Andrew Clavin dissects Trump’s Paris Accord withdrawal, exposing its economic flaws and China’s exemption while mocking Al Gore’s apocalyptic overreactions—like polar bear doom and House of Cards revolution calls. The episode then pivots to political correctness, framing Trump as a disruptor who forces debates on Islam, gender ideology, and free speech, from Theresa May’s post-attack clarity to Yale students rejecting campus PC. Jeremy Christian’s violent contradictions (white nationalist yet Sanders-supporting) and Kathy Griffin’s beheaded-Trump stunt—defended as satire but met with death threats—highlight hypocrisies in violence discourse. Data reveals 21 right-wing terror attacks vs. rare left-wing cases, yet media mislabels attackers like the anti-Israel socialist Holocaust memorial shooter as "right-wing," while leftist figures normalize punching and intimidation (e.g., Katie Ture vs. Shapiro). The conclusion: Trump’s bluntness exposes how progressive performativity masks deeper cultural fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump has pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord.
The president explained that the agreement was both economically destructive to the United States and virtually useless in preventing change to the climate.
Al Gore countered those arguments by explaining, quote, this is the apocalypse and everyone will die as sure as my name is Napoleon Bonaparte.
As long as we had the Paris Climate Accord, everything was great, but now that our wonderful accord is gone, the earth is suddenly so hot I'm burning up right now and can hardly breathe and all the water in my swimming pools has evaporated and people are devouring polar bears in the streets.
We have to start a revolution right away, although I still have two more episodes of House of Cards to watch, but right after that, we'll go on a big march to protest the fact that Donald Trump has single-handedly killed everybody, booga booga, unquote.
EPA head Scott Pruitt further defended America's leaving the accord by pointing out that the accord penalized the U.S., which has been leading the world in reducing carbon emissions while requiring virtually nothing of India and China, who are among the worst polluters.
Arguing against this, former President O'Hara, O'Mara, O'Rama, it's hard to remember his name now that his legacy is just a handful of dust that drifted through the air for a brief moment of time and then wafted to earth to mingle with the other dust, making it essentially just a big pile of dust.
But anyway, President Ocrama made a statement saying, quote, the nations that remain in the Paris Agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits and jobs and industries created, like the job of flying around the world in a private jet complaining about pollution and the industry of selling people solar panels for their houses and then coming back the next day to sell them candles so they'll be able to read at night, unquote.
President Pajama went on to say, quote, in withdrawing from the Paris Accord, America has rejected the future because if there's one thing I know, it's what's going to happen in the future.
Just like climate scientists know the future, because that's what scientists do.
They know the future.
Or maybe that's what wizards do.
I always get those two confused.
Which one wears the conical hat with the stars on it?
Unquote.
After making his statement, President Bahama left the podium and broke his nose by walking face first into a marble column, which had apparently been placed there by someone who didn't realize that the future didn't have a marble column in it on the spot where Obama was going to be walking in the future.
So it was a whole future screw-up.
We'll try not to let that happen in the future.
In any case, it's easy to understand why Obama loved the Paris Accord.
America Rejects the Future00:12:16
It was exactly like the Obama administration, hysterically loved by the left while hurting America and accomplishing nothing of importance.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky-dicky.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the world is it easing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Hooray, the Clavinless weekend is over, and best-selling cultural correspondent Michael Knowles is with us today to talk about his Yale reunion and political violence in America, possibly at the same time.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe they're happening the same way.
You can't see this, but our entire office is in disarray.
I mean, everything has been empty out.
We're moving offices, and everything has been emptied out.
There are people like scrabbling for food who have been hungry all weekend.
There's people, zombies wandering the halls.
And that's because we didn't go to ziprecruiter.com.
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It's got to be better than what is happening here, obviously.
All right, I thought, now maybe I'm alone in this, but I thought it was a great clavenless weekend for Donald Trump.
I know terrible things happened in London, and I don't want to get overly triumphant.
Normally, after Trump had had a weekend like this, I would play the Trump happiness montage.
But in respect to the tragic things that happened in London, we'll just play a brief gaffify.
Despite the constant negative press, it's a little more solemn, a little more respectful.
But here's what I thought was great.
See, here's the thing about Donald Trump.
I'm putting together the Paris, pulling out of the Paris Accord, which was a useless nothing.
I mean, the whole, I love the arguments for staying in the Paris Accord.
It doesn't require you to do anything.
