Andrew Clavin and Carrie Lucas of Independent Women’s Voice argue Democrats’ "socialist" policies—like Chuck Schumer’s "Better Deal"—ignore women’s core concerns, from $1.5T Medicaid inefficiencies to stagnant wages tied to labor market rigidities, while praising Trump’s deregulation as a private-sector lifeline. They dismiss leftist feminism as reductive, contrasting it with market-driven healthcare and education successes, and condemn the Charlie Gard case as government overreach trampling parental rights. With 40% of women voting for Trump in 2016, they reject Obama’s "Life of Julia" messaging as broken promises, urging conservatism to pivot from economic jargon to relatable solutions—before pivoting abruptly to war films and Borges’ Pierre Menard, framing today’s ideological clashes as a crisis of evolving meaning in a tech-driven world. [Automatically generated summary]
As many of you have noticed, our country is deeply divided.
For those of you who haven't noticed, our country is deeply divided.
Half the people seem to be clinging to old-fashioned values like faith, patriotism, and decency, and the other half vote for the Democrats.
But we here at the Andrew Clavin Show believe that through education and understanding, we can begin to build bridges between us conservatives and the evil knuckleheads on the left.
So today we'd like to examine a key principle of what we laughingly call leftist thought, namely relativism.
Relativism is the idea that there is no absolute truth, knowledge, or morality, but that each culture forms its own sense of what's true or false or right or wrong.
Relativists claim that there are cultures where our most deeply held morals and values do not apply.
Places where infidelity is acceptable, places where cowardice is admired, places where murder is just an ordinary event that one must get used to.
Places like France, in other words.
According to these leftists, the virtue of relativism is that it makes you less judgmental about other cultures.
Let's say, for example, you're a woman traveling in Saudi Arabia and you find yourself being flogged to death for exposing your bare ankle.
Rather than taking a haughty tone that privileges your Western values, you might instead observe that when one is in Saudi Arabia, one must learn to behave like a retrograde savage without the moral sense God gave a coyote.
Or you might prefer to stay in America with your relatives, hence the term relativism.
The important point is that if you don't believe anything is good or bad, you won't be prejudiced, which is bad in your culture.
In other cultures, prejudice is good, which is bad in your culture.
And so on.
Relativism derives from the belief that there is no God and therefore there can be no absolute moral values.
Many philosophers have expressed this belief.
For instance, Nietzsche said, God is dead, so when an eagle feeds on a lamb, it is neither good nor evil.
God responded a few years later by saying, now Nietzsche is dead, so ha But of course, the belief in God has also been destroyed by science, which has shown that the universe is without reason and without cause.
Science accomplished this by using reason to discover the causes of things, which would only be possible in a universe that had reason and cause and therefore had been created by God.
Scientists haven't quite made sense of this yet, but it doesn't matter because everything's relative.
Now, there could be some drawbacks to relativism.
For instance, if one culture believes in tolerance and another culture believes in slaughtering everyone who believes in tolerance, it could lead to occasional friction.
But it's safe to say the situation won't continue very long and soon there'll only be one of these cultures left.
So, hooray for relativism.
Hooray For Meundies!00:04:24
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky boo.
Birds are ringing me also singing hunky-dunky donkey.
Ship-shaped-topsy, you're welcome to zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day!
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
Hooray, hurrah!
That was my favorite opening ever, I think.
It's a mailbag day tomorrow, and you know what that means.
You know what that means.
It means you are one day away from having all your personal problems solved.
Look in the mirror, that miserable human being that you're looking at will be gone tomorrow if you get your question into the mailbag today.
And if I answer it, my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
But in order to get in the mailbag, you have to subscribe to thedailywire.com for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
That's what it costs to have all your problems solved.
And if you subscribe for the year, it's a lousy $100 a month.
And you get the leftist tears mug, which alone will solve most of your problems.
There will only be a few ancillary problems left over that I will solve in the mailbag when you ask.
We have a guest today.
We have Connie Lucas of Independent Women's Voice.
And I'm going to ask her the question that I think is on every conservative's mind.
Are women just no good at being free?
Is this like American women?
Do you know that if women couldn't vote, this is true.
I'm saying this to just because, you know, so you don't get the dart in the cheek, you know.
But if women hadn't been allowed to vote, there would not have been a Democrat elected, I think, in the last like ever.
That is a scientific proof of something.
It's almost the end of July, I've noticed.
This month really went singing by because we had all these problems and troubles with the set and everything.
Everything goes zinging by.
But that means that it's almost National Underwear Month.
