Ep. 337’s host slams CNN for retracting Anthony Scaramucci’s Russian-funds story and admitting ratings-driven bias, with producer John Bonnefeld calling the Russia probe "bullshit." The network’s liberal tilt—ignoring Trump’s Paris Accord exit while hyping outrage—mirrors broader media distortions framing conservatives as bigots, from equating religious liberty to discrimination to falsely claiming GOP healthcare cuts kill thousands. Contrasting Pericles’ Athens with today’s polarized America, the episode warns that demonizing dissent risks eroding civic virtue, leaving July 4th celebrations hollow without shared principles. [Automatically generated summary]
That's the day we commemorate the start of the greatest nation in the world ever to create a generation of young people who think it's the worst nation in the world.
That's right.
After nearly two and a half centuries of an America that has produced unprecedented peace, wealth, science, health, freedom, and equality, we are now being condemned by the youngsters who created man buns and duckface selfies.
Sure, the young folks say, when the founding fathers declared their independence from England on July 4th, 1776, they were risking their lives to establish a new creed of liberty that contained the distilled political wisdom of humankind.
But could they binge-watch Big Bang Theory while texting emojis and painting their toenails with sparkles at the same time?
I don't think so.
The founding fathers included genius inventors and philosophers, as well as international statesmen, hero soldiers, and generals.
But they were all white men.
Why admire them when you are surrounded by rainbow-colored people of indeterminate gender who know how to make a loud re noise to protest white supremacy, patriarchy, and smallpox, three things that no longer exist largely because of Americans.
But if there's one thing young people know, it's that America is bad because it doesn't have a big enough government.
Look at socialist countries like Cuba and Venezuela, where you have free health care.
So if you get injured at a food riot, you can go directly to an abandoned hospital building and get Michael Moore's autograph for absolutely no cost except your freedom and dignity.
Here in Rotten America, because of all the slave-holding, Indian killing, worker-exploiting, capitalist, patriarchal white men with smallpox, you have to actually pay doctors for curing you before you send a text to have a three-course meal delivered direct to your dorm room so you don't have to interrupt your conversation about how awful America is.
Because of July 4th, American ideals, creativity, and prosperity have lifted the entire world to new levels of freedom and happiness.
But that was so unfair to those cultures that were marginalized simply because they were different and wanted to remain in the Middle Ages where they could enslave and slaughter people.
And what about American women?
Look how oppressed they are.
I would even say that American women have no voice, except how would I then explain that loud whining noise coming from some of the most privileged and powerful females on the planet.
So, as we approach this July 4th, young people find themselves on the horns of a dilemma.
Should they celebrate and memorialize the never-before-seen accomplishments of a nation more powerful, peaceful, and free than any that has ever existed?
Or should they sit around in their parents' basements and talk about how woke they are?
Why CNN Misses the Mark00:15:01
My suggestion, try to contribute something to the beautiful culture you're privileged to find yourself in.
Or conversely, put a sock in your mouth, which would be a contribution in and of itself.
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-donkey.
Ship-shaped 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, hurrah.
All right, we are back in an unidentified bunker that we will be continuing to use until we have an actual studio, which is being built.
I can see it out the window.
I can see the chocolate champagne fountains.
Some of the naked dance, entirely naked dancing girls, amazing.
And elephants on parade that do tricks and everything that will be in there within a couple of weeks.
But now we're in this crummy little dive with the funny lamps from the Notel Motel behind me.
But, but, tomorrow is the mailbag day.
And I know what some of you are thinking.
Are you thinking, oh, only one more day, and this miserable excuse for human existence, I've been scuttling through like a lobster on the floor of salty seas.
It will be over, and all your questions will be answered if, if you are a subscriber to thedailywire.com.
If you're a subscriber, you can send in your questions.
I'll answer them no matter what the subject, religion, politics, personal things.
And all the answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
And if you subscribe now, it's only a lousy $8 a month.
Whereas on July 10th, is that it?
Austin, July 10th?
Yes, July 10th.
The prices go up.
I think they will then be 50 cents per word Ben Shapiro speaks.
So it'll be approximately $15,000 an hour.
And if you subscribe now, it will be $8, lousy $8 a month, and will remain that way even after the rates go up for all the little people.
And if you subscribe for a year, you get Ben's book, Say It So, written with his dad, David Shapiro, about the 2005 White Sox Championship series.
