Andrew Clavin dissects media bias, exposing CNN’s skepticism of the Russia probe via Project Veritas and mocking Cuomo’s "fake news" interruptions of Ron Johnson. He contrasts Trump’s Twitter attacks on Mika Brzezinski with softball questions for Obama, advocating conservative desk editors to balance reporting while warning escalating hostility risks. The episode pivots to faith, arguing consciousness ("qualia") disproves materialism and Christianity alone addresses humanity’s innate guilt and disconnection, framing secularism as a suppression of divine truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Nancy Pelosi's Democrat leadership position in the House may be in trouble.
After a series of Democrat losses and special congressional races, there have been subtle signs of dissatisfaction with Pelosi.
For instance, a subtle mob carrying torches gathered subtly outside the Capitol yesterday, subtly screaming, give us the monster.
They then chased Pelosi to an old windmill and set it on fire, trapping Pelosi in the flaming structure as it collapsed.
Pelosi was later found frozen beneath the wreckage and brought back to life by the humpback dwarf Igor in the sequel entitled Pelosi Meets the Wolfman.
Pelosi has been in the top Democrats' house spot since 2003.
During that time, Democrats have lost their majority, their credibility, their values, and the respect of every single human being who doesn't work for CNN.
But Pelosi's supporter Adam Schiff says, quote, Democrats will never abandon something simply because it isn't working.
Our policies have destroyed black communities, undermined decent values, and mired women in a victim mentality that has ruined their lives.
And yet we haven't changed any of them.
Pelosi's leadership is in keeping with that great tradition.
Unquote.
Schiff then went home to watch the old James Bond film from Russia with Love, looking for evidence that Donald Trump was involved with deadly Soviet agent Rosa Klebb.
Pelosi herself has been defiant in the face of Democrat calls she be removed from leadership, then tarred and feathered, then tossed into the Potomac and pelted with rotten fruit until she washed up on shore, then flogged out of the city.
Pelosi points to the fact that she has been an excellent fundraiser who recently channeled more than $30 million into winning Georgia's 6th District.
The $30 million could not be reached for comment because it had sprouted wings and flown away, then set itself on fire, then settled into a pile of ash, then blown off into nothingness, leaving Georgia's 6th District still in the hands of Republicans.
All the same, when asked if she was in trouble, Ms. Pelosi said, no, I'm in Denver.
When told she was in Washington, she said, oh, then I'm in trouble.
In a statement to reporters, Mrs. Pelosi went on to defend her leadership, saying, quote, people say that the voters don't support my extreme left-wing positions.
But who are these voters?
And why should they have a say on who gets to serve in Congress?
After all, many of them don't even support abortion.
And if they were given their way, millions of children would still be alive today and might then grow up to oppose abortion as well.
We can't let that happen, unquote.
After her statement, Mrs. Pelosi waved to a cement mixer, which she mistook for a crowd of supporters, then jumped into a car and drove away until the owner of the car managed to stop her at the next corner.
Meanwhile, Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan issued a statement on the matter saying, quote, please don't get rid of Nancy Pelosi.
Code Clavin Promo Offer00:03:42
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Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-hunky.
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All right, here we are, the last day before the long, long, long, clavenless weekend, a really dark abyss of nothingness for it.
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Because July 4th is Tuesday, yeah, so we won't be back till Wednesday, which means I don't know if you want to get in your mailbag questions.
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But for now, it's only a lousy $8 a month.
And if you subscribe for a year, you get Ben Shapiro and David Shapiro's book, The White Sox, Say It So about the last White Sox Championship season ever, which was 2005.
Meanwhile, I know you're all thinking the same thing: why does this guy look so fantastic?
How come he, look at the way he dresses, it's so brilliant.
And the answer is: I don't choose my own clothes.
Either my wife picks them out or I go in, you know, I once hired somebody.
I actually hired one of those personal shoppers.
And it was like being a cut-out doll, you know, and you stand there and all this.
And the thing is, all that is expensive.
You don't have to do it.
You can just go to the 5-4 club because the 5-4 Club will help men dress, will help you dress for a low, low price.
Okay, what it does, look, it doesn't have to cost a fortune.
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You answer a questionnaire, let them know how you want to look.
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I shouldn't have to sell it to you.
Go on the site, look at the clothes, you'll see they're really nice.
They've been helping men with fashion for over 15 years, and they have shipped to over 100,000.
They ship now to over 100,000 men every month.
They know what they're doing.
So if you don't, that's okay.
And if you're male, you probably don't.
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And when you look good, obviously you feel good.
This is why I'm so happy because I look like this.
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If you pay into the club, you get special offers like 50% off items on their online.
And the price that goes into the club, which I think is like five bucks, is not very much.
But that piles up and goes against the price of the clothes.