So soon you'll be singing underwear carols underneath the underwear tree.
And am I the only one who does that, giving underwear presents?
To celebrate Nash.
It actually is.
I'm not making this up.
It actually is National Underwear Month.
And to celebrate National Underwear Month, Me Undies is making it easier than ever to try the world's most comfortable underwear by giving you a risk-free guarantee all through National Underwear Month.
If you don't love your Me Undies, they're free.
I got to tell you, these things are insanely comfortable.
I mean, it really is.
They're weird.
I mean, it's this material.
It's called Lensing Micromodale.
And it actually is softer than cotton.
It really is.
It's not, not kidding.
It is sustainably sourced, naturally soft fabric, three times, they say, softer than fabric.
It is taken from Austrian beech trees.
Okay, this is, I swear, I'm not making it up.
Micro-modal is taken from Austrian beech trees.
It's three times softer than cotton, and it naturally inhibits odor.
This is why Austrians can sneak up on you so well because you can't smell them coming because their underwear is so fresh.
They really do feel good.
And if you go on the website, it's lots of fun.
I'm kind of old-fashioned and conservative, so I keep hitting the classic button, and they'll send you stuff that's black and white and gray.
But if you hit the, I can't remember what it is, like radical button, then they have all these incredible designs.
They have new designs every month.
So they're always changing around and you can do this.
And these things are built especially.
There's obviously some for men, some for women, though you can get matching colors, not matching underwear, but they're built especially to make you feel comfortable.
So all National Underwear Month long, you can feel for yourself that it is risk-free.
If you don't love your meundies, they're free.
Until August 31st, also, you can get 20% off your first pair plus free shipping at meundies.com slash clavin.
How do you spell on that?
Oh, gosh, you know, I never would have thought to say K-L-A-V-A-N, meundies.com slash clavin, meundies.com slash clavin, 20% off your first pair.
It really is worth trying.
I mean, it's just, it is a genuinely different experience with much softer material.
Parents Speak Out00:15:20
So to move from that, to move from the sublime to the unfortunate, we have to talk just a little bit about something because it actually plays into the news of the day, which is this Charlie Gard story.
The parents of Charlie Gard, you remember this is a baby who was terribly ill.
Basically, the parents said, look, we think we should take this child, this baby, our baby, to America, where they have an experimental procedure that'll cure this horrible disease the kid has, which is eating it away.
The courts said no, held this up so long that when the American doctor was finally allowed by the court to examine the baby, he said, look, it's too late.
The procedure will no longer work because the courts held this decision up so long.
So here, it's a heartbreaking cut, but it's worth watching.
Let's listen to Chris Guard, the baby's father, making the announcement that basically they've given up and why they've given up.
There is one simple reason why treatment cannot now go ahead, and that is time.
A whole lot of time has been wasted.
We are now in July, and our poor boy has been left to just lie in hospital for months without any treatment whilst lengthy court battles have been fought.
Tragically, having had Charlie's medical notes reviewed by independent experts, we now know had Charlie been given the treatment sooner, he would have had the potential to be a normal, healthy little boy.
Despite his condition in January, Charlie's muscles were in pretty good shape.
And far from showing irreversible catastrophic structural brain damage, Dr. Hirano and other experts say his brain scans and EEGs were those of a relatively normal child of his age.
We knew that ourselves, because as his parents, we knew our son, which is why we continued fighting.
Charlie has been left with his illness to deteriorate devastatingly to the point of no return.
So, I mean, obviously, this is England, right?
They have the national health.
They're so proud of the national health.
Rich people, of course, fly out to America to get health care.
I was there.
Well, I won't say I never used the national health, but whenever I needed something serious, I went and got private health care.
I don't know if you remember, I was talking a while back, just a few days ago, about, I think it was in Toronto, where they needed to build some stairs because people kept slipping in this park.
And the government put in a bid, got a bid for $65,000 stairs.
And a guy went out with some homeless people and built it for $550.
And the government, instead of saying, oh, we're ashamed of being the government and trying to get away with charging between $65,000 and $150,000, as I recall, they instead attacked the guy who built the stairs.
Now this father whose baby is going to die comes out and says, you know, you wait.
It may have been a slim chance.
This was our decision.
We're the parents.
We love this baby.
We know this baby.
This is our decision to make.
You held us up until essentially you eliminated this chance.
The High Court, this is the High Court of Justice Family Division, instead of saying, hmm, you know, maybe we should reconsider having killed this baby, maybe, you know, not at all.
