Ep. 263 skewers Super Bowl ads—Lumber 84’s "big beautiful door" mocking border security, Audi’s debunked wage gap myth, and Airbnb’s performative inclusivity—while Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles expose leftist messaging disguised as corporate virtue signaling. Clavin contrasts this with Lady Gaga’s halftime show, then slams Trump’s Putin moral equivalency, comparing it to Obama’s flawed 2016 prayer breakfast speech equating U.S. sins with Islamic extremism. Tracing parallels to the French Revolution’s descent into terror via Wordsworth’s disillusionment, he warns modern progressivism risks mirroring history’s tyrannical excesses when divorced from reason or tradition, framing free speech as the last bastion against ideological extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
Shockwaves are spreading through the anti-fascist movement at the discovery that anti-fascist activists are in fact fascists.
Anti-FA leader Thugly Dirtbag was the first to get the startling news.
In a YouTube video released from an undisclosed location, he said, There I was minding my own business, wearing a balaclava while beating up a housewife in a MAGA hat, when I caught sight of myself in a store window and I was like, Whoa, who's the real fascist here?
A peaceful woman I disagree with or the mass stormtrooper beating her unconscious.
I just slapped my forehead and said, Oh, I get it.
The real fascist is me.
Man, he could have knocked me over with a feather.
I guess now I'll have to punch myself in the face.
Ha ha, unquote.
Professor Evelyn Screamy of NYU's Manipulative Psychopathology Department spoke to reporters outside her room at the home for the terminally misguided.
Professor Screamy said, All these years I've been telling my students that there were fascists infiltrating the university, and now it turns out I was right, there were, and I was one of them.
Who could have seen that coming?
It was like one second I was in a classroom explaining how fascists marshaled government violence to silence their opposition, and the next second I'm standing out on the sidewalk shrieking that the police should beat up a group of peaceful Trump supporters.
Well, I just slapped my forehead and I was like, Hey, kids, look at the crazy fascist.
It's me, unquote.
By the way, it was later revealed that Miss Screamy was not an NYU professor, but a lobster porn artist.
Whereupon NYU hired her to head up their department of lobster porn.
News that anti-fascist leftism is actually fascist leftism has reached even the centers of ideological corruption and distortion.
At the New York Times, a former newspaper, op-ed columnist Googly Hysteric, told PBS anchor woman Googly Hysteric, no relation, quote, For a long time now, I've been labeling everyone who disagreed with me as Hitler.
He's Hitler, she's Hitler, everyone was Hitler.
Then suddenly I'm in my shrinks office and I'm ticking off the Hitler checklist on my fingers saying he demonized his opponents, encouraged violence in his adherents, and supported policies that would result in six million Jews being killed.
And I was like, wait a minute, that's me.
It was very liberating because now I don't have to be afraid of Hitler anymore because he's just the friendly face in the mirror.
Unquote.
Anti-fascist leaders are now trying to adjust to the new normal of being fascist leaders with various strategies.
Sources within the movement told the Daily Wire, quote, We recently held a meeting and there were a lot of different suggestions.
Some people wanted to simply drop the name anti-FA and rename ourselves FA.
Some thought maybe we should stop beating people up and setting fires every time someone disagreed with us.
One guy even suggested we read the Constitution and find out what these conservatives are talking about.
But of course, when he said that, we beat him unconscious with batons and set the room on fire.
Unquote.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Strategies For Fascist Leaders00:02:51
I'm for Hunky Dunky.
Life is hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy topsy.
The world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, hooray, ara, just one more week till the Super Bowl.
Oh, wait.
I missed it.
Oh, no.
What a great game.
And we have Heisman Trophy-winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles here, three-time Super Bowl MVP himself.
We'll discuss the insane ads that were on the Super Bowl during one of the greatest games ever played.
And we'll talk a little bit more about the game.
Knowles will be with us after the break.
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What a game.
What a game.
I mean, that was one of the most unbelievable Super Bowl games in history.
Julian Edelman, that was a historic catch.
