Ep. 1259 – Love in a Time of Murder ties media bias to moral decay, mocking Joy Reed’s MSNBC cancellation and framing Jingle Bells as a "racist anthem" while dismissing historical context. It contrasts Hamas’ October 7th violence with Ahmed al-Ahmed’s heroism, criticizing Chuck Schumer and Anthony Albanese for downplaying threats. The episode pivots to Rob Reiner’s murder, rejecting Trump’s "derangement syndrome" claim but defending his blunt truth-telling, then warns of leftist-Islamist alliances undermining freedom. Trump’s economic gains (22% lower car prices, 30-50% gasoline drops) and foreign policy successes—like ending wars and countering Iran—are praised over media distortions. Concluding with a call to trust "inner moral sense," the host promotes supplements and a Daily Wire Plus discount before Trump’s Christmas speech. [Automatically generated summary]
A recent video claims that the Christmas song Jingle Bells is racist.
And lest you think that's absurd, let me say that no less a philosopher than Joy Reed retweeted the video because she had nothing better to do since MSNBC canceled her show when they found they couldn't fit a camera into her padded cell.
To be fair, MSNBC also canceled MSNBC, changing its name to MS NOW, which caused the MSNBC audience to sit up and say, where the hell am I?
Before she sank back into the marijuana-fueled haze she's been in since 1969.
The idea that jingle bells is racist emanates from the work of a Boston university professor who says jingle bells isn't racist.
The professor does say the song may have been first performed in a 19th century minstrel show where white people dressed up as black people in the hope of tricking the audience into thinking they had musical talent.
The author of jingle bells wrote songs for such blackface shows and also fought in the Civil war on the side of the confederacy, but he's dead now, so he got his.
What's left is the song itself, and yes, it certainly is a sinister anthem of racist bigotry with such offensive lyrics as now the ground is white, which clearly suggests white supremacy to anyone who is so google-eyed crazy.
They wear their baseball cap backwards just in case someone should try to sneak up behind them.
The very lyrics jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way constitute an obvious and vicious attack on the aspirations and dignity of a race of oppressed people whose suffering cries out so loudly and persistently that it is inexplicable how I managed to fall asleep before I even finished writing this sentence.
Thus jingle bells joins other foul expressions of Christmas wickedness.
Like baby, it's cold outside.
That song recreated the age-old ritual of flirtation and seduction that has given both men and women some of the most pleasurable moments of their lives.
It thereby angered feminists by reminding them how unfair it is that no one ever flirts with them, because their scrunched-up faces and shrill falcon-like voices would shrivel the desire of a satyr, not to mention the fact that squeezing even 15 seconds of desirable femininity out of those shrikes is barely worth the trouble of lighting their cigarettes.
So who cares how cold it is?
Go home already now.
Of course, I don't mean to make fun of the ridiculous clowns who bring these matters to our attention.
After all, it's deeply important not to turn our eyes away from anything about this season that we can pretend is offensive.
Otherwise, people might drift off into a state of complacent holiday cheer, humming merrily as they greet one another on the snowy streets with a reawakened sense of fellowship and well-being, brought about by the knowledge that the savior of the world was born on Christmas day to save us all from Satan's power, with his everlasting love and forgiveness.
What a waste of our brief time on earth it would be to focus on that, when instead we could be dredging up centuries-old acts of unkindness that may or may not have been committed by people who anyway, are now long dead, so they got theirs.
We must never allow ourselves to become so immersed in feelings of goodwill towards men that we miss the opportunity to poison the pleasure of seasonal merrymakers by twisting the facts until we can append some imaginary crime or other to yet another facet of what used to be the happiest season of the year.
We must always remember that if we can manage to make even one person feel guilty for something he never even dreamed of doing, it will make us seem like virtuous culture warriors instead of the useless jerkwads we so obviously are.
So remember, even if someone just says merry Christmas, be sure to point out that that is not inclusive language and it offends those people who don't believe in Christ and thus cruelly reminds them of the lonely, tortured hell of godless eternity they will experience after death, jingling all the way.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back, laughing our way through the birth of our Lord and Savior.
I just want to take a moment uh, to talk about our holiday schedule.
Because the holidays, because the holidays fall on a thursday, which is when I often tape the show they would leave you clavinless for two weeks.
I mean I would take christmas off and then I would take new year's off and you, you would just be.
I mean, the body count alone would be intolerable and the cleanup would be disgusting.
So I what i'm going to do is i'm going to do a christmas special that we will air on christmas eve.
And what i'm going to do on this christmas special is i'm going to talk about Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol in a way I think you'll never have heard before.
You will actually find out new stuff about a Christmas Carol and new ways to look at it that give you insight into this moment in history, because I think it's one of the greatest works of literature ever, and all great works of literature become prophetic in some ways, and it has a lot to say about the moment we're in.
So that will be on christmas eve.
We'll put out a christmas special uh, we'll also have interviews and bonuses throughout the holidays uh, but you will only be able to hear any of this if you purchase after that The Dark, otherwise it will magically become uh, inaudible.
Uh, now it won't, but still, purchase after that The Dark.
You will love this book.
It has been.
It's gotten great reviews, where it has gotten reviews and uh, your friends will love it and you can give it as a gift, and then you will be able to hear all this stuff and also leave a comment.
Wherever you get the show uh, we will uh, you know, keep leaving them throughout the holidays.
If you're watching on Youtube, or if you're watching on uh, on daily WIRE plus, or if you're just listening on Apple, or if you're just imagining that you're listening, just leave a comment in your imagination.
And if the comment is, you know, disgusting enough, morally disgusting enough, we have a line.
You know, if you cross that line, we will read it on the show because it'll fit right in with the rest of our material.
Today's comment is from Cody Van Dyke uh 1714, who says, anyone who can come up with three different ways to rhyme with bonus, including Cojonus, is worthy of adoration.
All hail, Lord Clavin, right?
I mean, what other conservative podcasts do you get incredible songwriting skills like that?
None, none.
I'm telling you, bonus cojones, whoa was, bonus cojones, onus and phones.
So yes, that is the kind of thing that you will hear on the Andrews Clavin Show, and it will make your life better.
So let's get right to today's episode, Love in a Time of Murder.
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Faith Under Siege00:13:41
Chapter One, Ignorant Armies.
Now, since this is the last news-based show of the year, I'm going to do something a little offbeat.
I'm going to begin the show by quoting a very brief section of a poem.
It's one of the most famous poems in English literature, but you might never have heard of it or never heard it because people don't read poetry very much anymore.
And it's very relevant to what's been happening this week and I think to our moment in a larger way.
The poem is called Dover Beach.
It's by a man named Matthew Arnold.
It was first published in 1867, but it describes a scene from 1851 when Arnold was on his honeymoon and he was in Dover, honeymooning in Dover, which is where the famous white cliffs of Dover are.
You've probably seen pictures of them.
And the thing about Dover, I've hiked there and the beach is all pebbly.
So the ocean kind of rattles as it comes in, as the waves come in.
It kind of makes a rattling sound.
And Arnold was standing in his hotel room and listening, I think, out of an open French window, and he heard the tide coming in and out over the pebbles.