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Here's what you do: you go to 54club.com right now and enter the promo code Clavin, K-L-A-V, as in Victor, A-N, and they will give you 50% off your first month's package plus a free pair of sunglasses, which is much better.
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Why Fake News Must End00:14:34
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Put in promo code Clavin, promo code Clavin, you'll get 50% off.
Boy, I tell you, I look great, but I can't talk worth a damn.
All right.
You know, so all week long, the big story this week, I mean, it really has been the big story.
The big story has been the press, the media.
It is in free fall.
It is swirling down the drain.
And CNN especially has just been, they've been the symbol of fake news.
So, so we're going to start off the show today with my new Prager University video, Prager U video.
What is fake news?
Take a look.
You've probably heard a lot of people recently screaming and yelling about fake news.
Charges fly from all points on the political spectrum.
This story is mistaken.
It's fake news.
That statement is incorrect.
It's fake news.
But to my mind, these arguments miss the point.
Mainstream American news is all fake because the major news outlets are so consistently biased toward the left that whether any given story they report is factual or not, their overall reportage is essentially leftist propaganda.
You can complain about the right-wing slant of Fox News all you want, but left-wing ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN have combined almost 10 times the viewers.
Look, the chief journalist at ABC is former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos.
The president of CBS News is David Rhodes, the brother of a former senior Obama staffer.
Comcast, which owns NBC, is run by a major Democrat donor.
Same for the leadership at CBS and Time Warner, which owns CNN.
Only 7% of American journalists identify as Republican.
And while a lot of news outlets forbid their reporters to donate to candidates, 96% of those who did donate last time out gave to Hillary Clinton.
These journalists claim that despite the fact they're all Democrats, they can be objective.
It just ain't so.
Psychologists have shown that when people associate almost exclusively with those who agree with them, they suffer from groupthink and confirmation bias and lose their ability to see events clearly.
Now, it's not that these journalists are liars, exactly.
It's that their bias skews their reporting in very specific ways.
Let me give you Andrew Clavin's three rules of mainstream media journalism.
These can transform any story, whether it's true or not, into fake news.
Rule number one.
Whenever left-wing prejudices are confirmed by a single event, that event is treated as representative.
But whenever left-wing prejudices are contradicted by a single event, that event is treated as an isolated incident.
And if you treat it as representative, you are deemed to be hateful.
So for instance, a white cop shoots a black suspect.
The mainstream media treats that story as representative of general police racism, even though studies show cops don't use deadly force more often on blacks than on whites.
On the other hand, if a Muslim commits an act of terrorism and someone is bold enough to point out that the terrorist act is in fact representative of the daily acts of Muslim terror around the world, this is considered Islamophobic.
The leftist media cherry-picks when an event illustrates a larger narrative.
That's fake news.
Rule number two.
When a scandal breaks on the right, the news is the scandal.
When a scandal breaks on the left, the news is, who wrongfully disclosed that scandalous information.
Thus, when the media wanted to raise suspicions that Donald Trump was somehow in league with the Russians, they freely quoted illegally leaked information from intelligence sources.
But when Congressman Devin Nunes announced he had information that the Obama administration might have misused intelligence against Donald Trump's transition team, the story became, how did Nunes get that information and did he do it legally?
The scandal meter is heavily weighted to fall to the right.
Fake news.
Rule number three.
Individual extremists on the right are highlighted, but the overall extremism of the left is ignored.
In one of the fakest fake news stories in recent history, the mainstream media rose up as one to tar conservative Tea Party members as racist, when all they really wanted were lower taxes and less government spending.
Reporters gave the Tea Party disparaging nicknames, represented their almost universally peaceful gatherings as ugly and violent.
And whenever an individual Tea Partier said something wrong, it was cited as evidence that the movement itself was tainted.
Meanwhile, the continually violent, vandalizing, anti-Semitic socialist movement that went by the name of Occupy Wall Street was hailed by journalists as an important social development, right up to the moment it vanished without a trace, except for the piles of litter its protesters left behind.
Peaceful Tea Partiers wanted the small government prescribed by the Constitution so they were radicals.
Violent occupiers wanted the widespread government intrusion of socialism so they were heroes.
Very fake news.
Newsweek editor Evan Thomas was once criticized when his magazine essentially convicted some white Duke University lacrosse players of raping a black woman.
A rape it turns out they did not commit because it didn't happen.
Thomas defended himself, saying, the narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.
The mainstream media almost always get their left-wing narrative right, whether the facts support it or not.
That's called confirming your own prejudices.
It's called bias.
It's called fake news.
I'm Andrew Clavin for Prager University.
Wow, that was really good.
That's the first time I've seen that.
That guy's brilliant.
Who is?
Oh, that's me.
Anyway, this fake news.
You know, this is a good time to remember, by the way, that fake news was a media invention.
The phrase came from the media.
It didn't come from Donald Trump.
