Andrew Clavin dismantles media hysteria over the fabricated "Baraknikov Obomsky" Russian mole scandal, exposing its partisan framing while contrasting it with ignored Memorial Day imagery. Guest Benjamin Weingarten argues the press ignores Venezuela’s socialist collapse—hyperinflation, food shortages—and Turkey’s Sharia push, prioritizing domestic political narratives over global democratic threats. They blame progressive ideology’s persistence despite capitalism’s success, urging conservatives to reclaim messaging by highlighting freedom’s tangible benefits—like Uber’s innovation—over socialism’s regressive outcomes, framing fascism as less oppressive than Marxist guilt-tripping. [Automatically generated summary]
Our anonymous sources, who are even more anonymous than other people's anonymous sources, have given the Daily Wire a bombshell revelation about Russia.
You can tell it's a bombshell because it has the word bombshell written in front of it in all capital letters.
For those of you who aren't professional journalists like myself, a bombshell is a technical journalism term, meaning an unfounded rumor that would have no impact on your life even if it were true, which it probably isn't.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, a bombshell about Russia from incredibly anonymous sources in a story that could be ripped from the pages of the television show The Americans if television shows had pages and we ripped them.
It now seems clear that Vladimir Putin and the Russians had an agent planted at the very highest levels of American government.
This agent, or mole as they're called in technical tradecraft lingo from John LeCorre novels, is referred to in secret documents only by his Russian name of Baraknikov Obomsky, thus making it virtually impossible to hunt down this malicious sleeper agent who so enabled Putin while undermining U.S. defenses.
According to these top secret documents, which we know are real because our anonymous sources read them to us over the phone, the mole Obamsky was able to manipulate American policy in the following ways.
He conspired with Putin puppet Dmitry Medvedev to weaken American defenses in Europe while simultaneously defunding our military.
He twisted American foreign policy to ensure the Iranians would get the nuclear program Russia has been trying to give them for over 20 years.
He convinced Western leaders to do virtually nothing while a weakened Russia grew stronger by gaining influence in the Middle East, annexing Crimea, and invading the Ukraine.
And he had intelligence services illegally spy on Americans, then spread and leak classified information in an attempt to undermine the legal results of an American presidential election.
Working with a fellow Russian sleeper agent referred to only as Ivan Karinitsky, the nefarious plant Obomsky established various back channels with the Russians in which the mysterious Karinitsky floated secret offers to suspend American sanctions.
According to our insanely anonymous sources, the infiltration of our government by these Russian spies was so complete that they were able to dispatch a madahari-like female agent referred to in the documents only as Hillary Clintonaya to legitimize Putin's destruction of Russian freedoms by offering the Russians a gigantic red reset button right under the noses of the unsuspecting American people.
Whether we can manage to track down this Russian sleeper cell, which did so much damage to American foreign policy while empowering Russia's tyrannical leadership, will depend on whether America's free press can use its investigative tools to expose the nefarious evildoers.
In other words, they're all going to get away scot-free while we listen to one hysterical anti-Trump story after another.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I for hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-donkey.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
All right, we're back after the long, claveless weekend.
It was particularly long for Tiger Woods.
I saw he was arrested on a DUI.
I saw somebody on Twitter said he should have used the driver.
Stamps. Com Solution00:02:44
So that means tomorrow is the mailbag.
It's a short warning, so you've got to get your questions in.
But look at it this way.
It means you have probably more, a better chance of getting your question on, which means your miserable life will be turned around because all the answers are guaranteed correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Today we have Benjamin Weingarten with us.
He is the founder and CEO of Change Up Media, which is a media consulting firm that helps people spread the word about freedom.
And he wrote a piece in City Journal called Where Democracy Really Dies in Darkness, playing off the Washington Post's pompous and ponderous and all, did I say pompous already?
Also pompous.
New slogan, democracy dies in darkness, which the Washington Post then tries to provide.
So a lot of you, you know, one of the things about the mailbag is we ask serious questions like, why are we here?
And I know the reason why I'm here is because I'm not at the post office waiting online.
And this is the way I run my entire life, my entire life is organized around not being online.
And this is just something I have always hated.
And, you know, people keep writing in.
I say online, and Californians say inline.