So let's talk about how much the media sucks, okay?
We're talking about this.
You know, we talk about the media a lot, and I want to explain why I hate them so much.
I've got a PragueU video coming out on Thursday or Friday, I think it drops.
And it's about fake news, and it's about the fact that it's not this story or that story, this fake news.
It's the whole way the news is reported in most of the mainstream media in America.
And I think that that is the thing that we're looking at as we see the CNN scandal explode.
It's not just CNN.
It's one CNN scandal after another, really.
It's not just CNN.
CNN is at the forefront.
They're being caught out and they're being tripped up, but it's all of them.
It's ABC, CBS, NBC, News, all the news departments, and it's the New York Times and it's the Washington Post.
I want to talk about why it matters, what it has done to our country to have the news so one-sided and so corrupt.
And you know, it's not that these people are bad people.
It really isn't.
It's that when you surround yourself with people only with people who agree with you, after a while you become radicalized.
After a while, you begin to think that this is the only way that people think.
And this is why we keep having the hilarious spectacle of these polls that come out and tell everybody, oh, the Democrats are going to win.
The Democrats, there's going to be a landslide.
And then suddenly we get to watch people on CNN with their faces falling as the shock of reality comes in like smoke, like gas leaking under the door.
The reality comes in this sealed environment, and suddenly they realize that they've just been talking to themselves.
Not only is nobody watching them, nobody believes them.
And why does nobody believe them?
Because when you are sequestered among only people who agree with you, you start to make mistakes.
So three prominent journalists at CNN resigned on Monday after the cable news network was forced to retract and apologize for a story on its website involving a close ally of President Trump.
The article linking Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund manager and Trump confidant, to a Russian investment fund supposedly being investigated by the Senate, was removed from CNN.com late last week after the network decided it could not fully stand by its reporting and after they were caught out online by people pointing out that the whole thing was ridiculous.
They had one anonymous source and they went with it completely against any standards of journalism.
Frankly, I think you should have to have a named source before you go with it.
It's very rare that anonymous sources can be trusted, not because sometimes they're not telling the truth, but you never know when they're telling the truth and the reader or the viewer never knows.
The resignations, this is from the New York Times, our former newspaper, are a black eye at a sensitive moment for the news organization, which has emerged as a regular target of Mr. Trump and his supporters.
The president relishes dismissing the network's coverage as fake news and his closest advisors have accused the channel of harboring a bias against Mr. Trump.
Well, guess what?
We no longer have to accuse them.
We no longer have to suspect them.
Now we know because our friends at Project Veritas have gotten done it again.
They have gone in and sent an underground reporter, as is their want, and have exposed what they're doing.
This is James O'Keefe, of course, at Project Veritas.
He sent in an undercover reporter, and he got this guy, John Bonniefield, a supervisor and producer, to talk about the way this station is run under Jeff Zucker and has been run forever.
And, you know, well, we're going to play some of these tapes.
I mean, it is really worth looking at.
They have this, it's this hidden camera expose.
Now, remember, this thing that happened at CNN, this is the latest thing that has happened.
But remember, there was Kathy Griffin, who held up the severed head of Donald Trump and had to be fired for that.
There was Riza Aslan, who started to say all that filth, you know, spew filth on Twitter about Donald Trump.
And there was also that story where they said that James Comey, in his testimony before Congress, was going to say that it was inaccurate what Donald Trump had said that three times he had told them he wasn't under investigation.
In fact, James Comey, possibly inspired by Trump's threat of there being tapes, was forced to say, in fact, that he had told Donald Trump three separate times that there was no investigation, which has left this Russia story completely in the lurch and made all the ancillary investigations look utterly, utterly ridiculous.
So let's take a look at some of this Project Veritas stuff that O'Keefe has come up with.
First of all, we have the guy, this is John Bonnefeld, CNN supervising producer, and he's talking about liberal bias.
This is cut number three.
I think that there are a lot of liberal CNN viewers who want to see Trump really get scrutinized.
And I think if we would have behaved that way with President Obama and scrutinized everything that he was doing with as much scrutiny as we apply to Donald Trump, I think our viewers would have been turned off.
I think they would have thought we were attacking him.
But I think our viewers right now, and I'm not saying all of our viewers are like super liberals, but I think there's just a lot of them.
So Trump's good for business.
Just say it.
Trump is good for business right now.
