Ben Shapiro dissects Kristen Godsey’s NYT op-ed on Soviet-era sex under socialism, mocking her dismissal of Stalin’s purges and famines as "ideological fantasy," then pivots to Trump’s Charlottesville response, praising his media confrontation but criticizing his "both sides" framing as a missed chance to expose bias. He contrasts this with Obama’s unchallenged rhetoric on police killings, argues Islamist terrorism outweighs far-left violence, and dismisses moral equivalence studies as flawed. The episode shifts to mailbag advice—condemning marijuana for lowering IQ, urging independence over envy, and slamming Kaepernick’s anthem protest as misguided—before launching Tickety Boo News, warning against media-driven doomsaying and comparing today’s tensions to pre-WWI fearmongering. The takeaway: Progress thrives on optimism, not historical hysteria. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has published an article headlined, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.
And no, I swear I'm not making this up.
Apparently, someone at the Times thought some of us were still taking them seriously, and they wanted to put an end to that as soon as possible.
The article is illustrated with one of those Soviet-era propaganda photos of an apple-cheeked female comrade cheerfully working on the collective farm.
These happy snapshots were usually taken just before the apple-cheeked female comrade went back to watching her children starve to death in one of the Soviet Union's government-engineered famines that slaughtered millions during the 1930s while the New York Times continually reported it wasn't happening at all.
Anyway, the article, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, is written by Kristen Goddy, who is a professor of gender and women's studies at Bodoin College instead of doing something useful with her life.
She writes books about how great the Soviet Union was for women, which was in fact true if you're one of those women who enjoyed watching her husband being carted away to the gulags for no reason, which I'm sure for some wives was actually a good time.
So, in her article, useless gender Professor Godsey quotes a deeply suspect study in which women who lived in the Soviet slave states claimed to have more sex and better orgasms.
Professor Godsey says the evidence shows, quote, women had more fulfilling lives during the communist era, unquote.
Professor Godsey supports this assertion by interviewing one or two women who remember the era fondly and by ignoring the government genocide, blood-soaked purges, life-crushing breadlines, soul-destroying oppression, domestic spying, epidemic alcoholism, and widespread wife beating that characterize socialist life in Russia.
Now, you may ask, why would a woman write or publish such nonsense?
And the answer is, I don't know.
Maybe Professor Godse has some strange 50 shades of gray type fantasy about how hot it would be to have sex while being enslaved by a Soviet state.
And if so, I say who are we to judge her girlish dreams?
After all, if the Times weren't publishing fantasies about how great socialism is, the paper's pages would be blank.
Which might be an improvement since the ink wouldn't run when you wrapped fish in them.
In any case, I hope Professor Godsey's fantasies are one day fulfilled and she gets to experience such communism herself so she can have no freedom, no comfort, no safety, and precious little food while crying yes, yes, yes, oh yes, in the many orgasms she will doubtless have before she disappears without a trace.
To each her own.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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All right.
Crazy press conference, right?
Really insane press conference.
And of course, you know, here's the thing about this.
You know, everybody's picking the press conference apart.
And people on the right, I saw Nolte, the great John Nolte on our site writing, he thought it was great.
He said everything that needed to be said.
Obviously, Shapiro has a much harsher take.
I have a different take than everybody else that I've noticed about two things.
Why he's doing this stuff and how I feel about it.
Now, I've said all week, I keep saying all week, and I'm getting all this mail and tweets about sending me pictures of the left, the anti-FA left, and how awful they are.
And I know how awful they are.
I've been railing against them.
I've done videos about them.
I've done the whole shows about how awful they are.
And I will talk more about that.
And as I keep saying, though, these Nazis are in our house.
They are in the House of the Right, which is the right house to be in.
They're in the House of the Constitution.
We need to get them out.
I have no quarter.
I give them no quarter, nothing.
I have nothing.
Just because, look, you know, people, just because two people are fighting doesn't mean one side is right, right?
Just because there are two people in a fight, it could be the guy who's right is walking down the street somewhere else.
And that's what I think is happening.
Here is the thing about this press conference, and we will go through it bit by bit, but here's the thing about this press conference that really bugged me.