Is that the difference?
Yeah, see, for me, inline is skates.
And if you're skating online, then you're inline online.
But this is why you need stamps.com because as good a job as the post office does, you got to go there when it's open, you got to stand online, you got to ask questions, you know, wait for the other guy to ask questions.
You do not have to do that with stamps.com.
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You click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin.
If you can't spell it, join the crowd.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Go to stamps.com, hit the microphone, and enter K-L-A-V-A-N Clavinstamps.com.
You never have to go to the post office again.
So I woke up this morning after three days of, you know, I was paying attention.
No News Is Fake News00:15:20
I was keeping up with the news, but I woke up this morning.
I look at it, there's no news anymore.
It's just like, you know, they talk about fake news.
It's like, it's all ridiculous.
They're doing this Jared Kushner thing.
This Jared Kushner, Jared Kushner, this is the headline in the New York Times today, the top story in the New York Times.
First, let me pause before I go on to this and say: yesterday was Memorial Day when we honor our troops, especially those who have fallen fighting for our freedom.
Normally, on every newspaper in the country, there is a picture from Memorial Day.
Did you guys get the picture I sent you of the president?
Yeah.
Put up this picture of the president.
And if you're not watching, there's the president hugging a little boy who lost his father, a Marine.
It chokes you up just to see it.
The kid is dressed up in his little boy's Marine costume to honor his father.
And there's the President of the United States giving him a hug.
Nobody ran this picture.
If that were Barack Obama, it would have been broadcast like the head of Trump in Saudi Arabia.
It would have been like everywhere.
And shame on them.
I mean, shame on them for they're just like, they're just so angry that they lost this election.
They're so angry that their story did not work out the way it's supposed to work out that they're just going to tell this little kid basically, he doesn't matter, your father doesn't matter.
Screw you guys.
If it's Donald Trump, it ain't there.
Let's listen just for a minute to Trump's speech at Arlington.
To every Goldstar family, God is with you.
And your loved ones are with him.
They died in war so that we could live in peace.
I believe that God has a special place in heaven for those who lay down their lives so that others may live free from fear and this horrible oppression.
Now, let us pledge to make the most of that freedom that they so gallantly and brilliantly fought for and they died to protect.
So they can't play this.
They can't show the picture.
Just a little illustration to remind us was Memorial Day, what it means.
They didn't cover it.
Vox.com was attacking the Marines and shame on them.
I mean, this is insane.
You know, we do what we do because they do what they do, and some of them lose their lives doing it.
And it doesn't cost you anything.
You know, Dylan, what's his name?
Dylan Byers from CNN kind of stumbled onto the truth.
I mean, you can tell by the way he's talking about it.
He was talking about the Montana congressman who body slammed a reporter from The Guardian.
And this is, you know, these things, only violence and unfriendliness in America only become issues when they happen to the left.
It only becomes an issue when incivility, suddenly it's incivility.
I mean, I always say this, that incivility, they called us, they called men pigs, they called cops pigs, they called us racist, they called us everything.
And then Rush Limbaugh came along and started coming up with names for them, like feminazis.
And suddenly Bill Clinton was going, where's the civility?
Where is the civility?
Well, suddenly it's where, you know, did they ask, did Don Lemon, who wouldn't even let a guy say that Donald Trump had nothing to do with this, which he didn't, did he ever blame Barack Obama for the Black Lives Matter murders of police officers?
Did he ever blame Black Lives Matter for the rhetoric that caused that?
Or college students who have been listening, college students have been listening to conservative professors say that, you know, speech is violence, and now they feel fine about rioting when a conservative comes to speak.
But here is Dylan Byers of CNN, he's talking about this incident in Montana, and they're trying to blame it on Trump.
But he stumbles on the truth that they only tell one side of the story.
Two things have happened.
One, over the course of several decades, the conservatives have done a masterful job at capitalizing the waning trust in media among conservatives and using it to their advantage.
But a second thing has happened too, which is that on occasion, more than the media would probably like to admit, we have not told the story of conservative Americans, disenfranchised Americans, who believe that they are losing their country.
The story we have largely been telling is a story that is more or less in step with the arc of history as defined by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
That doesn't mean we'd favor them to win.
