Ep. 356 dissects Anthony Scaramucci’s 10-day firing after a profanity-laced New Yorker interview, exposing White House chaos as Trump replaced him with Gen. John Kelly to tighten control—while Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s influence waned. Amid media frenzy over Mueller attacks, Roger Kimball defends Trump’s deregulation, judicial picks (like Gorsuch), and economic gains (2.6% GDP growth, 17-year-low unemployment) as proof of success despite elite backlash. The episode ties universities’ $36B endowments—like Harvard’s—to leftist indoctrination, proposing tax penalties for ideological bias, while framing Trump’s rise as a revolt against coastal media and unaccountable bureaucracies. Conservative alternatives like podcasts and thrillers (Silva, Tay) are touted as antidotes to cultural homogeneity. [Automatically generated summary]
Another gangland slang has rocked Washington, D.C.
This time the victim was Antony Scaramucci.
Just 10 days after being appointed the head mouthpiece for Mr. Big, the man they call the mooch or moochie or mooch mooch or moochie mooch, moocharama or the grand mouchet vanished without a trace, leaving nothing behind but a string of curse words and a video of Sean Hannity saying how smart Trump was to hire him and a video of Sean Hannity saying how smart Trump was to fire him.
The announcement that Moochman was finished was made when Fox News received a package containing a pair of mooch's pants with a fish wrapped in them, an old Sicilian symbol that either means Scaramucci sleeps with the fishes or we mistook Scaramucci's pants for a copy of the New York Times.
The mob who favored the Scaramucci hire immediately ordered a revenge hit on the mob who favored firing Scaramucci, causing Sean Hannity to riddle himself with machine gun bullets while driving around in circles in a 1937 roadster.
The rest of Washington took to the mattresses, but that was just out of sheer exhaustion.
Investigators say the hit on Scaramucci was only the latest in a string of gangland rubouts in and around the mob hideout, sometimes known as the nation's capital.
Only a few days ago, Reince, dopey-faced Priebus, the Capo, the Tutti Capo, was eliminated by John, the Generalissimo Kelly, the Capo de Tutti Frutti, while Jeff the Ruski Sessions, the Capo decaf Cappuccino, narrowly dodged a bullet which may yet take out Steve, the slob Bannon, the conciliary de Tutu Menudo.
Rival gangs sought to take advantage of the DC mayhem as Chuck, the crybaby Schumer, tried to forge an alliance with John, the incredibly old man, McCain, in the hopes of destroying Mr. Bigg's agenda and bringing the entire country to a standstill.
McCain, however, said he was perfectly capable of doing that on his own as he'd been bringing the country to a standstill since 1987.
Meanwhile, across town, Nancy, the crazy lady Pelosi, sometimes known as Big Mama or Incredibly Annoying Mama, or I can't remember where I put my purse, but it's around here somewhere, Mama, made her move to take over new territories by inventing new territories and then taking them over in her imagination and then dozing off with her face in her Waldorf salad.
Observers agree that the crime spree has now gotten so far out of hand that it would be investigated by the federal government if it weren't being perpetrated by the federal government.
As it is, we're likely to continue for some time to see scenes reminiscent of The Godfather or Goodfellas or The Sopranos with the federal government.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm from Hunky Dunky, life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing me also singing hunky donkey.
Ships and tipsy topsy, the world is it he's in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It's about to sing Oh, hurrah Hooray, hurrah Finally, Donald Trump has done something I can't forgive.
This I cannot forgive all through commentary land.
People are weeping.
They're out in the halls weeping.
He fired Anthony Scaramucci, who promised to be more fun than we could shake a stick at for years and years to come.
But we will continue somehow to find something amusing about the death of the Republic.
We have the mailbag tomorrow.
That's very important.
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We have Roger Kimball with us today, and he will just one of the smartest guys around.
He's the publisher and editor of the New Criterion, and he also publishes encounter books.
He is one of the great observers of the culture and a big supporter of Donald Trump.
So it's going to be very interesting to get a guy.
He's a real high-culture guy, get a guy like that talking about Trump because there's a lot of kind of high-culture disdain of the Donald, and I think it'll be different.
I hear that, so I didn't get to hear Knowles' show yesterday because I have a life, but I hear a lot of people listen to it and said, How on earth did that ever happen?