Donald Trump's enemies are some of the worst people in this country, or let me put it to you this way.
They may not be the worst people in the country.
They're some of the people doing the most damage to the country.
That is the news media.
The news media is now a leftist, you know, it's just, it's leftist garbage.
It's leftist lies.
And one of the key reasons, one of the key reasons Donald Trump was elected was because of his bullish attacks on the news media.
And they lied to us for eight years.
They bolstered up Obama.
They ran down Bush.
They ran down Mitt Romney, a thoroughly decent guy, even if you disagreed with him, totally decent guy.
They've been saying the same thing about every Republican they're now saying about Trump.
And if Trump gives them ammunition sometimes, that doesn't change the fact that they have lost all their credibility.
I want Donald Trump to stomp these people.
I love watching it when he slaps them around.
But just because he's fighting the right people doesn't mean he's doing it right.
And yesterday I thought he blew an opportunity.
I think this is a moment when you can say things that the left, by which I mean the news media, which is basically now the center of the left, you can say things that will drive them crazy, so crazy that they will drive themselves off a cliff and destroy themselves.
But you've got to get it right.
You've got to get it right.
And some of the things he did yesterday, I loved.
Some of the things Trump did yesterday, I loved some of it.
I just thought he was just not, he just wasn't hitting the right notes, and he was giving some kind of shelter to these right-wingers.
And I'll talk about why I think he does that in a minute.
But let's first talk about the thing that is driving the press insane.
It is the idea that there is fault on both sides.
And there's just no question that there is fault on both sides.
So let's take a cut from this presser.
The presser was, he comes down to announce what was really a good infrastructure idea.
He was going to speed up the permit process with infrastructures, which can take up to 20 years.
He wants to speed it up to two years.
And then I think he wants to build a freeway through CNN.
I think that's the plan.
A train.
That's right.
Maybe the bullet train just right through CNN.
But, you know, obviously the press unleashed on him, and he can't walk away from a fight.
And so he went off.
And so he starts talking about this fault on both sides.
Let's look at cut five.
When you say the alt-right, define alt-right to me.
You define it.
Go ahead.
No, define it for me.
Come on.
Let's go.
Senator McCain defined them as the same groups.
OK, what about the old left that came charging him?
Excuse me.
What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?
Do they have any semblance of guilt?
This is true.
Let me ask you this.
What about the fact they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hand, swinging clubs?
Do they have any problem?
I think they do.
So, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.
Wait a minute.
I'm not finished.
I'm not finished, fake news.
That was a horrible day.
I will tell you something.
I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it.
And you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.
And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now.
You had a group, you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.
Okay.
Now, first of all, this is true.
These anti-FA people, the Black Lives Matter people, you know, the way the press has handled this, and one of the things I love about our press is you can always count on them to shoot themselves on the foot.
You know, I mean, they could have quietly taken him down, but instead, Mitt Romney, one of the stupidest tweets ever, says it's not the same.
One side is racist, bigoted Nazis, and the other opposes racism and bigotry.
Morally different universes.
Totally untrue.
It is totally untrue.
Black Lives Matter is a racist group.
These anti-FA people are fascists.
They don't oppose anything.
They don't believe in free speech.
They hit people for having speeches.
So the press picks up this thing and starts to compare these anti-FA people to the military who went and fought the Nazis.
But what they're really compared to is the communists who fought with Nazis in the streets of Weimar Germany when both sides were truly evil.
So he's right.
Now, look, the thing is, a murder was committed at this event, right?
A murder was committed by the right, and the right are the people who support Donald Trump.
So he should always go out of his way to give them an extra slap in the head.
But the way the press reacts to this, it just, first, here's Jim Acosta.
Here was Jim Acosta reporting on it.
Tell her I'm going to dump the apple.
All right.
That's just Jim Acosta.
That's Jim Acosta's id.
That's not there.
This is the way Acosta reports this thing, this press conference.
The real Jim Acosta.
When the questions started coming in, the real Donald Trump came out.
And this is somebody who I think, Wolf, that we're going to look back 10 years from now and observe this moment that we saw unfold here today at Trump Tower as really kind of a turning point in this presidency.