It just means that that sort of vision of a progressive future, a global future, and that is not one that resonates with so many conservative American voters.
And so there is this chasm, and no one exploited it as well as Donald Trump did.
And no one made it as violent and aggressive and sinister as Donald Trump did.
And that laid the foundation for the sorts of incidents that happened last night.
It was violent and aggressive.
It doesn't occur to him that everything they've done, all the violence of the left, you know, that just goes by the board.
One guy loses it in Montana, and I don't support that.
I think it's wrong to do.
But one guy loses.
And suddenly, this is an issue in American life because he's still stuck in that narrative.
And when he says we don't support them, he's just lying.
Or he's self-deceiving or something.
So today the New York Times, the lead story is Jared Kushner, he's got, had a meeting with a Russian banker who knew Putin and somebody, possibly the banker, said we should set up a back channel where you can talk to Putin.
Let Kim Strassel, she did this so well, let her put this in context, how nothing a story this is.
And it's just the long knives are now out for Jared Kushner.
I think we are having a discussion that is absolutely divorced from reality this week.
It is astonishing to me.
Let me set the scene for you.
It's 2008.
We're having an election and Kennedy, he's not even president-elect, sends William Miller over to Iran to establish a back channel and let the Iranians know that should he win the election, they will have friendlier terms.
Okay, so this is a private citizen going to foreign soil, obviously in order to evade U.S. intelligence monitoring and establishing a back channel with a sworn enemy of the United States who was actively disrupting our efforts in the military in the Middle East.
So is that bad judgment?
Is that a bad thing that happened?
Back channels are completely normal.
They happen all the time.
Reagan did them.
Obama did them.
Everyone did.
So I'm not quite sure why supposedly having, at least the president's now elected, setting up a back channel with the Russians is somehow out of bounds.
And here's the difference, okay?
Because the whole thing is now the left has managed to make Russia into a scare word, just like McCarthy goes, Russia, it's Russia, it's Russia.
There's a lot.
Vladimir Putin is a gangster, and the Russian government is a gangster occracy.
There's no question about that.
But unlike Iran, we actually have common goals with Russia.
You know, we both, we have a lot of nuclear weapons, and we don't want to see nuclear weapons proliferate.
So that's a big one.
Muslims, they have huge problems with Muslim terrorism from Chechnya.
We have those problems too.
They have them even more than we do.
China, of course, is a mutual interest.
China is expanding.
How are we going to deal with that?
These are things that we have to talk to the Russians about, even though it's Vladimir Putin.
And it's the reason why Putin, because Americans tend to be a little bit wide-eyed and innocent still when it comes to foreign policy, it's the reason why Putin was allowed to consolidate his tyranny in Russia after that little brief glimmer of freedom that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
For a moment, you had Boris Yeltsin, he had some free press.
You know, Putin, the former KGB guy, came back and established his gangsterocracy while George W. Bush, for one, looked, remember, he looked in his eyes and I saw his soul and he's a man I can deal with.
Then Barack Obama with his reset button and they just keep getting manhandled by this guy.
Trump so far has not been.
And we're going to talk about that in a minute.
I'm not going to turn off Facebook and YouTube because I want you to be able to see Benjamin Weingarten talk about where democracy really dies in darkness.
But that's no reason not to subscribe because if you subscribe to thedailywire.com, not only can you be in the mailbag and have all your problems solved, but more importantly, you can also get a free copy of Say It So if you subscribe for a year.
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So there was a wonderful, wonderful interview with Defense Secretary James Mad Dog Mattis.
This guy, what's his name?
Dickerson?
Is that the old Democrat hack?
And he was asked, it was really, if you want to know what the news is, this interview probably was more news than anything else.
And he was asked about Russia.
You know, what is Russia after?
This is cut number three.
What do the Russians want?
Beats me.
Right now, Russia's future should be wedded to Europe.
Why they see NATO as a threat is beyond me.
Clearly, NATO is not a threat, but right now Russia is choosing to be a strategic competitor for any number of reasons.
But the bottom line is NATO is not a threat, and they know it.
They have no doubt about it.
You've said that Russia is trying to break apart NATO.
Is there, is the United States going to take any action to deal with Russia as a threat to NATO, either in helping in the Balkans or in any other way?