Okay, now the problem with this, I mean, is that of course it's true that now CNN has liberal viewers, but where did they come from?
You think conservatives wouldn't watch a fair news station?
Of course they would.
You know, they watch Fox News because it's the only station where they can hear themselves represented at all in a fair and balanced manner, but they would go to CNN.
You know, MSNBC is hiring Hugh Hewitt and apparently their viewers are going crazy.
But MSNBC sees an opening.
This is a business opening because Fox News is floundering.
And so MSNBC is bringing in Hugh Hewitt, who's a wonderful conservative commentator, and they gave him, I think, a Saturday morning show.
And of course, their viewers burst a blood vessel.
But if, in fact, they were to become a balanced station with conservative and liberal views, maybe their audience would expand.
Maybe people's minds would expand.
Maybe they would learn something.
The thing is, the viewers, the super liberal viewers that Bonifield is talking about at CNN, they came second to the bias of the station.
People stopped watching CNN because they were biased.
And now the only people there are the people who are having their biases confirmed.
So now their business model, right, their business model has to serve the people that are the audience.
It's the only audience left.
The only audience left is the liberals because they're liberals.
And so now they have to serve the liberals.
And it's this spiral.
You get more and more and more liberal until finally you're just talking to yourself.
Here is Bonifeld goes on talking about, you know, you learn about ethics in school, but now we've got this business model and we're fighting for our lives.
And so we just have to feed the beast.
Cut too.
All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school, you're just like, that's adorable.
That's adorable.
Yeah, especially cable news.
You know, cable news isn't the New York Times, and it's not, it's not even like NBC News.
It's, it's, I mean, NBC News still gets 20 million viewers a night.
Cable news is getting a million.
So they got to do what they got to do to make their money, I think.
And so I love the news business, but I find it so.
I'm very cynical about it.
At the same time, so are most of my colleagues.
Yeah, it's like not alone.
So, you know, I want to point out too that there's a very specific kind of news media that I personally go after.
My friends at Newsbusters, which I love, one of my favorite sites, MRC, the Media Research Council, I think it is.
I just love their stuff.
But a lot of times they go after MSNBC.
And I've always, whenever I talk to them, I always say, don't go after them.
They're an honest broker of left-wing news.
They give you left-wing commentary.
Nobody goes to Rachel Maddow and thinks I'm going to get it fair and balanced.
You go to Rachel Maddow for the same reason you go to Sean Hannity to get their opinions on, which are going to be on Fermatow the left, on Hannity on the right.
You know what you're getting.
There's nothing dishonest about that.
There's nothing dishonest about that as long as they're talking about the facts and they're not making facts up.
You know, sometimes they go astray in their vigor and their verve to get the opposition.
I don't like what Hannity's doing with the Seth Rich thing.
Unless he has information that I haven't seen, he really should let that go.
But still, he's an honest guy.
He says, I am a right-winger.
Here is my right-wing opinion.
Rachel Maddow, honest.
I'm a left-winger.
Here's my left-wing opinion.
CNN, The New York Times, the networks, Washington Post, they pretend that they are the voice of truth.
They speak in that, you know, old-fashioned, newsy voice.
This is the news.
This is the news.
And they are lying, and they're not just lying in some small level where there's some level of bias, where the reporter is biased and you know he's biased.
It is very, very difficult now to pick up the New York Times and find the facts of the story.
There is actually now a profession that we here at the Daily Wire are in of sifting through what the New York Times and all these other people say because they have the resources to send out reporters into the field, which a lot of websites don't have, of sifting through that information and trying to figure out what the real story is.
Hey, I want to mention again, because we're going to have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
I want to mention again that it's mailbag tomorrow.
So come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe.
And I do want to say before you go, you know, I just noticed before coming on the air that PopZet, LifeZet, which is Laura Ingram's website, LifeZet, and it has a part of pop culture called PopSet, has an article today called Four Podcasts Truly Worth Your Time.
And it includes Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan.
And it includes this guy, the show you are listening to right this minute.
It says the podcast from novelist and conservative Andrew Clayman is the most political on this list, but it's the creativity and thought he puts into his Daily Wire show that makes it stand apart from the others.
That's Zachary Lehman.
Clearly, he doesn't listen to the show and he drinks.
But aside from that, that's very complimentary.
And so this is what you will get if you come over to TheDailyWire.com and subscribe.