It is very difficult to imagine many Republicans in Washington rallying to the president's side after he almost gave the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists a pass for what unfolded in Charlottesville over the weekend.
I think it's one of those moments, Wolf, that as it sinks in, the worse it gets.
It was that kind of a disaster that we saw here at Trump Tower today, Wolf.
Well, that was objective.
That was an objective take on the.
So this is a turning point.
It's the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.
Let me read you a couple of things.
This is from July 13th, 2015, from the New York Times, Nate Cohn.
This is the beginning of the end of the Donald Trump surge.
Here is Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard.
Trump attacks McCain.
I apologize for this pronto.
Otherwise, it's the beginning of the end.
Here's Cecilia Vega, ABC News.
Some now predicting, Martha, this could be the beginning of the end of Trump's candidacy.
Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post on July 19th, and I don't think this is the end, but I think, and this may be a little bit wishful thinking, it might be the beginning of the end.
Juliana Goldman, CBS, Republican strategists, tell us they think this is the beginning of the end for Trump's candidacy.
Kevin, so it could be that this is not the beginning of the end of Trump's candidacy.
And I will tell you why.
I mean, the thing is, he's right about this.
Even, you know, people say, well, this was not the time to say it.
And I have some sympathy with this.
I wish he had said it better.
I wish he had said it better.
But listen to the New York Times react to this.
The New York Times says, what about the alt-left?
Here's the answer.
Anti-FA or anti-fascist activists certainly use clubs and dyed liquids against the white supremacists, according to our own reporter, the New York Times reporter Cheryl Gay Stolberg and Haas Spencer, who covered the violence.
Other counter-protesters included nonviolent clergy members.
Why Quips Replace Violence00:04:26
But there's one stark difference between the violence on the two sides.
The police said that James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio drove his car into a crowd and killed at least one person, Heather Heyer.
Mr. Fields was charged with second-degree murder.
And then they go on to use a quote to say what they want to say.
Comparing anti-FA to Mr. Fields' act is like comparing a propeller plane to a C-130 transport, said the director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.
They say, overall, says the New York Times, far-right extremist plots have been far more deadly than far-left plots.
This is their excuse.
This is their excuse.
And Islamist plots eclipse both in the past 25 years, according to a breakdown of two terrorism databases by Alex Nawasta at the Cato Institute.
I know Alex, really smart guy, really honest, direct guy.
So I went to his study.
Now, here's the thing about these stupid studies about how deadly these people are, because it's like comparing women's suicide and men's suicide.
Women commit suicide more often, but men succeed more because they use guns.
So you're just talking about efficiency.
You're not talking about intent.
Let's pause here for just a moment to talk about something else.
Let's take a brief break to talk about teeth.
Teeth are important, and I'll tell you why.
It's not just for eating.
Every time you smile, right, you're making an impression on people, and it's really important.
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I did.
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The problem with them is they're so huge that you can't take them when you travel.
So, Quip has invented a really sleek, easy-to-carry toothbrush.
It looks like a toothbrush, what would a toothbrush look like?
An electric toothbrush would look like if it were designed by Apple.
You know, it's like Steve Jobs toothbrush.
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Quip is backed by leading dentists and was named as one of Time Magazine's best inventions of 2016.
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The thing about this is Islamists have killed, have killed 97% of the people who have been killed by terrorists since I don't know what it is, since 1992, I think it is.
But of course, most of those people were killed on 9-11.
Right-wing terrorists have killed more, many more people than left-wing terrorists, but most of those people were killed at the Oklahoma City bombing.
If you look at the last year, if you just look at the last year, 2016, then left-wing terrorists have killed almost twice as many as right-wing terrorists.
All right, so these are bad people.
Trump is right.
They're just all bad people.
There's no making excuses for these guys.
There's no comparing them to the soldiers who fought against the Nazis.
These are all junky, junky people.
You know, and so Trump is right about this, but it's when he starts to kind of wax sentimental about the people who are out, you know, protesting.
He says, play number seven from this press conference.
But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
Wine Subscription Offer00:03:25
You had people in that group.
Excuse me, excuse me.
I saw the same pictures as you did.
You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
Yeah, not so much.