And it made him think of the fact that faith was dying in the Western world, that faith was, he heard the tide going out, and he thought of the tide of faith going out in the Western world, that people were losing their faith in God and specifically in Jesus Christ.
And in the most famous line of the poem, he says the sea of faith is going to low tide with a melancholy, long withdrawing roar.
And sometimes when you hear conservatives talk about faith leaving the Western culture, they will talk about the melancholy, long withdrawing roar, which comes from this poem, Dover Beach.
And of course, many people knew, like Nietzsche knew.
Nietzsche was a non-believer, but he knew that the death of faith was going to be a catastrophe for Western culture because the entire culture was built on the framework of faith.
So when you hear people like in the EU, when they had their declaration, they exiles Jesus from it, which once you do that, you're pulling out the bottom block of the Jenga Tower.
And a lot of people knew this was going to happen.
I think Nietzsche was probably the most honest of them.
But he realizes this is going to happen.
So he's standing on his honeymoon with a woman he loved, and they went on to have six children, and it was reportedly a very happy marriage.
And he's thinking about the sea of faith going out, and he's describing the sea of faith going out, this melancholy, long-withdrawing roar.
And suddenly, he turns to her with passion, and he says this.
He says, ah, love, let us be true to one another.
For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
And we are here as on a darkling plane, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.
In other words, our love is the only thing that is going to protect us in a world that's coming apart, at the seams, and was never really a good place to begin with.
Now, those of you who occasionally listen to that nice Andrew Clavin on his podcast, a wonderful guy, you may have heard him say that we are going through a time of massive cultural shift.
And while America often handles political transitions of power peacefully, you'll often hear people say that, well, we have the tradition of the peaceful transition of power.
I don't believe that's true.
We have a tradition of the peaceful transfer of political power.
But when cultural power changes, and I've talked about this before, that's when we tend to get violent.
And the reason is in a place where power is conferred through democratic means, the culture rules because the culture shapes the electorate.
As Andrew Breitbart loved to say, the politics is downstream from culture, and the culture shapes people.
And then you can have political change when the culture does that.
So people fight over culture.
When cultural shift comes, you have violence and you have meanness in America in a way you don't usually have.
So it's fighting for cultural power that Americans tend to lose their way.
I talked about this, I believe, after the murder of Charlie Kirk.
We saw it too after the slaughter in Israel on October 7th, when people who you would think would have some kind of moral restraints, maybe because they were educated or privileged or rich, you would just think they would know better, did things that were disgusting.
You know, Susan Sarandon, after October 7th, after babies were murdered, women raped to death by Hamas, innocent people who just were Jews.
That was why they were killed.
They were killed because they were Jews.
Susan Saranda said that never happened.
I mean, that's a despicable thing to do.
After Charlie Kirk was killed, Jimmy Kimmel came out and tried to blame it on MAGA, even though we knew it was a leftist shooter.
He lied.
He was despicable.
He said despicable things.
A lot of people did about Charlie that were just untrue.
They were untrue.
But even if they had been true, even if they were true from their point of view, that was not the time to say it.
Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, you've heard me talk about this too, when Charlie Kirk died trying to kind of, Candace, I believe, you know, coming up with these baseless conspiracy theories that somehow the leadership of TPUSA was responsible for this.
This is not something that she keeps promising.
She's going to show us proof.
She's never shown us proof.
Tucker just spewing out after October 7th, this anti-Semitic tripe that he allows other people to say, but he sits there credulously saying, you know, the worst people in the world, the people I hate most in life are Christian Zionists.
Those are the people he hates most in life.
He's certainly fond of the Russian dictators.
I don't know why Christian Zionists.
But these are people who are moving into this cultural shifting place, hoping that they can set the narrative because this is what we're fighting over.
The narrative controls cultural power and they are fighting for cultural power.
But the thing is, murder should be a sign that your philosophy is wrong.
When you are backing murder, that should be a sign that your philosophy is wrong.
And if your narrative is explaining away murder or putting murder like what they do with the Jews in Israel, where they call them genocidal when they're the victims of genocide, they're not genocidal at all.
They fought a war against a genocidal people, protecting civilians as much as they could.
So they just switched things around.
When your philosophy is backing murder, you should change your mind.
And the only exception that I will make is people who live in a world of murder.
If a mobster gets killed by another mobster after having killed mobsters, that's a totally different thing.
But I'm talking about people murdering the innocent.
And these transitional moments, they're moments of chaos, violence, cruelty.
And that means that any flaw in your political philosophy or your personal philosophy or even in your personal morals can get you into trouble.
It can be a doorway for the devil.
And the devil can start to say to you, well, if you want the narrative to go this way, if you want the country to go this way, if you want things to be this way, if this is where your self-interest lies, just ignore that murder.
Just treat it like it's nothing or that it's justifiable or whatever you want to do.
Now, another thing you may have seen if you are listening to that lovely Andrew Clavin, what a nice guy that guy is, is you might have read a book that he wrote this year, which is not After That the Dark, which is another, a second book he wrote this year, which you guys were kind enough to make into a New York Times bestseller.
It was called The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
And it was speaking in that Clavin's prescient way, that the foresight he has is just amazing.
He was speaking about murder and the meaning of murder and how we can find meaning in looking at murders from a creative way.
We don't find meaning in the murders.
We find meaning in thinking about what murder is.
And one of the things that this book, The Kingdom of Cain, says is that murder is the absence, is evil, and it is evil because it's the absence of good.
Evil is the absence of good.
And this is important.
A lot of people think the only good things are doctors, soldiers, policemen who only exist because there is evil.
But the fact is that good exists before evil.
Evil is the absence of good.
It's an important philosophical point, which the book will explain, but I won't explain today.
The good is love.
The good is that love which convinces you emotionally, deeply, that other people exist.
Other people's inner lives exist.
Anybody who loves a spouse or a parent or a sibling or a friend understands that when something happens to them, you feel it differently.
You might see a stranger slip on the street and accidentally laugh because it looked like slapstick.
But if your wife slips on the street, you don't laugh.
You think, oh my God, she was hurt and I love her and I care about that inner person.
And that is why Jesus puts love first, because he's telling you that each person is made in the image of God and you should love that image wherever, wherever you find it.
And murder is, of course, the erasure of that image.
It's saying that what I care about, what I think, what I want, is more important than another soul, than the image of God represented in another person.
Now, I talk about politics all the time, but I only have one political opinion, which is that people should be free.
But freedom requires certain things, right?
It requires small governments, strong communities, some semblance of Christian morality.
And the founding ideas of this country are the best machine we have yet for people to remain free, right?
That's why we love it so much.
There may be another one down the pike, but anyone who tells you that we need to go back into the past to get some of that wonderful monarchy or some of that wonderful feudalism or some of that wonderful tyranny, it's leading you astray.
And they're the people who want to fix the narrative so it makes murder go away or it makes murder justifiable.
So there's going to be a lot of Jew hating and a lot of shrieking and a lot of lying and a lot of twisting in these days to come.
And this is going to last for a while.
This is not going away tomorrow.