Well, then, what difference does it make?
I mean, so we pull out of it.
But it was, in fact, the way it was written was written like a treaty.
It had words like shall, you shall do this, and we must do this, and all this stuff.
And it would have just given the left carte blanche to sue every time somebody did something like repeal some stupid regulation that was hampering businesses and hampering jobs.
So it was a good thing to pull out.
It wasn't going to help.
We've been innovating.
Innovation and capitalism have been really helping us cut back on carbon emissions, which is fine.
But he was pulling out of the Paris Accord and his tweet storm after the horror in London, which people are picking on him about and everybody's yelling at him about.
You know, he tweeted immediately after London.
He picked on the mayor of London, who is an appeaser.
He's an appeaser, and Trump went after him.
He said, we've got to bring back the travel ban and all this stuff.
A lot of times in life, your strengths and your weaknesses are the same.
I work very hard.
That's one of my strengths.
But I also can be a workaholic.
That's one of my weaknesses.
I think this is true of virtually everybody.
You might be relaxed and it might lead you to be lazy.
It might be jovial.
It might make you sometimes uncaring.
All these things.
All your strengths are also weaknesses.
There is something uncouth and raw about Donald Trump that goes right up my spine as a couch, not raw person.
I mean, as a civilized human being, there's something about him that goes right up my spine.
But, but we have been living in a PC China shop for way, way too long, and he is breaking the china in that shop.
And that is one of his strengths.
I mean, when you pull out of this Paris Accord and you get the kind of insane reaction, this is the end of the world.
It's all over.
You know, it's a terrible, terrible thing.
I mean, he pulls out.
First of all, his speech was completely rational, completely fact-based, very calm, very easygoing, saying, this is why I'm doing it.
Well, we'll play one cut from the Trump speech pulling out.
So we're getting out, but we will start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair.
And if we can, that's great.
And if we can't, that's fine.
As president, I can put no other consideration before the well-being of American citizens.
The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers who I love and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories,
and vastly diminished economic production.
Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.
So now you have like Tom Steyer, who is this Democrat billionaire who probably wants to run for president.
And he says, this is a traitorous act of war against the American people.
So that's a reserved, you know, wise judgment.
And here, let's just listen to Al Gore for a minute.
I mean, this is the response.
This is the opposition.
One guy, Donald Trump, he's supposed to be a wild man.
He's supposed to be a crazy man.
He says, look, this isn't good economically.
It won't have a big effect environmentally.
We can do good things without it.
I have to take care of the American people.
Now, George Stephanopoulos is talking to Al Gore.
Listen to this.
So does it really make all that much difference then if the United States pulls out of the Paris Climate Accord?
Remember back, you know, the United States under George W. Bush pulled out of Kyoto, yet the innovation continued after that.
Well, we lost a lot of time when did not join the rest of the world community then.
And while it is true that we have this sustainability revolution underway, and it's very exciting, it has the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution, but the speed of the digital revolution.
But we're still not changing fast enough because it's not just the scientific community warning us now, it's Mother Nature.
Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation.
70% of Florida is in drought right now.
Missouri just declared an emergency with another one of these historic climate-related downpours.
We've had 11 once in a thousand year downpours in less than 10 years in the United States.
So we have to move faster.
It's good news that the rest of the world is.
It's good news that states and cities and businesses are.
But we need presidential leadership.
Since he's not going to lead, the American people are stepping up.
So it's the book of Revelations.
That's calm.
And all of his facts are untrue.
I mean, there have been far worse droughts.
The Dust Bowl was a worse drought.
I mean, the Dust Bowl in the 30s was insane.
It turned a huge swath of America into the Sahara.
That's when all you had the Oakes and all that stuff moving to California to get away from it.
You know, it's like, it's ridiculous.
The storms, we don't have that kind of records where you can compare storms.
But, you know, hurricane, they kept saying tornadoes were going to get worse, hurricanes were going to get worse.
That hasn't happened.
Tornadoes is a little different because there's a lot more people around and a lot better ways of communicating tornadoes.
So we see more tornadoes, but there's no real evidence that we're having more tornadoes.
It's just all nonsense.
So on one hand, I mean, this is the thing that Trump, in his willingness to take this hit, in his willingness to have the press come out and say these things about him, because of course, as you know, on the mainstream media, one after another, oh, what a mess.
The world isn't a mess.
Oh, this is so terrible.