And the reason is we didn't hire our, we don't hire our podcasters at ziprecruiter.com.
We just go outside and say, Does anybody want a podcast?
And the first guy walks in the door, we gave him a podcast, so it was Knowles.
But as ZipRecruiter, if you really want to hire good people, ZipRecruiter is different.
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If we had done that, we would have gotten a real podcaster.
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If you don't want the kind of disasters that we have here at the Daily Wire to happen to you, the mooch is gone.
I am sad.
I have to say, 10 days in the job, and it is kind of interesting politically.
Like, I'm never dazzled by the press hysteria over changes in the office.
And the press, the press loves nothing better than to report this one hates that one, and this one's feuding with this one, and this one is stabbing the back.
And these guys love to leak to the press.
And oh, you know, Steve hates Reince, and this one hates this.
But this is kind of interesting because the chief of staff runs the White House.
I mean, he's the guy who lets you in to see the president.
He's the guy who arranges things.
And clearly, this White House has not been using the president's time very well.
So, the question here: well, let's look at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the spokeswoman.
She is dealing with John Roberts.
And John Roberts is the Fox News.
He asks some really good questions of her as she explains why Scaramucci, obviously, the mooch took the hit after he gave that interview to the New Yorker with all the vile language.
But the word is that John Kelly came in to be chief of staff, General John Kelly, Marine General, and said to Trump, he's already turned the job down once, and he said, I'm not coming in with this clown around.
I am taking over this office.
He wanted to establish that he was the power.
He was the guy who's going to make decisions, and there wasn't going to be any loose cannons like the mooch running around.
Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Look, the president certainly felt that Anthony's comments were inappropriate for a person in that position.
And he didn't want to burden General Kelly also with that line of succession, as I think we've made clear a few times over the course of the last couple of days to several individually.
But General Kelly has the full authority to operate within the White House, and all staff will report to him.
When you say you didn't want to burden him with that line of succession, you mean the chain of command?
Yeah, correct.
And if we could just clarify one point about this chain of command.
Apparently, Jared Gush and Vonk Trump have said they look forward to following General Kelly's lead.
When it comes to the people who have access to the president, will that conduit be narrowed down now?
Will everything flow through Kelly, or will some things still flow around the Chief of Staff?
As I just said, the President's given full authority to General Kelly, and he'll make those determinations.
So the important thing here, the reason, see, this is smart reporting there from Roberts.
The important thing here is Jared and Ivanka.
I mean, you listen to Ann Coulter, for instance.
Ann Coulter, a big supporter of Donald Trump, but Ann Coulter is never afraid to just call people out when they're not going the way she wants them to go.
And she is very afraid that because Trump only trusts his family, he seems to only trust his family and generals.
So, and remember, Trump went to military school, didn't he?
He went to a military school, and like, I think that probably gave him a kind of respect for the military order.
But Jared and Ivanka are liberals.
They are classic left-wing Democrats, and they really have Trump's ear, right?
And they've been, according to, you know, reporting, we don't know how much of this is true, but according to reporting, they've been the force behind a lot of his decisions, like his executive order requiring federal contractors to embrace the gay agenda and bombing Syria was the big one.
That drove Ann crazy.
Hillary Clinton's health and family leave policies, that's been a big thing of Ivanka's for a long time.
And maybe they've been softening Trump on immigration.
It is rumored that they're the ones who got him to go after Jeff Sessions to attack Jeff Sessions because Sessions has been very hard about immigration.
And you know, one of the things about John Kelly, the Marine General, who was running Homeland Security before this, and he has cut down the number of illegals coming across the border, making it much harder for us to hire our staff because we don't use ziprecruiter.com.
But he has really cut down on illegals coming across the border.
And the rumor is that Ivanka and Jared are very liberal on immigration.
Of course, Trump ran on the wall.
That was his main thing.
That was the main thing that shot him to prominence.
So the question now is, will Jared and Ivanka be able to get into the Oval Office without going through John Kelly?
Because this is his family.
Basically, Ivanka was tweeting, I'm happy to work alongside John Kelly, you know, in his new capacity.
And everybody jumped on that word alongside.
Is he going to be in charge or not?
The real question, and it goes beyond this, the real question is, let's call it chaos, call it turbulence that's come out in these last weeks.