I mean, I've never, I have seen amazing catches, but that was an historic catch.
Putin's Moral Equivalency Game00:15:02
And it was very hard not to see, obviously everybody was yelling at Brady for being a friend of Trump's.
It was hard not to see a sort of allegory of Trump's election victory.
But for me, the reason I love the Patriots, everyone hates the Patriots.
The reason I love the Patriots is they are America.
I mean, you look at Tom Brady and his wife, Giselle, is that how to pronounce his wife's name?
You know, they're beautiful, they're unbeatable, a little bit corrupt.
But they just, you can't hate them because they just keep winning and winning.
They're like a metaphor for America.
I mean, that's what it was.
It was very uplifting to watch that happen.
Sorry about Atlanta.
I mean, Tom Brady ended last season deflating a couple of footballs and ended this season deflating an entire city.
So it was tough.
Atlanta is a great, great team.
And all I could say when I was looking at their faces that, you know, after that just absolutely debillion loss was at least you lost to the best in the business.
And we're going to discuss the ads.
Our Heisman trophy winning cultural correspondent, Michael Knowles, we made him watch the ads in the halftime show so I didn't have to, basically, because I was too busy eating.
But we will discuss that in a little while.
First, we have to talk about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, Putin, his foot in his mouth.
Bill O'Reilly.
Before the Super Bowl, Bill O'Reilly did an interview with the president, and the president said, had this one moment that really did start a lot of controversy.
Here he was number one.
Do you respect Putin?
I do respect him.
Why?
Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get along with him.
He's a leader of his country.
I say it's better to get along with Russia than not.
And if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS, which is a major fight and Islamic terrorism all over the world.
Right.
Major fight.
That's a good thing.
Will I get along with him?
I have no idea.
He's a killer though.
Putin's a killer.
A lot of killers.
I've got a lot of killers.
Well, you think our country's so innocent?
You think our country's so innocent?
I don't know of any government leaders that are killers.
Well, take a look at what we've done, too.
We've made a lot of mistakes.
I've been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.
Mistakes are different, Dan.
A lot of mistakes, okay, but a lot of people were killed.
So a lot of killers around, believe me.
Okay.
So let me tell you why I think this stinks, why I don't think it stinks as much as it might stink, but why I really do think it does represent a problem for President the Donald.
You know, the real problem with this is the ignorance behind it.
See, I think what Trump is doing, I really do think what he's doing, is you can't call a man a killer and then sit down and talk with him.
And I think if he had said, if he were a typical statesman, what he might have said was, look, I have to sit down with this guy.
I'm going to leave the name calling to you, but I'm going to sit down with him and talk, and it would be a good thing if we can get together.
Let us start off on a good foot.
The thing that really worries me when he says stuff like this is that worries me that he believes them.
Here is Senator Ben Sass, who has just been an excellent, excellent spokesman for the conservative point of view.
Let's listen to his response because it is 100% accurate.
Let's be clear.
Has the U.S. ever made any mistakes?
Of course.
Is the U.S. at all like Putin's regime?
Not at all.
The U.S. affirms freedom of speech.
Putin is no friend of freedom of speech.
Putin is an enemy of freedom of religion.
The U.S. celebrates freedom of religion.
Putin is an enemy of the free press.
The U.S. celebrates free press.
Putin is an enemy of political dissent.
The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places where our ideas are in conflict.
There is no moral equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom-loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Putin's defense of his cronyism.
You know, this is so true, and it has been a problem for a long time on both the left and the right.
I mean, I remember Clint Eastwood, one of my favorite filmmakers.
He made one of my own books into a movie, True Crime.
You know, I owe him a lot, and he is one of the great artists.
But he made that movie about Iwo Jima, where he showed Americans committing atrocities, killing prisoners, and all this stuff, as if that were the same as the massive program of atrocity that the Japanese did during the war, and as if we were fighting for the same things.
It matters what you're fighting for.
And what Ben Sasse is pointing out is that our country actually stands for something that is good, and Russia has never stood for that ever.