It came from the media attacking sites like Breitbart, which were openly pro-Trump.
They weren't trying to be fair.
And it blew back in their face, just like this Russia scandal is blowing back in the face of the Democrats.
And if you want to see, I mean, so all week long we've been covering Project Veritas and James O'Keefe got some undercover stuff where CNN, people at CNN were saying that this Russia story that they have been pushing and pushing and pushing unbelievably for every month of the, let's see, January, February, March, April, May, June.
That's six months, the first six months of the Trump presidency, that it's all a fraud.
I told you, I mean, of course, you come to the show, which is where the future comes to announce itself.
I told you months ago that this thing was a fraud.
Now they've caught Van Jones, one of the leftiest of leftist commentators on CNN.
Project Veritas caught him in this little clip.
What do you think is going to happen this week?
I mean, with the whole Russia thing.
The Russia thing is if it'll be nothing burger.
Really?
That's just a nothing burger.
This is after he walks off the air.
This is all they've been talking about, all they have been talking about.
So, you know, and as I keep saying, it's not just about these stories that are untrue.
And as that video points out, it is about the entire, all the assumptions of the left, the way they're talking about this, you know, this health care bill, the way that the ideas they have, that somehow the assumption that if the government isn't giving it to you, you aren't going to get it, that it's better to redistribute wealth and create wealth.
If we let the free market take care of health, its prices would drop just like the prices of television drops.
The day, the day that leftists declare that television is a right, the price of TVs will never drop.
And if you think this isn't getting to the people on CNN, I got to play this one clip because it's just hilarious.
This is Chris Cuomo, the dopiest man on TV, except for Don Lemon, who is the dopiest man on TV, except for Chris Cuomo.
He's interviewing Senator Ron Johnson.
Here's the setup.
The setup is they are rewriting the health care bill, right?
They're supposed to rewrite it by tomorrow so they can consider it over the long weekend, come back and vote for the bill.
So Johnson is describing to Chris Cuomo, who looks like he's never heard this.
The look on his face, if you're not watching, is like he's never heard this idea before.
He's describing why a free market solution might be better.
And Cuomo blows up about the fake news thing, which has nothing to do with anything.
It's hilarious.
Take a look.
Get rid of all the market reforms.
Give Americans the freedom and insurance companies to design products that people can afford that suit their needs.
And we won't be spending so much money on subsidies.
And people will have, in terms of net effect, in terms of premiums, they won't be harmed.
But two things.
We need information, and the debate on this thing has been completely distorted using incorrect information.
Well, two things about that.
Well, first of all, one thing.
I know you're not suggesting that I'm using misleading information, right?
No, you let me know.
We know what I'm saying.
That's inaccurate.
Because what I'm saying is this whole fake news needs to end and it needs to end right now.
Just tell me what I'm getting wrong, or we'll deal with the numbers.
I'm not accusing you.
I'm talking about the fact people don't understand the 22 million and it was a wrong baseline.
And then the way the premiums are reported, you have to really understand the way economists take a look at this and what's really happening.
I love it.
It's like Cuomo.
You can just see as Johnson's talking, Cuomo in his mind is going, they keep calling me fake news.
And Cuomo is one of the fakest of fake news.
I mean, he's as far left.
You know, it's another guy.
It's another guy who you just, if I wanted to build a news agency, if you said to me, Clayman, build a news agency, the first thing I would do, the very first thing I would do, is hire people from both sides.
I wouldn't hire a Cuomo, one of the big leftist dynasties.
I wouldn't hire, you know, George Snuffalupagus, whatever his name is.
You know, it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
They're so corrupt that they are audaciously corrupt.
You hit a level of corruption, and it's intellectual corruption.
It's not necessarily money corruption, but you hit a level of corruption where your corruption, the openness of it, becomes a kind of brag.
I'm so corrupt and I'm so powerful that I don't have to give anything to anybody.
I want to pause here for just a second because I keep saying that I think the Republicans should pass this bill, even though it does not repeal Obamacare.
And I don't think they can find their way to repealing Obamacare.
I wish they could.
If I thought there was a path forward to that outcome, I would be for it.
But I don't think they can.
And as I keep saying, Donald Trump is too unreliable as a conservative for us to allow for us to lose the House and for us to lose support.
You know, Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal today wrote this piece called Should Trump Abandon the GOP.
Here's what he says: he says, in 2016, Donald Trump stood on debate stages and ran against a half dozen Republicans in the party's presidential primaries.
He won.
With his presidential victory, he came Republican control of the House and Senate in part because of his coattails.
After Senate Republicans this week failed to move a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, Mr. Trump must be asking himself, why do I need these people?
Most intriguing of all is the longer-term future of Mr. Trump's formal relationship with the Republican Party.
After voters in 2018 reorder Congress, Mr. Trump can consolidate his base with a big infrastructure bill co-designed by Democrats and likely approved by independent voters.