Okay, so Donald Trump, of course, is having a field day with the CNN corruption thing and with the Project Veritas thing.
He tweets out.
So they caught, when Trump is funny, he's hilarious.
So they caught fake news, CNN cold.
But what about NBC, CBS, and ABC?
What about the failing New York Times and Washington Post?
They are all fake news.
And I completely agree with the president on this.
They're all fake news because the bias is so intense, so far, so wide, that everything they say is skewed.
And like I said, I'll have this Prager U video coming out where I talk more about it and explain it.
But how much of this has to do with this crazy Russian investigation that has now caught the Democrats in its coils?
It's like they are caught in the coils of their own beast, like some monster mad doctor in a horror movie who invented this thing and now finds himself being eaten alive by it.
Here is from the Media Research Center.
What did I say before, the Media Research Council, the Media Research Center.
Here's a study.
How much has the media's obsession with the ongoing Russia investigation smothered the rest of the Trump policy agenda?
A media research center study of every broadcast network evening newscast in the five weeks since the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller on May 17th found a whopping 353 minutes of airtime devoted to the Russia probe or 55% of all coverage of the Trump presidency during those weeks.
The network's relentless coverage of Russia meant little airtime was spent on important policy topics as the investigation garnered 20 times more attention than the new health care bill, 100 times more attention than the administration's push to improve the nation's infrastructure, and a stunning 450 times more coverage than the push for comprehensive tax reform.
The study also found one-third of the network's Russia coverage was based on anonymous sources, some of which later proved erroneous.
Which brings us back to Bonniefield.
And I know this is not one of the broadcast networks, but still they have harped.
Russia Leaks Dominated Media00:05:38
I mean, nothing that MRC says about the broadcast networks is untrue of CNN.
If not, if anything, it's more true that CNN has been covering and covering and covering Russia.
So let's go back to Bonniefield on the Russia thing.
He talks about how he talked to Jeff Zucker, the new head, and Trump had just declared that they were pulling out of Paris and they were covering this.
And Zucker said, no, no, no, no, it's Russia because they were getting big ratings off the Trump hate from their liberal audience.
They had gathered because they were so biased.
So it's like I said, it's this vicious circle.
So here is him talking about Jeff Zucker, cut one.
My boss, I shouldn't say this, my boss, a couple days yesterday, we were having a discussion about this dental shoot.
He goes, he's like, I just want you to know what we're up against here.
And he goes, just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords, and for a day and a half, we covered the climate accords.
And the CEO of CNN said in our internal meeting, he said, good job, everybody, covering the climate accords.
But we're done with it.
Let's get back to Russia.
The CEO?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
So even the climate accords, he was like, okay, a day or so, but we're moving back to Russia.
Okay, and here is Bonnie Phil's personal opinion of the Russia story, complete with obscenities that hopefully we remember to cut out.
Here it is.
Honestly, you'd think the whole Russia is just like bullshit.
Could be bull.
I mean, it's mostly bullshit right now.
Like, we don't have any big giant proof.
But then they say, well, there's still an investigation going on.
And you're like, yeah.
I don't know.
If you're finding something, you're what we've done about it.
The way these leaks happen, they'd leak it.
Bid leak.
If it was something really good, it would leak.
It would have leaked before the voting, I would say.
If anything was good out there, it would have came out already.
Yeah, the leaks keep leaking, and there's so many great leaks, and it's amazing.
And I just refuse to believe that if they had something really good like that, that that wouldn't leak because we've been getting all these other leaks.
So I just feel like they don't really have it, but they want to keep digging.
And so I think the president is probably right to say, like, look, you are witch hunting.
Like, you have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.
So, no real proof.
The president is probably right to say it's a witch hunt.
It's a witch hunt.
And this is the guy, the supervising producer at CNN, talking about the fact that they've been reporting something that's largely BS, you know, all this time.
All that stuff that the MRC was talking about, how much time, 55% was it that they were spending on this.
It's all a lot of nonsense.
And this doesn't include Russia trying to hack the American elections.
It's just that we know that America tries to hack their elections.
We all do this stuff.
It's not, it's only a big story because they've been trying to take down Donald Trump because they couldn't, because they couldn't believe that he won.
They couldn't believe that somebody outside of the elites, outside of the people who all agree that the government should get bigger and bigger and we shouldn't be able to make decisions and they should be able to tell us what's right, what's wrong, who we should serve cakes to, what weddings we should participate in.