Right now, we are dealing with Russia attempting to deal with Russia under President Trump's direction in a diplomatic manner.
At the same time, while willing to engage diplomatically, we are going to have to confront Russia when it comes to areas where they attack us, whether it be with cyber or they try to change borders using armed force.
And that's admittedly a strategically uncomfortable position.
Okay, so what he's talking about is, again, if Russia were run by a sane, decent, normal kind of Western leader type, we'd have plenty of mutual interests.
But because Putin knows in order to keep his tyrannical power in force, he's got to demonize America.
This is the way he, this is internal politics, this is internal Russian politics.
He's got to demonize America.
He's got to demonize gay people.
That's a big thing because there's this big kind of, what would you call it, a millenarian apocalyptic Christianity in Russia.
So, you know, the gays have to be demonized, and he's doing that.
He has to have expansionist goals, just like, you know, Hitler, because once you start to, you know, once you're oppressing your own people, they're like, what are we getting?
Well, we're becoming a world power again.
So we're going to take over Crimea.
We're going to go into the Ukraine.
These are all challenges that Trump is going to have to face.
And so far, what has he done?
You know, Trump has been pretty strong.
He is, you know, he wants to negotiate.
That's the right thing to do.
But, you know, Putin is not loving Trump.
He's not colluding with Trump.
Obama stood there with his thumb in his nose, you know, doing absolutely nothing while this went on.
And by the way, also trying to establish back channels because John Kerry was good friends with Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, who everybody was so shocked that Trump was talking.
That's what all this Russian stuff in the news is not news.
And you keep hearing it, like I said, when they appointed the special counsel, Robert Mueller, suddenly we're going to hear the burgeoning Russian scandal, the burgeoning.
There is no burgeoning scandal.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Stuff may come up that I don't know about that we haven't seen yet.
But so far, this is absolute nonsense.
And they may find a guy here or a guy there who talked to Trump.
But where's the crime?
There is no crime.
If it was not a crime for Obama to open a back channel with Iran before he was even elected, it's certainly no crime for the people in the Trump administration to be talking to the Russians and talking about the election and talking about all kinds of things.
So I just want to play Mathis on two more things, and then we'll get to Ben Weigarton.
First, he's talking about the change strategy, Trump's change strategy on ISIS.
And it's really an interesting change.
Listen to this.
Our strategy right now is to accelerate the campaign against ISIS.
It is a threat to all civilized nations.
And the bottom line is we are going to move in an accelerated and reinforced manner, throw them on their back foot.
We have already shifted from attrition tactics where we shove them from one position to another in Iraq and Syria to annihilation tactics where we surround them.
Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa.
We're not going to allow them to do so.
We're going to stop them there and take apart the Caliphate.
So he's talking about keeping Trump's promise to wipe these guys off the face of the earth.
He talked about humiliating them.
He talked about making sure that people understand that these are not religious people, that this is not going to be the face of Islam in the future, that this is their caliphate was a dream, it was a mistake, it was an illusion.
He's talking victory.
He's talking about victory.
And Dickerson goes on to say, Well, what about civilians dying?
Are we going to get used to that?
And Mathis' response is: We're the good guys.
We're not the perfect guys.
And sometimes civilians die, but a lot of times the civilians die because the bad guys put them in the way of our guns.
But of course, the line of the year, it was certainly the line, the big line of the year, was this one.
Dickerson asked him what keeps him up at night.
What keeps you awake at night?
Nothing.
I keep other people awake at night.
All right, mad dog.
But the interesting thing to me about this is he gave a different answer to Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker.
Dexter Filkins is a terrific reporter, wrote a great book about his embed in the Iraq War.
He was in some of the worst moments of the Iraq War.
And the book was called The Forever War, which it turned out not to be, but he was wrong about it.
But he's a terrific writer, and he was interviewing Mathis in The New Yorker.
And this is just a quick excerpt of that.
He says, When I asked what worried him most in his new position of defense secretary, I expected him to say ISIS or Russia or the defense budget.
Instead, he said, the lack of political unity in America, the lack of a fundamental friendliness.
It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.
I come out of the tight-knit Marine Corps, but I've lived on college campuses for three and a half years, he went on.