And my complaint about the turbulence in the White House is not political because what do I care if there's turbulence in the White House?
I don't care who's working there as long as they're doing a good job and things are happening and my freedom's not imperiled.
I don't care.
My problem with the turbulence in the White House is that it came while the health care bill was on the floor of the Senate and Trump was not out there herding the cats.
He was not out there on the phone.
He was not soothing the feelings of John McCain, who seems to have just stuck it to him because he doesn't like him.
He wasn't doing that stuff.
Instead, he was firing this one and that one.
So the big question is, is this turbulence, as so many people suspect, is it generated by Trump?
Is wherever Trump is, that's going to be the eye of a hurricane.
Is he going to generate turbulence?
Or is it structural?
Trump, an outsider, comes to Washington.
He tries to build bridges to the Republican establishment.
He puts Reines Priebus, right, former head of the RNC.
He puts him in there as his chief of staff.
He appoints Jeff Sessions.
Jeff Sessions was an ally, but he's also a guy that all the senators know, former senator, all the senators know him.
He's trying to build bridges.
And then he finds that that's not what he wants.
He likes being an outsider.
So now, by golly, he's going to bring in his people and he's going to shut things down and he's going to run things the way he wants.
And now the chaos will end.
Hard to imagine.
Hard to imagine Trump without chaos.
But again, this is a successful guy.
It's a guy who has done a lot of stuff in his life.
So it may just be that the Trump administration has hit bottom.
I mean, this is what Krauthammer.
Krauthammer had this remark the other day about this.
It looks like the Trump administration hit bottom last week and it seems to have bounced off the bottom.
Kelly is exerting his authority.
He's been given authority.
I have to say, Sikara Mooch, we hardly knew ye, although I think he would be a better contestant on Dancing with the Stars than Spicy would.
So I think it's actually an upgrade for them.
That's apparently the fate of people who leave.
But the thing is, when the health care bill crashed and burned, and it's not over yet because everybody in the Senate is saying it's time to move on, time to move on to tax reform because we can get more of that done.
But Trump is still badgering them about this.
He wants this done and he's still going after them.
When that died, that was a low point in the Trump presidency.
And the question is, is that the low point in the Trump presidency?
And to be fair to Trump, a lot of good things are happening.
And I keep bringing this up, but everybody is so mesmerized by his personality.
Everybody is so mesmerized by the size of the man and the coarseness of the man and the violence of the things that happen.
A guy comes in for 10 days and he's thrown out.
You're fired, you're fired, just like an episode of The Apprentice brought to life.
Everybody's so mesmerized that they forget that really good things are indeed happening.
Here is Trump.
This is cut number three.
This is Trump talking for a minute about some of the good things that have been happening.
Harder to Find Answers00:17:29
We have the highest stock market in history.
We have GDP on Friday.
Got very little mention, although I guess in the business areas it did, but got, I think, very little mention.
2.6 is a number that nobody thought they'd see for a long period of time.
Remember, I was saying we will hit three at some point in the not-too-distant future.
And everybody smiled and they laughed and they thought we'd be at one.
And 2.6 is an unbelievable number announced on Friday.
Unemployment is the lowest it's been in 17 years.
Business enthusiasm is about as high as they've ever seen it.
In fact, it is as high, the highest point in 28 years, according to a certain graph and a certain chart.
The manufacturers are, the enthusiasm level is incredible.
We have a lot of tremendous things going.
We have some interesting situations that will handle, North Korea, Middle East, lots of problems that we inherited from previous administrations, but we'll take care of them.
We'll take care of them very well.
But overall, I think we're doing incredibly well.
The economy is doing incredibly well.
So that, you know, 2.6%, remember, the experts were saying we never reached 3%.
2.6%, which is mostly driven by consumer confidence.
It's mostly driven by consumer spending in the second quarter of this year.
That is this culture that Trump is creating.
And it's the culture we want to be talking about.
We have Roger Kimball coming on after the break to talk about that, the way that Trump has transformed the culture by inspiring business people, the cutting of regulations.
Somebody wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal called The Myth of the Do Nothing Trump Presidency, saying, you know, he's not doing nothing.
He has not had legislative accomplishments, which are very important, but he is cutting back regulations.
He is making it easier to frack, making it easier to bring in to get energy.