But there's going to be violence and there's going to be murder.
And people are going to offer you a lot of bright, shiny new religions and new forms of government that are really just old religions and government that America was created to leave behind, to get behind.
And that's why what I want you to say is I want you to remember that we have to be true to one another.
We have to be true to the love we have for one another and the love we have for this country and the love we have for God.
We have to be true to those things because the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various and so beautiful and so new, has really neither joy nor love nor light nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain.
And we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night.
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Chapter two, how do you solve a problem like Sharia?
Now, one of the factions looking to shape the narrative is the faction of Islamism, let's call it Islamism or Sharia Islam, and those who associate themselves with Sharia Islam for one reason or another.
And I'll talk about that a little bit later.
But the struggle between Islam and the West is a real thing.
And it's a delicate matter because we have to defend ourselves against Sharia Islam while preserving our Western values, which include religious freedoms and tolerance of other people's thoughts.
So in Australia this week, this is a week of murder.
Australia's Tragedy00:15:15
And in Australia, some Jews had gathered for a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, which is a famous beach there.
A father and son terrorist team opened fire.
They killed 15 people, including a 10-year-old child, a little girl, a rabbi, and a Holocaust survivor.
These were Muslim people, the father and son, inspired by Islamic State and other radical Islamic outposts and were carrying out this Islamist agenda.
The Holocaust survivor who was killed was named Alex Kleitman.
He escaped from the Nazis when he was a little child.
Obviously, I think he was in his late 80s when he died, but he escaped as a child and went into Siberia where his family almost starved and went through terrible times until he made it to Ukraine and then to Australia.
And he was on video during this horrible onslaught, putting his body in front of his wife, and he died a hero.
But imagine this, having seen the Holocaust, the absolute nightmare of the attempt, a very successful attempt to almost eliminate the Jews of Eastern Europe and seeing that and living your life and making it to Australia, a free country and once a tolerant country, and dying by throwing your body in front of your wife as an anti-Semitic Islamist tries to kill you.
There was also another hero, Ahmed al-Ahmed, I believe it's pronounced, who was a Muslim fruit vendor who ran into the fray saying, I'm going to die now, but it's worth it.
He said this.
I told a friend, tell my family I love them.
I'm going to have to die.
And he wrestled the gun away from one of the killers and saved a lot of lives, but also took some bullets and is still in bad condition.
And then there were just other people who did amazing things.
I'm going to play a brief video.
If you listen to it, you'll hear the screams and the gunfire.
But under that, you'll hear the voice of a woman protecting a child whom she did not know.
So you can hear her voice during the attack.
this is cut one.
Now I play this because I'm shamelessly playing to your emotions.
I'm shamelessly playing to your heart.
And I'm doing that on purpose to make a point, which is this.
I believe that every person whose soul is still his own, who is not a psychopath, who has not been taken over by the soul's enemy, but every person whose soul is still his own, knows the difference between good and evil.
I'll admit there are some gray areas.
I'll admit there are some situational gray areas where it's not clear to see how to get to the good, but we know the difference.
We are born to know the truth and to know the difference between good and evil.
And when you hear that lady's voice and God's blessing on her, and when you hear about the man shielding his wife, and when you hear about the Muslim man running out to grab the gun, you know who the good guys are and who the evil guys are.
And this is what makes me so upset with guys like Tucker Carlson who blur those lines by basically not telling the truth about what's going on.
And when you see a successful actress like Susan Sarandon pretending that women weren't raped to death because she wants she's getting something out of supporting Hamas, some inner sense of virtue by doing that, or Tucker saying the things he says, I'm sorry.
You know it, and you can be gulled by your self-interest.
Maybe you love Tucker when he was on Fox.
I love Tucker when he was on Fox.
Maybe you love Susan Sarandon at the movies.
I love Susan Sarandon at the movies.
Maybe it makes you feel good to think that something was wrong with the Jewish people who were at Bandi Beach celebrating Hanukkah.
There's all kinds of reasons to forget this, but when you see murder, you should wake up.
And I will tell you something else.
You know, I always get into trouble when I say these things that I get out of my reading of the gospel.
I'm not a theologian.
I'm not a pastor, but I tell you what I see when I read the gospel and when I read theology.
People say you can't be saved without Jesus Christ, and I agree with that 100%.
But I tell you that people like this who are Jews and who are Muslims, these people will see the face of Christ.
They will see the face of Christ when they are before him and they will recognize him and they will go to him and he will welcome them.
I say that about Ahmed.
I say that about the Jews who, the Jewish man who shielded his wife, because life and death are barriers to us, but they're not barriers to God.
So we think everything ends when you die, but that's not true.
And everything that's going to happen doesn't have to happen here on earth.
There's no way to salvation but through Christ.
But Christ is still there after you die.
And I believe if you recognize him, you will go to him and he will welcome you in.
And people say, well, well, wait, you know, you're saying these people did good deeds, so they're saved.
No, I'm not, because I know you can't be saved by good deeds.
You are saved by the sacrifice of Christ.
But good deeds can be an expression of a soul that has been changed the way Jesus calls our souls to be changed, right?
You know, when he says metanoio and he says repent, when he says church, what that means is change, change your mind.
When you create that soul in Christ, that gives you the vision to see him and to know him, even if you don't know his name and life.
And this is, you know, I read the Bible.
I believe in the Bible.
I read a lot of theology.
But when I find somebody quoting the Bible at me to justify murder or to negate murder or to, you know, sort of play down the evil of murder, I think to myself, no, let us be true to one another.
Let us be true to the reality of one another and remember that murder is an evil because it erases that inner life that is the soul of man.
So let me just, I want to show you a little bit in real life, in political life, what it means to let your desires, your ambitions, your philosophy get in the way of what you know.
You know, good and evil.
And if you are toying around with saying, oh, well, you know, this murder was fine, you know, you have gone astray.
I mean, that's one of the ways you should kind of wake up when you see that, when you see Hamas move into a group of peaceful people living on their borders and slaughter them in the most and celebrate the slaughter of them and film it and brag about it and cry out, oh, look, how many Jews I killed.
You know, if your philosophy basically condones that, you should look in the mirror and say, you know what?
I got to go back over my philosophy because all philosophy is hung on the love of God and the love of neighbor.
So I got to go back over my philosophy and make a change.
To start with a comic example, Chuck Schumer, who's probably the most powerful Jewish person in American politics, made this statement.
I couldn't make this up.
If I made this up as a satire, you guys would turn me off because you wouldn't believe it.
Here's Chuck Schumer addressing the slaughter of 15 of his fellow Jews in Australia.
Cut to.
And of course, I'm going to say a few words about the terrible shooting in Sydney, Australia.
Okay?
So, and first, of course, as I always say, no matter what, go bills.
They beat the Patriots today.
It's a big deal.
No, I have to tell you that Schumer at least had the self-awareness to take that down.
You can't find it on the internet.
I had to search and search and search to find it.
He got rid of it.
The link that I had when I went to it had been totally changed into this serious thing.
It was a moment.
It comes out of his love of power.
I'm sure of it.
It comes out of his love of power.