Not so many fine people in the Nazi ranks.
And the people protesting against the Nazis, there were fine people.
There were people who weren't on the alt-left.
There were clergymen.
Look, everybody should hate these guys.
There's no excuse for this stuff.
And the racism, the stuff about whiteness, and that's what we're going to talk about next: is why this is a special bad point and why it sucks people in.
Let me pause before, because we're going to have to go to the break and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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All right, we got a break.
We got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
That means you cannot watch the rest of the show, but you can come over to thedailywire.com and listen to it.
And if you just subscribe for a lousy $10 a month, you can watch the whole thing on our site, on the Daily Wire site, and be in the mailbag and ask your questions.
Race And Disgrace00:06:35
So, underneath all this, there is a big issue, which is an issue about race.
And Charles Krauthammer, as he so often does, kind of hit on this, but he had a slightly different take on it than what I would have said.
But let's play why Krauthammer felt this press conference was a disgrace.
The reason it's a moral disgrace is this.
This generation, for the last 50, 60 years, all the modern presidents, you know, you can go all the way back, you can say Woodrow Wilson was exempt, but beyond that, understood there was something unique about the history of slavery and racism in this country.
That we had to cure this original sin.
It was not cured by the Civil War as Lincoln had hoped, because it was followed by 100 years of state-sponsored oppression.
It began to be cured with civil rights, equality of rights, and this generation, the last 50 or so years, has done a splendid job in redeeming itself.
What Trump is missing here is the uniqueness of white supremacy, KKK, and Nazism.
Yes, there were bad guys on both sides.
That's not the point.
This was instigated, instituted.
The riot began over a Nazi riot, a Nazi rally.
And the only killing here occurred by one of the pro-Nazi, pro-KKK people.
See, this, see, this is the thing.
And I bet I know what you're thinking right now: is that, you know, yes, yes, yes, but, but, but, okay.
I think that this is what Trump is addressing, and I think it's what he's playing off in people, is we're tired of it.
You know, I think we are tired of the race thing being thrown in our faces, especially after eight years of Barack Obama.
Because, you know, to be fair, and this is not what about ism, I'm making a point about race, but Obama did this both sides thing too.
Remember, five police officers were killed by Black Lives Matter crazies in Dallas, and he went to the memorial of these guys, and this was part of his speech at the memorial of five dead police officers killed.
I thought, because he had ginned up a lot of this feeling.
Remember, things got much worse.
Racial relations got much worse under Obama.
And this is part of the speech he made at the memorial.
When study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently.
So that if you're black, you're more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested.
More likely to get longer sentences.
More likely to get the death penalty for the same crime.
When mothers and fathers raise their kids right and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer, yes, sir.
No, sir.
But still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door.
Still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.
See, now, yesterday, people took pictures, kind of comical pictures of John Kelly, chief of staff, listening to this Trump presser with his head hung down.
But if you look behind Obama, there are cops glaring at him and refusing to join in the applause for what he said, and I don't blame them.
Was that the time?
Was that the time to bring up these studies which don't say, never have said what Obama said they said?
That the study after study actually shows that cops don't use deadly force more often against blacks than they do against whites.
They use it more often against whites than against blacks.
Was that the time?
Of course it wasn't.
Of course it wasn't.
And so he was never called out.
He was never called out for that kind of both sidesism, let's call it that, both sidesism.
And of course, Trump, the minute he opens his mouth, he is called out for it.
Krauthammer is right.
Krauthammer is right.
It is a special thing in this country, just like it's a special thing in Germany.
In Germany, they outlaw the Nazi salute Zig Heil.
It's against the law to say it.
And as an American, you think like, wow, that's a violation of free speech.
But you've got to understand their history.
Their history is blood-soaked from that.
And they're still traumatized over it, and they haven't gotten past it.
So this is a special part of American history.
It's a special part of American history.
And what Trump is catching on to is he's catching on to the fact that Obama played the race card for eight years and people, white people, are sick of it.
They are sick of being blamed for something they didn't do.
They're sick of being blamed of refighting the Civil War.
They're sick of being told, you know, why are we even talking about the Confederacy?
It's like over 150 years ago.