By then, the Republican opposition that tanked Obamacare reform will be irrelevant.
And please hold the faux shock when Mr. Trump, a non-ideological pragmatist, entertains Chuck Schumer's Medicare for All as the final health care fix.
In Mr. Trump's world, subcontractors come and go.
The GOP shouldn't bother trying to collect for work done.
This disorder could surface the possibility that dare not speak its name until now, a more centrist Trumpian political party of the sort favored by Ivanka.
And that is what I think conservatives should be trying to avoid.
So you take the hit and you move the agenda forward, keep Trump in the Republican camp.
Because there's one, you know, Trump knows he doesn't have any friends.
They asked him, they asked him at a meeting if he was going to negotiate with Chuck Schumer.
Here was his response.
Humor says he'd like taking it out and have all 100 senators come here to talk health care.
Would you be willing to negotiate with all of them?
Thank you.
Thank you, Trump.
Got to find out if he's serious.
He hasn't been serious.
Obamacare is such a disaster, such a wreck.
And he wants to try and save something that's really hurting a lot of people.
It's hurting a lot of people.
You'd have to be very, very serious.
You know, he's done a lot of talking, bad talking, and he just doesn't seem like a serious person.
That is good Trump trolling Chuck Schumer, but we did have some bad Trump this morning.
I'll talk about that in a minute, but we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to thedailywire.com to hear the rest of the show or subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month, which will go up on July 10th.
So subscribe now for a lousy eight bucks a month, and you can watch the whole thing on the site.
You don't have to bounce around.
Plus, you can be in the mailbag, which is Wednesday, the next time we will be on the air.
So, it's getting, CNN and the left wing, it's getting, and the media is getting to them.
I really believe that along with cutting back on regulations and appointing good Supreme Court, good Supreme Court justice and some really good conservative justices, one of the most important things Trump has done is expose the media for what it is.
Expose the media because as I say, as I said in that Prager video, I think it is all fake news.
And that's why it was a little disappointing today.
You know, Trump has been dialing it back.
You know, it's not like I said this before, it's not like I want Trump to stop using Twitter.
I just want him to stop saying stupid things on Twitter.
Today he went after Mika Brzezinski, who has just been relentlessly hounding him and made some crack on Twitter about her facelift.
She was bleeding from her facelift or something like this.
Like bad Trump.
And you know, it's bad because it's classless.
It degrades the office of the presidency.
There they are.
They're beating each other to death.
They are in this death spiral.
Don't shoot yourself in the foot.
And I know I'm going to hear from all the pro-Trumpers who are like, no, no, they do it to him.
He can do it back.
No, he can't.
He's the president of the United States.
He's got to keep it good.
He's got to be the classier guy.
He's been growing into the office.
People Die Here00:10:19
This is the great thing.
So this is a setback.
But look, Trump is a flawed guy.
He's a flawed guy.
He's been doing some great things.
It is, however, still incredibly hilarious to watch the media overreact to what's happening to them.
I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Magazine, and I like the Atlantic Magazine.
They're one of the few outlets that has tried to be fair, that has really run pieces from both sides, in-depth pieces from both sides.
But now Goldberg is hysterical because he thinks that this is going to lead to violence against journalists.
We're all engaged in a reality TV show, that this is a reality TV version of a war between a president and the press.
And I mean that in one specific sense, right now, we're all benefiting.
The weird part of this is, of course, when the New York Times and the Washington Post get tweeted at this way, their subscriber base goes up, right?
More people subscribe and want to support them.
The problem is, and this is what I worry about more than anything else, is that there are people in the country who don't understand that this is a cynical reality TV game and are going to hear over and over again from the president that the reporters, journalists, are enemies of the state.
And someone, I mean, God forbid, but someone is going to do something violent against journalists in a large way.
And then I know where the fault lies.
But they're not worried about, you know, all the people who've been addressing this health care bill.
One after another of them, people are going to die.
People are going to die.
This is all they've been saying about the Republican.
Oh, hundreds.
What is Nancy Pelosi?
That hundreds of thousands of people are going to die.
Remy, who I really, I've only come to see him recently, Remy from Reason TV did a satire of this, starting with Focajontis, Elizabeth Warren, telling everyone that everyone's going to die because of this health care bill.
Take a look.
These cuts are blood money.
People will die.
Let's be very clear.
Senate Republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with American gods.
People need kidneys.
It's sad but decreed.
Yet the senator's hoarding one more than she needs.
I offer this bill and I hope you'll vote aye.
Unless, of course, you just want people to die.
Traffic deaths have many crying with fear.
Over 30,000 people are dying each year.
This modest change I propose must be applied.
Unless, of course, you just want people to die.
Alcohol deaths are exceeding comparisons.
Black people, white people, Native Americans.