Go back to Ben Frank.
He talks about this for a while, and then he says, I think that when you look at veterans coming out of the wars, they're more and more just slapped in the face by this isolation, and they're used to something better.
They think it's PTSD, which it can be, but it's really about alienation.
If you lose any sense of being part of something bigger, then why should you care about your fellow man?
What he's saying, we talked about this last week too, about the sense of meaning that you have in war, the sense of camaraderie, the sense of being a part of something that's important with other people.
If We Could Rid Ourselves Of...00:15:01
And that, he says, is disappearing from America.
And listen, you know, I'm willing to say that maybe there are some voices on the right that are involved in this alienation.
I know there are some angry voices on the right.
But the left has basically, because the left's programs have failed everywhere, because socialism fails everywhere, because all their equality makes life worse, because all their programs make people dependent, because all their cities are where the worst problems for black Americans are in Democrat cities.
Because of this, they have had to go to work destroying, shifting the blame onto basic norms and values of decency and Americanism.
So it's basically their narrative now is if we could just get rid of whites, if we could just get rid of men, if we could just get rid of objective truth, if we could just get rid of reason, if we could just get rid of God, then socialism would work.
Then it would all work.
And a lot of this division comes for that.
And that's the story.
That's the story that Dylan Byers of CNN has been telling all this time.
And that is an incredibly, incredibly divisive story.
And we'll talk about that some more.
But right now, I'd like to bring Benjamin Weingarten on.
He is the founder and CEO of Change Up Media, which is a media consulting and production firm dedicated to advancing the principles of individual liberty and limited government.
He writes everywhere, Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Conservative Review, The Federalists, The Hill, National Review.
You can find him at BH Weingarten on Twitter, B-H-W-E-I-N-G-A-R-T-E-N.
Have we got him?
Benjamin, how you doing?
How you doing, Andrew?
It's a pleasure to be with you.
It's nice to meet you finally.
I read your stuff in City Journal, and I thought this article was just terrific.
It's called Where Democracy Really Dies in Darkness.
And you're basically talking about the fact that while the Washington Post has this pompous and portentous new saying on their paper, they're actually not paying attention to the fact that there are places where democracy is really dying.
Isn't that so?
It is amazing.
You know, we see that the left is so concerned about this creeping fascism in America.
Meanwhile, for the last eight years, we actually had a creeping regressive philosophy that animated the entire Obama administration and our government.
But meanwhile, actually around the world, democracy really is dying in darkness.
And the people who are not shining a light on it are the very people who are focused on this phantom fascism creeping into America.
And so I bring up three recent examples of this that should chill everyone who watches your show and every other show out there, in particular in Turkey, Venezuela, and Hong Kong.
And here we see in these instances two different types of democracy really dying in darkness.
There's the darkness of Islamist Sharia supremacist fascism, and then you have the leftist variety.
And this is happening in real time.
We're talking about hundreds of millions of people around the world falling under the iron fist of tyranny.
And our press is out to lunch focusing on the latest tweet and, you know, intrigue over Andrew Jackson being in the White House and the like.
Well, let me ask you this.
It just seemed not that long ago, I'm old enough to remember when it seemed that democracy had won the argument.
It seemed like democracy and capitalism were basically, you remember the end of history and the last man and it was all over.
We all knew what worked and what didn't work.
What went wrong?
How did these people get so, you know, how did they get so suckered?
Yeah, well, even though I think a lot of conservatives were enamored over the fact that the Soviet Union had fell, even though let's not forget that it's not as if then the Soviet leaders were then rounded up and put in prison or went on trial for their crimes.
I mean, the system kind of morphed.
And from the Soviet perspective at that time, it kind of worked out pretty well.
I mean, they opened up their markets to the West.
They were able to get the West technology, intellectual capital, all the benefits of it.
But the fact of the matter is that the ideas never died.
While capitalism triumphed in the sense of, look, you had markets that liberated around the world and people saw the benefits of free trade and accepted those as fact and as positives, at the same time, the progressivism that seeped into the West never stopped its march through our institutions.
And so while in practice, our principle is, you know, the ones that we hold deeply, conservatism, limited government, individual liberty, free speech, and all of these rights that we care about, while we hold them as fact and self-evident and critical, on the other hand, progressivism continued on its march.