All those people were shocked and they want this guy gone.
Just, you know, Donald Trump has been pointing out on Twitter that we now know that Obama knew the Russians were hacking the election and basically refused to say anything because he says he didn't want Donald Trump to be justified in talking about the rigged election.
Let's go back in time in our Wayback Machine to hear then President Barack Obama.
Some of you may remember him.
Many of you probably have forgotten him since his legacy has gone up in smoke and ash and dust and has just kind of drifted away into absolute nothingness in the wake of his completely meaningless eight years of a presidency that the press hailed as great but turned out to be nothing.
So some of you may have, I personally have even forgotten from the beginning of the sentence who it is I was talking about.
But let's go back and look at then President Obama as he was telling people, oh, you know, Donald Trump is talking about these rigged elections.
No, no, no.
Listen to this.
No serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections in part because they're so decentralized and the numbers of votes involved.
There's no evidence that that has happened in the past or that there are instances in which that will happen this time.
And so I'd advise Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.
And if he got the most votes, then it would be my expectation of Hillary Clinton to offer a gracious concession speech and pledge to work with him in order to make sure that the American people benefit from an effective government.
And it would be my job to welcome Mr. Trump, regardless of what he said about me or my differences with him on my opinions, and escort him over to this Capitol in which there would be a peaceful transfer of power.
Divided Country Debate00:13:37
That's what America.
Who is that again, Austin?
I forgot.
Barak Obamaiah, who I don't, he used to be an important guy.
And I think.
And anyway, he's saying this is what Americans do, that they have this peaceful transfer of power and they just accept the results of the election, unless, of course, the Democrats lose and then all bets are off.
And so, you know, this brings me to what it is about the media that I feel is so permissious, pernicious, and why I feel so strongly that it needs to be reformed for the good of the country.
Obviously, because of the First Amendment, and quite rightly, there's nothing the law can do to touch the touch the media, and it shouldn't do anything.
But I think our CEOs, look, these people aren't bad people, a lot of them, some of them.
You know, they're not bad people.
They're just following a business model and the business model is in this vicious circle that is dragging them into more and more biased news.
And why does it matter?
It matters because the theory of the left is that there is their opinion and there's evil.
It's not like you have an opinion and I have an opinion, how much health care is good, how much should the government afford health care.
You know, I believe in gay marriage because people should be free, but you don't believe in gay marriage because you believe marriage is a founding principle.
That argument doesn't exist on the left.
It doesn't exist.
There is no time when two people on TV that I've seen recently sit down and one of them says, you know, I understand that gays, you know, people think that gay is sinful, but I think that the government can't be a theocracy and therefore we have to tolerate it in law.
And the other person says, well, you know, I understand and I sympathize and I don't want to oppress anybody, but at the same time, marriage is a founding principle of a free society and it's the way we govern ourselves and you can't just redefine marriage without pulling away a load-bearing wall.
That never happens.
It never happens on TV.
Instead, you have one opinion, which is there should be gay marriage, and then the other opinion is these people hate gay people.
And of course, you can always find people on the right who actually do hate gay people.
Of course you can.
And so you focus on that guy, and that's how you define the debate.
And what is the result?
Well, we know the result.
We know this country is so divided.
We are no longer, it's no longer true.
It wasn't true then, really, but it's no longer true what Abraham Lincoln said.
We are not enemies, but friends.
That has ceased to be the case in America.
We are living in two different worlds because the media and the academy and the entertainment industry have told us again and again that there are two opinions.
One of them is the left's opinion and the other is hate.
One is the left and the other is evil.
And how do you even, you know, whenever I talk to liberals, whenever I give a speech and there are liberals there, I always start by saying, I know what you think, but you have no idea what I think.
You have no idea what my founding principles are.
You have no idea why I hold the opinions.
So if you listen now, you will find out things that you didn't know.
And most of the time, people will listen.
If you're not insulting them, if you're not just making fun of them, if you're not just running them into the ground, if you say, this is why I think what I think, they will listen.
A lot of them will.
And yet the media does everything they can to keep that from happening between us.
You know, Bill McGurn, William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal, wrote a great piece today about Anthony Kennedy.
And it shows how this principle folds into the principle of the Supreme Court, which the left now uses as a super legislature.
And he's talking about Anthony Kennedy.