It's time to let it go.
They're sick of it, and Trump has caught on to that.
Here's the problem that, and this has always been a problem with Trump.
He's fighting the right people, and sometimes he's even fighting the right battle.
He could have said exactly what I just said now, and the press would have gone just as insane, but he wouldn't have been saying there were good people on both sides, which just isn't true.
It's just not true.
And it isn't true.
You know, he could have said what needed to be said, and he could have blown the press up, and he could have made his point if he had been reaching out to all of us, all the good people on both sides.
And here, you know, there are wonderful people on both sides of the political divide in this country.
And if you don't believe that, you're not paying attention.
There are wonderful people on both sides of the political divide.
And we all hate these people.
We all hate these Nazi.
You know, that's why the press is so evil.
You know, that they compare these guys to the GIs who fought Hitler instead of comparing them to the people they should be comparing them to, the communists who fought in the streets against the Nazis and were just as bad.
Where the communists won, they slaughtered tens of millions.
And where the Nazis won, they slaughtered tens of millions.
They were the bad guys.
It's the guys who don't sign on to the isms but believe in freedom, believe in the individual.
Those are the guys who don't leave trails of dead in their past.
Trump could have said it.
End of Day Pleasure00:04:58
He could have said it.
And my score against him is that he blew an opportunity to nail the people that we dislike, who are hurting this country, and to speak up for all of us on the left, too.
He is the president of everybody, to speak up for everybody who just hates all these people as they deserve.
The only good people at those rallies were the people who were praying for peace.
You know, the clergymen and the people following the clergymen.
It sounded like the lady who was killed was one of them.
She was not linked to Antifa in any way.
You know, those are the people that he should have been speaking to when he spoke.
Instead of making it a battle between him and the press, which is entertaining, we love to see it.
It was a moment when he needed to be the president, needed to reach out to everybody.
I think he stepped on the mine of his own anger and of his own pugilism.
And he blew an opportunity.
I don't think it's the beginning of the end of his presidency.
I think the press is going to blow themselves up the same way as he did.
And I think it's going to be a tie.
All right, let's do the mailbag.
Before we had this clip of Lindsey screaming, there was always a little pause, and I would say mailbag, and then there'd just be this thing.
But now we've actually done it.
Good job.
Good job, Bat.
All right.
From Zachary, dear king of the heartless.
How did I get to be king of the heartless?
Maybe the heartless leader of the heartless.
I am 19, about to leave for college in about three weeks, and have had much contemplation on my future and what it will hold.
One question I keep asking is: when is it appropriate to live on my own financially?
I have no idea what age or what time would be smartest.
I see way too many college students, grads, still living with their parents.
Sincerely, Zach from Chick-fil-A.
After you graduate college, you should not go home.
After you graduate college, you should get a job and support yourself and live in the manner you can afford.
It's okay if your folks can send you a little couple extra bucks, but you should not go home after college.
I would not have allowed my kids to come home after college unless, of course, they were ill or suffering in some way.
You know, what's Robert Robert Frost who said at home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
But you should not be taking advantage of that once you're out of college.
If your parents can help you get through college, that's great.
And I hope they do if they can.
And then they're done.
You're on your own.
You're an adult.
Get out.
And don't, you know, make it, it should be a matter of pride for you not to go back.
You should be doing your own work, living on the cheap, living in the places, you know, because you have to solve problems that will teach you everything you need to know.
You know, when I hear people say, well, I don't want to leave this area.
That's why I'm living at home.
Leave the area.
Go to someplace that's cheaper.
Go to some place where you can afford it.
That'll teach you a lot.
You'll learn just how much money you need to be a happy guy.
All right.
From Jessica, happy Wednesday to you.
If I remember correctly, you stated in an interview with Dave Rubin that you believe that weed is harmful to people.
I did say that.
My question for you is, what are the negative effects of smoking weed and how would you respond to someone who tells you that smoking weed is not bad?
The studies that I've seen that I believe do show that marijuana cuts down on your IQ.
It makes you stupider.
And the reason I believe those studies is because I've known a lot of potheads and they are stupider.
They're slower.
It has a long-term effect on people that obviously abusing alcohol also has.