And add to that the fact that you had the ascendance of Islamic supremacist ideology at the very same time that you had the kind of collapse of Soviet communism, history did not end.
In fact, the march continued, and it's up to us to actually defend it because liberty has been the exception to the rule.
It has not been the rule throughout history.
Most of history has been about who is the strongest person, who has their hand on the trigger.
On the other hand, it has not been liberal freedom, democracy, whatever you want to call it, that has been the norm.
And we should also say that we have to define our terms here because when we talk about democracy dying in darkness, well, the Obama administration would say, look, we supported democratic uprisings in the Arab Spring.
But democracy does not equal freedom.
50% plus one at the ballot box is not liberty.
And we don't have Tocquevillian democracies playing themselves out throughout the Middle East.
Actually, we have an Arab Spring turned to an Arab winter.
It really is true.
And in the case of the Russians, one of Vladimir Putin's sad songs that he sings is that the Americans humiliated Russia after the end of the Cold War.
But the exact opposite is true.
We never called them to account.
We never called them to account for their crimes.
We never prosecuted any of the people who had done terrible, terrible things to their own people.
And we basically just said, you know, join the fun of freedom.
And Putin used that friendliness to take over the machinery over there, really, and establish his gangsterocracy.
But why do you think, why is the press not covering this story?
They're covering what seems to me.
Well, let me start with this.
Do you think that Donald Trump poses a danger to the norms of our Republican democracy?
I don't think he poses a danger to the norms of our democracy.
If you listen to what the America First Agenda was, it's actually about reanimating the principles that were inherent to our democracy.
And oh, by the way, we have three branches of government where if someone does go off the rails and doesn't stick within the confines of our constitutional order, we have checks and balances that hold them in effect.
All of a sudden, the left loves checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism.
So federalism was not okay for the, you know, in the Confederate era, but now it's okay for the left, apparently.
And of course, they like to tarnish the notion of federalism where states are laboratories of experiment by saying that federalism is actually about preserving, you know, again, the Confederacy.
But actually, when the federal government does things the left doesn't like, all of a sudden they think that states should have the freedom to innovate and actually represent their populations.
Because guess what?
We really have 50 countries within one big country, in effect.
I mean, our states are different in terms of their character, their resources, the people, the history, et cetera.
In any event, though, no, I do not believe he poses a threat.
And again, we have an amazing system that was put forth by the founders to keep in check anyone that would threaten that order.
I think the greater problem is when you have three branches of government that are out to lunch or that get together and collude to ensure that those checks and balances and that separation of powers do not exist.
And I would argue that we had that under the Obama presidency.
And under this president, you see the courts completely overstepping their bounds, I would say.
They're setting foreign policy.
Executive orders.
Yeah, and foreign policy and the like.
So why is the press not covering?
I mean, we have, this is in our own hemisphere.
We have a country going up in flames.
You know, the pictures are just insane.
And we have this kind of idea that somehow the problems in the Muslim world are our fault.
What is it the press is not thinking?
Why won't they cover these stories?
Well, the Occam's razor answer, and I think that's always the first place that you should look here, is the fact that it's not a story that casts the left in a positive light.
Think about it.
When it comes to Venezuela, Venezuela is Bernie Sanders' democratic socialism on steroids.
And what has been the results of that?
Well, you had a thriving economic superpower endowed with tremendous natural resources, including oil, in our hemisphere.
And under first Hugo Chavez and now under Maduro's regime, you've seen the collapse within 15 to 20 years of a great liberal Western democratic nation.
What has been the result of socialist policies where you've seen recently nationalized factories controlled by U.S. companies?
Well, you've seen rampant hyperinflation.
You've seen the, you know, essentially minimal food stock for the public beyond the military.
You've seen actually in a nation where guns were outlawed, now the regime is actually arming its citizens to point the guns at their fellow citizens on behalf of the regime.
I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
But this is what happens when you take socialism to its logical conclusion.
And ultimately, socialism or progressivism, progressivism should be rebranded.
If conservatives had any idea about marketing and they could learn something from the president on this, progressivism is regressive.
Progressivism is not let's move forward to the 21st, 22nd, 23rd utopic centuries.