One after another after another.
Because he doesn't care that much, and he is willing to walk into that China shop and break these things.
These guys are exposed for what they are.
If one guy is arguing this is bad economically and not that useful environmentally, and the other side is saying, oh, it's the book of Revelations.
You know, who are people going to believe ultimately?
One of the things that the polls show, you know, the polls show that a lot of people, like maybe a third of the people, think this is a serious issue, but about 2 to 4% think it is a primary issue.
So if you really believed, if you really believed this was the end of the world, it would be a lot more than 2% to 4%.
And here is the other side of this, is this world, our relationships with the world is getting in the way.
You know, when Barack Obama talks about people rejecting the future, I just love that, this idea.
They know what the future is.
The future is what is in their head.
And if you don't like that, or you disagree with it, or you think the future should go elsewhere, you're not just against them.
You don't have a different opinion.
You are rejecting the future itself.
So here's Fareed Zakaria explaining what Donald Trump, how Donald Trump has essentially sold America down the river.
This will be the day that the United States resigned as the leader of the free world.
It's nothing short of that.
The irresponsibility of this act is breathtaking because the Paris Climate Accords are actually extraordinarily flexible.
They do not dilute American sovereignty.
They allow every country to make its own plans.
That's why countries that have jealously guarded their sovereignty, like China, like India, like Russia, have all signed on.
There are 194 other countries that have signed on to this, including the countries that Donald Trump keeps saying always beat us in these agreements.
They're all in.
They're all in.
All the countries in the world are in, except there's two, I think, that didn't sign.
Why do you think that is?
It's because it doesn't mean anything.
It's because only the top guy, us, is going to get hurt.
You know, wouldn't you sign on to a deal where the top guy said, oh, I'm not going to compete as hard because we're so far ahead of you, we're going to be nice.
I mean, it's like, you know, it's like some AAA team signing on to an agreement that the Yankees are not going to bring up their cleanup hitter.
You know, it's like, of course, they're all signed on.
And we have absconded from our leadership of the free world by not obeying the free world, by not following the free world.
This was Obama's leadership from behind that you're always following.
So what I'm saying is the important thing, that the treaty itself was just going to be an annoyance.
It was just going to be an annoyance.
And by the way, by the way, since it was, in fact, the language was, in fact, the language of a treaty, and all the other countries ratified it the way treaties are ratified in their countries, why didn't we send it to the Senate, which is what you have to do to a treaty here?
Why does it just have Obama's signature on it as if it were an executive order?
And the reason is, the reason is the Democrats weren't going to vote for it.
The Republicans weren't going to vote for it, and the Democrats weren't going to vote for it because it killed jobs.
And they didn't want to go back to their districts and their states and say, oh, yeah, I killed jobs, but I saved the world from sunshine.
Okay?
Unlocking Design Skills00:03:19
So this is the thing.
We have been wrapped into this fantasy world of climate catastrophe.
And Trump, because he's a bull in a china shop, broke through it.
I'm going to pause.
You know, we're going to have Michael Knowles come on, which we always enjoy.
I don't know why.
Why do we enjoy having him?
He's a decent human being.
Sort of.
But we're going to have Knowles come on, but you cannot see it if you're just on Facebook or YouTube.
You'll have to come over to thedailywire.com.
Sorry?
Second half.
Yeah.
You'll have to come onto thedailywire.com.
And while you are on thedailywire.com, you will have to subscribe because we say so.
You must subscribe.
It's only a lousy eight bucks a month.
And if you subscribe for the year, you can get Ben Shapiro's new book, Say It So, Papa Dad Me in the 2005 White Sox Championship Season follows that amazing season when the White Sox somehow, I think it was the last time they had won the World Series, was I think 1642.
And then they came back in 2005, and the Shapiros are big fans, and they followed every game.
You can get that, and you can be in the mailbag, which is Wednesday.
You can ask questions in the mailbag, so it's well worth it.
Before we cut you off, we do want to tell you about Skillshare.
And this is, you know, here's one of the funniest things.
I only wanted to do one thing in my entire life.
All I ever wanted to do was write novels.
Never wanted to write movies, but I've written movies, never wanted to do anything else.
When I look at my resume today, and I still write novels, it's still kind of the main thing I do.
When I look at my resume today, a lot of the stuff that I put on my resume, the words, the very words, didn't exist.
Words like podcasts, words like blog.
