Ken Stern, ex-NPR CEO and author of Republicans Like Me, reveals how two years immersing in conservative spaces—from Texas hunting trips to evangelical churches—shattered media stereotypes, exposing shared values ignored by partisan narratives. His shift from liberal agnostic to independent criticizes both parties for ignoring America’s consensus, blaming gerrymandering and social media for polarization while advocating cross-partisan dialogue. Stern’s journey, from debating gun control with economist John Lott to facing backlash for questioning Roe v. Wade, underscores how direct engagement over algorithms could bridge divides—if not for Trump’s rhetoric turning enemies into adversaries. [Automatically generated summary]
Here was the reaction from the editor of the New York Times.
Meanwhile, some people are sickened to learn that NBC's Matt Lauer had a button installed on his office desk that could lock the door so women staffers couldn't escape his grotesque sexual attacks.
It kind of reminds me of the time I had a chair installed that automatically strapped women in so a gigantic fan could blow their clothes off.
Of course, I was 12 years old and it was just a fantasy and Lauer was actually locking women in his office and getting rapie on them while being paid $20 million a year.
But other than that, it was kind of similar.
NBC scored this major interview with the perpetrator.
From NBC News, this is today with Matt Lauer.
You were fired by the network over allegations of sexual harassment.
Did you ever send a lewd text or email to another employee?
Five women.
Did you ever have any human resources cases brought against you?
And that happened back in 2015.
And I just want to mention the two things can be mutually exclusive.
Think about those five women and what they did.
They came forward and filed complaints against the biggest star at the network they worked at.
Think of how nerve-wracking that must have been.
Doesn't that tell you how strongly they felt about the way they were treated by you?
Kind of speechless there.
Geraldo Rivera, meanwhile, says that all these sex scandals may be criminalizing courtship in the workplace.
Pretty soon, an ordinary guy won't be able to lock a girl in a room and bring her chocolates or even lock her in a room and give her flowers.
The next thing you know, you won't be able to lock her in a room and assault her until she faints and has to be taken to a nurse.
How will any girl ever be able to meet the man of her dreams?
We have Kim Stern here today, a liberal who once ran NPR, but he decided to leave his bubble and go out into America to meet some of us right-wingers.
So of course we killed and ate him.
But he went on to write a book called Republicans Like Me, Republican Like Me, How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.
We will talk to him about it right here, and then we'll kill him and eat him.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
There's a rainy also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Movement Watch Reviews00:03:19
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoora, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hooray.
All right, you know, we started this week with a day in which everyone behaved badly, and we're ending the week with a day in which everyone behaved badly, but things are going great.
Everything is terrific.
So I'm going to end off, you know, I started out, we were talking about morality and rules-based morality versus individual morality.
I'm going to present by the end of the show, I'm going to present a different vision of those two things, a way of looking at rule-based and individualistic reality that's really different than the way most people think of them.
And we'll get to that, but first we have to go through all the crappy things that people are doing and all the great things that are resulting from it.
I mean, this is the weirdest time imaginable.
And then it will be the semi-Clavenless weekend because remember, you still have another kingdom.
The new episode drops on Friday.
And after I leave here, I'm going to pitch it to one of the biggest TV producers in town.
So please, you guys were so great when I asked you before to go on and subscribe and give it good reviews.
I mean, it's been up.
It's now close to 1,200 five-star reviews.
I mean, it really is amazing.
And people, genuinely, I don't think they're just leaving these things unless it's Knowles going on different computers.
I don't think they're just leaving the reviews.
They seem to really love the story.
And I think personally, I know I shouldn't say it because I wrote it.
Personally, I just think the story gets better and better as it goes along.
So please go on iTunes or whatever you use on your Android and subscribe to it.
It's called Andrew Clavin's Another Kingdom.
And subscribe and leave the good word.
Also, you know, it's December.
This is the last day of November.
And Advent will be starting soon.
And that means you need a new watch, right?
Also, you want to give people watches.
You want to put them in their stockings.
And that means you want a movement watch like this one.
A movement watch like this.
This one actually is spelled MVMT movement because for some reason these new companies, they can't use vowels.
I'm going to start a company called Yayu, you know, just use all the old vowels that have been thrown out of all the other companies.
But movement watches are really beautiful.
A couple of guys started this because they loved beautiful watches, but they didn't want to spend the big money.
So they used the internet to bring down the price.