The judge then issues a decision and he says, I think it's my duty to comment briefly on the absurd notion that has appeared in recent days that Charlie has been a prisoner of the National Health Service, or that the National Health Service has the power to decide Charlie's fate.
This is the antithesis of the truth.
In this country, children have rights independent of their parents.
This is a baby we're talking about, right?
When you say a baby has rights independent of the parents other than the right to life, the right not to be tortured or something like that, you're essentially saying that the government has the right to make decisions for the baby because the baby's not going to be making decisions for himself.
He says, almost all of the time the decision goes on.
Parents make decisions about what is in the best interest of their children and so it should be.
Just occasionally, however, there will be circumstances such as here where a hospital and parents are unable to decide and it's in the best interests of the parents that we take it to the court.
Well, good job.
Good job.
Jackass.
I mean, people were actually writing me about this because I complained about it before.
They were writing me from England and saying, no, no, no, you don't understand.
In England, you see, when you put your child in the hospital, he becomes essentially the charge of the doctor, and the doctor has to decide.
My answer to that is: remember back in 1776 when we were shooting at you?
This is why.
You know, this is why.
We don't want the decisions made from the top down.
We want decisions made by the people who love us, by the closest person to us.
We want decisions made by family, if not the family, the town, if not the town, the city, if not the city, the state.
Only when it has to be made by the federal government do we want it made from some central government.
This was a decision.
And look, this is not even a question.
We don't even get to the question of the right to life or anything like that.
It's a question of who decides, who makes these decisions.
The person who loves the baby.
And the reason this is so important is because as we speak, the Senate is trying to continue a debate about Obamacare.
All they want to do is vote.
They have to vote on the bill that they have, but that vote will open up debate.
It's just a vote to open up debate, and they're still not sure.
I mean, Rand Paul is still posturing on television saying, well, this is that vote to open the debate.
Debate it.
Let people see you, and they don't want to do it.
And Donald Trump, you know, this is the thing.
I keep saying Donald Trump has learned stuff.
And what I keep saying about Donald Trump is he has learned to do things, but he still has his personality.
And his personality is, you know, different.
Let's put it that way.
It's different than most of the presidents we've had.
And the big question is: will his personality get in the way of his learning to become president?
Because I do believe he can learn to be a good president.
And now, suddenly, finally, he is caught on to what he is supposed to do, which is get out there and sell this bill, hold the Republicans' feet to the fire.
So he goes on.
Let's just take a quick look at Trump making a speech, the kinds of speeches he should have been making all along, but he's doing it now.
He's caught on.
This is what a president does.
This is cut one.
There is still time to do the right thing.
And for Senate Republicans, this is their chance to keep their promise.
Over and over again, they said repeal and replace, repeal and replace.
But they can now keep their promise to the American people to provide emergency relief to those in desperate need of help and to improve health care for all Americans.
To every member of the Senate, I say this: the American people have waited long enough.
There's been enough talk and no action.
Now is the time for action.
We are here to solve problems for the people.
Obamacare has broken our health care system.
It's broken.
It's collapsing.
It's gone.
And now it is up to us to get great health care for the American people.
So this is what he should be doing.
And, you know, of course, you can say he should have been doing it all along, but okay, he's a novice.
He's learning.
At least he's learning.
He went to the Boy Scouts.
This was my favorite.
This is Trump when I love him.
You know, he went to the Boy Scouts Jamboree, and the place is packed.
And again and again, he keeps taunting the press.
Oh, they're going to say there are 100 people here.
They're not going to show the press.
They're not going to show the crowds.
CNN tweets the crowd and the crowd is immense.
It's all these Boy Scouts.
And there's a gigantic big mockery of Barack Obama, a big Barack Obama mask in the background that gets on CNN.
It would never have gotten on CNN, except Trump just lives in their heads.
And they tweet out, we're not fake news.
We're showing the crowd.
We're showing the crowd.
It was great.
And here was my favorite moment.
Here he is taunting his old pal.
By the way, just a question.
did president obama ever come to a jamboree and if you can't see he turns around he's looking at rick perry He goes, where's Obama?
Where's Waldo?
It's like, where's Obama?
And the Democrats are going nuts and saying, you shouldn't politicize the Boy Scouts.
These are the guys.
The reason Obama never went to a jamboree is because they politicized the Boy Scouts with the gay question.
You know, the Boy Scouts didn't want to have gays.
So the Democrats were just hounding them, trying to defund them, all this stuff.
But when Trump does it, suddenly it's wrong.
So Trump is in their face.
He's fighting back.
This is good stuff.