He is making business easier, making spending easier for businesses and hiring easier.
And that is having an effect on the economy.
The stock market really is going through the roof.
And that's what we're going to talk about.
And if you want to know about the culture, and if you want to know about the news, I mean, this is one of the things that has been happening to me as a lifelong news junkie.
I am finding it harder and harder and harder to get the facts.
And the reason is, is this Trump hate and the division in the country has everybody reporting the facts in such a skewed way that just finding out what happened, just answering the question, what happened, has become harder and harder and harder.
And the best place I find to go are magazines.
And that is why I have this texture.com thing.
This texture app is amazing.
And I also like it because it makes my life disappear.
You know, like you're going around, you're just going around doing your life.
And I always read off my iPad and I press the texture.com thing and vanish.
I just vanish because you just have so many good magazines in this thing.
You know, Time, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, all these magazines that have guys, they have the time and they have the money and the expenditure to go out and get real stories and really write about them in a lengthy way that you can start to understand.
Texture, this normally costs you $9.99 a month.
And when you think about that for a minute, you're getting something like over 200 magazines.
So $9.99 a month, that is basically a magazine subscription.
That's like a one magazine subscription.
But if you sign up right now at texture.com/slash Clavin, you get a 14-day free trial.
That's a funny name.
How do you say that?
That's a funny name.
I'm glad you brought that up.
That's texture.com slash K-L-A-V-A-M.
Why subscribe to just a couple of magazines when you can have all of your favorites on your smartphone or your tablet all the time for way less?
And Texture was selected as one of Apple's top 2016 iPad apps.
You can start your free trial now and download the texture app.
They got everything.
They got People, Better Homes and Gardens, Esquire Times, just reading off the list, National Geographic Sports Illustrated Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Vogue.
I mean, this is just some of the 200, over 200 magazines they have.
Right now, Texture is offering my listeners a 14-day free trial when you go to texture.com/slash Claven, 14 days to try Texture for free.
When you go to texture.com/slash Claven, texture.com/slash Clavin, really try it out.
Once you'll get it, you'll just love it.
14-day trial.
You will be on there forever.
So, we're going to have to take a break.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
So, you want to get your questions in.
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It'll be just a beautiful, beautiful thing.
You want that to happen.
Roger Kimball is coming up.
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So here's the thing.
When we talk about the culture, one of the things that is really important for us on the right to understand is that the left is living in an entirely different country than we are.
They're living in an entirely different imaginative space.
You go to New York, you go to LA, you hear people talk about things that you cannot believe.
And one of the reasons that I go to the New York Times is just, I mean, you suddenly realize the level of hysteria that they are dealing with.
I mean, we're watching, we're watching this presidency.
It's got amusing things.
It's got things we don't like.
It sometimes goes too far to the left.
Then suddenly something great will happen, like the Gorsuch appointment or the cutting of regulations or the support for pro-life causes and all this stuff.
And we say, hey, that's great.
And so it's up and down.
It's black and white as gray.
You know, if you go over to the New York Times, you will see the kind of hysteria.
That's why I like to visit what I call Knucklehead Row.
And finally, we have got what is the name of the listener who sent this in?
Let me look it up, really.
All right.
It's Joseph Quinlan.
Is that it?
Joseph Quinlan.
Joseph Quinlan was good enough.
I kept saying we need a musical bumper to take us to Knucklehead Row, and he sent this one in.
Here it is. I love it.
Good job, Joe.
Really, really good job.
I just want to read to you one thing that is one piece on Knucklehead Row, the op-ed page of the New York Times.
This past week proves that Trump is destroying our democracy.
Okay?
That's what it proves.
Some guys got fired in the Oval Office, people you don't know, people who have no effect on your life.
Some guys got fired.
This past week proves that Trump is destroying our democracy by Yasha Munk, a Harvard lecturer who has written a book with the perfect left-wing title.
This is the perfect title for left-wingers, The People versus Democracy.
In other words, we can have a democracy, but we just got to get rid of all those people.
So Yasha Munk writes: America is on its way to a full-blown constitutional crisis.
This is what people who read the New York Times are waking up to every morning.
Over just a few days last week, President Trump and his allies stepped up attacks on Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the campaign's connections to Russia.
They tried to push Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of office.