It's actually let's go back to the time of kings, where a king can essentially decree that all of your freedom is gone the next day.
If we actually got to a place like that, I'd have a lot more confidence in the direction of the country.
Unfortunately, because we don't see what's happening in a place like Venezuela, because it's not in the press's interest to print a story showing the logical conclusions of their ideology, what we get instead is what we have today.
So this is the last question I want to ask you.
You are the founder and CEO of Change Up Media.
I'm sure I noticed that you were a Publius Fellow at Claremont Institute, which is a real honor.
I suspect you were probably there with my friend Owen Brennan from Madison McQueen, who has a similar company.
You're obviously trying to teach people how to sell the principles of individual liberty and limited government and all this.
How do we win this argument?
Is that too broad a question?
How do we begin to win this argument?
First of all, we should start by asking the right questions like, have we won to this date?
Okay, if not, what did the other side do to, in my view and in the view of the Claremont Institute?
And I think self-evidently, if you go around the streets of the Upper West Side around here or where you are out in California, you see that the progressive ideas have won.
They have triumphed in the institutions.
How was it that these progressives who were on the fringe of society, many of them these Germanic philosophers, professors who came over 100 years ago and were this cohort of alienated, marginalized folks, intellectuals, how did they triumph?
How did they make these ideas sexy enough to win in the war of ideas?
And what I would say is that we win two ways.
One, we have the truth on our side.
And while the other side may argue that there is no such thing as objective truth, fact and fiction and the like, they certainly believe that their truth is the truth.
So we can point out their hypocrisies.
I don't know that pointing out hypocrisies, though, wins.
I think ultimately what has to win is the idea of freedom and liberty.
That is something that everyone values in their everyday life, whether they recognize it or not.
And I would say they oftentimes do not recognize the fact that the fact that something like an Uber or Airbnb or Google or any company that we like that we use on a daily basis only springs up when you have the conditions for freedom.
And those conditions are deeply rooted in our country and have been over the last over 200 plus years.
And that didn't just arise out of nowhere.
That came out of hundreds of years of experimentation, often leading to poverty and misery that you see in places like Venezuela.
And soon, I fear, Turkey.
And unfortunately, Hong Kong, as I point out, Hong Kong will be a great example of a place that was liberal, free, and Western, and now it turns to turn it.
It's tragic.
You're absolutely right.
And it's funny that the left hagiographizes guys like Steve Jobs, who are absolute products of capitalism and benefactors of, you know, and benefited themselves from capitalism, but they don't get the greater point.
Benjamin Weingarten, thank you very much.
The founder and CEO of Change Up Media, your article in City Journal was excellent of where democracy really dies in darkness.
You can be found on Twitter at BHWingarten.
Anywhere else you'd like people to look for you or anything else I should say?
Also, BenWingarten.com.
You can find my website there and a newsletter and keep up to date with all my latest writings.
And thank you so much for having me, Ansudu.
I really appreciated it.
It's a pleasure.
We'll talk again.
Thanks very much.
And that brings me to stuff I like.
Let me remind you, by the way, that tomorrow is mailbag day, so we have a short lead to get to the mailbag.
So get those questions in now, and remember you'll have a better chance of getting your question answered because probably there'll be some fewer questions, and then your life doesn't have to be like this.
It can be different, maybe worse.
But hopefully better.
You know, the reason we talk about the arts and the culture a lot, and one of the problems with talking about the culture in a political atmosphere is people start to think that what the culture is about is about propaganda.
And propaganda in the arts is always boring.
It's always counterproductive.
It's just really bad storytelling, bad art.
But then why do the arts help us?
Why are the arts important to conservatives?
And the reason has to do with what the arts do.
It has to do with human nature.
The arts are the way, it's just in the same way that numbers are the way we preserve the scientific information, right?
If we couldn't write down numbers, imagine if you couldn't write down numbers.
We'd be gorillas, right?
We'd be passing on information to our kids and they would remember what they remember.
It's because we can write stuff down that we can grow.
We can build on the stuff that people found.
We don't have to reinvent Newton's theories.
You know, in each generation, he wrote them down.
And the arts write down something important, whether it's painting or music or literature.