He wants to be, he doesn't want to be too Jewish.
He doesn't want to be, you know, bring up things that maybe the left doesn't agree with anymore because the left is very, very, very, not to mention very anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.
And so he always thinks, well, maybe let's put in a Go Bills, Go Buffalo Bills.
Was a great game, by the way.
But really, really, if ever anybody exposed themselves, that was the moment.
But here also is Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia.
There's cut three.
We are stronger than the cowards who did this.
And I want to conclude finally by saying that the government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.
Included in that is the need for tougher gun laws.
And this afternoon at four o'clock, I will put on the agenda of the National Cabinet tougher gun laws, including limits on the number of guns that can be used or licensed by individuals.
A review of licenses over a period of time.
People's circumstances change.
People can be radicalized over a period of time.
Licenses should not be in perpetuity.
And checks, of course, making sure that those checks and balances are in place as well.
So, you know, it's those guns.
You just never know when a gun is going to leap into the hand of an innocent Islamist and start pulling its trigger.
You just don't know.
And look, you know, you ban guns.
You will cut down on mass shootings if you ban guns.
But of course, as we know from England, that's not going to stop people from crashing cars into crowded streets or knifing people on bridges.
And he sits there and says, we're stronger than these cowards.
I don't think terrorists are cowards.
I think they're evil.
I think that's different.
It's worse when you're not a coward and you're evil.
But when you see people being killed, the National Guardsmen who are killed in Syria, the National Guardsmen who are killed in DC, again and again, we see this, this Islamist terrorism.
So why is he saying guns, but not?
We also have to deal with the fact that we now have this large Islamic population which is not assimilating and which is clinging to radical, violent, anti-Semitic, hate-filled, you know, beliefs and practices, right?
So if you're willing to do anything to address this, why not address what is obviously more to the point than the guns?
You know, Australia, ever since October 7th happened, there have been massive demonstrations in favor of Hamas, in favor of the murders, in favor of the terrorists.
And Australia has done nothing about it because the left sort of feels that they can make common cause with Islamism, not with nice patriotic.
And I've said this before, but I'll say it again.
There are millions of lovely Muslim people in America.
I meet them all the time.
There are millions of lovely, patriotic, peaceful, pious Muslim people.
But there is something in Islam that breeds this in ways that other religions don't.
And what the left thinks is we can make common cause with them because they share some values.
They despise freedom because it empowers people to live their own lives instead of having the government live the lives that the left thinks they should live.
The left despises women and gays because they support transgenderism, which renders both women and gays non-existent, right?
If anybody can become a woman, then there's no such thing as a woman.
And of course, there's no such thing as a gay person who's a person of one gender attracted to that same gender.
If there's no such thing as gender, those people don't exist either.
And transgender activists have said as much.
So there's a lot of things that bring these people together, mostly the hatred of freedom and the hatred of the little guy running his own life.
And so they think, well, you know, the Islamists and the left think, well, we'll tolerate each other and pretend to like each other for now, and then we'll settle things after we get rid of America and the great Satan and, you know, the little Satan, Israel, and the Great Satan in America.
Now, President Trump has now expanded the ban on entry to America to 39 countries, many of them Islamic, so that we can better vet people before they come in.
But, you know, there's something more that has to be done.
There's something more that has to be done.
In Europe, the countries are race-based.
I've said this a lot, I know, but England was made by the Anglo-Saxons and the French was made by the Franks.
And these are countries that are race-based at their soul.
They never had to become multi-ethnic.
I asked a Britain about it once, and I said, why are you doing this?
He said, we have America brain.
We have America on the brain.
We think we have to emulate America.
They don't.
They can have a country where they say, no, you can't come in because you're not British, because we want more British people here than anybody else.
They can say that, but we can't.
We are going to have to, we are a creedal country.
We are a country based on a creed.
That doesn't mean we let in everybody.
That's ridiculous.
That's not our creed.
Our creed is not, you can come in.
Our creed is not everybody's welcome.
We have no borders.
But our creed is that we are born equal in, when it says all men are created equal, what it means is they are equal in their right not to be governed by people they did not choose.
They are equal in their right to live free, to have life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Okay, that is the way that people are born equal.
They're obviously not born with the same talents.
They're obviously not born to have the same desserts.
They're not all going to have the same money.
They're going to be rich people and poor people.
There always have been.
There always will be.
However, in America, the poor people are richer than poor people have ever been before because of the freedom, right?
So, you know, the divisions between us is not left and right.
The division between us is pro-founding and anti-founding.
When Martin Luther King says, live out the meaning of your creed, I'm like, sure, we can always get better.
The way black people have treated in this country was at times was disgraceful.
You know, we got to fix that.
When Colin Kaepernick says, screw the American flag, I say screw him because that flag represents all the good he has in his life.
So we're a creedal nation, and that creed can be passed on, but it has to be passed on.
And this is the thing that I'm trying to get to, is that we need a program of assimilation.
We need to program people, to teach people, once we let them in, once we are assured that they want to assimilate, we have to teach them to assimilate.
We have to teach them what it means to be an American, not just the history, what the documents mean, what the laws mean, how the laws work.
And if we do that, I think we can allow some people to come in if we pick and choose which ones they're going to be.
But we have to understand there are philosophies that are antithetical to what we believe.
And one of them is Islamism.
That's one of the things that we cannot have in this country.
And we are, I don't care what color a person is.
If limiting people to people who approve of our creed means less black people will come in, so it goes.
If it means less white people will come in, so it goes.
As long as they stick to our creed and want to be part of our creed and are willing to assimilate, we should teach them how to do that.
And we have not been doing it.
If you don't believe in what we believe, stay out.
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Nick's Role in Drugs00:16:04
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That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Chapter three, The Horror.
Now, I'm going to talk about the murder of Rob Reiner in Hollywood.
And I have to be honest here and say this kind of got to me a little bit because that world that he comes from, his father was Carl Reiner, a very creative guy who worked with Mel Brooks on the funny 2,000-year-old man routines, but also was the creator of the Dick Van Dyke show, one of the premier situation comedies of the 60s.
And that world that he came from of Jewish showbiz was my father's world.
And I met Carl Reiner when I was a little boy.
My father went to California, took me to California, to Los Angeles.
And the writers, the chief writers on the Dick Van Dyke show were guys named Sam Denhoff and Bill Persky, and they had started their careers as assistants to my father.
And so we went there.
And maybe I was 12 at the most, so my memories of it are a little blurry.
But he took me into a meeting that he went to with Carl Reiner.
And they sat and chatted for a long time.
And I have to say, even then, I understood, you know, my father was a local talent.
Now, the locality was New York, so he was in a big locality, and he was the king of broadcast radio in New York.
But, you know, he was not living this big life in Hollywood.
And Reiner just treated him in the kindest possible way and sat for a long time with him and was just a kind, open-hearted guy.
And it was very, a very nice experience.
And so I've always kind of looked kindly on not just Carl Reiner, but Rob Reiner, even though I know his politics where it sometimes repelled me, but I always, almost always disagreed with him.
And so that world, I kind of know that world a little bit.
It was just the world I kind of grew up around.