They thought out loud about whether the president can pardon himself.
This all points to the same conclusion.
Mr. Trump is willing to deal a major blow to the rule of law and the American Republic in order to end an independent investigation into his Russia ties.
That's what it means.
So forget the Constitution.
Forget the fact that left-wing judges just say the Constitution means anything they want it to mean.
We are in a constitutional crisis because Trump complained about Mueller and attacked the Attorney General, who he has the complete right to fire, works at his discretion.
Paul Krugman, in his article, a guy who hasn't been right about anything in 50 years, his thing is called Who Ate the Republicans' Brains.
So it's not even like being among adults.
It's like being at this little girl's birthday party after a mouse got in and everybody's screaming and yelling.
So this is this, you have to understand that the culture on the left and the atmosphere on the right are just two entirely different places.
Have we got Roger?
Let us bring on Roger Kimball.
Roger Kimball, one of the smartest guys I know, and I know all the smart guys.
He is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion, an excellent journal on high culture, the president and publisher of Encounter Books.
He has a blog, a regular column at PJ Media called Rogers Rules, and you can find him on Twitter at Roger Kimball, K-I-M-B-A-L-L.
How are you doing, Roger?
I'm doing very well, very well.
How are you doing?
I'm doing excellently.
And you stand out, I have to say.
It's difficult.
It's difficult here at the end days of the Republic.
I was listening to what you had to say about our masters at the New York Times, and I too were stocking up on water and in armed camps here.
It's really horrible.
I can see the gulags that Trump has been creating all over the Northeast.
He's pushing all of the Democrats into them.
He's going to gas them.
It's horrible.
It's horrible.
Somehow we bear up.
So you're on the East Coast.
You can actually just see the black smoke coming up.
I mean, it's just horrible.
It's horrible.
The rule of law is at an end.
I'm glad we get to talk to you just before the chaos overwhelms you, before there's wards, the zombie wards are at your door.
By the way, I see the stock markets at 22,000 more.
You mentioned that great Nobel economist, Paul Krugman, who opined in the early hours of November 9th when asked whether the stock market would ever recover from this assault on American democracy.
He said the best answer is probably never.
So now we are 4,000 points ahead of the game.
Thanks, Paul.
That was at least in keeping with his predictive capabilities.
I think I cannot remember the last time.
Like Dewers, Scotch, he never varies.
So you always strike me as kind of unique.
What a horrible thing to say.
You strike me as among a very few people who you have been defending high culture for as long as you've been a professional.
This is what you do.
I mean, the new criterion is the great journal of high culture.
And yet, there are many people, high cultural people, even on the right, who really look down on the Donald and really sneer at him.
And you never have.
Why is that?
Why did you sign off?
I can answer that question.
I can answer that question in two words.
Hillary Clinton.
No, that's, you know, I was quite critical of Donald Trump at the beginning.
He was not my first candidate by a long shock.
I, like many people, I regarded his candidacy at first as a sort of jeux desprit.
How could Donald Trump as president?
You've got to be kidding me.
And yet, even back in July of 2015, I could see that something was happening.
And I said, if the establishment, Republican establishment, did not pay attention to this man, they would rue the day in November 2016.
And so it turned out to be.
Now, Hillary Clinton, what I cannot understand is my friends on the right who would have preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.
What would that have meant?
What would that have meant?
Just the Supreme Court.
She would have been able to make three or four appointments to the Supreme Court.
Just that.
That by itself is reason enough to celebrate Donald Trump's administration as a world historical triumph.
It really is.
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
You know, I began listening to him during the campaign.
He said what I liked about taxes.
He said what I liked about America.
He said things I liked about immigration.
I don't agree with building the wall and so on.
But it turns out we don't need to build the wall.
The fact that Donald Trump is president has depreciated the illegal immigration by something between 60 and 70 percent.
So thank you, Donald, for that.
You know, all over the country, you can sense it's like springtime with sun and rain.
The shoots are coming up from the ground.
It's terrific, you know.
And this ties to Russia.
It's just, I mean, it is surreal.
It's a fantasy.
It's surreal.
So now, what about the culture?
I mean, this is the thing I hear from people on the right all the time.
You know, Fareed Zakaria has a CNN specialist.
I thought you were going to talk about people on the right.