When I was starting out, when I had ambitions and I said, this is what I'm going to do in life, many of the things that I'm doing didn't exist.
I helped invent an app that was a movie app that delivered a movie into your iPad called Haunting Melissa.
Apps didn't exist when I started out.
So things that I put on my CV that are my credits, you know, that I'm proud of just didn't exist.
And that is why things like Skillshare are so important.
Skillshare is a website you go on and it just has experts in their fields giving you little classes, little video classes about different things.
It can be stuff that will help you get a leg up at work or something that'll just be some new hobby that you want to take up.
You can make yourself better at your job.
I've been looking at some of their marketing things, some of their writing things that are really interesting.
Some of the writing things, I mean, look, at this point, I'm kind of an expert at what I do, but I can look at them and just say, do these things work?
Are these things that I have found to be true?
And yes, they are.
And it's basically this online learning community with over 15,000 classes in design and business.
You can learn anything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography, unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price.
So you don't go on and start to get like five classes in and think, yeah, this is really good.
And they say, oh, yeah, but now you've got to pay for the other five classes.
You have one monthly price and you can go on all of them.
And there's stuff in design like Adobe Illustrator, logo design, typography, animation, photography, marketing, entrepreneurship, and all these other things like just watercolors, stuff that you might want to take up for fun.
For this, Skillshare is giving my listeners a month of unlimited access.
So you can just try it out, which is worthwhile.
It's absolutely free.
Go to www.skillshare.com slash Andrew and you get a free month, www.skillshare.com slash Andrew for a free month.
Campus Conversations on Extremism00:14:47
We're going to talk a little bit more about the Trumpster and then go on to talk to Knowles.
But you've got to come over to TheDailyWire.com because we're saying goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
All right, we're back.
We lost the trumpet player.
Even our trumpet player died.
Even our trumpet player died.
He was eaten by the zombies that are roaming the empty halls of the Daily Wire.
You know, here's the other thing about this terrible attack.
The way people are talking about terrorism around the world, especially in the English-speaking world, has changed because of Donald Trump.
So when you say, oh, Donald Trump went on and he said this and it was garrison and he said this and it was rude and he said some goofy thing about he's pushing his travel ban he said something about they should have gone with the original travel ban not the one that's now politically correct so he's kind of undermining his own uh state department all that stuff is true his flaws and his strengths are the same like With most of us, but he has changed the way we talk about terrorism in the world.
And why does that matter?
I mean, let's just listen to Theresa May came out and gave this statement, and she had this stuff about, you know, on cyberspace, we've got to stop giving, allowing Islamic extremism to be preached in cyberspace.
That's ridiculous.
That's not going to happen.
I mean, they always talk about how many Muslims there are, but on Facebook, there are over a billion people.
You cannot censor, you cannot censor the internet.
And if you did, just like with guns, only the bad guys will be able to be free because they'll hack through it.
But listen to the way she is now talking about Islam.
She mentions Islamic extremism, but play cut number four, one of her points of things they're going to have to do.
While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is, to be frank, far too much tolerance of extremism in our country.
So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society.
That will require some difficult and often embarrassing conversations.
But the whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism.
And we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly united kingdom.
So she's now talking about assimilation, that we have to push assimilation.
We have to bring these people into the communities.
I'm sorry, but this was not happening under Barack Obama.
And look, I don't know yet what Trump, you know, Trump is saying, oh, we have extreme vetting and all this stuff.
I don't know if Trump is going to be as good as his words, but his words have mattered.
I mean, that is the Trump effect.
They were not talking about this before.
They were not, you know, remember, Obama was like, oh, we can't possibly mention Islam and terrorism in the same sentence.
It can't happen.
Hillary Clinton, there, absolutely no connection, absolutely no connection between Islamic extremism.
The left has sold.
You know, the funny thing is, is that even people who have rejected the left have been forced by this China shop that we've been hemmed in on.
They've been forced to accept some of the ideas of the left.
So for instance, people are arguing over Bill Maher, used the N-word on TV the other day.
He didn't use it in a racist context.
It's an ugly word.
I get it.
It's got an ugly history.
Bill Maher, I don't see Bill Maher being a racist.
I mean, there are ways in which Bill Maher is a racist.
There's probably ways in which everybody is a racist.
But he wasn't being racist by using it.
He was making a joke about something.
So it's like, why do we even have to discuss that?
Why do we have to get outraged over every little thing people do?