And Rob Reiner was incredibly talented.
He was funny on screen in All in the Family.
He was funny when he acted on screen.
He made really good movies, one of which is a classic.
Now, I don't do great inflation.
People are always saying it's a classic.
You know, this is a classic.
A classic is a film that 100 years from now, people will still watch if they love movies and it will still speak into their lives.
So he made a lot of really good films.
This is Spinal Tap and Princess Bride, a few good men.
Those are really good movies.
And that is no small thing.
Making a good movie is hard.
But when Harry Met Sally is a classic, and it's a classic because it does something radical.
It tells a romantic comedy.
It's written by Nora Efron, a very feminine, you know, romantic comedy writer, but it tells it with the full inclusion of the male point of view.
And I can't even think of another movie that does that.
Rob Reiner had gotten divorced and he was dating at the time they made that.
And he told Nora Efron his experiences dating as a male.
And she was appalled.
She was appalled the way men think.
As I can't blame her, but it is the way men think.
So like Rob Reiner told her that, you know, if you go on a date with a girl and you have sex with her after the sex, you just want to go home.
You want to leave her alone.
You know, it's like there's an old joke that you don't pay a prostitute for sex.
You can get sex.
You pay a prostitute to leave after the sex is over.
That's why a prostitute is valuable.
And so Nora Efron put that kind of sensibility into the movie and it became a classic.
It really was beautiful.
And the kind of nice thing about it was that in the movie, originally as a spoiler alert, but Harry and Sally don't get together at the end because he was dating and he couldn't see how that dating was ever going to lead to marriage.
But then he fell in love.
He fell in love with Michelle and he changed the ending so that it has the happy ending that it has.
It's a great film.
It's a genuinely great film.
And so he was divorced from his first wife, Penny Marshall, the actress, and he had this very happy marriage after that with Michelle.
He had happy children in that marriage.
And the child he had with Penny Marshall was happy in that marriage.
And he had many friends.
The people who knew him loved him, including the great conservative actor James Woods.
Woods says Reiner saved his career.
And this is what he had to say after this murder, Cut Four.
People who didn't know that Rob and I knew each other, they'd see us laughing and kidding each other.
And they'd go, how is it that you and Rob Reiner are friends?
And I'd say, well, what do you mean?
They said, well, you are so different in your politics and so on.
I said, look, let me explain something about Rob Reiner so that you know.
First of all, I judge people by how they treat me.
And Rob Reiner was a godsend in my life.
We got along great.
We loved each other.
We had more fun together doing a very serious subject.
It was a way to kind of get through it.
And he was always on my side.
But when people would say to me, well, what do you think of his politics?
I would say, I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot.
Do I agree with some of or many of his ideas on how that patriotism should be enacted to celebrate the America that we both love?
No.
But he doesn't agree with me either, but he also respects my patriotism.
So, you know, again, he was a person that people loved, obviously very talented.
And he had happy children.
And one of them, Nick Reiner, was a drug addict.
And he was in and out of rehab his whole life.
And he was one of these drug addicts who gets very violent.
He said so himself.
They made a movie about his drug addiction, a fictional movie about his drug addiction, and they were interviewed about it.
And here's just a little cut of that.
This is Rob Reiner and Nick Reiner being interviewed about a movie they made about Nick's drug addiction as Cut 12.
Our relationship was not as it was portrayed in the film.
Like there were this sort of like holding the line and being tough, but like we didn't ever argue like quite like that.
I mean we did, I guess to a degree, but it was never he was fiery.
You don't seem very fiery to me.
You seem to be crazy.
I get crazy.
Okay.
You don't want to set me off.
So big blow-ups there.
No, we're both, we both can get pretty hot.
You don't roll easily.
No, we can both get pretty hot.
And there were times when we did get hot.
But you weren't like cold like that.
He was very loving and compassionate.
I just think that he didn't really know what to do.
You know, a lot of people are looking for a narrative to put this in.
He's a Nepo baby.
You know, he's the son of Hollywood royalty.
That's a very hard thing to be.
You know, how do you make your own mark?
Although people have done it.
Michael Douglas did it, but Michael Douglas and Sean Penn.
But those people have other people in their families who didn't quite survive.
But once somebody gets addicted to drugs, that's who's in charge.
If he does not break that addiction, that's who's in charge.
And I think that people, you know, after I read Matthew Perry's autobiography where he went, he spent millions of dollars in these rehab clinics.
I started to think we really need a new framing of what addiction is.
I personally believe addiction is a purely spiritual, not a chemical thing.
I think when people say it's a disease, I think that's wrong.
I think it's a spiritual disease, if you want to call it that, or some kind of spiritual fault or need that people are trying to fulfill.
I don't think it's just killing pain.
I think it's seeking something we all know is that we all know that there is a spiritual world right behind the scrim.
I don't know if you know what a scrim is.
It's a transparent screen that they use for special effects in the theater.
They can paint scenery on it and then the scenery can disappear because you can see through the scrim.
And right behind the scrim of reality, I think is a spiritual world that we can all feel is there and we want it there because the comfort and love that we want so badly to experience is there and we can't see it.
Maybe drugs make you feel like you're going to see it, but it's obviously a tool of the devil because it steals your soul away.
And I think that this is a sad, it's a sad thing.
So anyway, they went, you know, the drugs made him crazy at times.
And they had a Christmas party at Conan O'Brien's house.
He was acting.
Nick was obviously back on the drugs and he was acting rudely to O'Brien's guests and going up to people and asking them how much money they made and whether they were a star and all this.
And Rob Reiner and Nick Reiner got in an argument.
And apparently, according to the police, Nick Reiner went and cut his father's throat and his mother's throat.
It's just a horror.
I mean, it is a horror.
How can you even think of the horror of that death?
When I think back to Carl Reiner, I think, like, I'm glad he's not alive to see the way his son die.
That is as horrible a story as can possibly be.
And I think that unless we, the only narrative I can think of here is the narrative of how evil these drugs are and how spiritually sick people are when they get addicted.
That is the sickness of drugs.
And I think there's something wrong with a rehab system that has the failure rate that rehab systems have.
I do not think the disease model of drugs is a good one.
Now, our favorite president, Donald Trump, let his ideas, which are too often centered on himself, cause him to make a mistake.
He made a moral mistake.
He put out a stupid truth social post blaming Rob Reiner's death on having his having Trump derangement syndrome.
And when he was questioned about it, he doubled down.
This is cut five.
Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all.
He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned.
He said he knew it was false.
In fact, it's the exact opposite that I was a friend of Russia controlled by Russia.
You know, it was the Russia hooks.
He was one of the people behind it.
I think he hurt himself in career-wise.
He became like a deranged person, Trump derangement syndrome.
So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form.
I thought he was very bad for our country.
So, listen, first of all, let me say a couple of things because people defended this.
The problem with Trump is when you defend his worst qualities, then those worst qualities become normalized.
That's what I'm talking about: about letting a philosophy or a love that you have or something you want to blur your sense of good and evil, which was given to you for a reason.
Let me say this: what he said about Reiner was true.
Reiner's behavior politically was bad.