And now you can get a beautiful, it really is lovely watches like this.
People compliment it all the time.
And you can get it for watches start at only $95.
That would cost you hundreds probably if you went in to a jewelry store and tried to buy them there.
And this is great stuff.
At those prices, you can put this in a stocking.
You can put it under the tree.
And people will really like this for men and women.
And people will really like these very, very clean, modern designs.
Movement watches, sorry, they have already sold over a million watches in over 160 companies.
And if you are smart enough, and because you're here, that's always a question, but if you're smart enough, you can get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns by going to movement.com.
That's mvm.com slash Andrew.
That'll get you 15% off.
Watch has a beautiful, clean design.
It will step up your watch game.
Go to movement.com/slash Andrew for 15% off today.
Join the movement, the movement, movement.
All right.
So John McCain, this is big news.
Insane Destruction Of Political Correctness00:15:14
I mean, John McCain is supporting this tax plan, and he was one of the big holdouts.
They were writing articles saying he might be the vote to kill it, just like he killed the healthcare repeal.
But this would really be, we know this is good because the New York Times, a former newspaper, is going insane.
I mean, if you read the paper, it is hilarious.
I mean, we showed that guy's head exploding, but that doesn't even describe.
Here's their op-ed from the editorial.
It's called The Senate is rushing to pass its tax bill because it stinks.
Don't pull any bunches.
They have absolutely no nuance, nothing.
And the reason is, I think that this tax bill basically reverses the socialist premise that has been put in place, not just during Obama, it really was all the years before that your money belongs to them.
Remember that old video game, all your outposts belong to us, all your money belong to them.
And this does reverse that.
And guys, I will tell you, a lot of people who are listening, I know, did not live through the Carter to Reagan transition.
And I did.
And during the Carter years, you had to wait online for gas.
And I'm talking about hour-long lines to get gas.
Everybody was depressed.
There was all kinds of, you walked down the street and people had these long faces.
The neighborhood I lived in, I remember men and women getting in fights in the street, people screaming in the night.
It wasn't a great neighborhood, you know, but you couldn't be in a great neighborhood because there were no jobs.
Everybody was unemployed.
Inflation was terrible.
And then Reagan came in, and it was the same thing.
The New York Times and all the papers and everybody was telling us what a dope this guy was, what a dope.
Cut taxes, major tax cut.
The economy skyrocketed.
I may have this wrong, but I think it was like something like 8% GDP.
We're now at 3.3% GDP growth.
It was the people that helped, single women and black people, that was the biggest, those were the biggest benefactors.
But the whole country turned around.
I mean, and people talk about Reagan's charm and his ease and all his humor, but none of that would have mattered if the country hadn't turned around the way it did.
It was really, it was like laughing gas.
So we'll get to this in a minute because the thing is, it really is the way you hear the news now, people are just behaving badly.
And even Donald Trump, who was doing some amazing things, he did something yesterday that I got to knock him for.
I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me, but he retweeted these, how can I put them, unconfirmed videos of Muslims attacking people.
Now, look, you have heard me go after Islam, and I think that the mass immigration that Angela Merkel engineered and that Obama was happy to engineer, where they were bringing refugees in without thinking about how they were going to fit into our communities and whether we could help them instead of building safe places for them in their own countries.
Insane, insane.
But this guy, he is the president of the United States.
He has got to know when he retweets something, he's got to know what it is, where it comes from.
Comes from a far-right organization in England.
Now, here's the difficulty of this situation, right?
These European countries are race-based countries that have been changed by us.
They have taken on our ideas.
Our idea is we're a creedal country.
We have a creed.
If you ascribe to that creed, you can be an American.
England is England because it was founded by Angels.
France is France because it was founded by Franks, Germans, Germans, all this stuff.
They have a point.
When these people come out and they say, we want a white Germany or we want a white France, they have a point.
It's not a great point.
But when you have reasonable people saying, gee, I think my culture is being destroyed by violent, women-hating Islamics.
I think my culture is being destroyed.
And next to that reasonable person, a Nazi is standing.
You basically give credibility to that Nazi because he's standing next to a reasonable guy.
And that's why you don't open your gates and flood the place with a bunch of people that you can't assimilate and who don't like your ideas and who don't like your culture and are just running away and have this vision in their mind of transforming England or Germany into a Sharia country.
You just don't do that because it gives credibility to the far right.
And Trump, listen, I love the fact that Trump says, calls out Islamic extremism for what it is.
