.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with Mike Pence.
He just happens to be a Republican.
But other than that, he's never done anything that he should be canceled for.
But my prior publisher, Hachette, canceled Woody Allen's book, not because of the book, but because he was Woody Allen.
This is chilling to see books being, and you know this, seeing books being canceled because junior editors, you know, felt that they were being offended.
They were being offended.
Well, you know, they get the book for free anyway.
Who cares if they were paying?
Also, they're in the wrong business.
I'll get into another business.
Well, this is publishing business.
I actually got an editorial comment recently.
I shouldn't describe a woman as having coffee-colored skin because black people had to pick coffee when they were slaves or something like this.
And I find this incredibly pernicious because as a writer, one of the things you're trying to do is tell the truth about the world.
You're trying to tell, I mean, you've always been a very rich writer.
You're not just writing things to move, to tell stories.
You also should depict the world.
And these are editors who are 20 years old, know not a sliver of what you know about the world.
And I find that incredibly pernicious.
Do you think this is going to stand?
Do you think it will last or do you think it'll pass away?
That's a good question.
I see either the pendulum is swinging the other way, or there's enough pushback.
Some of the senior people in some of the publishing houses, I think, are a little bit embarrassed.
The man, the CEO at, well, I'm trying to think, I shouldn't name names, but the CEO who runs my prior publisher, he is one of the ones who have canceled books.
My CEO, John Karp, has taken a stand.
He said, no, we publish murderers.
We publish, as long as there's no incitement to violence around that, you know, some of the older publishers, I can't remember which one is still publishing Mein Kampf, you know, for the last 80 years.
I mean, you know, Adolf Hitler's book.
If you can publish Adolf Hitler's memoir, you should be able to publish whatever you want.
That's the whole point of the First Amendment.
We know this.
It's not like, you know, the First Amendment's good only when people agree with us.
No, it's there to protect speech that other people might find offensive.
So what?
You know, get over it.
And again, as long as there's no incitement to violence and as long as it's truthful.
And as a novelist, of course, you're trying to find another kind of truth that doesn't exist in nonfiction.
You're going deeper into some of the motivations of people in your characters.
And so the coffee-colored skin, that's a new one on me.
I have to make a funny one.
So the question I get asked from young conservative writers is: what would you do?
What would you do if you were starting out?
What would you do if you're a young person?
You want to write, you want to be in the business, but you don't want to serve the woke agenda.
How would you proceed?
What a good question.
You know, right from the beginning, I guess I was lucky.
Maybe the world was a little bit different when I started.
But I had that problem with my very first book, By the Rivers of Babylon, 1978.
And I won't bore you with all the details, but the guy who betrayed the Israelis was a State Department man named Richardson, who was an anti-Semite.
And he goes, he has this vile, you know, kind of outpouring of anti-Semitism towards somebody else.
So we know he's an anti-Semite.
We know his motives.
And my editor said, this is so vile, so anti-Semitic.
I said, he's an anti-Semite.
This is his motive.
But I was a young wannabe publisher.
This is my first major novel.
And I took all this stuff out.
Afterward, I mean, the joke was like people are coming to me and they said, we don't understand Richard's motivations of betraying these realities.
They said, well, he's an anti-Semite.
He said, we didn't get that.
We used to be an anti-Semite before the editor got away with it.
And this is 1978.
So, you know, this is the beginning of this.
And, you know, it didn't make any sense to me.
It was illogical what the editor was asking me to do.
But after that, I kind of stood my ground up to a point.
You know, then that was why you back off a little bit, open to outside reality.
But mostly I stood my ground.
And I've been, you know, they back off because they know that either they're bullying you or they know that logically what you're saying is the truth.
And they don't want to, they're going to deal with the truth.
And this is the truth and deal with it.
And nobody's ever, you know, threatened to cancel my books, but I can see with a young writer coming, you know, online and kind of, you know, getting intimidated by this.
All right.
I got to stop there, Nelson.
But first of all, it's great to see you.
Balancing Identity and Violence00:10:00
The new book is The Maze, a John Corey novel.
For obvious reasons, you should buy this book and read it before you won't be able to read such books anymore.
It's great to see you, Nelson, and good luck with it.