The Nation magazine, this is one of the big left-wing magazines, they wrote an article called Ariana Grandi Understands Terrorism Better Than the Secretary of Defense.
So it's the opinion of one of the premier liberal magazines in America that a 12-year-old, whatever she is, pop singer, understands terrorism better than the Secretary of Defense.
Why?
Because the Secretary of Defense wants to annihilate the enemy, and she wants to bring us all together in peace and love.
What that really means is the Nation magazine understands terrorism as well as Ariana Grandi.
That is what that means, okay?
This world in which we are hemmed in and we cannot say, look, I don't want to pick on Muslim people.
It has nothing to do with this.
You know, this is the thing, because we have nuts on the right, too, I know, but the nuts on the right are outside of our mainstream.
And that's what we're going to talk a little bit to Michael Moles about.
The nuts on the right are outside of the mainstream.
I know we've got racists on the right and all this white supremacy stuff that kind of had a little bit of a showing during the election.
It ain't about race.
It really is not.
It ain't about make-believe genders.
It's not about, it's about the ideas.
And if we can't say to Islam, hey, you know, your idea that religion should govern the polity is a bad idea and unacceptable in the West.
Your idea that women should be second-class citizens, unacceptable in the West.
idea that children, little girls, can be married to fat old men, unacceptable in the West.
You know, there are things, you want to pray five times a day to God and call him Allah.
Nobody in America gives a rat's caboose.
Not one person cares what you call your God in America.
We may want to convince you that we have a better God.
We may want to convince you our religion is better, but no one is going to oppress you for that.
We are oppressing you for killing people.
We are angry at these ideas that are embedded in Islam.
Can you get them out?
That's the question.
And that's a question we have to debate.
And when one side, when one side is saying, hey, there's a problem in the House of Islam, when one side is saying, oh, this Paris Accord isn't any good, and the other side is saying, everybody will die if you pull out of the Paris Accord.
You're a racist if you say anything but bad about Islam.
You can't have a debate.
And if Trump shatters that China shop of silence that the left has created to protect its bad ideas, then he has done yeoman service to the state.
And I will support him in that, even though I don't have to support every word that comes out of his mouth.
Michael Molls, you are back from New Haven.
I'm back.
I've somehow arrived.
Flying in.
Barely.
I just came from LAX.
Yeah, how was it?
It was bad, huh?
Oh, it was awful.
I finally landed at midnight, and they said, okay, the good news is we're here a little bit early.
The bad news is you're going to be sitting on the tarmac for an hour.
So if I fall asleep during this segment.
Thanks for getting me in early.
That's right.
So how was the reunion?
Oh, the reunion was great.
This was my fifth reunion.
And during this weekend, we had the fifth reunion and the 50th reunions.
And so it was me and George Pataki.
We were the only Republicans on campus basically.
Just you guys.
That's right.
But now you return in triumph as the best-selling author of Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
You know, I will tell you, there was an alumni author panel at the reunion, and I think we all can agree I sold more books than any other alumnus.
Probably all together, right?
Well, probably all together.
And they didn't invite me.
What do you mean?
Can you imagine that?
You get to discuss the ideas in your entirely blank book?
You know, I am joking a little.
I mean, some of my classmates were not thrilled with my recent professional accomplishments.
But, you know, everyone pretty much lightened up and had a good time.
I went into one party, which was at one of the secret societies.
And before they let me in, they gave me a haranguing at the door.
They said, you know, you've advocated everything that I oppose and this, that, and the other thing.
And I said, well, hey, man, I'll leave.
I don't want to spoil the party.
They said, no, no, no, come on in.
We just wanted to lecture you first.
Yeah, I just wanted virtue signal.
That's right.
But the kind of interesting thing when I was on campus is not the reaction to my blank book.
It was the negative reaction among the two conservatives there, me and George, and among everyone else who's clearly on the left and on the far left, that the nonsense that has been going on on campus for the past two years and the failure of leadership from the administration who wouldn't defend free speech and who wouldn't back up their own professors and who coddled to aggressive and anti-liberal education students was a terrible thing.
So they're not buying into the PC thing.
They're not.
They seem to be just as tired of it as we all are on the right, which was really surprising to me.
And one of the evidences of it is I talked to must have been 100 people I asked this question to over the course of the night.
And I said, did you go to the president's speech, President Salave's speech, kind of explaining himself and what's been going on?
They said, absolutely not.