I'm not in favor of abusing alcohol, but I think weed is easier to abuse.
I mean, the thing about a drink is at the end of the day, you can sit down and have a drink and you get a little relaxed.
You know, it makes the end of the day kind of pleasant.
But when you smoke a joint, especially now when they're so packed with THC, they're so powerful, you get stoned.
It's different.
It's different to get stoned than to have a relaxing drink.
It's different to have a relaxing drink and to get drunk.
And I think that people do it.
What would I say to people who say, I want to smoke weed?
None of my business.
It's none of my business.
If it's my friend, if it's my kid, if it's somebody I care about, I might bring these things to their attention.
I might tell them to lay off it.
I've always found it kind of, you know, I don't know what I've always found it kind of effeminate almost.
You know, like, I mean, if you sit and have a drink, you are in complete control of what, you know, what kind of, you know, you're having a drink.
I enjoy alcohol.
I really enjoy the taste.
I like drinking it and all this stuff.
And it does smooth the end of the day out and all this stuff.
But when you smoke dope, it's just injecting this kind of stone-dumb mindset.
I haven't done it a lot, so I don't know a lot about it.
You know, I have done it, but I haven't done it a lot.
I hear it's so much more powerful now.
But again, it's none of my business.
Choose your own poison.
Do what you want to do.
I just don't think it's a very good idea.
There was one.
Oh, oh, great overlord Clavin, can you give us a piece of advice guaranteed to change our lives for the worse?
Thank you, oh great one, from Patrick.
I love that idea.
Expectation Kills00:11:49
Yes, yes, I can.
I can give you a great piece of advice that will absolutely change your ideas, your life for the worse.
Play into your envy.
Envy people who have things that you don't have.
Envy people who do things and achieve more than you achieve.
And you will be miserable every single day of your life.
The thing about it is, is whatever it is that you are meant to do, do it at the highest possible level.
Whatever it is you are meant to do, do it at the highest possible level.
The fact that somebody else is meant to do something else or may be more popular or may get richer or all that stuff has nothing to do with developing yourself to the highest possible to the highest to your best ability, to the highest possible ability.
You can live a beautiful, beautiful life focusing on just getting you right.
If you get you right, you will live a beautiful life.
But if you worry about the fact that getting you right is not as much fun, doesn't look like as much fun as what the guy next to you is doing, you will be miserable.
So try that.
That'll work for you.
Did we get a live?
We get a live question?
We do, yeah.
Give it to me.
All right.
So this is from Austin Stoltz.
Okay.
And he says, what are your, he doesn't even address you by title.
No, come on.
Maybe he was in a hurry because it was lying.
That must be it.
Okay, so his question is, what are your thoughts on more people sitting during the national anthem?
Seems that people are using Charlottesville as an excuse for that, and that's disgusting.
It's a free country, do whatever you want, but it's still wrong.
That's right.
That's it.
Well, that's that you answered your own question.
I mean, one of the things that really got me about Colin Kaepernick, Kaepernick, Deppernick, Engelbert, Humperdink, whatever the hell his name is, it really bothered me when the leftists at ESPN, and one of the reasons ESPN is dying is because people got sick of getting all their politics with their sports, was they kept saying, well, he has a right.
He has a right to do it.
And of course he has a right, but that doesn't make it right.
And these guys are doing sports commentary.
Here are people who are benefiting, especially in sports.
They are benefiting from the largesse of this country.
You know, sports are places where the country comes together to celebrate not just the sport, but also the country.
You know, we were all at the Dodgers game to celebrate the success of the Daily Wire.
We all went to the Dodgers game last night.
And when they play the national anthem, you have this feeling that, like, I don't know who these people are in Dodgers Stadium.
It's L.A. I'm sure a lot of them are left-wingers.
I'm sure we disagree about a lot of things.
I don't know.
But in that moment, in that moment, we're all together.
It's a blessed thing to do, right?
You're there enjoying the incredible talents of people.
You know, you stand up for the national anthem.
It's like that's the thing.
And the right that you have to sit for the national anthem was won for you by people acting on behalf of the national anthem.