It has never stood for that ever.
So not only does Putin poison his political enemies with jamming radiation into them so that they die a slow, painful death, and I don't see Marco Rubio doing that to Nancy Pelosi.
I know we may have dreams, but that's not what happens.
And that's not what any of us really want to happen.
That's not the country we want to be living in.
And so that is, it's a real problem with Trump because it suggests to us that maybe he really thinks that's true in the same way when he attacked Ted Cruz's father saying, oh, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald?
Because he read about it in that stupid paper.
What's the name of that paper?
The New York, not the New York.
It's not the Examiner.
What's the name of the paper?
The Inquisitor.
That's not the Inquisitor.
The Inquirer.
Got it.
It's a room full of people.
See, if you go to ZipRecruiter, this doesn't happen.
The Inquirer, he thinks The Inquirer is a respectable newspaper.
And I think that that is a real problem.
Now, here's Mike Pence, the grown-up in the room.
He goes on, he goes on TV, the morning interview shows, and he tries to clean it up.
This is cut number six.
I simply don't accept that there was any moral equivalency in the president's comments.
Look, President Trump, throughout his life, his campaign, and in this administration, has never hesitated to be critical of government policies by the United States in the past.
But there was no moral equivalency.
What you heard there was a determination to attempt to deal with the world as it is, to start afresh with Putin and to start afresh with Russia.
Look, we face very, very serious dangers in the world.
But that's why the United States in many ways has created a vacuum in the world as we've backed away from the world stage.
But what the American people see is President Trump leaning into these relationships, bringing a healthy skepticism to all of it, particularly when it comes to Russia, but saying, look, if we could have a better relationship with Russia and with Putin and not getting lost in the usual debates, but to say we're going to take an honest effort to advance America's interests in the peace and security of the world.
So that's like Pence in his job as the Trump whisperer.
You know, Trump comes out and says this stuff, and then Pence comes out and tells us what he really meant.
And I do have a feeling that that is to some degree what Trump means.
I mean, I do have this feeling that Trump feels that there is a relationship to be had.
I think he's wrong about this, by the way.
But, you know, fair enough.
He's going to try to have a relationship with Putin and team up with him to take on ISIS.
He's said this repeatedly again and again and again.
And he is trying to set that up so that when he sits down, he won't be sitting down with a guy that he's called a murderer, even though Putin is a murderer.
That is what Putin is.
That's what he does.
But the moral equivalency is nonsense.
It's slandering America.
America has never been that country ever.
And remember, it's the left that is, this is the stock and trade of the left.
And Donald Trump has always been a man of the left.
He's always been a Democrat.
And he's sucked up that stuff.
Let's go back.
You know, last week, I ended last week by talking about seeing Donald Trump at the national prayer breakfast and how out of place he was and, you know, kind of a fish out of water and how he made that unfortunate comment about Arnold Schwarzenegger, which wasn't a bad comment in itself.
It was merely the tone of it.
But let's not forget what Obama did at the national prayer breakfast.
I think it was just last year when he said this about, he was talking about all the violence that was being committed in the name of Islam, which he didn't mention.
No, he did mention it in this speech.
I'm sorry.
He was talking about all the violence that was being done in the name of Islam.
And then he said this.
This is cut nine.
The profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends.
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.
And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.
In our home country, slavery.
And Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
I mean, now listen, Obama took a lot of flack for that, and he deserved it, but he took it from the rebel press.
He took it from us, the conservative press.
My only objection, look, Obama deserved taking flack for those stupid, stupid comments of moral equivalency, of making a moral equivalency between America and its Islamic enemies.
That's absurd.
He deserved to take the flack.
Trump is taking some flack for this.
He deserves it too.
The only difference, and I think it's a difference worth noting, is the tone of hysteria that is what the press is doing.
It is what the press is all about.
It is creating this atmosphere of hysteria and crisis.
I mean, you read the front page of the New York Times at this point, it looks like we're living in Nazi Germany.
It really does.
You know, I've got to stop.