All of this is good stuff.
And meanwhile, before I go on, and this is really going to get interesting.
So you're going to want to come to thedailywire.com and listen to it because you can no longer use the free video on Facebook or YouTube.
We're going back to the Daily Wire.
If you subscribe, if you subscribe, you can watch the whole show on thedailywire.com and put your questions in the mailbag and have your miserable life transformed.
so so Trump is doing this And meanwhile, meanwhile, I mean, not to forget, okay, because I'm going to get to all the Trump drama and craziness in a minute.
But meanwhile, while Trump is doing this, the Democrats have become kind of, they've gone full commie.
Chuck Schumer gets up and they've announced their new thing.
It's called the better deal.
And it's, you know, people attack them because it's such a stupid phrase, it's such a weak phrase, but I guess it's better than the new deal and better than the deal that the art of the deal would give you or something like this.
And what is the new deal?
First of all, so Chuck Schumer gets up and he says that capitalism is finished.
This is number four.
Old-fashioned capitalism has broken down to the detriment of consumers.
Adam Smith has lost his way amidst these big corporations.
Large corporations, in too many instances, merge for their own interests so they, not the consumer, can dictate prices, the quantity, and the quality of goods.
We're going to fight to allow regulators to break up big companies if they're hurting consumers and to make it harder for companies to merge if it reduces competition.
Yeah, that's it, Chuck.
That's where we need more regulation.
It's like, you know, they're acting, you know, you know what's sad?
It's too, it's just too bad that Democrats weren't in office for the last eight years.
Because if Democrats had had the presidency and had a super majority for two years in Congress, they would have fixed everything.
Uh-oh, you know, that's what happened.
They got nothing done.
They were too busy telling us who should use our bathroom, too busy imposing this healthcare system, which is like, it really is like an anchor on the economy.
I just want to play one more cut of Schumer so you realize if Donald Trump is as unpopular as the polls keep telling us he is, as the press keeps telling us he is, why are the Democrats suddenly talking exactly like Donald Trump?
Okay, let's hear from Cut Five.
This is Chuck Schumer selling his new plan.
Average families feel they're being pushed around by large economic forces and are losing that traditional American faith in the future.
Too many families in America feel like the rules of the economy are rigged against them.
They feel like they're getting a raw deal.
And they're right.
They're almost powerless to change them.
We are here today to tell the people of Berryville and the working people of America, someone has your back.
Yeah, that's good.
The working people of America, someone has your back.
This is the party, this is the party that does nothing but divide people.
It does nothing but say, oh, the blacks against the whites, the straits against the gays.
Oh, if you're this, you're oppressed.
And the people who have been their traditional villain, the white male, the working class guy who goes to work, does his job, maybe thinks that like the old fashioned ways are better than their new fangled ideas.
And he's the guy they have been targeting.
Guys clinging to his Bible and his guns.
They had the government for eight years.
These radicals, these communists, these socialists, they had the government for eight years.
What we are living in now is Obama's America.
We are still living in Obama's America.
And that is why, that is why it's so important that Trump gets this right.
And he's been doing this other thing at the same time where he has been tweeting about Jeff Sessions.
And again, this has nothing to do whether if you like Jeff Sessions.
Obviously, Trump is really upset that Sessions recused himself from this Russian investigation.
And you know what?
I don't blame Trump for being upset.
I think this Russian investigation is nonsense.
It doesn't mean that there wasn't a meeting here that shouldn't have taken place.
It doesn't mean that there wasn't a conversation.
What it means is the narrative that they're putting, wrapping that all in, the Democrats have done so much more with the Russians, even with Russian disinformation that they were getting from that fusion GPS that was gotten by a Hillary donor.
It was false information that they were using and spreading around and getting James Comey to start an investigation using that disinformation.
All that stuff that they were doing, you know, that's completely forgotten.
Unmasking people in classified phone conversations, completely forgotten.
It's just any meeting they had.
They've got Kushner, Jared Kushner, is now, yesterday, I think he was at the Senate Intel Committee.
He was meeting staff.
And today he is with the House Intel Committee, actually meeting with the congressman, answering questions.
Remember, he was in on that meeting with Donald Trump Jr. where they talked to the lawyer and nothing happened.
And it was such a big story because nothing happened.
When nothing happens, that has got to lead the news.
And Kushner kind of came out and blew it away.
He gave an 11-page statement.
He said he was in the meeting for 10 minutes and he texted somebody, his assistant, to call him, get him out of the meeting.
I thought, you should remember that next time you're talking to Jared Kushner.