It was that right that you have to sit, that thing that makes it your right, that makes it so that people don't, you know, complain about it or arrest you or anything, was won for you on battlefields under that flag that you're not saluting.
So it doesn't make any sense.
And when Kaepernick did it, it really did bother me.
And by the way, I don't think that's why he's not getting a job.
I think he's not getting a job because these quarterbacks who come up and everybody says, oh, wow, he can pass and run.
Wow, he passes and runs.
So you never know what he's going to do.
And then he runs and gets tackled.
And the owner says, oh, wait, I spent $50 million on this guy.
I don't want him running and getting tackled.
They take away his running game and he's not that good a quarterback.
That's what happened to Colin Kaepernick.
That's why he's not playing.
And also because he's a pain in the neck.
I mean, you know, this is showbiz.
And if you're alienating the audience, why would you put it in there?
Sorry, I couldn't hear that.
Oh, okay.
Somebody was speaking in my ear.
All right, one more, I guess.
Hi, Andrew.
I'm a Patty living in England.
This is from Neil.
Patty is an Irishman, for those of you who don't know.
I heard you mention once that you lived in England for a spell.
Yeah, for seven years I did.
What's the one thing you miss food-wise from this neck of the world that you can't get in LA?
Wow, that's a strange question.
The English are not that good with food.
Food is not, they're wonderful with literature.
They're great with homosexuality.
Oh, no.
The theater, that's what I meant.
The theater, kind of the same thing.
But they're really good with freedom, or they used to be.
Food is not their best thing, but I always did love, I like crumpets.
Crumpets are good, and they're not that easy to get here.
Digestive biscuits, those were always really good.
And the, oh, what were the cookies that the Prince made?
They were shortbread, shortbread, which you can get shortbread here, but it was a little easier to get it there.
But digestive biscuits were very, very good.
The stuff that the British eat that they love, like Marmite and Ribena, I just hated that stuff.
My kids grew up eating that because my kids were little when we were there and they would eat that marmite.
You know, I don't even know what it's made of.
That's like, have you ever tasted Marmite?
Have you ever seen it?
You don't even know what it is.
You've never heard of it.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
It's disgusting.
All right, that's the mailbag.
Next week, we'll do it again.
Get your questions in early, and you just press the button, Austin says, on the podcast page.
And if you're a subscriber, you can send in a question right away.
All right, now we have a new feature called Tickety Boo News.
And I've been told that a little man who looks like me is running across the screen.
I can't see it.
There he is.
Oh, I can see it.
That was actually filmed earlier.
I did that earlier.
I was a little shorter then, but there it is.
Now, I wanted to do this feature.
This is not a feature of, oh, here's some good news, so cheer up.
This is a feature about how to read the news, think about the news properly because the news is so much better often than what we're talking about.
We're always talking about the problems, and there's reasons for that.
And I'll talk about that in a sec.
But the thing is, try this experiment when you're reading the news.
Try this experiment.
Look at how much bad news is not something that has actually happened, but it's something they're telling you is going to happen because of something that did happen.
It's how much bad news is a prediction being made about what may happen because of something that has happened.
So right now, we've had some bad news.
In one city, in this huge, huge country, in one city, in this huge, huge country, a handful of right-wing dirtbags clash with a handful of left-wing dirtbags, and one sick, crazy terrorist killed a young woman.
It's very tragic.
It's a country, but it's a big, big country.
Tragic things are going to be happening every day.
In Chicago, they're happening to poor people who never get covered every 20 minutes because of how badly the city is run.
We don't cover that.
We're covering this.
Why are we covering this?
We cover it because it's worrisome, because of stuff Krauthammer said, because we know these white supremacists are dangerous.
We know that they have a tendency to get out of hand.
We know that the communists have, the anti-violent communists have backing in the mainstream left.
We know that they have backing in the mainstream left, by which I mean CNN and the New York Times, these people telling us that sex was great in the Soviet era.
I mean, these guys are bad guys who give shelter to the violent people who do kill people, like the guy who, the Bernie bro, who went out and shot at our congressman.
I mean, these people do kill people.
They are very bad.
So we've got a bunch of bad people, and we worry about what's going to happen next.
But, you know, the headline could just as easily be today, number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday.