I'm going to finish this thought on the other side, but I've got to stop and say goodbye to folks at Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to thedailywire.com and you can listen to the rest or subscribe and you can watch it and also be in the mailbag, which is uncomfortable, but you get all your questions answered.
So I just want to finish this thought before we go to Heisman Trophy winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles.
I just want to finish this thought that the atmosphere, the tone of hysteria in the media is what it is what they are doing.
It is how they perceive their job at this point to create that tone of hysteria.
And a media observer, Michael Wolf, was on CNN with Brian Stelter.
Yeah, Stelter.
And it's a hilarious segment.
I think Michael Wolf here is being played by Mike Myers, by the way.
He looks almost exactly like Mike Myers in makeup.
But he just really gives it to Stelter, and this is, it's a really wonderful piece of commentary.
Many journalists say absolutely not.
This is not a war against Trump.
You know, the me, it's just like preposterous.
And also, the interesting thing is then you can follow them on Twitter where they are having a very personal war with Donald Trump.
But very clearly.
Or a war against lying and falsehoods.
Very clearly at the center of this is this new grail that we have.
How are we going to take this guy down?
Let me read from your Newsweek column.
Let's put part of it on screen here.
You said the media strategy is to show Trump as an inept and craven sociopath.
The Trump strategy is to show that media people are hopeless prigs out of touch with the nation.
And then you mentioned me.
You said the media correspondent for CNN turns to the camera every Sunday morning and delivers a pious sermon about Trump's perfidiousness.
I hope I pronounced that right.
Tell me about that particular issue.
Do you feel that my style is wrong or my substance is wrong, trying to fact-check the president?
I think it's, and I mean this with truly no disrespect, but I think you can border on being sort of quite a ridiculous figure.
I mean this with no disrespect, but you're absurd.
That guy should be on every television show talking to every person and then walk over to the New York Times and tell them, all right, Heisman Trophy winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles covering the Super Bowl from the Super Bowl, actually.
We're bringing him in direct.
He's the last man standing at the game.
And can we bring him on?
There he is.
There's the ball.
I have no idea what the audience is seeing right now.
I think we've particleized Knowles and sent him to another question.
This is what happens when you bang the satellite feed off of Neptune.
Nuclear physics goes.
Zip recruiter.
Zip recruiter, don't let this happen to you.
All right, Knowles, so we send you in to watch all the stuff that I didn't watch last night because I love football.
I watch the game.
I could care less what these people are doing.
But it sounds like it was pretty bad out there.
It was a pretty terrible assignment you gave me.
I do need to start out on a positive.
I like you that much.
I do need to start out on a positive note.
Lady Gaga really impressed everybody.
I think she is John Philip Souza compared to Beyoncé Knowles, my cousin, you know, my sister, Beyonce.
Yes.
You know, her big political statement, which we were promised, was standing up, singing God bless America, then reciting that we are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
And then the final moment was a bunch of drones in blue and red forming an American flag in the sky.
And then she did her crazy Gaga thing.
So it was really impressive.
You know, Super Bowl MVP goes to Lady Gaga.
Okay, fair enough, yeah.
The commercials were another story.
The commercials were insane.
It was insane.
It was, I think we have to begin.
You know, actually, I think I'd like to begin with some of the media coverage of these commercials, which were just so absolutely awful.
Here's the coverage.
Bizarre Super Bowl commercial perfectly parodies Donald Trump.
Perfectly.
These Super Bowl ads sent a powerful message to Donald Trump.
They're all listing the same ads, which I'll show you in a minute.
Airbnb's Super Bowl ad takes dig at Trump with beautiful message.
It was a beautiful message.
NPR, how Twitter turned a Super Bowl of political subtlety into a 2016 proxy fight.
I'll give it to Lady Gaga, but political subtlety, every single commercial is attacking the president.
And then Variety had the best one of all.
Super Bowl ad review.
Audi's Border Wall Ad00:08:34
Madison Avenue urges U.S. to move past Trump.