If he gets a phone call, he's bored.
He's just tired.
But here he comes out and makes a statement.
And very rare for him to say anything at all, but here he is.
Let me be very clear.
I did not collude with Russia, nor do I know of anyone else in the campaign who did so.
I had no improper contacts.
I have not relied on Russian funds for my businesses.
And I have been fully transparent in providing all requested information.
Donald Trump had a better message and ran a smarter campaign.
And that is why he won.
Focus On Women Voters00:14:57
Suggesting otherwise ridicules those who voted for him.
See, that's such a good point because what he's saying is everything, everything that they have done to suggest that this was a Russian invasion of America is attacking the people who went to the polls.
All those people that Chuck Schumer's trying to win back, all those former working class Democrats who voted for Trump, they're the people who are there saying when you call them deplorables, that's who you're talking to.
When you say that they were fooled by the Russians, that's who you're talking to is a really, really good point.
If Trump could just stay on point.
So, I don't blame Trump for being upset, but he's going after Jeff Sessions, his oldest friend, his oldest ally, the guy who really gave him the idea of the wall and going after immigration, who supported him in that.
He starts tweeting against him angrily and just kind of humiliating him in public.
It's no way to treat somebody, first of all, it's no way to treat a friend.
I mean, you call a guy in, talk to him, or whatever you want to do, you know, send him a message through an intermediary.
You don't go out on Twitter and go after your pals.
That is not what you do.
And so, here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
You know, just before I play this, I just have to say there is a guy.
Let me see if I can find this.
There is a guy on who called, here it is, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
He called her.
This is at the Daily Beast, this left-wing thing.
This guy, Ira Madison, III, he called her a butch queen.
And he said, as he went in front of the press, he said, it's her first time in drag at the ball.
If a right-wing guy did that, he would be pilloried, and rightly so.
It just disgusts me.
Anyway, she comes on, Fox and Friends, and they ask her basically, is she going to fire, is Trump going to fire Jeff Sessions?
Look, I know that he is certainly frustrated and disappointed in the Attorney General for recusing himself.
But as we've said, I think that's a decision that if the president wants to make, he certainly will.
And he's continuing to move forward and focus on other things.
But that frustration certainly hasn't gone away.
And, you know, I don't think it will, given the fact that the president is being attacked unnecessarily and certainly for no reason on something that I think he and most of America feel is a complete hoax and that the media has gotten so spun up in Russia fever, we're looking to move on.
And it makes it really hard when every single day the media spends 15 times as much time talking about Russia as they do that the issues that Americans care about.
There was a poll in the Wall Street Journal just last week that said the top three issues that Americans care about are health care, immigration, and jobs.
And the top three issues that the press covers is Russia, Russia, and more Russia.
You know, I get it.
I do get it.
But it's like, you know, I don't want any Charlie guards in this country.
I do not want any Charlie guards in this country.
Not one.
Not one.
I do not want the government deciding who lives and who dies because they're just no good at it.
They're no better at that than they are at building a stair in the park.
Okay.
And so all I'm saying about Trump is focus, dude.
The guy could be good at being president.
He has the skills to be president.
Don't let the senators, don't let the GOP say, oh, we were too distracted.
You know, don't let the press focus on something else.
Keep the focus on these guys and get that health care bill up for debate.
It really is.
It really is what I think the Donald has to do, and it has nothing to do with right or wrong here.
This is politics, talking pure politics, getting stuff done.
All right, let us bring on our guest.
I'm sorry, I kept her waiting.
Carrie Lucas, the vice president of policy and economics at the Independent Woman's Voice.
Her work has appeared everywhere: Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today.
And the thing that endears her to me more than anything else, she is the co-author of, she is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, which I should have bound in leather and put on my shelf.
You can find her on Twitter at Carrie Lucas, C-A-R-R-I-E-L-U-K-A-S.
Carrie, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me on.
It's a pleasure.
First of all, tell me what the independent women's voice does exactly.
Well, we're an educational organization and we try to represent what we consider mainstream American women.
interesting hearing you talk about the list of issues that people care about.
It's so important that people recognize that that's what women care about too.
So often when you hear the average women's group makes it sound as though women only care about reproduction or child care issues, where we know that women are most concerned about things like the economy, getting our health care system right, national security.
And so those are where we spend our energies too.
So it's almost as if you're saying that women are people, almost like I know.
Controversial.
So let me ask you this.
I was on Fox once on their morning show and I said, I asked the question, why is now the national organization women, why is it a left-wing group?