We need to ban alcohol.
It can't be denied.
Unless, of course, you just want people to die.
Murders are bad.
They have no defenders.
Yet many are committed by repeat offenders.
I say lifetime in prison, whatever the crime, unless, of course, you just want people to die.
I don't have a bill or a groan in detail.
I just need a short clip for my donor email.
Tim, there's blood on your hands.
You want people to die.
That good?
Cool.
Tim, dinner at five?
Yeah.
The car deaths I mentioned are terrible stuff.
Doesn't seem one seatbelt is ever enough.
You must vote for my act so that fewer will cry.
Unless, of course, you just want people to die.
The carbs, the container, we cannot ignore.
Whipped cream's killing more people than ever before.
This bill would be passed and be ratified.
Those people that didn't want people to die.
Why not?
Weigh all the costs.
The effects, the results.
Empathize with each other as if we were adults.
Use our brains to craft arguments, not vilify.
See that freedom's a traitor.
You want people to die?
That's Remy from Reason TV.
And, you know, that is the thing.
Allowing these arguments to go unchecked, as the left-wing media does, they create, they have created this division between us because if the idea is there are left-wing opinions and then there's hate, right?
50% of the country is erased.
50% of the country is silenced.
50% of the country has no voice on NBC, CBS, ABC, anywhere, New York Times, all those places, they're no voice for those 50% of the, we deplorables, we deplorable people.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, yesterday I played this hilarious cut of Brian Carom of Playboy Magazine going off on Sarah Saunders at the White House.
And oh, you're triggering us.
We're snowflakes and all this nasty stuff you're saying about.
So now, of course, they're surrounding him like he's some kind of hero.
They wonder why, they wonder why Sean Spicer turned the cameras off at the briefings.
It's because of this, because these guys make a fool of themselves and shout and yell, and they think, oh, it's great TV, so I must be a hero.
So now they bring him on MSNBC to pat him on the head.
But listen to the lack of self-awareness.
And we'll end this part of the show with this and one more clip after this, just to show how unself-aware this guy is.
You're urging me to watch media that you can't vouch for, and then claiming that the people that are in that room have an agenda.
And the only agenda I know of is for those people, and that's all of them, everybody that I've met in that room.
The whole agenda is simply to try and get the facts out and ask questions.
So it's really kind of, you know, as I told my wife this evening, it's like it was like dealing with my children.
After a while, enough is enough.
And I had had enough.
And you can speak for yourself, but it seemed to me watching you that a big concern to you was this kind of negative affirmation for the audience that already is highly suspect of the information that comes out of the news media, believes we're all in the tank.
They believe we're all in cahoots together, cahooting together.
We have a nefarious plan.
The nefarious plan, the only agenda is to try and get facts.
And every time that you paint us as such, you're undermining the very First Amendment that you claim that you support.
And time after time after time, they've told us in that room how they support the First Amendment.
They just don't like the people that are practicing it.
So they think we're all in the tank.
Why would we think we're all in the tank?
I'm going to end this by playing, I think this is from Free Beacon.
I'm not sure if I've ever played this before, but it is terrific.
It is just a collection of the kinds of questions they asked Barack Obama for eight years, right?
Barack Obama, who corrupted the IRS, who corrupted the Justice Department, who lied to us about his health care, which didn't work, who lied to us, who established back channels with Iran before he even was elected, before he even won the election.
These are the tough questions that these scions of the First Amendment were asking Barack Obama.
People in the mainstream media have been accused of being afraid to speak truth to power.
And I've got some truth to power.
Your dog looks like he's out of control.
A lot of parallels have been offered between yourself and John F. Kennedy, who also made history, came in with a young, attractive family, had a lot of big Harvard brains around him.
When was the first moment that it began to sink in that you were president of the United States?
I'll ask you about it anytime in this campaign that you have a chuckle that you just couldn't get rid of.
Something weird that happened.
It was so crazy that you just went to bed laughing about it.
How confident are you that your plan is going to work?
And how do you avoid the dangers of being too cocky?
You racked up a lot of wins in the last few weeks that a lot of people thought would be difficult to come by.
Are you ready to call yourself the comeback kid?
You know, you are the equivalent of a rock star in politics.
Do you feel sometimes like your administration is not given the credit it deserves?
Where do you get all this confidence?
How does this feel of all the honors that have come your way?
During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office?
Christy and I go backwards.
I've never seen you lose.
I wasn't looking that one time.
There you go.
Finally, this is a political question you want to duck, but how does your golf game hold up next to Tigers?
Golf.
What does it do for you?
You think Utah, which finished undefeated by defeating Alabama, has a good acclaim as either of those schools to be the national champion?
How do you handle the controversy, the negativity?
Why be president?
Are you a masochist?
And business gets done on this walk.
Yes, exactly.
And what do you think Republicans will be sipping and saying next year?