And everybody was waiting with bated breath for Kennedy to announce that he was going to retire.
And he didn't.
And a lot of people think, well, he wants to stay in place because next time they're going to be debating about, they're going to be hearing the case about the Baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding, saying his religious principles force him not to do that.
And they're going to be arguing that before the Supreme Court.
And it's Anthony Kennedy who has basically made himself this voice of the left-wing culture wars.
It's like he wants to give everybody dignity.
He wants to give everybody happiness.
He wants to give everybody equality.
Instead of just saying, this is what the Constitution says, and this is what we're going to do, and the rest of you should debate this.
So, what is the result of this?
Well, Antonin Scalia, quoted by McGurn in this column, talks about this, about what happens when the court makes these decisions.
By foreclosing, this is Scalia, by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.
This is exactly what happened with Roe v. Wade and the abortion issue.
Because the court simply declared what was obvious nonsense, that the Constitution guaranteed the right to an abortion, we never had a chance to argue it out.
We never had a chance to reconcile and to compromise and to find ways forward where we could all agree.
McGurn ends his column by saying, What makes issues such as abortion and marriage so contentious is that the opposing moral positions cannot be reconciled.
The beauty of democratic politics, however, is its recognition that what free people want and what they will settle for as reasonable are two different things.
Justice Kennedy's unfortunate legacy on these hot-button issues is to take compromise off the table and thus ensure anger and ill will.
And that's what the press and the Academy and the Supreme Court have done.
They have taken away from us the right to debate and argue among ourselves and settle.
What McGurn says is true.
What I want and what I'll settle for are two different things.
I might want abortion made illegal, but I might understand that, you know, in an argument with you, I might say, well, maybe there's got to be some compromise because people are going to do it anyway.
Whatever, whatever.
As long as I feel I have been heard and have had a vote, I don't, that anger that has divided this country ever since Roe v. Wade, that's the start of it, ever since Roe v. Wade, that anger that has divided the country, goes away.
It goes away when you debate and you vote and you have a choice and you know that you can come back and keep debating and get another vote and go back.
If the Supreme Court just declares it, five people declare it, then essentially you're not living in that kind of society anymore and there's only culture war, there's only anger.
You know, Dennis Prager wrote a piece a couple weeks ago.
We talked about it a lot, about how we're in the midst of a cold civil war.
And everybody picked on Dennis on the right.
People were saying, well, you know, once you start using war terminology, it's not good because we're not really shooting at each other.
But, you know, I think that Dennis had a point.
There's an article by Angelo Cotavilla in the Claremont Review of Books.
If you don't read the Claremont Review of Books, it's up there with City Journal, two of the really great think tank magazines in the country.
And Angelo Cotavilla is, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing his name right, but he is part of Claremont, the Claremont Society.
He writes, America is in the throes of revolution.
The 2016 election and its aftermath reflect the distinction, difference, even enmity that has grown exponentially over the past quarter century between America's ruling class and the rest of the country.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln observed that all sides prayed to the same God.
They revered, though in clashing ways, the same founders and principles.
None doubted that those on the other side were responsible human beings.
Today, none of that holds.
Our ruling class and their clients broadly view biblical religion as the foundation of all that is wrong with the world.
According to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the phrases religious liberty and religious freedom will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.
Now, think about that for a minute.
Think about that.
That your religious principles are just code words for homophobia.
It's not that you have a view of the teleological purpose of man, the reason that sex existed, the reason that it's not that you have a sophisticated view thought out over centuries about why people have sex and how sex is good for them and how sometimes it's not good for them.
It's not that you have a view about Islam and why perhaps it's not in keep, that basic Islam is not in keeping with Western values.
It's not that.
It's just a code word.
These are all just code words for your hate, all just code words for your bigotry, your intolerance, your racism, your sexism.
I mean, this is the US Civil Rights Commission.
That is an amazing, amazingly reductive view of the opposition.
And that is the view, that is the view that the media basically sells.
It's them.
It is them.
I know I should say it's they, but it's them.
They are the ones who tear us apart by not hearing our voices, by not letting us speak to one another except in these shouting matches that define the right always as the bad guys.
And you know, you see this stuff.
You see this stuff in this healthcare debate that's going on now.
We get these, I mean, listen, listen to this.
Here's Bernie Sanders.
You know, now the Senate has got obviously its health care bill coming out.