If it represents women, there are right-wing and left-wing women.
Why has the left been able to co-opt the question of what's good for women?
Yeah, you know, they've been so successful.
And I don't know how we've allowed them to get away with it.
I actually think that's something that conservatives should grapple with and say, you know, we need to take this topic a lot more seriously.
For so long, we've allowed the women's studies program.
If you think of what happens kind of in our popular culture and on college campuses, really left-leaning women have absolutely dominated and been able to control the conversation about women and public policy.
And that's a real shame because you're right.
Women, the last election, you often hear this idea that women vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
And while, yes, there's a wage gap, it was pretty small.
It's not nearly as expansive as people would have you believe.
It was four out of every 10 voters, female voters, voted for Trump in the last election.
That still means Republicans have some work to do, but it still shows there's a lot of women out there who are open to that message.
We'll be a lot more open to that message if Republicans focused on reaching out to women in ways that resonate with them.
Well, you know, as a right-winger, I have a lot of friends who are certifiably insane, and they are constantly sending me things about YouTube videos.
Women can't do freedom.
Women don't want freedom.
They threw out the men who took care of them.
Now they want the man, capital T, capital M, to take care of them.
And nobody ever dares to ask this question.
So I'm going to ask, is this a problem?
I mean, women seem, as you say, they're not totally in the pocket of the Democrat Party, but the Democrats have been very successful in co-opting their issues.
Is there something about women that just doesn't want to, that will not support the idea of being free and individualism?
You know, I don't think it needs to be that way.
You know, it's interesting.
I think, you know, I'm a libertarian type of girl.
Clearly, what resonated with me when I was young was this idea of freedom and independence.
And a lot of the messages that are considered more, you know, that tend to attract more guys worked with me.
But I think what we're increasingly learning and what research shows is that a lot of women are open to the idea of conservative ideas, of free markets and limited government when you talk to them about it in ways that make sense to them.
You know, women are, we have some different concerns than men.
Women are more likely to be taking care of kids.
Women are more likely to face issues like poverty and be worried about health care access.
But I think that what Republicans and what conservatives should feel good about is say, we have a great story to tell.
We should be, I think that the reason why women should support conservatism is that we do a better job at giving opportunities for those in poverty.
We have a better, we have better solutions for making sure our health care system is there for people who need it.
And our education system provides the skills that people, particularly those at the bottom, are going to need to get into the economy.
But so often I think when you talk about things like tax reform or Social Security or budgets, you'd be talking language that the guys that work with guys, things like, we want 4% economic growth.
Well, you know, that's not going to convince many women, but talk about how it's going to help families and how it's going to make the system work better for people like them.
We can win them over.
We just have to be smart about it.
You know, I couldn't help.
I wanted to cut that.
Remember the video, The Life of Julia, that the Obama administration put out?
I wanted to bring a little bit of that in and play it.
But, you know, they've made it impossible to find.
They've removed it as well.
They should.
It was an embarrassment.
But just to remind people, it showed Obama advertising essentially that under Obama, women would be taken care of from cradle to grave.
If your organization, if the Independent Women's Voice made a life of Julia, what would it look like?
What are you offering to women through freedom that trumps what Obama was offering?
Yeah, you know, I think one of the conversations to begin with, all the failures out there in the life of Julia, because yeah, you're right, this idea that the government can take care of you every step of the way and provide this like wonderful child care system that's going to help your kids.
And then you can go to the public schools and you can get a loan and go this whole idea that government's going to take care of you and support you.
That's, you know, even if that is tempting to women, people should remember that like government does an awfully bad job at a lot of this.
You know why you don't want government to run your child care system and private and pre-K schools?
It's because they're not doing a very good job with the kids that they have from ages five to 12.
You know, we look at things like our health care system, you know, government makes a lot of big promises, but then, you know, if you're in Medicaid, a lot of people out there would be saying, you know, I still can't get a doctor's appointment.
It's still not helping me get the care I need.
So I think that first we need to remind people that government may promise to take care of you, but it does a really bad job at it.
You know, it does a better job.
If you look at the things that work in America and the ways we've made progress, it's in the private enterprise.
It's through that market-based exchanges where things are getting better, where education and kind of information is becoming.
You have better ways to educate your kids.
It's not really the public schools haven't been changing and improving, but there's a whole lot of other things that are.
So I think we can kind of explain that those markets, there are these solutions.
And then, you know, I'm not, you know, I don't think that we should be out there saying that there's no role for a safety net because I think there is.
And I think we can have make sure that the safety net is doing what it needs to do.