Every single one of their ads harped on the results of the presidential election.
So to begin with, I think we need to take on the final few moments of Lumber 84's ad.
Yeah, what the hell was that?
This was pretty strange.
It opened up.
No one knew what this company was advertising.
And it was a woman from Central America and her daughter walking and running through various landscapes in Central America.
And then she finally gets to some point, and she, you know, they encounter all sorts of obstacles along the way.
She gets to a point, and the commercial cuts out and it says, watch the rest at our website.
Because I guess they weren't allowed to run it on TV or they wanted to draw clicks to their site.
Anyway, here is the final moment from that ad.
Do we have the clip?
Yeah, she's coming to a wall.
If you're not, can't see this.
This is mom and the little girl coming to a wall.
And they're discouraged because they've come so far.
And now there's a gigantic wall.
They can't get through it.
But wait.
But wait.
There's a door in the wall.
There's a big, beautiful door.
Isn't that what Trump promised us?
It doesn't make any sense.
They get to the big wall that's promised, and we get our big, beautiful wall.
And then we're all sad.
But then there's hope because there's a big, beautiful door.
So I think that's Trump's re-election ad for 2020.
What did they do then?
Is there a part where she takes out a tattered American flag?
I couldn't even bear to put it on the clip.
She takes out a tattered American flag that she had knit from some other thing, God knows what.
And the point of the message, of course, is that all, everyone who comes into this country is just an American patriot deep down and just trying to have a shot at the American dream.
There are no drug runners or human smugglers.
I think it's something like 80% of women who are brought across that border illegally or sexually assaulted.
But let's forget about all of that because Trump is the meanie, even though ultimately the big, beautiful wall lets you into the country.
So that commercial, I think, ended up being a little bit off message, but that was the big story.
Then, you know, I think the opposite of Super Bowl MVP has to go to George Clooney for his bizarre Audi commercial.
I'll just let you see this and then we'll talk about it.
Do I tell her that despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she's automatically valued as less than every man she ever meets?
Or maybe they'll learn something different.
So by and out, I guess.
She can't afford it because she's being paid 70 cents on the dollar.
You know, this story is so wonderful, though.
Audi a couple days ago sent out a tweet about this saying we support equal pay and pushing forward this myth of the wage gap.
They say the women are paid 77 cents on the dollar that men are paid, except when you control for all of the factors that go into that, the wage gap virtually disappears.
By some measures, women are paid slightly more than men when you control for those factors.
So anyway, somebody tweets at Audi and says, so Audi, you pay women on average the same amount that you pay men.
Audi responds, absolutely oblivious, and they say, well, when you control for all of the factors, the wage is even out.
Yeah, that's very funny.
So Audi also undercutting their own ad.
Let's go to Airbnb's.
This was a very political ad, all on this question of immigration and refugees.
Do we have it?
Yeah.
We believe no matter who you are, where you're from, who you love, or who you worship, we all belong.
The world is more beautiful the more you accept we accept.
Hashtag we accept, right?
So rent our pseudo-hotel rooms, I guess.
By the way, where they're having a problem because people will not offer their Airbnbs to black people.
It's unbelievable.
And what Airbnb is now saying is that they'll house refugees who are being held up because of Donald Trump's executive order.
The issue here with all of these commercials is it seems that they're advertising messages and products that have nothing to do with their actual products.
So, you know, these are not cheap ads to air during the Super Bowl, but they're making a play that the minority of the country will support their products.
What I find vastly offensive about this, vastly offensive, is the subtle, not so subtle suggestion that there are some of us on the right who do not want to accept people of various races and colors into America who perceive America as being like a white country.
And I know there are like 200 guys on the alt-right who feel that way.
You know, I saw Richard Spencer tweet it out in celebrating the Super Bowl, he tweeted out that for the white race, it's never over.
And I thought, yes, unless we devolve into hate-filled racist knuckleheads like you, and then we're finished.
But I mean, come on, really, all of us love this country.
We love this country because it has so many different people, all of whom theoretically believe in freedom.