Yeah.
No, but he stated something where he has a show coming on CNN.
Why did Trump get elected?
How could this have happened?
And he says this is an uprising of the uneducated people against the educated people.
This is what he said.
There are a lot of people on the left and the right who just feel this guy is the swamp monster from the swamp of reality TV, the worst of our culture come to life, the avatar of the worst of our culture.
Do you think this guy is degrading our culture?
I mean, you have been a defender of high culture for so long.
Do you think that this is a step down for our culture?
No, I don't, because I think that the fundamental ingredient for any culture, high culture, low culture, a vibrant culture, is to have one's instinct for self-preservation intact.
And I believe that Donald Trump, the reason he was elected, it had nothing to do with uneducated versus educated, or I should say unschooled versus schooled.
I mean, the fact that these people went to elite institutions and spent a quarter of a million dollars or more acquiring these useless pieces of paper to study gender studies and global warming and advanced degrees in racial awareness and so on.
I mean, that has nothing to do with it.
Now, believe me, I don't think that Donald Trump is probably a charter subscriber to the new criterion.
And to be frank, I've never had an extended conversation with him about the merits of Schopenhauer.
But who cares?
I mean, here he's supposed to be, as you say, this swamp monster who's going to come in and upend everything and send immigrants into a gulag and so on.
Well, what is he doing?
He comes in and he governs like Ike.
He governs like Eisenhower.
I mean, he governs like a businessman.
He obeys the law.
He does.
That's true.
You know, I think he's doing a fantastic job.
Now, there are a lot of cosmetic things that we might wish that he did differently.
I mean, I too wish that he tweeted a little less, but maybe he has a point.
Maybe he has a point.
This is the way for him to communicate with 110 million people, he says.
I think the guy's doing a brilliant job.
And I like that, you know, I think Chenel Kelly is a brilliant appointment.
The truth of the matter is that he came to office without that usual atmosphere of protocol and decorum and deference of the honeymoon period that presidents are supposed to enjoy.
He came to office without any of that.
It's been tooth and claw attacks from the moment he took office.
So I don't blame him for being a little touchy.
Yeah.
No, I feel that way too.
You know, you mentioned the universities and the uselessness of a university liberal, certainly a liberal arts degree.
You wrote a book called Tenured Radicals, which is a classic in its field, basically detailing this takeover of our universities.
I told you when I read it that I was embarrassed for the professors because you made them look so bad that I actually.
They made themselves look bad.
I didn't quote them.
It was even worse.
I mean, I was like covering my eyes.
I could barely watch the car wreck.
Things have gotten so bad now that obviously people can't even go on and speak.
I mean, our pal Ben Shapiro gets shouted down, Ann Coulter, all the rest.
Do you see any change in this happening?
There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the day before, saying, well, Claremont University is at least standing up.
But do you see a change happening in the universities at all?
You know, I don't know, Drew.
I've been writing about this stuff for, gosh, decades, I regret to say, for decades.
And every now and then I say, oh, there's, you know, some professor who does X or somebody's written an important book that the New York Times actually deigns to review, or there's a college that issues a statement that's saying, well, you know, it is actually okay to express your own opinions on our campus.
Institutions Gone Awry00:09:00
These are good things.
But the large picture is pretty depressing, actually, because these institutions are so rich, so unaccountable, and they have swallowed wholesale the left-wing politically correct agenda, which is not simply in tension with a traditional liberal arts education.
It contradicts it.
So you see this weird phenomenon that at Berkeley in California, the home of the free speech movement in 1964, now they're on a campaign to stamp out free speech.
These institutions have somehow turned into their opposites.
So what used to be, why do we give these institutions such incredible favors, the tax-exempt status, all of the perquisites of the honor that we accord to professors and so on,
when we do it because we think these institutions are entrusted with a very important role, namely to preserve and transmit the highest values of our civilization.
Among those values, by the way, is being self-critical, to say, you know, why should I do this rather than that?
What is the good life?
There are many, many different paradigms from the past, and we should be able to examine them and pick among them and act like rational men and women about picking what is the good life for us.
And yet they've turned into their opposites.
Now they don't want to ask those questions anymore.
So many things are out of bounds for our universities that they have turned into institutions that don't preserve and transmit our culture, but that trash it.