It's amazing.
I mean, that is an amazing series of clips.
Has anybody asked anything like that besides Fox News, besides Fox News, has anybody asked anything like that of Donald Trump?
I mean, they say, why do we disrespect them?
That's why.
That's why.
You know, that is Waikato.
There's eight years of that.
We had eight years of that while he stomped on the economy, ruined the health care system, sent the Middle East up in flames, corrupted the Justice Department, corrupted the IRS, all that stuff that he did, but it was scandal-free.
It was scandal-free because if you don't ask the questions, you don't find the scandal.
And this is why we think these people stink.
And, you know, I don't care what they say.
I don't care how afraid they are.
I don't care how angry they are about it.
They do a bad job.
They do a bad job when they treat one president like that, a corrupt president like that, and when they treat Donald Trump, don't even give him a chance.
And there's an easy fix.
This is the thing that drives me nuts.
There's an easy fix.
Hire some conservatives, not conservative faces, not conservative voices, not conservatives in front of the camera.
Hire them on the desks because we know it's the desk that controls the flow of information.
Hire some conservatives who control the flow of information.
Reporters will do their job.
Reporters are animals.
Ultimately, they'll go after the scandal.
If they get the story, they want to get the story.
But they won't get the story if they know it's not going to run.
That's why Cheryl Atkinson left CBS.
It was because she knew Scott Pelley wouldn't run her stories on the news.
They will run the stories if you hire some conservatives to make news decisions at the decision-making level.
Got to happen.
It's for the good of the country.
It's for the good of the business.
You all look ridiculous.
I don't care how much money you're making.
You look like buffoons.
And you're getting caught and it's hilarious.
It's like that scene in the comedy movies where the guy tears the seat of his pants, but he doesn't know it.
And he's walking around with his backside hanging out.
That's what the press looks like.
All right.
Got to end this week.
One of the things about this show that I'm working on is I get to the stuff, the culture stuff and the religious stuff toward the end of the show.
I run out of time all the time.
So I'm always talking really quickly.
We ended the show yesterday talking about faith and I was really rushed.
Desires and Delusion00:11:57
And I have faith here with me today.
I have my daughter Faith is here with me today.
Say hello, Faith.
Hi.
So I want to go back to some of the stuff that I was talking about as the show ended and as I was watching the clock and rushing.
Because I was talking about, I made this remark where I said, you all know that there's a God.
You all know that faith is real and the lie, not the lie, the wrong that you are being told, that you're being surrounded with, this mist of misinformation, that we live in a world where science has eliminated the need for God, where God is primitive, where intelligent people don't believe.
What did I mean that you all know?
Because it sounds like kind of an obnoxious thing to say, oh, you know, you're just denying it.
It's not true.
Here are three things that you know, okay, that you know are true.
Number one, you exist.
That sounds silly, but it's true.
If you're Jack or Jill, you are the same Jack or Jill you were when you were three years old.
You're the same Jack or Jill that, you know, you was yesterday.
If you've changed, it's Jack or Jill who has changed.
If you've been injured, it's Jack or Jill who's injured.
If you've been emotionally damaged, it's Jack or Jill.
Sometimes you might say, I'm not myself, something's wrong with me.
You know that you're not Jack or Jill, okay?
Science and Eastern religion, some Eastern religion will tell you this is an illusion.
They will tell you that this is just an illusion being created by the brain.
And what we're talking about when we talk about Jack and Jill is what scientists call qualia.
It is experience.
It is an experience that happens.
If you feel pain, right, I can trace, I might be able to trace the nerves that send that pain to your brain.
If you feel love, I might be able to trace the chemicals that send that love to your brain.
But nothing can trace or photograph the actual experience you are having, the unspeakable, indescribable experience you are having.
The reason we have art is because nothing can describe that experience except stories, paintings, music, all those things that go beyond words to describe what it is to be a human being, this thing inside.
And the scientists and the people who don't believe in this will say, yes, but you can be wrong.
You can be deluded, right?
You can think you're in love, but not be in love.
You can think you're in pain, but it's just me, you know, stimulating some part of the brain.
But the very fact that you can be wrong proves that you can be right, right?
If you can be deluded, that means there's something you're being deluded from.
So there is a real you in there that you are trying to get to.
And this was the big, you know, this is why I'm so fascinated by the Romantic writers, especially the English Romantic writers.
A lot of people say, oh, you know, we had the age of the wonderful enlightenment, the age of reason, and then those rotten romantics came along with the backlash.
It was backlash against reason.
All they wanted to talk about was emotion.
That's nonsense.
That's not what happened.
First of all, the age of reason, the highlight of the age of reason, was the terror of the French Revolution.
It was people cutting each other's heads off because they took away religion, they took away tradition, they took away all the things that guide human beings in their hearts.
They took them away, they ended up just beheading each other.