I don't see what that has to do with accepting people from war-torn terrorist nations.
I don't see what that has to do with controlling our borders.
It has nothing to do with any of that.
And what's so offensive about all of these commercials is that it totally misses the point of the immigration argument, which is that a country has a right to control its immigration regime, and there's a difference between illegal immigration and legal immigration.
And all of these commercials, except for Audi, which talks about the mythical wage gap, but all of the rest of them are blurring that distinction and slandering conservatives.
So the final commercial, and I think actually the most egregious on this point after Lumber 84s, is Budweiser's commercial.
Do we have any of that?
You don't look like you're from around here.
So this is the German Immigrant is coming.
Why leave Germany, it says.
I'm with the Brupia.
He's going through all this trouble to get out west, I guess, to Milwaukee.
What we're saying, not that bright.
He started in New York.
That's right.
Just stick around.
This is the beer we're race.
So Anheuser meets Busch.
Anheuser meets Busch.
And the thesis of the commercial is that we wouldn't have delicious mass market beer if not for we didn't accept immigrants.
But it so misses the point, as the left has always missed the point on this argument.
And what I think all of these commercials, especially Lumber Miss, is that there are many compassionate reasons to oppose illegal immigration, both for the nation that can control its borders and for the destitute people who are trying to come across.
But for these Super Bowl ads, they totally missed their point.
And it's also worth remembering that Budweiser is no longer an American company.
Really, that's true.
And I think we should take a tip from Ted Cruz and allow a lot of illegal ad copywriters to come into the country and pay them half the wages and see how fast the ads change.
Heisman Trophy winner, winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles, thank you very much.
You did what we wouldn't do.
We sent you out there to watch liberal ads and lady gaga and you came back a lot.
I will say it was still better than Southside with you.
So thank you for that.
All right, so we're moving up.
We're moving it off.
All right.
Unbelievable.
Wordsworth's Radical Dream00:06:52
And if there were, I don't know what you guys were seeing at home if you were watching.
So if there were all those technical difficulties, hire at ziprecruiter.com because you don't want this to happen to you.
All right, stuff I like.
This week I want to talk about my favorite writers of all time, the English Romantics, who were the guys who came along during the French Revolution and afterwards, immediately afterwards in England, the greatest generation, two generations of poets that ever lived.
At one time, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Did I leave anybody out?
No, I think that's all six of the greatest poets in the English language who ever lived were all living on the same island at the same time.
An amazing, amazing thing.
And what had happened was something very similar as what has happened to us, and that's why I want to talk about them.
When, if, for those of you who remember, there probably aren't that many of you who remember the 1960s, but in the 1960s, there was a cultural revolution in this country.
And suddenly, everybody went from, you know, if you go back and look at before the 60s, you go to a baseball game, all the men are wearing ties and hats, the women are wearing dresses.
I remember, you know, when I was a little kid, I lived in the suburbs and I would go by windows, and at every kitchen window, there was a mom watching you, so that no matter, nobody had to look after you, because no matter how far you got, there was a mom at her kitchen window looking after you.
So you knew that some mom was going to talk to your mom if you got in trouble.
All that changed in the 60s, and it was a complete upheaval, a complete cultural upheaval.
At the same time, it was a political loss because it got Richard Nixon elected, essentially.
And so the left actually lost politically, but it won the cultural war.
Now, including me, none of us wear ties if we don't have to.
We come to work looking sloppy.
You know, we all curse.
Ladies curse.
That never used to happen.
People are divorced en masse.
I knew one couple that got divorced when I was a kid in my late teens.
My kids, of course, grew up 50% Of the people were divorced in their neighborhood.
So there was a tremendous, tremendous change.
And the thing you have to know about the 60s is that smart, educated, sophisticated people thought the millennium had come.
When they said this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, people actually believed that.
They thought that the world was now going to be a better place, as if it has ever been a better place.
The only thing that makes the world a better place is medicine and is medicine and technology and good religion.
Those are the three things that make the world a better place.