He accused Trump of things that Trump was not guilty of.
He said terrible things about Trump.
He said terrible things about Rush Limbaugh when he died.
Here is Rob Reiner and his wife at the border talking about Trump and the border.
This is cut seven.
There is no crisis except for the one that Donald Trump created.
There is no crisis here.
But he created one, and clearly, all he's interested in at that point, let's cut to the chase.
This is about racism.
This is pure and simple racism.
That's all this is.
He's hoping that the people who support him will be ginned up and running to the polls to make sure that brown people don't come into America.
Follow the exact pattern that Hitler has.
hate to say it with the propaganda, even down to the Red Cross went into Auschwitz.
They cleaned it up for two days.
It looked fine.
They went back.
They said everything seems fine there.
You know, fascist playbooks.
And it's shocking that there are 40%, as you say, or 46%.
Yeah.
Those people who are supporting what he's doing here are racist, period.
So obviously that's nonsense.
The whole thing is nonsense.
This was a staged invasion of our country.
And Trump was trying to put an end to it.
And he now has put an end to it.
And so terrible things to say.
However, however, in a moment like this, and I think we all know this, we know this in our hearts.
In a moment like this, out of our common, our recognition of our common end in death, we all die.
The people who love us grieve.
This is a terrible thing.
And this was a horrible, horrible thing that happened to a community, a community of people.
The Hollywood community is a community.
It's an industry town, just like if you live in a town that has an electric plant or a hospital where most of the people work, that's the way it is in LA.
A lot of people work in this industry and they know each other and they get together and all this.
And it's a terrible thing.
And the way you should react in moments like this was exemplified by Rob Reiner when Charlie Kirk was murdered.
Here he is with Piers Morgan.
This is cut six.
You first heard about the murder of Charlie Kirk.
What was your immediate gut reaction to it?
Well, horror, absolute horror.
And I unfortunately saw the video of it.
And it's beyond belief, what happened to him.
And that should never happen to anybody.
I don't care what your political beliefs are.
That's not acceptable.
That's not a solution to solving problems.
And I felt like what his wife said at the service at the memorial they had was exactly right.
And totally, I believe, you know, I'm Jewish, but I believe in the teachings of Jesus and I believe in doing to others and I believe in forgiveness.
And what she said to me was beautiful.
So why does it bother me?
You know, I don't, I'm not making a big thing out of what Trump said.
You know, I think, you know, people, here's the thing about Donald Trump, and here's why this bothers me, by the way, and why it should bother you.
It doesn't have to, you know, you don't, not the end of the world.
It's not the worst thing anybody ever did.
It's not this thing, none of that.
But like most people, Donald Trump's worst traits and his best traits are the same trait.
This is something, if you think about it, is probably true of you.
You know, like the things that you do that when you do them rightly, they're great, but when you do them wrongly, they're bad.
And Trump's superpower is that he is so indifferent to fake politeness that he will speak the truth.
And he, because of that superpower, he has broken, you know, with the help of the rebel media, he has broken the stranglehold that the left had on our culture.
And he's done it because he didn't have the good manners to be afraid of saying things that were true.
You know, when he goes after the Somalians and says they're garbage, you know, that may be impolite, but it's not as impolite as having Somalians, you know, bilk the country out of billions of dollars, right?
So it's a shame that it took somebody impolite, because I believe that politeness is a virtue.
It's a shame that it took somebody being impolite to break that stranglehold, but it did.
Backstage Guide to Performance00:12:41
And it was him.
And when he does something like this, which is clearly classless, it poisons that superpower.
It makes that superpower, turns that superpower into what the left thinks he is.
So I just think that we, we have to be true to one another.
We have to be true to one another.
We have to say, hey, you know, Trump bobbled the ball on this one.
He bobbled the ball on it.
And I think that's important for us because we ultimately will be the culture.
You and I and everybody will be the culture.
And so when Trump gets out of line, there's nothing wrong.
There's nothing disloyal with saying, I, you know, love what Trump is doing as president, greatest president of my lifetime.
I think he actually may be, you know, with Reagan and him, maybe the greatest presidents of my lifetime.
No question about it.
I, you know, I would vote for him, take every vote I voted for him.
I would vote for again.
But, you know, when he makes a mistake like that, it poisons even the goodness that he does.
So anyway, rest in peace, Rob Reiner, and peace to those who knew and love him and loved him.
He made a real contribution to our culture.
That's no small thing.
And he was a flawed guy and they did things that made us angry.
And that's life and that's the way life is.
And we got to live with that.
But he did not obviously deserve the horror that brought him to his end.
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Final chapter, a train wreck called Desire.
One of the few movies I saw this year that I liked was called Blue Moon.
It's a flawed film, but I didn't care.
I knew it was going to be a flawed film when it opened.
It's basically a film play.
Ben liked it as well, although I think I liked it more than he did.
But I loved it because it takes place in this backstage theater world.
And it's about the great songwriter Lorenz Hart, who worked with Richard Rogers.
It was Rogers and Hart, and they were very successful.
And then Rogers teamed up with Hammerstein, Oscar Hammerstein, and they became the most successful team in musical theater history.
So they wrote Oklahoma and Carousel and My Fair Lady.
Not My Fair Lady.
Was it My Fair Lady?
It was certainly Sound of Music is the one I was thinking of.
And this is the night on which Oklahoma opens.
And Ethan Hawk, the best performance I saw all year by far, a fantastic performance, is there pretending to be happy for his former partner's success, but actually dying inside.
And here's a great moment.
Ethan Hawk is Lorenz Hart congratulating Rogers and Hammerstein while he thinks their place sucks and he hates them and he's sorry this is happening.
This is cut eight.
My God, the show is going to run 20 years.
It's going to be bigger than Abe's Irish Rose.
And much more coyish, so we can tour.
Well, thanks for coming, Larry.
Oh, Oscar.
Larry, you get taller every time I see you.
What can I say?
The lyrics are brilliant.
Poetic when they need to be poetic, funny when they need to be funny, not a rhyme out of place, easy on the ear.
I'm just a fool when lights are low.
Perfect!
Did you hear me applauding?
I think you're the loudest person in the entire theater.
So, you know, I often, Lawrence Hart was famously gay, and a lot of it is about his misery in being gay.
And I love that world, that backstage world.
I love the theater, and I love the backstage world.
And when I was in London, my wife and I sometimes got a pass to go to the backstage bar at the wonderful national theater, and the actors would come in.
They were just like that.
They were just like, oh, lovely.
They call them loveies in Britain.
They say, lovey, you're marvelous.
I've never seen.
I couldn't call it good.
You know, that's what Noel Coward used to say after a bad performance by a friend.
He would come in and say, good just isn't the word.
And I just, I used to sit there and say, this is heaven.
For me, this is heaven.
I used to say to my wife, people who think gay people can't get into heaven should come to the backstage bar at the national.
Because of course, theater and musical theater, especially, I always say Western culture stands on the shoulders of Jesus and Socrates, a Jew and a queer.
And I think all of musical comedy is written by Jews and queers.
And so that's, if you ever wonder why they're here, that's why.