Andrew, thank you, and good luck with yours.
Thanks a lot.
Well, if you were listening to that Nelson DeMille interview, you understand what writers are up against.
And when I ask you to buy A Strange Habit of Mind and Nelson's The Maze, I'm not kidding around.
I mean, if you don't do that, you're not going to be able to read anything that reflects your views.
I'm serious about this.
This is an actual movement.
These are like 20-year-old kids who are coming in here and running these publishing houses and bullying older editors.
Strange habit of mind, the maze, go out and buy them.
All right.
We are approaching a long clavenless week.
We will have a best of Thanksgiving show with some of the content that has only been for subscribers up till now.
So there will be something going on right after Thanksgiving, but, you know, it's going to be kind of damp out there.
So you want to get ready now and solve all your problems with the mailbag.
Orange Man is back.
I hate him.
I hate him.
I hate him so much.
Yeah.
What the hell was that?
All right.
Don't tell me.
I don't want to know.
All right, from Jacob.
Dear Mr. Clavin, I am a huge fan of your show.
You are by far the wisest host on the Daily Wire.
Well, thank you for that.
My question is that I am deeply depressed and often have hateful and violent thoughts toward leftists.
I want to talk to a therapist about this, but at the same time, I don't want to talk to a left-wing nutjob.
What is the best way to find a good therapist like the one you said saved your life?
Keep up the good fight.
Jacob, first of all, let me congratulate you or pay my respect to you for noticing that something is going wrong.
I mean, you should not be angry, as I've said before.
You should not be filled with violent and hateful thoughts.
If you are, then you shouldn't be paying attention to politics.
You should be paying attention to something else.
But good for you for noticing that something is going wrong.
This is wrong.
You should not be filled with hateful, violent thoughts.
That's not the way this is supposed to, it's not the effect it's supposed to have on you.
So the first thing I would say to you, truly, and I will get to therapy in a minute, because you're right.
You need some help.
You need somebody to talk to who is not a leftist and who knows what he's doing.
But in the meantime, in the meantime, while you're looking for something, stop following politics and start focusing on improving yourself and your life.
Make sure you're doing good work.
Make sure you're getting rid of the bad habits.
Don't be smoking dope.
Don't be drinking too much.
Don't be watching porn.
You are in a spiritual fight now.
And if you want, and to get therapy, there is an organization called conservative therapists.com that recommends conservative therapists.
You can also go to a religious college, a religious university, and ask their psychology department.
They sometimes can help.
You don't want a psychiatrist.
You want a psychologist or a psychotherapist, somebody who will talk to you and listen to you.
But therapy is a real thing.
And I just want to emphasize this is a spiritual fight.
When you have rage and depression and violent thoughts, that's like finding a lump somewhere on your body.
You go to somebody and you get help.
And again, I congratulate you on knowing something that's wrong.
And I just want to say, you know, to everybody, to everybody out there, you know, we're all passionate about America.
We're all passionate about freedom.
We're all passionate about stopping leftism.
Those are small fights.
Believe me, I know you disagree with me about some things.
Believe this.
Those are small fights.
The only big fight is the fight for your soul because your soul is the only thing that lasts forever.
America will fall.
Freedom will die.
The left will dissipate and come back and all these things will go and come.
But you are forever.
You are forever.
And when you are letting your soul get infected by anger and violence and depression, You've got to take that fight.
That's where the fight is.
That's the front line.
That's the front line.
Forget all the rest and take care of that.
And you should go to church.
By the way, I was saying other things you should do.
Go to the gym, get in shape, get rid of your bad habits.
You should go to church.
And you know what?
You don't believe in God?
Go anyway.
It doesn't matter.
God is there whether you believe in him or not.
Doesn't matter.
Don't worry about your sacred belief.
Go talk to God.
He will listen.
He will talk back.
He will help you.
So again, this is a spiritual fight.
This is the most important thing you have to do.
You know, God knows.
God doesn't care who's president of the United States.
God does not care because he knows America will go away and other countries will come back and other Americas will come.
You know why?
Because we built America.
He built you.
He created you.
He's got a bet on you.
And he's got, you know, his dignity, his respect, all of those things are on the line with you.