So now I think it's worth asking, why should we as a society so lavishly support these institutions?
You know, Harvard with its $36 billion endowment.
Why should that happen?
My friend Peter Thiel had a great idea.
He said, what we should, any institution that has an endowment over X, you name the amount, a billion dollars, let's say, should be required to spend, let's say, 10% of its endowment on social programs that they say they care about.
Like, you know, Harvard should have to give $3.6 billion a year to Howard University.
How's that?
They could use the dough.
So when you look at this, I'm going to have to let you go.
This is my last question.
When you look at this, the question I get asked all the time, because the hammering of people, of ordinary people by the culture, I think is the key reason why Donald Trump got elected.
I think for eight years, the late-night comedians and the Hollywood movies and the universities and the news industry just spat on Americans who lived between New York and LA, just spat on them, kicked them, and the people finally just said, you know what?
Here, you want to know what it feels like?
Here's Donald Trump.
Do you see any way when you have universities teaching our kids this garbage, when you have kids who think that socialism is a good idea but can't even define what socialism is?
Can't even spell it.
They can't even spell it right.
Do you see the future just getting worse and worse?
Or do you think that there is a way to turn this around?
Or are we in the midst of turning it around?
Well, I think one way to turn it around, actually, is to do what Donald Trump is doing.
I think, no, I'm a cheerful person.
I think that this is a great country.
We have a lot of potential.
But our biggest problem in a phrase is the administrative state.
The fact that we have ceded power to people who we did not elect, who are unaccountable to us, who run every little detail of our lives.
I mean, you know, you want to get a driver's license?
Well, there's a bureaucracy for that.
You want to kind of throw out your trash?
There's a bureaucracy for that.
There's a bureaucracy for everything.
And who are these people?
You know, Friedrich Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom that the low-level bureaucrat who you run into has much more power over your life than the billionaire who might live next to you might employ you.
Why?
Because he comes bearing the coercive power of the state.
When you think about this alphabet soup of the EPA and the DOJ, all of these things that were kind of made up over the last 40 years or so, and they run our lives.
That's why people elected Donald Trump.
It's, you know, partly it's because they didn't like having Hillary Clinton call them irredeemable deplorables.
But behind that is this, you know, this administrative structure.
It's got to go.
You are preaching to the choir.
And when I talk to the kind of anti-Trump guys on the right, and they have these big ticket issues and these big dramatic events, they do not see Donald Trump really disassembling that state, getting further really than Reagan has in a way in just taking that apart.
And it is an amazing thing.
Roger Kimball, publisher of The New Criterion and Encounter Books on Twitter at Roger Kimball, at Roger Kimball, K-I-M-B-A-L-L.
Roger, it's great to see you.
I don't see you often enough.
I'm sorry.
You're such a neighbor.
I'll give you a buddy.
All right.
I will talk to you again soon, I hope.
Take care.
My- You know, that was really interesting to me anyway.
I mean, like, first of all, you know, I know you've heard a lot of that.
If you're listening to the show, you've heard a lot of these things that I complain about, the administrative state, and it is just immensely important.
And we concentrate the press, the media, it creates this cloud.
I mean, this is the thing that the right doesn't understand about the culture.
The culture works by immersion.
It doesn't work by, oh, you know, there's an idea and now everybody's going to follow that idea.
It works by constantly hearing that this is what's hip.
This is what's cool.
This is what Stephen Colbert laughs at.
This is what George Clooney gives to.
This is what all these people who you may disdain, but who create the culture around you are saying.
And that is what really affects people.
But the truth does have a constituency.
I mean, you know, one of my favorite articles, this obviously, yeah, here it is.
One of my favorite articles recently comes from Variety.
Variety, for those of you who don't know, is our showbiz trade thing.
You know, if you're in the movies, if you're in theater, you want to read variety and find out what's going on.
They reported on a panel at a conference in Beverly Hills called, has politics made late night great again?
And it was all these comedy writers from the Samantha B show and the Daily Show with Trevor Noah and all of these guys.
And they're very disgruntled.
I mean, I love this article.
It says, panelists included Ashley Nicole Black, a writer for Full's Frontal with Samantha B., Christine Nangel.
I just find it exhausting.
It's hard to find it fun, said Jason Reich, the head writer for the Jim Jeffries show.