I think when you don't call it out, when you don't say it, you just bottle up the hatred.
You know, you bottle up the hatred.
So I think good things may come out of what Trump is doing, but I think he made a mistake.
I don't think you give credibility to people until you know what you're retweeting.
I truly think what he did was he pressed the button.
You know, people always argue, I was talking to Rob, our producer, yesterday, that people argue, is Trump playing three-dimensional chess or is he an idiot?
I don't think he's either one.
I think he's like a great running back.
He's a guy who knows where the daylight is.
You know, you talk to a running back.
He's not going to explain to you all the strategy of the game, but when you give him the ball, he knows where to run.
He knows where to go.
He has that instinct.
Trump has that instinct.
Sometimes the running back runs into a wall and gets flattened on the scrimmage line.
I think this time he made a mistake.
You don't want him to discredit himself because we need him to say this thing.
Could good come out of it?
Yes, I'll tell you what good could come out of it.
The shattering of political correctness is a good.
It is an un diluted good.
Shattering political correctness is a good.
We need to talk about Islam because we're a creedal country.
And so the left's argument is, look, we have a creed, so we can let in everybody.
But you can't let in people who have a creed that is against your creed, right?
You can't let in too many people who say, yeah, your creed, I'd like to destroy it.
I'm going to use your freedoms to destroy your freedoms.
I'm going to use your religious tolerance to destroy religious tolerance.
I'm going to use your fact that you can go anywhere and do anything without having your papers checked.
I'm going to use that to blow up your churches and blow up your planes and all that stuff.
You can't let those people in.
Trump is absolutely right about that.
And that's why I want him to have credibility when he speaks.
And I think when he does something like this, where you just don't, we just don't know what those videos are.
I mean, one of them was a guy attacking, I think it was in Holland, I think it was in the Netherlands, attacking a guy on crutches.
And the woman who tweeted it said, oh, here's a migrant, you know, Islamic migrant attacking somebody.
They say, well, no, he's not.
He was actually born in Holland.
My question is, yeah, but was he a Muslim guy?
I mean, that's her point.
That is her point.
And I do not want to stir.
That's the other thing.
That's the other thing.
We have to deal with this situation because Islam is a genuine threat to the West.
But, but we have to deal with it without having religious hatred blow up in our faces.
Anyway, he did go out and he made a speech.
Where did he make this speech?
Was it St. Louis?
I can't remember where he made the speech yesterday.
Missouri or something?
He's promoting, I think it was in Missouri.
He was promoting the tax bill.
And when he is on his game, he is absolutely hilarious.
Here he is promoting the tactical saying it's going to be bad for the rich because this is the only Democrat talking point.
It's just going to help the rich.
That was the other New York Times headline.
You know, as a bill increasingly helps the rich, so here's Trump saying it won't help the rich.
This is cut number two.
We're also going to eliminate tax breaks and complex loopholes taken advantage of by the wealthy.
Who are they?
I don't know.
I think my accountants are going crazy.
All right.
Hey, look, I'm president.
I don't care.
I don't care anymore.
I don't care.
Some of my wealthy friends care me.
Me, I don't care.
This is a higher calling.
Do we agree?
As Hillary said, what difference does it make?
It made a big difference.
Made a big, big difference.
This is, I mean, he's hilarious when he's like this.
This is when he is absolutely great.
The U.S. economy, this is from the Wall Street Journal this morning, the U.S. economy is running at its full potential for the first time in a decade, a new milestone for an expansion now in its ninth year.
Total economic output in the third quarter was slightly above the maximum sustainable level of output as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.
So things are going really well with all the things that are happening and all the panic and CNN falling.
CNN is boycotting the Christmas party.
I love this.
CNN is boycotting the White House Christmas party.
So all the people who are there won't get to enjoy Don Lemon walking into a corner and having to have assistance finding his way out.
They'll just have to settle for celebrating the birth of Christ.
It's going to be tough.
It's going to be tough without CNN there.
Anyway, if Trump succeeds with this and it does what I hope it will do to the economy, so many good things could come out of it.
You know, nobody knows the future.
We're all connecting the dots.
It's like connecting the dots to make constellations.
You know, there are a million gazillion stars in the sky.
You collect them, you see a big dipper.
If you connect them in a different way, you see something else.
You know, that's the way the future is.
If you decide to connect the dots to a good future, a booming economy will mean a Republican replacement, will mean another Trump term and then a Republican after that.