And here's Bernie Sanders talking about the health care bill.
And I'll comment on it after.
Let him say his piece first.
What the Republican proposal does is throw 23 million Americans off of health insurance.
What Harvard University, what a part of Harvard University and the scientists there determined is when you throw 23 million people off of health insurance, people with cancer, people with heart disease, people with diabetes, thousands of people will die.
I wish I didn't have to say it.
This is not me.
This is study after study making this point.
It is common sense.
If you have cancer and your insurance is taken away from you, there is a likelihood you will die and certainly a likelihood that you will become much sicker than you are today.
That's the facts.
Unpleasant, but it's true.
Now, I'm old enough to remember.
I know I look vital and young as incredibly vital and young, but I am old enough to remember when a man with a rifle, a Bernie bro with a rifle, went out and took hot shots at our congressman because he was so stirred up to hatred of the Republican Party.
Here is this guy talking on Meet the Press.
The guy who inspired this violence, or who at least inspired it in the heart of this madman, is talking about thousands of people dying because of a health care bill.
The underlying assumption is that if the government doesn't pay for your insurance, you will die.
That's his underlying assumption.
You know, Al Franken, yeah, Al Franken, the same way.
Here's his cut from MSNBC.
The New England Journal of Medicine just put out a thing.
They did a survey of all the research on this.
One to two thousand people will die if you cut 750,000 people from Medicaid.
So that means you're killing one to two thousand.
Killing them.
So the 400, that's the New England Journal of Medicine.
Yeah.
Yeah, they did a survey.
Basically, people on Medicaid have better health care outcomes.
They have access to a doctor.
They don't have to have catastrophic costs.
They don't go bankrupt.
This works and it saves lives.
Okay, he goes on to say, they're killing people.
The Republicans are killing.
How can we have a debate if people are allowed to go on TV and say that without being challenged?
With Joe Scarborough just sitting there going, huh, wow, the Journal of Medicine.
Look, the New England Journal of Medicine runs left-wing editorials all the time.
They're by doctors, but they're left-wing doctors, and they run these editorials.
Just quoting that editorial, I mean, you know, so what?
So what?
The underlying principle that he's talking about is that if you don't have Obamacare, people will die.
Then the question is, shouldn't we have gotten healthier under Obamacare?
But in fact, we haven't.
In fact, the American life expectancy is in decline.
It's in decline for the first time since 1993.
Why are people dying more under Obamacare and living shorter periods?
You know, let me see this.
A study on mortality rates released on Thursday by the National Center of Health Statistics showed that Americans could expect to live for 78.8 years in 2015, a decrease of 0.1 from the year before.
The overall death rate increased 1.2%.
That's about 86,212 more deaths than those recorded in 2014.
So if Obamacare is so great, how come we are dying earlier?
I mean, how come we're not healthier?
But there's nobody on.
Now, this is NBC, so I won't attack them.
But Chuck Todd had Bernie Sanders, did it occur to him to say, gee, maybe you should tone down your rhetoric because people shot someone in your name just a few weeks ago?
Did it occur to him to say, hey, how come people aren't getting healthier under Obamacare if this is so great?
No, because they all have the same opinions.
They all have the same opinions.
So we're left with this idea that there is the left and there are people who hate you and want you to die.
Republican serial killers who somehow happened to get into Congress.
Gee, he looked like an ordinary congressman.
Nobody Knows00:07:27
Who knew?
He was going out there killing, as Nancy Pelosi said, hundreds of thousands of people.
You know, he's burying them in his cellar, you know?
And it's like Mitch McConnell has got a cellar and he buries the people who die from his health bill in the cellar, and that's why the country is in the state it's in.
You know, I mean, if that's the way we're going to think about each other, how can we come together?
How can we start to mend the rift that really is tearing this country apart?
It is on the media.
It is on the media.
And look, it's not that they don't sometimes do good stuff.
It's not that every story they report is untrue.
It's not that the facts are wrong.
It is the constant, constant slant and the attitude, the underlying attitude that there are two opinions, the left's opinion and hate.
That's what they sell, and they sell it all the time.
All right, let's move on to stuff I like.
And we're talking about sort of patriotic stuff I like.
I don't know exactly how to categorize this.
We have July 4th coming out, and we'll be off, so you'll somehow have to get through a clavenless July 4th.
It's a nightmarish proposition.