Not bad religion, just good religion does that.
In that moment, in that moment, though, people thought that the world was going to change, that human nature was going to change.
We were not, you remember, you know, it was Hare that was, this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, mystic revelations, and suddenly we were all going to be sexually free and the sexual freedom was not going to be a problem, and the people who thought it was going to be a problem were pinch, stupid people.
William Wordsworth was one of the greatest English poets who ever lived.
And he was alive and a young man during the French Revolution.
And he traveled to France and actually had an affair and an illegitimate child in France and visited what was happening there.
And he was a fierce radical in favor of liberty.
And he wrote in his prelude, which is the story of his transformation throughout his life, he wrote is an autobiographical poem about what happened to him before, during, and after the French Revolution.
And he wrote this famous line: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
Oh, times in which the meager, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute took at once the attraction of a country in romance, when reason seemed the most to assert her rights, when most intent on making of herself a prime enchantress to assist the work which was then going forward in her name.
So the world was going to be run by reason, religion was going to be gone, you know, everything, kings would be gone, everything would be liberty, everything was going to be great.
They thought it was the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
And of course, we know that what followed was not just the terror, because the terror followed, where they started beheading everyone.
Here's what he wrote about the terror: domestic carnage now filled the whole year with feast days.
Old men from the chimney nook, the maiden from the bosom of her love, the mother from the cradle of her babe, the warrior from the field, all perished.
All, friends, enemies of all parties, ages, ranks, head after head, and never heads enough for those that bade them fall.
So that was the beheading, mass murder in the name of liberty, in the name of reason.
It turned out, you know, somebody once said that the sleep of reason produces nightmares.
I think it was Goya who said the sleep of reason produces nightmares.
But it turns out that the rule of reason also produces nightmares because the rule of human beings produces nightmares.
After that, there was a world war.
There was, for the Europeans, a world war.
Napoleon then tried to conquer the world, and there were people who thought this is wonderful.
You know, Beethoven was writing symphonies about it because they thought, oh, here is great Napoleon bringing freedom, bringing the French idea of liberty to the rest of the country.
But Wordsworth understood that this was a terrible disaster, that the people who had touted the sons of liberty had become the fathers of tyranny, essentially.
And that is what had happened.
Everything had been turned around.
And I think we see this now, today, when we see the place where the free speech movement was born has now become the place where you can't have free speech.
It's now become the place.
And, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos may be a provocateur, but Ben Shapiro isn't a provocateur, and he takes this stuff all the time.
I mean, he's being chased out of colleges all the time, banned, security showing up on the borders of the college to keep Ben out from speaking.
All the people who were the sons of liberty have now become the fathers of tyranny.
And what Wordsworth said, because of course now Wordsworth was attacked as an apostate.
He had left liberty behind.
And what he said in one of his letters, he wrote, I should think that I had lived to little purpose if my notions on the subject of government had undergone no modification.
My youth must in that case have been without enthusiasm and my manhood endued with small capability of profiting by reflection.
If I were addressing those who have dealt so liberally with the words renegade, apostate, etc., all these people who are calling him names, he said, I should retort the charge back upon them and say, You have been deluded by places and persons while I have stuck to principles.
In The Midst Of Churn00:00:59
And that is what we're trying to do here in the midst of this incredible ferment that is going on over Donald Trump and in the midst of Donald Trump saying things that sometimes cannot be defended, whether we want, even if we want to defend them, we are trying to not keep loyal to places and persons because Donald Trump doesn't matter.
What matters is the freedom of this country.
And even this place, though we love our country as we love our mother, we also love what the country is supposed to stand for.
And that's what we're trying to stand for, our principles.
And so the Romantics had the same kinds of problems that we have today.
And what I want to look at a little bit as this week goes on is how they tried to solve some of them and what those problems were, because I think we're facing the exact same problems now.
We will do some more of that tomorrow, but we now have to go.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin show.
Hang on, because this is an island, a little raft of sanity floating in the sea of madness.
And the sea will continue to churn and we will float on.