Take care of yourself.
And so again, Jacob, let me congratulate you on realizing something's wrong.
These are spiritual symptoms, just like something that might, you know, a mole might be a physical symptom.
Depression, anger, violent thoughts.
You've got to get rid of them.
You got to get well.
And then, you know, if then you can go return to politics, that's fine.
But first, take care of yourself and your soul, truly.
From Anonymous, let me start by saying thank you for sharing some of the history between you and Spencer Claven, no relation.
My son came out as gay last night.
And to be honest, I've known for a long time, of course.
I'm beyond thrilled to see the anger and pain that he's been harboring start to dissipate.
I feel closer to him today than I have in years.
My question now is how do I balance making him proud of who he is, because he's a really good person, while helping him as a young teenager avoid getting sucked into the LGBT and so-on moke nonsense.
Can I?
Should I?
I am happy he came out, but I do want to keep him based in reality.
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
You're my only hope.
Well, first of all, should you keep him away from the, yes, the LGBTQ woke nonsense.
They are like the devil, you know, prowling like a lion.
They wait for parents to reject their kids.
They wait for them to be thrown out.
They wait for them to be told that they're no good.
And then they move in and they are the worst.
They are everything bad about the left.
They are groomers.
They groom you in leftism and wokeism and hatred and anger.
Nobody, nobody is happier being part of that community.
It is a disgusting, opportunistic infection on a body politic.
However, so far, you've done exactly the right thing.
Can you stop him?
Well, no, nobody has control over another person.
Other people are going to go their way, but you can help him.
And you can help him by giving him someone, a father who loves him.
Well, it's anonymous, so I don't know if you're a father or mother, but giving him a parent who loves him, someone who accepts him for who he is, who understands that this is who he is, and who basically keeps him as part of his family and part of the love that we hold our family in.
You know, listen to him.
Listen to what he's telling you.
Help him find his way.
He may find different moral challenges.
He may do them differently than other people.
He may do something that, you know, he may say, well, I just, I don't want to act out my homosexuality.
He may say, I do.
Then make sure he does it in a way that's not destructive to him, that it's not going to destroy him.
I get a lot of angry emails from people telling me that I should reject my son or I should disapprove of him or I should lecture him.
I disagree with that.
I think that one of my few talents, I have two talents.
One is that I'm a really spectacular writer, and the other is I love people where they are.
I take them where they are.
I love them where they are.
And I've always loved my son.
I respect him.
I admire him.
I think he is one of the best people I've ever met.
And I think he's a better Christian than the people who write me about him, especially the ones who write me using the kind of language they should be ashamed of.
You stick by him.
If you stick by him, he's got a place to go.
He's got a way to grow.
He's got a role model to look to and a way of fashioning his life in a way that you can be proud of.
You're doing just the right thing.
And the love he gets from you is going to be a path away from these LGBTQ leopards who prowl and take people away from both their families and from themselves because the identity that they sell you is not your identity.
Your gayness or your straightness is not your identity.
The love you express into the world is your identity.
And the talents that you were given and the person that God made you to be, that you're not, that you're trying to be, that you want to strive to be, those are the things that make you who you are.
Those are your identity.
In fact, when Jesus said, if you lose yourself for my sake, you will find yourself, he was not whistling Dixie.
He was telling the absolute, exact, precise truth.
When you give yourself up to let Christ, the part of Christ that you are, come to life, you will find that you will live.
And that's much easier to do when the people who love you represent the love of God to you.
That's what you're here for.
That's what I'm here for.
We're here to represent the love of God to one another so that they can say, oh, that's what God looks like.
I can look like that too, and I can live a life that is meaningful.
Let me see if I can get one more in.
I don't think I can.
Nah, too complicated.
The questions are too complicated.
All right, I'm going to stop there.
The members block is coming up.
For those of you who don't subscribe, who do subscribe?
Those of you who don't subscribe are about to drop through the floor into a nothingness like you simply can't imagine.
It will suck you into a world of pain and agony, and you'll be destroyed.
But if you're not destroyed, happy Thanksgiving.
We will do a special show on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and then we'll be back the Friday after that with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
If you are a member of the Daily Wire, stay tuned.