And that's helping people who actually need it instead of trying to put the vast majority of American on food stamps.
You know, that's that's not good news.
That's terrible news.
And we shouldn't all want everybody to be on Medicaid.
We should be trying to get people into a private health insurance system, which does much better.
All studies show that private health insurance serves people better than places like Medicaid.
That's why we want to reform Medicaid and get people off Medicaid so they have something better.
That's it.
I agree.
And I agree with you about the safety net, that it's not like we're trying to get rid of every possible aid that government can give.
It's just we don't want them running people's lives.
So you need as little of it as possible, basically.
I know you're a nonpartisan organization.
Independent Women's Voice is a nonpartisan organization, but you're looking now at a big change we've had.
Obviously, this election has turned everything topsy-turvy.
Are you hopeful?
Are you feeling good about where we're going right now?
Or are you still?
Yeah, certainly we're feeling better.
There's a lot of opportunities out there when it comes to something like health care reform.
It's very easy to be frustrated and to be thinking, oh, why can't we just get this repeal done?
It seemed kind of incredible.
But man, it's a much better conversation and a better problem to have than had we been sitting here with Hillary Clinton moving us further and further down the line towards a single payer system.
So obviously I'm frustrated.
I wish that the progress was faster.
I hope that we can move on tax reform.
You know, right now, the Trump administration is talking about rolling back a whole lot of regulations and kind of behind the scenes doing undoing a lot of the damage that the Obama administration did in terms of making our labor markets more less flexible.
There was a lot of things that the Obama administration that was doing behind the scenes, which was really killing jobs and kind of making our workforce a lot less flexible.
That was terrible news for women.
The energy policies that the Obama administration was putting together through executive fiat, that was terrible news for our economy.
It was terrible news for family.
And the Trump administration is succeeding in rolling some of that back.
So yeah, there's a lot of frustrations.
And I want our guys and anybody who believes in limited government, whether you consider yourself a Republican or a Democrat or somewhere in between, I think we need to do more and focus on that.
But boy, it's much better placed than it could have been, you know?
You know, it is funny.
Just as we're having this conversation, I'm just reflecting on the fact that I almost never hear, I never hear people who specifically represent women having conversations like this on TV.
It's always about sex.
It's always about reproductive rights.
It's always about abortion and things like this.
And it is, I can see why that seizes the news, why that colonizes the news.
But it really is a shame because obviously, as we say, women have a lot more concerns than just that and just like everybody else.
Yeah, we have a saying we often say at our organization that all issues are women's issues.
And it really is unfair to make it sound as though it's frankly kind of, you know, it's a little insulting and sexist.
Just a little.
Just a little bit.
Yeah, when Nancy Pelosi comes out and says, oh, this is our agenda for women and it's all about child care.
Well, you know what?
Yeah, child care is important to me.
It's also important to my husband.
But you know what's more, it's just as important to me.
It's things like our tax policy and health care reform.
It's, you know, it is.
It's just funny how I think the left can be really guilty of kind of trying to pigeonhole women as if that's all we care about.
Where can people find you and your organization?
Well, please come see, come to the Independent Women's Voice at iwvoice.org online.
We also have another organization, Independent Women's Forum, and there's lots of information up there at iwf.org.
We're on Facebook and come find us on Twitter.
And we have a lot of information about all these topics.
We really appreciate people stepping by.
Well, thanks for coming on, Carrie.
It's been really nice talking to you.
Really interesting.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, that is different.
It is amazing when you think about it.
It's amazing when you think about it how entirely the left has relegated women's issues to their bodies.
I mean, it's kind of bizarre when you think about it that feminists, feminists, feminists must be like, they must just call the dumbest women in America to get them to be feminists.
War's Glorious Shift00:02:54
That's the only thing I can think of.
I mean, I just do not see where any of the, you know, it's funny.
Very quickly, when women wanted to enter the workforce, and they're talking way long ago back in the 70s and 80s, that kind of opened up.
People sort of, look, corporations don't care who they hire ultimately.
They want more workers.
They can pay people less.
One of the reasons I think wages have stagnated is because the workforce has doubled with, or the potential workforce has doubled with the entry of women.
But, you know, I just think feminists have been utterly destructive.
I do not think there is a good thing I can say about them, except where the circle of feminism intersects with the circle of individualism.
That little sliver there, I think, is where feminism, you know, I agree with it because I think people should be able to do whatever they want, no matter what they are.
All right, stuff I like.
This is a complicated one.
Do I still, yeah, I have enough time.