So we could have President Mike Pence.
We could even have President Ted Cruz, depending on things, how things go, which would be amazing.
I have to say, the destruction of political correctness, even though maybe it took a guy like Trump, maybe it took a bull to walk into that particular China shop and shatter that particular China.
But once it is gone, a guy, an elegant, restrained guy like Pence could really do a lot with political correctness gone.
I think it'll be good for the arts.
I think it'll be good for everything.
So all these people are behaving badly, and all this great stuff is happening.
You know, you could even have a sort of Pollyannish good view of this sex scandal.
I mean, some of these guys and these sex scandals, I will get back to this.
Roy Moore, he made a speech in a church at this Magnolia Springs Baptist Church, okay?
And he gets up and he says, who's to blame for all these women accusing him of going after them when he was 30 and they were 16?
Listen to this.
And they tried unsuccessfully.
They tried unsuccessfully to change that.
They've done everything.
When I say they, who are they?
They're liberals.
They don't want conservative values.
They're the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender who want to change our culture.
What?
What do the gays have to do with it?
Some gay guy walking down the street in West Hollywood.
It's like, what does he have to do with the fact that Roy Moore was chasing 16-year-old girls around the room?
It's like, yeah, I wouldn't have done that if it hadn't been for the gays.
It was the gays who made me chase those girls around the room.
Yeah, they were screaming, but it was the gays.
It was the gays.
You know, come on.
Such a fraud.
He's such a phony.
And look, I don't know who I would vote for in Alabama.
I got to be honest with you.
I mean, I think the people, who was it?
It was David Limbaugh, Rush's brother, really bright guy.
He sent out a tweet today saying, I genuinely wrestle with these questions.
And if that makes me a reprobate, so be it.
I wish the choices were better, but there's nothing I can do about that.
Not voting would not absolve me if I'm judging myself, because one will win.
These are complicated questions.
Each person has to go into his heart.
There's no rule.
You know, all the people on earth can pound their hand into their palm, their fists into their palm, and say, you got to do this, or you got to do that, or this is the threat.
You know, these are very, very difficult questions.
More, you know, I have no respect for the guy.
I have no respect for him.
But the other guy believes in killing babies five minutes before they come out of the womb.
I mean, to me, that guy belongs behind bars.
So I don't know.
I don't know how you make that decision.
I'm glad I'm not in Alabama.
I'm not going to tell him what to think.
I think each person has to go into his heart.
What you don't do, what you don't do is you don't lie.
You don't lie about the situation.
You don't tell yourself that this guy is some kind of Christian hero because he's not.
You don't blame gay people for what he's been doing.
That's absurd.
You know, that's ridiculous.
Lying is the one thing you cannot do.
You have to tell yourself the truth, or how can you make a good decision?
Speaking of lying and speaking of people behaving badly, NBC says they had no idea that Matt Lauer had a button under his desk.
Now, there is some explanation a lot, because what's his name?
Roger Ailes had this too, a button under his desk, which I'm sure he used in much the same way.
But apparently, if you're very famous or very powerful, that's a security measure.
If somebody comes in with a gun, you can lock the door.
I guess.
I guess that's what it's for.
But what our friend Matt was using it for was he was locking the door and then just assaulting these women.
I mean, it's insane.
So the NBC says our management had no idea.
They had no idea.
And here's the guy, Variety, wrote one of the, you know, the only reason they fired this guy, they keep saying, well, he made, a woman came forward with a claim that we really believed we couldn't get out, get out.
They fired because the times and variety were coming after him and they knew it.
They were coming down the pike.
It was going into the press.
You know, they had to get ahead of that story.
So here's the reporter from Variety on with Allison Camerada.
His name is Ramin Setoudeh on whether NBC knew.
We spoke to three women who consider themselves victims of sexual harassment.
And we learned in one of the cases, Matt Lauer gave this colleague a sex toy with a note about what he wanted to do with the sex toy.
There was another story about how Matt Lauer had a colleague come into his office and took down his pants and exposed himself to the woman.
And told her it expected and expected a sex act when he did that.
And reprimanded her when she resisted.
And the question I think in going forward is what did NBC know who was involved?
Speaking to the victims, they say that the network was aware of Matt's behavior.
Meaning what?
Who did these, the women that you've spoken to, who did they tell?
Who did they go to?
High-level executives at NBC were told about his behavior.