Writing Down Human Experience00:03:03
They write down the internal experience of being a human being.
And they translate that.
There's nothing on earth that can put that into words directly.
You cannot put into words directly.
If you'll notice, even an athlete who are sometimes not the most articulate people in the world, you'll say, how did it feel to score that touchdown or hit that home run?
And they'll say, oh man, it was like Christmas morning.
It was like Christmas.
They immediately go to a metaphor, which is the beginning of the arts.
It's a way of saying how something felt by comparing it to something else.
What was that like?
Well, it was like a ghost came back and asked me to avenge my father and I couldn't make up my mind what the right thing to do was.
That's what Hamlet translates it.
And it translates it in terms of the emotion, the internal experience of a great artist to you, the person receiving the arts.
Why does that matter for freedom?
Because human nature is the basis on which you construct freedom.
The reason, you know, if you watch, if you look at old fascist governments that collapse, it is easier for a fascist government to become a free government, like say in Spain, than it is for a communist government, like in the Soviet Union, to become a free government.
And the reason is that socialism perverts human nature and fascism doesn't.
Fascism is very natural to people.
You know, you've got a strong man, you follow, it's like going, like, you know, you go back to the strong man, he leads, all he wants is power.
Everybody understands that, but it doesn't say to you what socialism says to you, which is that you are not a worthy recipient of freedom.
That is what the socialists are selling all the time.
You're a white male, you're the dominant person.
You are not allowed to be free.
You should not be free.
You owe reparations.
You should feel guilty.
All this stuff.
If you learn about human nature, which you can really only do, I mean, obviously you do it by living, but you can do it so much better with the arts.
They expand your life.
You begin to see the limits of human nature and where it does have to be restrained because it has to be restrained.
You can't let people be absolutely free.
They'll just start killing each other and ultimately the strong man will emerge.
That's why fascism is so natural.
So you've got to put limits on freedom.
But what are the limits?
So there are two ways of thinking about human nature.
One is that human nature doesn't exist.
It's whatever, that's the Marxist way.
Marx said this.
He said, they're just a bunch of relationships.
And this is what they sell you in your leftist college courses.
That raises a question.
It raises the question, if human nature can be molded into anything you want, who's doing the molding?
Whose ideas molded, right?
But if human nature is set within limits, then the question is, who serves it?
What serves it?
What serves human nature?
If human nature wants this, this, and this, how do I best serve human nature so the most people are served, like McDonald's, the most people are served, and that human nature is allowed to thrive.
And that's what the arts are teaching you.
They're teaching you about who you are, who people are, what we have to limit, and what we don't have to limit, how free can we get, how free can we make human beings, and how limited government, because that's the other side.
Who Serves Human Nature?00:01:41
So stuff I like this week.
It's a short week.
I'm just going to do a couple of narrative poems because I really like narrative poems and nobody reads them anymore.
And so I just thought I would just recommend a couple because they're usually pretty short.
And this is one of the most readable.
Sir Gowan and the Green Knight.
Has anybody ever read Sir Gowan and the Green Knight?
You have?
Who did?
Who said yes?
Hey, there you go.
All right.
Hey.
It's a 14th century poem.
You can get it translated by Tolkien.
He translated it.
The guy who wrote The Lord of the Rings translated it.
It's an Arthurian legend.
It's Camelot.
It's New Year's Day, which is part of the Christmas celebration.
King Arthur's court is there.
And a giant comes in and makes a deal.
And the bet that he makes is, any knight who is brave enough can take my axe or take a sword and hit me in the neck with it as hard as you can.
And in a year and a day, if you don't kill me, I get to do the same thing to you.
And that's the bet they make.
And Sir Gowan, who is related to King Arthur, I think he's his nephew maybe, Sir Gowan takes the bet, and it's what happens after that.
And it is, as they say online, what happens after that will astonish you.
So it's clickbait.
Anyway, it's great stuff.
It is wonderfully readable.
Find a good translation.
You don't have to read it in verse.
As I said, Tolkien did a good translation.
I liked his translation, but there are so many others.
And, you know, these days you can get it on Kindle or on your iBook for like a dollar.
So really worth it.
Sir Gowan and the Green Knight.
Tomorrow is Mailbag Day.
Start those letters coming in.
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