But, you know, I wanted to talk about things in literature and in the movies that reflect our values, even though they don't come from us necessarily.
So yesterday I was talking about Mel Gibson's version, his Americanized version of William Wallace and Braveheart.
This is something that predates America, but of course was very much in the minds of our founders as they were drawing up the Declaration and Constitution, which was the ancient Greeks and the Romans and their ideas of freedom and what went wrong and how the empire fell and what went right and what made it last and what made it strong.
And they were trying to avoid pure democracy, which they knew led to tyranny.
And one of the most famous speeches in ancient literature is in Thucydides, his great work on the Peloponnesian War, which is one of the first truly true works of history in literature at all, in Western literature at all.
I think it's Herodotus who may call the father of history, but it's really Thucydides who writes history as we know history to be.
And he writes about the Peloponnesian Wars, which was the war between the Athenian, the people led by Athens, and the people led by Sparta, the various leagues of cities led by Athens and Sparta.
And Sparta was a very militaristic community.
Athens was, of course, the free democratic community.
And they started out as long as Pericles was alive, it really looked like Athens was going to win the Peloponnesian Wars, which went on forever.
But once Pericles died, they started to extend the wars so far, and they started to fight a two-front war in Sicily and so on.
And then things went bad for Athens.
But at first, they were winning.
They were winning against this highly militaristic community.
And this is interesting.
You know, you might not have heard, but in the Trump White House, they love Thucydides.
McMaster, Mattis, Steve Bannon, they all read Thucydides to try and think about it as a way to learn about China because Sparta was a rising power.
China was a rising power.
How do you avoid what they call the Thucydides trap, which is the trap of getting into a war with a power that rises up suddenly?
How do you manage that shift in power without everybody killing each other?
But I want to talk about something a little different.
Let me just read a little bit of Pericles' famous oration that he made.
Once a year, they would give a speech to pay tribute to the military dead.
And basically, we believe that Thucydides wrote this speech, or at least highly edited it for reading.
But here's just a little bit of it.
Our Constitution, he says of Athens, does not copy the laws of neighboring states.
We are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves.
Its administration favors the many instead of the few.
This is why it is called a democracy.
If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences.
If no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit.
Nor again does poverty bar the way.
If a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.
The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life.
There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, though they inflict no positive penalty.
In other words, their freedom creates a live and let live, a live and let live attitude that creates friendship between the Greek peoples, between the people in Athens.
Now, I just want to, sorry, I just want to read a little bit more, and he says, if we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists, the Spartans.
We throw open our city to the world and never, by alien acts, exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality.
Does all this sound familiar?
I mean, they were facing all the same problems that they were facing.
But one of the things that Pericles talks about, and this is, by the way, you know, 400 years before the birth of Christ.
So, I mean, this is basically, this idea of democracy seems to have sprung up.
Nobody knows.
Nobody knows why it sprung up among the Greeks.
There are all kinds of theories about it, about because they were seagoing people and all this stuff.
But nobody knows why they, it was like inventing fire, how you did it, how you came upon it.
Nobody knows, but they did, and they were alone.
And a lot of people, this was what they were fighting about, whether or not it was good to have a government by and for the people.
But one of the things that happened in their victories, especially in their victories over the Persians, you all remember 300, the movie 300, where Sparta and Athens fought against the Persians.
In their victories, they became convinced that there was something good about being free.
So Pericles talks about the fact that you fight harder if you're free.
And the only thing I want to say about that is victory can be very deceptive.
You know, every nation that has been victorious in a major war thinks that it is because of their underlying principles.
with the Greeks it was basically the war not this war but the war against the Persians where they said there must be something right about the West because we beat these Eastern you know tyrants with our free society so our freedom must be a good thing America has World War II there must be something right about America and our system because we won but you always have to remember that the Soviet Union said the same thing when they won at Stalingrad.
They said there must be something wonderful about communism to help us beat the Nazis as we did.
So victory can be deceiving, you know, it can be deceiving.
It's only right principles that guide you.
And the principle of freedom is right per se.
It is right because we are children of God and made in his image and we are meant to be as free as is humanly possible so that we can fulfill the design that is built into us, the design that is built into us to lead us to God.
All right.
So that is Pericles talking about him.
I'm running out of time.
I've got to say goodbye.
That's why I'm hurrying.
But tomorrow is the mailbag.
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I'm Andrew Clavin.
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