That was the age of reason.
That was the top of the line of the age of reason.
That's what it led to.
And what the romantics were saying was, wait, wait, you forgot about this internal experience of being a human being and what is it all about.
And they tried to find it.
Most of them tried to find it without having God.
So they would get to ideas of reuniting with nature.
They would get to ideas of beauty as truth, truth, beauty.
And they tried to reestablish the religious experience of the internal sense of self, the spiritual experience of what it means to be Jack or Jill without God.
Usually it didn't work.
Guys like Wordsworth got wise and they started to find God.
But you know, the whole thing, the command to love others as yourself that you get in the Bible is a command to know others and to know yourself.
Because you can't know anything until you love it.
You can't know people until you love them.
It's at some level, in some way.
And so it's this idea that you exist and other people exist.
And when you start to get there, you start to understand the religious experience.
You know, you see this on the left all the time.
They don't believe that anybody exists except a small number of people in New York and LA.
Muslims come along, Islamist terrorists come along and they say, I'm blowing you up because of Allah.
And they say, no, no, no, you don't understand.
You're blowing me up because you don't have a job.
No, no, I'm blowing you up because of Allah.
No, no, no.
It's because we're imperialists and we've ruined you.
No, no, no.
I'm blowing you up.
Don't let the guy exist.
They don't let him explain his motives to them.
They're too busy explaining their motives because that's narcissism.
That's assuming that you exist, but nobody else exists.
All right, so that's number one.
You know you exist, and that means that you know there is some kind of spiritual essence of you that is more than the physical essence of you, the physical being of you.
Number two is you know that something's wrong with you.
You know you are not the Jack or Jill you were meant to be.
Everybody knows it.
Everybody does.
You know, Sigmund Freud had to invent a myth of what he called the, I think he called it the primal murder, the first murder.
People murder because he couldn't understand why everybody felt a sense of guilt.
Everybody felt the sense of guilt.
In Christianity, we call it the fall, right?
The fall of man.
That man is a sinful being, that he has broken, he has broken the connection with God, and history has taken him further and further away.
And Jesus has opened up a door in history through which we can escape back toward ourselves.
We know something's wrong with us.
Every one of us knows we're not, you know, you ever listen to people talk about what's good about them and what's wrong with them, right?
You know, you have the kind of a jolly outlook on life.
Yes, I've always had a jolly outlook on life.
I was born that way.
It's just kind of the way I am.
Or, you know, you have a bad temper.
Yeah, well, my dad used to pick on me, and so now I have a bad temper.
You know, like, in other words, the bad things are already somebody else's fault.
They're always the fault of history.
They're always, you know, but the good things we know are inherent.
But that actually is true.
There's something, there is a person that you were meant to be who does not have those flaws.
You know that you are not who you were meant to be.
You know you're not the person you were as a child.
You know, something has damaged you.
You know that you're out of whack.
And in Christianity, we call that original sin.
Number three is you know that there is a relationship with the world that you could be having that you are not having.
There is something about the world that is escaping you, that days go by when you're lost, you're not connected.
What do they call it now?
The psychologists call it being present.
I think they call it being present.
You know that you're not living at peak existence.
You know, I make this joke all the time about on the mailbag, I always say, will change your life possibly for the better.
And the joke behind that joke is the idea that if you say this will change your life, people immediately assume it's for the better.
You go up to the, you know, pick the person who maybe has the best life on earth.
Some movie star gets all the girls or all the guys, gets all the fame, all the things, and you say, read this book, it'll change your life.
And he goes, okay.
He doesn't say, change my life.
My life is perfect because nobody's life is perfect.
We all know something is wrong.
We all try to solve this in different ways.
We try to solve it by getting fame, by getting money, by getting love, all the things that don't really deliver what we want in the end.
But also symbolize what we want.
You know, you watch sports, a guy hits a ball with a stick, and we're so deeply moved.
It means nothing, right?
He's hitting a ball with a stick.
It means nothing, but we know that it symbolizes some kind of effort that we're supposed to be making toward excellence, toward perfection, toward a relationship with matter, to a relationship with the world of control over the world that we don't have.
So those are the three things you know.
You know you exist, you know you're not right, you know you're not right with the world.
Now, there basically, in my opinion, there are basic three approaches to this.
One is that everything is an illusion, and this is kind of the Eastern and scientistic idea.
The idea that scientistic means science is a religion, basically.
Science is not just the control of matter.
But the idea, and I know I'm being simplistic because I don't have time to go into it, but the idea is that, you know, the Buddhists would say, say, desire is suffering, so get rid of your desires.
You know, the world is an illusion.
Don't let the world bother you.
And you lift above it, and you sit in meditation and you wear the red robes and then you have lifted above it.
Another way of dealing with this problem that we all have, this problem of guilt, this problem of disconnection, of alienation with the world, is rules.