That would be a real life headline.
You know why it's not the headline?
Because that headline has been true every single day for the last 25 years.
Every single day, the number of people in extreme poverty fell by over 100,000 people.
2016, Nicholas Christoph, one of the guys on Knucklehead Row, wrote a piece once.
He said, 2016 was the best year in the history of humanity.
Remember during 2016, everybody was saying, oh, what a horrible year this is.
All the artists were dying, you know, and all this stuff.
And Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were running against each other.
So we knew that whoever won it wasn't going to be a good person.
And everybody was right.
But inequality was falling globally.
Child mortality is roughly half of what it has been since 1990.
That's not that long ago.
That's a quarter of a century ago.
That child mortality is roughly half of what it's been every day.
People are getting new electricity.
Artificial intelligence is going to help people.
Free trade and fracking are all going to help people.
All this stuff is going on and life is getting better.
So does that mean you walk around singing everything is tickety boogleic in our opening song?
No, that's not the point.
The point is this.
We are evolutionarily created to worry because the guy who worries, who sits around and says, you know, I'm not going to go to sleep because maybe a sabertooth tiger is going to come here and rip my head off is the guy whose head doesn't get ripped off by the saber-toothed tiger.
You know, we are engineered to worry.
But worry can also destroy us.
And I don't mean by stress.
I mean like this.
I always say that people read just enough history to know that the Roman Empire fell and there were Nazis.
And so they're always saying, oh, this time is just like the Nazis or this time is just like the fall of the Roman Empire.
They always say that because that's all they know, right?
So you see communists and fascists fighting in the streets of Charlottesville, and you think, oh, it's just like Weimar, Germany.
But it's not just like Weimar, Germany, because we haven't just lost a war that devastated our country.
We haven't got an economy collapsing so that people are wheelbarrowing money, you know, pushing a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread.
We're not in that kind of those kind of desperate straits that led to that kind of thing.
What it's much more like, if you want to worry about something dangerous, what it's much more like is the time before World War I. World War I.
A lot of people say World War I and World War II were the same war, and there's a lot of truth to that, but World War I devastated, devastated Europe.
It was the end of Europe.
The Europe that we think about when we think about Michelangelo, when we think about Mozart, when we think about Shakespeare, ended in 1914, begun.
The thing about it is, is that a couple of years before that war took off, it was the height of European civilization.
I mean, I'm not talking about 50 years, I'm talking about 10 years before.
It was the height of European civilization.
How did World War I happen?
It happened because of people thinking what was about to happen, about people worrying what was about to happen.
One small terrorist act, the assassination of the Archduke, right, set off this chain reaction of people thinking, well, he's going to do this, so I've got to do this, and they're going to do that, so I've got to do that.
Set off this chain reaction of a completely, utterly, totally needless war.
You cannot find a history that can tell you in rational terms why that war started, and it was utterly, utterly devastating.
We in the United States don't know as much about it because we went over there and kind of ended it, and we didn't suffer the kinds of things that the Europeans suffered.
You can't enter a European town that doesn't have a memorial basically with the names of an entire generation of young men.
Pessimism kills in that regard.
Expectation kills in that regard.
This is a moment of high-tech miracles.
It is a moment of food production, miracles.
It's a moment of wealth spreading, miracles.
And for these little creeps, these mothers' basements, self-righteous little creeps, to start a fight over a statue, over a statue.
It's not even a living thing.
They're fighting over a statue and kill a girl, okay?
Miracles And Pessimism00:00:46
For them to do that, and for us to let that set us against each other, for us to let them, those demons, set us against each other.
That's a crime.
That's a sin.
And that's the sin of pessimism.
And so we've got to look at the news, step back a little bit, and say, is this bad news or is this guy some guy telling me there's going to be bad news?
Is this guy some guy telling me that, oh, if I say this, the left will do this.
If I do that, the left will do that.
You know, we have to step back and realize we are in an age of miracles or otherwise we'll blow that age.
We will blow it just like they did in World War I. I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We have a guest tomorrow.
Who is it?
I think it's Jesse Lee.
I think Jesse Lee Peterson is going to come on.
Great, excellent person to be talking to at this moment.