It can really get boring to deal with this same person, Trump, provoking the same level of outrage with everything he does, said Hagelin from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
All of them are complaining that they're not getting through.
They say, we're not getting through to the other side.
They all admit that they're on the other side.
One of them says, I wonder how much is preaching to the choir.
We're not really going to convert anyone, but we're trying to point things out that people might have missed.
So they admit that they're all on one side.
They've never met us.
They don't know what we think.
They really don't know what we believe.
See, we know what they believe because we see them on TV, because they manufacture our entertainment, because they manufacture our mainstream news.
We know what they think.
They have no clue who you are.
They have no clue who you are.
I get this all the time.
You know, in my neighborhood, in the people I meet, they think I must be a monster.
I kind of support Donald Trump.
I'm a conservative.
I must be a bad guy.
They do not know.
And that is kept in place by Stephen Colbert, who every day uses the public airways to insult every single person between New York and LA.
It doesn't matter because he can get his audience from all the rest.
He can get a big audience from all the rest.
So he doesn't care that he's spitting on all those people.
And I think that the thing is, that culture is the thing that we have to be thinking about all the time.
How do we get our voices out there?
Podcasts are great.
YouTube is great.
But all these places, they start, they try to censor right-wing voices because they do not know who we are.
They just assume if we disagree with them, it must be hateful.
And that really is what we have to work on, what we have to think about.
We don't just have to think about ideas and governance and all this stuff.
We have to think about the culture and how we communicate and who we are and how we appear and making sure that people know who we are.
Mystery and Culture Clash00:02:00
All right.
Stuff I like.
I want to do some beach reads.
You know, instead of all this serious stuff, I'm doing all that.
Let me do, you know, you probably, I've been reading Daniel Silver recently.
Have you read Daniel Silva?
He does these thrillers about a Mossad assassin, an Israeli assassin, who goes around.
I just like him because he goes around killing the enemies of the Jews, which, let's face it, is everybody.
So it's like, you know, it's like, you're a Lutheran, I remember the Peasants' Revolt.
You're a Catholic.
Oh, you know, you guys didn't help during World War II.
Bang.
He just goes through killing the enemies of the Jews.
But they're very exciting.
They're good stuff.
But because I like the classics, I like old-fashioned stuff.
I want to tell you about a book you probably have never heard of.
A book called Brat Farrar by Josephine Tay.
If anybody knows Josephine Tay, she was a great, great mystery writer.
When was she around?
I'll make sure I don't say anything I regret later.
She was kind of a woman of mystery.
The Wall Street Journal just had a big piece about her that she was writing in the 40s and 50s.
And if anybody knows her, they usually know The Daughter of Time, where she had a series detective, I can't remember what his name was, Inspector Grant or something like this.
And one of the books, he breaks his leg.
And for the next book, he's just in the hospital, sort of past the time he tries to solve the mystery of who killed the twins in the tower, whether it was Richard III or not.
And he just does a historical mystery.
So she was very creative, but she has one book called Brat Farrar, which I just think is terrific.
And I'll tell you what it's about.
It's about a family with a kind of nice house, upper-middle-class family in Britain who has some money.
And one of their kids killed himself about 10 years before.
And his double shows up.
And they construct him.
Some con men construct him into a replacement for this kid who committed suicide and whose body was never found.
And he comes and claims that he is this kid, come back to life.
A Family's Secret Mystery00:01:12
That's not giving anything away.
That's in the first two chapters.
It's a scam.
But the character depiction of this guy, Brat Farrar, who is doing this, it's just a great, great old-fashioned 40s mystery.
And once you get past the coincidence that this guy looks like the guy who disappeared and the guy disappeared, you know, there's a little lot of coincidences that put the plot into motion.
Once you get past that, fantastic read, entertaining every page.
Josephine Tay, terrific mystery writer.
Good beach reads to go along with your Brad Thor and your Vince Flynn, who we also love.
Brad Thor, Vince Flynn, and Daniel Silva, all conservative thriller writers that we should support.
But Josephine Tay, also Brad Therar, great stuff to take to the beach.
All right, tomorrow, it's the mailbag.
Have I mentioned that?
I have.
And I will mention it again.
If you're a subscriber, ask any question you like, religious, political, personal, whatever you want.