I'm going to talk about this.
This is a genuine.
I wanted to talk about this.
It was yesterday we were talking about Dunkirk, which I thought was a good movie.
Didn't think it was a great movie, but I thought it was good.
And I was thinking about the fact that I went to look, I kind of considered just doing a whole stuff I like about war films and war books, but I've done that before.
And one of the things that I find so fascinating about war is that war has changed, obviously, since the days of Achilles, where Achilles must have been this great athlete, right?
He runs out there with a sword.
He's fighting a million.
You know how tired you would get if you were wielding a sword for more than three minutes.
I mean, swords were light in the old days.
They were much lighter than people think they were.
But even so, let's say it was five pounds, swinging a five-pound weight around, you know, while people are running at you with other swords trying to kill you is very exhausting.
That's why when I see women doing it in the movies, I kind of roll my eyes because I don't think it would be easy for a man.
I mean, I think the men who fought in those days must have been incredibly fit and in incredibly good shape.
And obviously war changed with the invention of gunpowder, changed further with the invention of like rapid-fire weapons, and the glory went out of war to some degree.
The courage that it took to enter war and the glory that you got from making that decision remains.
But the glory of the fight, you know, that old-fashioned like one man against another wielding swords is gone because modern warfare is utter chaos.
You know, when you see, you know, obviously the opening of Saving Private Ryan was kind of the cinematic version where that became reality.
Just utter chaos, utter death all around.
And really, if you watch that Restrepo, I think it was called, that documentary, you see just the confusion and the terror of it all.
So the glory of war, and it is glorious that people sacrifice themselves to defend our freedom, defend our country.
That is a glorious thing.
But the whole idea of glory and honor and combat and physical courage has changed and mutated.
Borges And The Quixote Crisis00:04:16
And so I want to recommend a very strange, bizarre story.
It's kind of an intellectual story.
It's not for everybody, by Jorge Luis Borges.
And Borges is, I believe he was Argentinian, was he?
He was Argentinian, yes, and he wrote in Spanish.
And he wrote mostly short stories.
He wrote two famous volumes of short stories.
A conservative, by the way.
He died in 1986.
And he became pals with William F. Buckley.
There's a famous interview with Buckley and Borges talking.
And he wrote these incredible exercises in intellectual experimentation.
So he would write about an endless library, what it would be like to live in an endless library.
But he has this one story that I've always loved called Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote, author of the Quixote, which is what they call it in Spanish.
And the idea is Pierre Menard is a more or less modern writer who sets as his task to rewrite Don Quixote word for word.
And the idea is that if you rewrote Don Quixote word for word, it would be an entirely different book because it wouldn't be written by the same person.
It wouldn't be read in the same time.
It wouldn't be read in the same context.
And he has, part of it is just hilarious.
So it'll compare parts of the original Don Quixote to Pierre Menard's Don Quixote.
So here's it says, it's a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes.
Cervantes wrote the following.
Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future's counselor.
And then Borges says, this catalog of attributes written in the 17th century and written by the ingenious layman Miguel de Cervantes is mere rhetorical praise of history.
Menard, on the other hand, writes, truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future's counselor.
History, the mother of truth, the idea is staggering.
Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality, but as the very font of reality.
So everything changes because it's written in a different time, the same exact words, and it's comical in this kind of high intellectual way.
The only reason this came to mind was we are obviously in a crisis of ideas.
When I say crisis, I don't mean crisis like the building is falling down.
I mean a turning point, a point when something, a tipping point, when something is going to change.
Obviously, it's not just the election of Donald Trump.
It's the eight years of this radical Obama that came before the fact that we have an actual party, a major political party that seems to have abandoned the basics of freedom, the basics of capitalism.
The fact that we have another party on the right, the Republican Party, that is in disarray, that it's at war with itself.
And there are a lot of very deep ideas underlying this division that I'd like to talk about, but I don't have time to talk about now.
But I'll come back and talk about it again.
But the thing is, the conservatism that comes out of this is not going to be the conservativism of the past, even if it has a lot of the same ideas, because it's going to look entirely different in the context of the modern world, in the context of technology, in the context of sexual freedom, in the context of mixed races, of the white race becoming less of a dominant force and other races becoming part of it.
Everything is going to be different, and conservatism is going to have to accept that in order to be the same, it will have to be different, because if it remains the same, it will be different in ways that we don't particularly like.
And that, in some ways, is part of the message of this wonderful Borges story.
If you like intellectual experimentation, Jorge Luis Borges, one of the great, great writers of the 20th century and one of us.
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