I'm so furious at what's happened to this campus that I want no part of it.
This is to me so interesting.
And it may be another good effect of what Trump is doing is that like, I hear these guys on the air saying, oh, we pulled out of the Paris Accord, now we're all going to die, which is like so silly.
And I hear them saying, oh, anybody who says anything about Islam, terrible.
And I wonder how many people really believe this garbage.
Like, how many people really want socialism?
How many people really think that gender is a social construct, you know?
And if it's not as many people as are being emphasized by the media, maybe there's some connection we can make to people, like, you know, where we can start talking to each other again instead of just screaming at each other on Twitter.
And there's another question: even if they think that they really want to stay in the Paris Climate Accord, how deeply do they feel that?
You know, I think a lot of people probably go to churches on Sunday and don't really feel much of a connection to their religion.
They just kind of go because their families go or their friends go.
And I think that's clearly the case with the Paris Climate Accord and the religion of the left, which is environmentalism or redistribution or what have you.
That when you scratch below the surface a little, they're not so out of their minds as we might think they are, as they appear.
That's what I mean.
I mean, everything they do is based on silencing us in order to create the idea that to have the opinions of a Ben Shapiro is an evil in and of itself.
That's right.
And once they do that, it is like a religion because it's, you know, I always hate when people say like a religion because religion can be a wonderful thing.
True religion is great.
I recommend it.
But it is this idea that like, yes, and if you disagree, we burn you at the stake, which makes it very useful to keep your mouth shut, you know?
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
So in keeping with this, we gave you this assignment to take a look.
And I want to say, so nobody blames Knowles, that I said I want you to be utterly fair about this.
Who commits political violence in America?
Because this is an argument we keep getting into.
You know, I think you assigned this to me when I was going to Yale for the weekend because you assumed I would be the subject of the discussion.
I figured you weren't coming back, so I gave you something to do, you know?
That's right.
No, obviously, political violence has been in the news recently.
There was this wacko up in Portland.
And actually, I think this guy is a good example of this.
The guy's name is Jeremy Christian.
From what we know of his Facebook page, he is a white nationalist.
He killed two people, attacked a third up in Portland.
He was screaming at a Muslim woman at the time.
That's right.
He's screaming these kind of racist tirades.
And what we know about him is we know he's a white nationalist.
We know that he's an intense anti-circumcision activist.
I don't know what that, but he writes extensively about it on Facebook.
And we know that he's a Bernie Sanders supporter.
We have a quote from him on Facebook, which is, Bernie Sanders was the president I wanted.
He voiced my heart and mind, the one who spoke about the way America should have gone.
His words, not mine, away from the military and prison industrial complexes, the Trump is who America needs now, that Bernie got ripped off.
What are we to make of this?
Is he who owns white nationalism?
Who owns racist identity politics?
Who owns Bernie and who owns Trump?
Where do these all play out on the fringes of movements or in the mainstream of movements?
I don't know.
I think it's very complicated.
And also, the man's clearly a lunatic.
He's a psycho, right?
That's right.
And speaking of lunatics who peddle in violence, Kathy Griffin is probably the biggest story.
We just have to watch this.
Kathy Griffin, after showing the beheaded head of our president and getting in trouble for it, this is how she defends herself.
I am teasing the president because this is America and you shouldn't have to die for it.
The death threats that I'm getting are constant and they are detailed and they are serious and they are specific.
And today it's me and tomorrow it could be you.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm just too tired from my flight or something.
Is Kathy Griffin complaining about being threatened with violence?
In what other country could you do that and not be put in prison, right?
I mean, that's threatening the president of the United States, isn't it?
That's exactly right.
And so I was kind of curious, who owns political violence?
Which side are we on?
I looked up, there were a number of lists.
One from New America Foundation says that there have been, just the last 20 years, 21 instances and 53 dead from right-wing terror attacks.
Now, I guess this last 17 to 20 years.
And that would mean that the majority of these instances are right-wing.
But the story is a little more complicated than that.
Obviously, we've all heard about abortion clinic shootings.
And in the last 20 years, there have only been four fatal attacks on abortion clinics.
So I think some of the left-wing media would have you believe this is happening every month.
It's relatively rare, but it still exists and clearly is on the right.
But for instance, a lot of the lists say that the Holocaust memorial shooter was a right-winger, that attack that happened years ago.
But what we know about him is he hated Israel.
He opposed the Iraq war.