So I mentioned this to an actor friend recently.
And I mentioned that I love this backstage world.
And he's been in the theater his whole life.
And he said, I hate that world.
I hate the hypocrisy.
I hate the bitchiness.
I hate the envy.
I hate this fact that they call you a lovely, but they're really hating you, just like in that scene I showed you.
And I thought about that for a while.
And I thought, I know why I can love it.
I can love it because I'm not really in the theater.
I had that one play, The Uncanny, that was put on in Ohio.
It was a wonderful experience.
I'd love to do it again, but I'm not really a theater person.
And so when I go into the theater, I don't want anything.
I don't want anything.
I have no desires in the theater.
I'm not looking to put up a play.
I'm not looking to be a king of the theater or anything like that.
And so I have no envy.
I have no competitiveness.
I can just enjoy the people as they are.
And are they flawed?
Can I see that they're fake?
Can I see that they're hypocritical?
Yes, but there's something funny and beautiful about it.
And I just like it.
And I think I feel this way about politics too.
I have no desire for political power.
I don't particularly want to meet politically powerful people except to be interested in them.
And so I look at political people for all their flaws and I think that's fine with me.
I enjoy the political world because I want nothing from it.
And this is basic Buddhism, that you suffer for your desires.
You suffer for the things you want.
And I think that if we could treat the world the way I treat the theater and the way I treat politics, we'd all be happier if we walked through the world and we didn't want anything from it and we could forgive people for their piccadillos and their flaws and their sins and just enjoy the show of life.
Think how happy life would be.
I think there's something to that.
I think there's something Christian in it.
And in fact, most people, most people sign on to evil, not through malevolence.
They don't sign on to evil because they're malevolent.
They sign on to evil because they want something.
They want Trump to be perfect, so they say, oh, well, it's okay that he said something wrong.
They want Trump to be president, so they overlook his flaws.
They want Israel to be gone.
So they hate Jews.
So they say, oh, Hamas didn't do anything wrong.
Hamas is, no, they're Hamas.
Hamas is not.
It's a political organization.
They're not terrorists.
It's the things that we want that lead us astray.
And that's why, you know, and people say things, as I've mentioned before, they say things because they want clicks or because they don't want to lose their audience, right?
I mean, I always tell you, I don't do that because I'm on a mission from God, but people do that.
They don't want to lose their audience.
So they'll tell you what you want to hear.
They'll lie to you.
They will lie to you because you want to be lied at, lied to, and tell you things that you want to hear because they don't want to lose that audience.
Many Christians fear the power of desire so much that they have lived as celibates or they've lived as they fast a lot or they flog themselves.
In the old days, they used to whip themselves to erase their desires, to teach themselves that desires are bad, that they're meaningless.
But I believe that the harder path and in some ways the more Christian path is to train your desires to focus on God so that your work life, your sex life, your need for recognition, your need for money, all of them go through God.
All of them put God first.
Because I think our desires are important.
I think our ambitions are important.
I think our ambitions are salience of our soul, the outsticking part of our soul.
They're the things that guide our souls to act in a way that we become the people God made us to be.
You don't want to be a writer to hurt people.
You want to be a writer because that's who you are.
There's something that you are.
And then you want to have kids because that's who you are.
You want to be married and have a love life because that's who you are.
But those desires have a mind of their own, right?
So like, you know, what kind of husband would you be if you didn't desire your wife?
But if you desire your wife, it's pretty sure you're going to desire every pretty girl who walks down the street because the desire doesn't care.
The desire doesn't care.
You have to care.
You have to shape your desires into the shape that God wants them to be in.
So I don't believe we're supposed to abandon our desires.
I believe we're supposed to train our minds, and this is hard, this is not easy, over time so that our desire is for God in everything that we do.
I think that that's how you handle your desire.
And, you know, every church, every church has rules about how to do that.
But the rules don't always work.
And the rules don't always restrain people.
And the rules just make you feel bad for breaking them.
And I just think of it differently.
I think that it is you train your life in love.
That's what you do.
You train your life in love.
And every time you see yourself drifting, you drift back.
You pull yourself back.
Every time you hear yourself saying, well, you know, murdering that guy wasn't so bad because he runs an insurance company and insurance is bad.
Every time you hear yourself say, that's not as loving as I wanted it to be.
Murder is a very good guide to when you have gone off track.
When you are making light of murder, that is a good guide that something has gone off track.
And, you know, Jesus put it this way.
He said, take no thought saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or wherewithal shall we be clothed?
For after all, these things, even Gentiles seek those things.
That's how low they are.
Even non-Jews seek some of those things.
And he says, and your heavenly father knows that ye have need of all these things.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.
You will get the things that you need.
God knows what you need, and he will get you those things.
So look, there is more chaos to come.
This transition is not going to happen overnight.
It's going to take a long time.
This is a cultural transition.
It's going to take years, probably, hopefully not 10 years, but it may take two years.
It's going to take time.
And there's more lies to come, and there are more people to deceive you and to deceive me and to rise up and call to your desires instead of that thing you have inside you that you do have that knows right from wrong.
And so when you hear people, whether they're on the other side like Susan Sarandon and Jimmy Kimmel, or they're on supposedly on our side, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, you are going to have to remember: let us be true to one another.
Let us be true to that inner moral sense that we have, because then, when the cultural shift is over, there is a very high chance.
I really do believe this, there's a very high chance that we're going to come through to much, much better days.
I think when Trump says a golden age is coming, I think there is a good chance, a strong chance that he is right.
It's not the only chance we have, and if we go off astray, it won't be there at all.
But there is a good chance, and you want to be standing in the good when America returns to the good.
So, let us be true to one another and love one another and walk straight to the kingdom of God and seek ye first the kingdom of God, while all around us, the ignorant armies clash by night.
You know, many people look at me and say, How do you look so beautiful?
Many others just say, How come you're not dead yet?
Trump's Golden Age Hope00:11:43
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All right.
Usually this is where we do Klavan clapbacks, but I went a little long.
So, what I'm going to do instead, as a Christmas present, I'm going to invite you all in to member block.
I bring that copy back, Adele.
So I can say, I'm going to bring you all into member block so you get to see the glorious 10 minutes that usually you're locked out of while you're being plunged.
If you're not a member, you're being plunged into clavenless darkness.
But this is a good time to become a member.
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That is dailywire.com slash subscribe.
And you too can get an extra 10 minutes before you are plunged into Clavenless Darkness.
But we will end.
This is the last news podcast of the year.
So we will end by letting everybody in and talking a little bit more about what Donald Trump is doing and some of the, I think, great stuff that he's amazingly great stuff that he's doing.
This presidency has been so insanely great that even the administration cannot promote its greatness enough.
And I know Trump is always patting himself on the back, but they're not explaining all the time why they're doing the stuff they're doing.
I've talked more, and I'm not even sure Trump has a full, fully formed theory of it.
He's such an instinctive political figure that sometimes he doesn't.
So they did something I thought was kind of dopey.
Susie Wiles, who is President Trump's chief of staff, and he loves her.
She is loyal to the death.
She's very tough behind the scenes.