And this is kind of most orthodox religions.
You have rules.
By the way, in the first thing, the idea that it's an illusion, I would include stoicism and existentialism.
This idea that you just tough it out.
You know, it's just like you're not trying to do anything.
The idea that you can achieve anything is an illusion.
Forget it, just tough it out.
The second is rules.
That's most Orthodox religions.
If you just follow the rules, you'll be okay.
God will love you.
Maybe this life won't be so good, but the next life will be good.
The Christian answer, as I read it, is different.
It is to live into your life.
Live into the situation, into the suffering, into the desire, into the anguish, into the joy.
All of that stuff.
Live into it because that way, because God himself can manifest as a human being, there is a you that is the you God meant you to be.
And I think it was Saint Ignatius Loyola who said, your desires, I'm probably misquoting this, I'm quoting from memory, but the way I read it is, your desires are the outline of your personality.
You're supposed to have desires, but your desires are broken.
You are, instead of wanting to hit a ball with a stick as a symbol of what you can be, of a symbol of your excellence, of a symbol of the perfect relationship with matter, you actually want to hit a ball with a stick to get money and have people cheer for you and throw popcorn at you.
You know, that's the way that desires get ruined.
And that is why you find a lot of people who achieve their desires become very unhappy people.
A lot of movie stars become really nasty people because they've gotten everything they set out to get in life and it doesn't solve the problem.
So this is what I mean when I say that Christianity for me is the one religion that speaks into the person that I am and it tells me there is a person that you are, that God made, that you can move toward and moving toward it is the great joy of life.
That is what I think.
I think that when you find your North Star, which is God, and you start following that North Star, your life becomes happy on the instant, happier on the instant.
And this is whether you're in bed with your spouse or eating a donut or on the toilet or reading a book, whatever you're doing, if you're moving in the direction of that star, you will be happier.
Your life will be better.
And so all I'm saying about religion is that this whole myth that has been created, this scientistic myth that it's outmoded, that it's outdated, that it's not true, it really is a flaw in logic.
It is flawed logic.
And yet, the media and the academy and the intellectual class, and when I say the intellectual class, I don't mean real intellectuals, because real intellectuals aren't like this.
I mean the semi-intellectual class who form most of our commentators, most of our writers, most of our reviewers, most of the people who talk in your ear all day long and teach you your classes and create your movies, the semi-intellectual class have created an atmosphere where you cannot reach the things you already know, that you are there, that God made you to be something that you're not, that you can correct that.
You can start to correct that if you live in a certain way.
All right, I just wanted to get that off my chest because I felt the great clavenless abyss is opening up before us and I didn't have time to get it in yesterday.
Stuff I like before we go.
You know, we started out talking to the redoubtable Michael Knowles about, he did a great segment this week about providence, about providence in the founding.
And I really do believe there is providence in history that sometimes you mistake victory for providence, but that if you look back in history, you see what providence means.
You know, the God-King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, often says that prophecy is not to let us know what's going to happen.
It is to let us know after it happens that God did it.
The Battle of New Orleans00:02:31
And so sometimes we see Providence looking back better than we can see it in the moment.
So I just wanted to talk briefly about the Battle of New Orleans.
Andrew Jackson is a guy who kind of reminds me of some of the stuff that was going on today.
People were appalled when Jackson was elevated to the presidency.
It was the end of the elegant Virginia planters who kind of founded the country.
It was the beginning of this kind of backwoods nobody.
But one of his great achievements was to beat the British at the Battle of New Orleans.
He was far outnumbered, and Providence just seemed to be in operation.
The fog came in.
Even, you know, people never think about this, but this was right before, I think it was 1814, the end of 1814.
It was right around the turn of the year.
And this was the year that Napoleon escaped from Elba.
And the Hundred Days started when Napoleon gathered an army out of nothing and came back and attacked and was defeated at Waterloo.
So the British didn't have the forces and the attention to pay to Andrew Jackson at New Orleans.
And Jackson beat them, beat a much bigger force.
This was commemorated in the hilarious but also lovable 1959 Grammy winning number one hit by Johnny Horton, the Battle of New Orleans.
We will be back on Wednesday.
If you have questions for the mailbags, send them in.
You got to subscribe to thedailywire.com.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
a fabulous 4th of July.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans.
And we caught the bloody British in a town in New Orleans.
We fired our guns and the British kept a coming.
There wasn't as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to run it.
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
We looked down a river and we seed the British come.
And there must have been a hundred of them beating on the drum.
They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring.
We stood beside our cottonbills and didn't say a thing.
We fired our guns and the British kept a coming.
There wasn't as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to run.
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
Old Hickory said we could take them by surprise.
If we didn't fire muskets till we looked them in the eye, we held our fire till we see their faces well.
Then we opened up our squirrel guns and really gave them well.