He thought 9-11 was an inside job.
He hated Fox News.
He hated both George Bush and John McCain.
He openly disparaged Christianity, and he called himself a socialist.
Okay.
But because he hates Jews, he's a right-winger in the minds of these people.
That's exactly right.
They'll find one stereotype that they associate with the right or something that even could be associated way out on the fringes and then ignore everything else that we know about.
Right, because our anti-Semites are on the fringe of their exist, but they're on the fringe of the right wing where anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in leftism.
The anti-Semitism on the left, you just have to look at a college campus to see it.
Culture Wars Punching Bags00:06:03
Yes.
It is pervasive, it is prevalent.
You know, another example is the Austin tax office suicide attack.
The guy who carried this out, he flew the plane into it and it was an anti-tax office, you know.
He was an anti-big government guy, ostensibly.
But what we know is the guy hated George Bush, capitalism, the church, and he constantly talked about how awful the drug and insurance companies are.
It doesn't sound like a right-winger to me, but it depends how you define it.
Same thing, the Pentagon shooting in 2010.
He was labeled right-wing, but he was a registered Democrat.
And he opposed President Bush, and he called the Iraq war satanic.
The list goes on and on.
An interesting case, Roger Stocklam, was arrested for threatening the Detroit mosque in 2011.
He was reported to be a Tea Partier, but he actually was left-wing and a Muslim, and obviously also mentally ill.
This list goes on and on.
The question then that I think we have to ask, rather than arguing over which extreme fringy position, some of which are held by the extremes of both the left and the right, who gets to own which, the question is, right now, who is advocating for a culture of political violence in America today?
That's exactly right.
That is the question.
There is one clear answer to this.
I mean, you just have to turn on the news to see cities burned down across the country over the last 10 years.
That obviously would be more closely associated with left-wing activism.
But look first at the thought leaders of the left.
Obama's speechwriter, Jon Favreau, responded to the punching of Richard Spencer by saying, I don't care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I'll laugh at every one.
There was breathless reporting and breathless commentary after Richard Spencer, the head of the National Policy Institute and a white supremacist, was punched by an anti-FA protester.
Endless commentary of, is it okay to punch a Nazi?
Is it okay to punch a Nazis?
I mean, there was some of this when the guy in Montana punched the Guardian reporter.
A little bit of that.
But that was only you and me saying that.
That wasn't widespread on the right.
But I mean, there is this thing on Twitter where everybody's a tough guy.
Everybody's a tough guy online.
That's right.
You know, like, I'm going to punch this guy and punch that guy and all that.
There's a lot of that talk.
But the idea that it is okay to silence speakers to riot and all this stuff, that is only on the left.
I mean, I do not see, or I'm sorry, only in the mainstream, that's only in the mainstream on the left.
I think there's one video clip that you need to see to answer this question.
And it involves this guy.
I don't know, I forget his name, but do we have it up there?
Katie Ture and some conservative commentator.
I forget.
Excuse me, the chromosomes with nuclei, yeah.
Chromosomes don't necessarily mean you're male or female.
Gender.
With gender.
Gender identity.
Go ahead.
But even so, you have a thing like Kleinfelter's syndrome.
So you don't know what you're talking about.
You're not educated on genetics.
I'm not going to discuss the genetics or not.
Well, no, no, no, no, genetics.
So I'd stay away from the genetics and back to the brain scans.
You cut that out now, or you'll go home in an ambulance.
Oh, yeah, it was Shapiro.
It was Ben Shapiro.
That's her guy's front benchman.
These are not people shooting their mouths off on Facebook or on Twitter.
These are not people even yelling things at protests.
These are political commentators on major left-wing news channels.
You know, that looks like a scene from Psycho.
The guy dressed up as mommy.
And intimidating.
And Ben's response, he says, this seems inappropriate for a political conversation.
And I think when you look away from the fringes and you look away from what we're debating, who owns which of these attackers, and you look more at the people who are in the mainstream, it's very clear that one side is encouraging a culture of violence, a culture in which we respond to alleged microaggressions with macro-physical aggression.
And you have one side which is sitting right there and saying this is not appropriate for discussing ideas in the United States.
You know, it was when the guy in Montana, Gianforte, is that his name?
Yeah, Greg the Rock Gianforte.
When he slugged the reporter from The Guardian, every commentator, especially on CNN, the opposition party, they said, oh, well, Donald Trump is responsible for this.