And she very rarely speaks on the record.
For some reason, she gave something like 11 interviews to Vanity Fair.
Now, there is a disease on the right, which is simply this, that we all know that the New York Times is garbage.
We all know that Vanity Fair is garbage.
We all know that NBC News is garbage.
It's completely biased to the left.
But we also know that they are conduits to elite approval.
And so we hanker for that approval.
And when the New York Times comes and says, can we do an interview with you?
We go and try to explain ourselves to the New York Times.
And the New York Times butchers us and dices us and takes ugly pictures of us.
Vanity Fair and this whole thing.
All they have is pictures, I mean, of like Carolyn Levitt, who's a beautiful woman.
I've met her in person.
She's a lovely girl.
They had this close-up picture.
Nobody could withstand the close-up picture they had of her.
And they just took pictures to make people look bad and they edited things to make people look bad.
And it was just a silly thing to do to send people in to Vanity Fair.
And I just think it's that hankering.
You know, you can tell by the way people react to Bill Maher.
I have a lot of respect for Bill Maher because he lets all kinds of different people speak.
And I've always had respect for him.
But whenever he says something nice about the right or something against the left, we're like, ooh, we become like these fluttery girls, you know, who've just been asked out on their first date.
Ooh, you know, Bill Maher said something good about us.
And like my feeling is okay, you know, but, you know, like I've said something good about us.
Plenty of people on the right say something good about us.
We should be giving interviews to those people instead of people like Vanity Fair.
So one of the things she said was the one thing that bothered me, because most of it was like she said, Trump has an alcoholic personality.
Trump says that.
Trump says that if he drank, which he doesn't, he would be an alcoholic.
He says he has that personality.
She says Elon Musk is an odd duck, which he is.
Most of the stuff she said meant nothing to me.
And especially when you actually read her words, as opposed to the way the press was reporting what she said.
So she says significant context was disregarded.
But I think even the way they used phrases, they would say, like she said that she was appalled when Elon Musk cut USAID.
But she also says that USAID was terrible.
And, you know, she was appalled just by the random way he was doing it.
Anyway, the one thing she said that bothered me was she said that JD Vance has been a conspiracy theorist for 10 years.
And the reason this bothers me is I just cannot get a full read on JD Vance.
I hope he is the next MAGA guy.
I hope he's a great candidate.
I hope he can become the inheritor of the Trump legacy.
But I worry about him.
Here is JD Vance's defense of himself as a conspiracy theorist as cut nine.
Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.
For example, I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask three-year-olds at the height of the COVID pandemic, that we should actually let them develop some language skills.
I believed in this crazy conspiracy theory that the media and the government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job.
And I believed in the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was trying to throw his political opponents in jail rather than win an argument against his political opponents.
So at least on some of these conspiracy theories, it turns out that a conspiracy theory is just something that was true six months before the media admitted it.
And that's my understanding.
So, okay, you know, that's fine with me.
I want to know, does he believe that, you know, 9-11 was a conspiracy within the U.S.?
I want to know, does he believe that, you know, Mossad was running Jeffrey Epstein?
I want to know about those conspiracies as well, because those conspiracies are not true.
And that bothers me because I just cannot get a read on him.
I know people who think he's a fascist.
I know people who think he's a wonderful guy.
And so I'm not sure yet.
And I think there's a very good chance he's going to be the next president of the United States.
Meanwhile, oh, and the other thing is he hangs out with Tucker Carlson.
I know that they've been friends, and I know that Tucker's son works for him and all this stuff.
But at some point, I think he got to stand up to the things that he is saying.
For instance, Trump decided to make a speech.
His people want him to explain himself, especially about the economy, because people are hurting.
People who are not wealthy are hurting, and he's losing poll numbers.
He's bleeding poll numbers.
And so Trump made a speech, and before he did, Tucker Carlson came out and said, oh, we're going to war with Venezuela, which turned out to be entirely untrue.
And a lot of people said, well, he did that because Trump wanted him to do that.
So the networks covered it.
The networks would have covered a speech by the president to the people anyway.
So I think that's ridiculous.
And this is what Trump said.
Instead, he tried to convince people that things were actually fine.
I've restored American strength, settled eight wars in 10 months, destroyed the Iran nuclear threat and ended the war in Gaza, bringing for the first time in 3,000 years, peace to the Middle East and secured the release of the hostages, both living and dead.
Here at home, we're bringing our economy back from the brink of ruin.
The last administration and their allies in Congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before.
I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.
Let's look at the facts.
Under the Biden administration, car prices rose 22% and in many states, 30% or more.
Gasoline rose 30 to 50%.
Hotel rates rose 37%.
Airfares rose 31%.
Now under our leadership, they are all coming down and coming down fast.
So one of the things that I think Trump cannot do, must not do, is tell people that they're not seeing what they're seeing.
I think that he is making strides.
I think that wages have really climbed as he shut the border.
I mean, of course, they've climbed as he shut the border.
And they've climbed faster than prices have risen.
I think there is a delay of people realizing, you know, when they go in and see that the prices are still high on food and things like that, there may be a moment before their higher wages kick in.
The Trump tax cuts will continue.
The cuts on no tax on tips and all that stuff.
But I also think he's going to have to deal with this at some point in very aggressive ways and show people that he's dealing with it because he can't tell people they can afford things that they can't afford.
Listen, I think this first year has been a miracle.
It has been a miracle.
I would never, the reason I keep playing the Trump happiness montage is because I think I would never have guessed that he could accomplish so much.
And what the press does, as I've said before, is they just stop covering the problem as soon as he solves it and go on to not the next problem, but the next thing that they think is going to be a problem, the massive inflation that's going to come from tariffs that never came and all the terrible wars he's going to start that he never starts and all the evil things he's going to do that he never does.
So I think that this is an amazing thing.
Just an amazing thing.
It has been a great, great year, despite all the struggles and despite all the chaos and despite all the bad things that are happening and are going to continue happening until this cultural shift is over.
So listen, I will come back on Christmas Eve with a Christmas show, but for now, let me just say I, you know, it has been a pleasure reporting this year on this incredible victory, this incredible presidency.
And I think the change in the culture that is coming that I believe is going to be a change for good as we go into the new year.
I look forward to Trump making this speech that will take us into 2026.
This is Cut 11.
An Incredible Year00:03:04
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with the military.
We're going to win with healthcare and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
This is the Andrew Klavan Show.
I'm Andrew Claiborne.
What was it like, Merlin, to be alone with God?
Is that who you think I was alone with?
Maradin, I knew your father.
I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.
All men know of the great Taliesin.
You are my father.
The gods should war for my soul.
Princess Garris, savior of our people.
I know what the bull got offered you.
I was offered the same.
And there is a new pirate work in the world.
I've seen it.
A god who sacrifices what he loves for us.
We are each given only one life, singer.
No.
And we're given another.
I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower.
He's waiting on an Earl, and I think you can give him one.
Trust in Yezu, he is the only hope for men like us.
Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Life.
Great light, great darkness.
Such things mattered to me then.
What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies?
You, nephew.
The sword of the High King.
How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield?
Still clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you.