Donald Trump has created this culture of violence.
And yet, when five police officers were killed in Dallas after years of Obama instigating, you know, spreading this idea that the police were somehow bigoted, nobody said, hey, you know, doesn't Obama, nobody but me, said, doesn't Obama have blood on his hands?
Doesn't Black Lives Matter have blood on his hands?
So there is this disparity in the way this is reported and the way people are blamed for this that I think has created a false impression.
Everybody has psychos.
We have psychos on our side, they have psychos on their side.
I mean, that's really so many, so many shootings are a mental health problem rather than a political problem.
But the idea that when an act of violence occurs on the right, it is the fault of all the right, and when an act of violence occurs on the left, that doesn't change anything.
That, to me, is a genuine problem.
And I think whenever these attacks occur, it's good to refer to Andrew Clavin's rules of mainstream media news reporting because I think the culture that has been created by the left wing in this country is clearly advocating for these acts, and the culture on the right simply has not been doing that.
And when you see right-wing extremists reported in the paper, look a little bit more closely, and you'll find out, especially if you look at the list of these last 20 years, a lot of them are Democrats.
Yeah, it's so true.
The Highwayman's Tale00:03:03
And you know, this really is.
Thank you, Michael Knowles.
Excellent report.
Really good to talk.
Welcome back to civilization, but it's something.
Gomorrah by the sea, Los Angeles, California.
And this is true, by the way, of the Christian-Islamic divide as well.
You know, people will say that there is violence in Christianity, but no true Christian supports violence in the name of Christ.
Nobody supports violence in the name of Christ who is truly a Christian.
Whereas there is lots and lots of evidence that there are plenty of people in Islam who do not commit violence, who think like, you know, sometimes jihad is a jihad, as the old joke goes.
You know, you got to do what you got to do.
All right, stuff I like.
So last week I started off, I wanted to talk about narrative poetry, about storytelling poetry.
And I was talking about Gowan and the Green Knight, which is a great one.
And then I got distracted by my whole anniversary and things like that, just talking about meaningless marriages and things like this.
But I really love, you know, one of the things that I'm trying to do more and more is turn off the internet and read, you know, turn off the internet and read a book.
If I'm reading an e-book, I will turn off the internet on my e-book machine so I'm not constantly getting mail.
And I think it really is helpful.
And with your attention span, all of our attention spans being reduced to about 90 seconds, you know, I try to find stuff that is completely immersive and literary in some sense that you can still get through kind of quickly.
And one of the reasons narrative poetry is so much fun is you get the story, but you also get this language.
So here is one you may not have read called The Highwayman.
Has anybody read The Highwayman?
You've never read The Highwayman?
You went to Yale and you never read.
Alfred Noyes, 1906, he wrote one other poem, I can't remember what it's called, that was kind of famous, but The Highwayman was really famous.
And it is this incredibly romantic story.
Highwaymen is guys who used to hold up stagecoaches and things, but in England they were carriages.
And this is just, it's just written to the tune of the horse's hooves.
And there's this incredibly romantic love story between a highwayman and a landlord's daughter.
So I'll just read you one quick passage.
The wind was a torrent of darkness.
And you've got to remember, this is like if you can hear the horse's hooves in the meter of the verse.
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor.
And the highwayman came riding, riding, riding.
The highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark innyard.
He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there but the landlord's black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord's daughter, plating a dark red love knot into her long black hair.
I just, I love this poem.
And it gets better and better.
It's a really good story, really interesting story, worth reading, The Highwayman.
And you can read it, you know, it's like five minutes.
You can turn off your internet for five minutes and read a poem.
The Highwayman's Tale00:00:54
All right, tomorrow we have the great Henry Olson is here.
He is just a terrific, he is an election watcher, kind of an election geek, who really talked about for years was talking about the people who voted for Donald Trump, the out-of-work white people who used to be Democrats and then became Reagan Republicans.
And he kept, he was on our show a long time ago before the election talking about how these people had been ignored.
And the first person who reaches out is going to win.
Trump did that, so we're going to bring him back, talk about what he sees now.
He's got a new book coming out, and we'll talk about that.
But really, really an interesting guy, one of the best political observers out there, Henry Olson.
We will talk to him tomorrow if we have any machinery left.
This place is absolute shambles, so I'm talking really in the midst of ruins.
I'm just happy like a pipe hasn't fallen down on my head in the middle of the show.