Meaning Andy Lack.
I'm not going to name names, but high-level executives were told about his behavior, both current and prior executives.
And what was their response to the one?
And we were told that they protected Matt Lauer because he was so valuable to this day show.
Yeah, they're lying.
NBC is lying.
I try not to predict the future too much.
I predict that NBC will be exposed as lying.
They are lying.
And you can't.
Somebody installed the damn button in the desk.
Somebody knew these women were going in there.
Everybody knew.
Everybody knew, I'm sure.
I don't know how you would work in an office like that and not know that was going on.
Hey, we're going to stay on so you can hear my interview with Ken Stern, author of the book Republican Like Me, a liberal guy, goes out and met conservatives, and somehow we let him live.
But he came back to tell the story.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't subscribe.
You should subscribe.
Spent Time, Found Truth00:15:29
You should subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, and then you can be in the mailbag, and then your problems can be solved.
And if you subscribe for $100, you can be in for the entire year, and you get the leftist tears tumbler, which will continue to fill up as this show goes on.
But let's just pause for a minute.
Plause for a minute.
If you're a guy, go look in the mirror.
I know, right?
It's ridiculous.
It's absurd.
And look, you're bringing down the show.
This is a classy place, and you can't come in here looking like that.
So what you got to do is you got to go to Indochino and get yourself a bespoke suit.
That's what the British call it, a bespoke suit.
Bespoke suit is opposed to going in and pointing at something and saying, yeah, take up the cuffs.
You go and have it fitted to yourself.
And there's a little office here in LA, and there are offices around the country where you can go in and get measured.
And if you can't do that, or you're someplace where they don't have one, you can just do the measurements yourself and send them in online, and then they'll have them on file.
And anytime you want a shirt or a suit, pair of pants, they will make them for you perfectly to fit you perfectly.
And you can choose, you can design them, you can design the shirt, the collars, the pockets, everything that you want.
So you visit a showroom or shop online at IndoChino.com, pick your fabric, choose your customization, submit your measurements, and place your order, and it will arrive in just a few weeks.
I have a beautiful shirt they made and it fits like a glove.
This week, my listeners can get any premium Indochino suit for just $359 at IndoChino.com if you enter Clavin at checkout, K-L-A-V-A-N.
That's 50% off the regular price of a made-to-measure premium suit.
Plus, the shipping is free.
So go to IndoChino.com, promo code Clavin for any premium suit for just $359 and free shipping.
It's a great deal, and you do not have to look the way you look right now.
You're embarrassing everybody.
Especially here.
So here's what I was thinking.
I was thinking about the fact that it stuck in my mind all week that Cokie Roberts line that every woman in the press corps knew she couldn't get into an elevator with John Conyer.
And I don't mean to elevate myself above anybody because every man knows that the thoughts going through his head are disgusting.
We all have a pornographic.
Every guy has a pornographic movie running through his head.
Every guy's thought terrible things.
Some of us have said terrible things, done terrible things.
Okay.
This is true.
I decided in the 80s when feminism first flared up, the disease, the plague of feminism first flared up.
I decided I wasn't going to buy into it.
I just wasn't going to live that way.
I didn't like it.
I thought it was foolish.
I thought, you know, I'm an individualist.
I think any woman can do whatever she wants.
It's not for me to judge what choices she wants to make in life, but I am going to make the choices that I want to make in life.
When a woman gets into an elevator with me, I take my hat off.
Now, this usually only comes out in New York because in California, I'm not always wearing a hat, but in New York, I always wear a hat.
And when I get in an elevator, if a guy gets in, I don't care.
But if a woman gets in, I take my hat off.
And I was thinking about this because we've been talking about the fact that these two kinds of ways of approaching morality.
One is a rule-based system that at its extreme becomes tyrannical, and the other is an individualist system that at its extreme becomes anarchical.
It just becomes chaos.
But I was thinking, like, I don't like people telling me what to do, and I don't actually trust anybody to tell me what to do.
Not the church, not any organization, certainly not the government.
I don't trust anybody to tell me what to do.
I believe I have a conscience and a mind and a moral center, and I can find my own way studying great thinkers and studying the church and going to church.
And I thought, why do I take my hat off when a woman gets into the elevator?
Certainly not because I think some woman is just dying to see the top of my head, although I know they are, fairly.
But no, it's not.
It is a rule I made myself that trains the mind.
I think that that is what rules are for.
They train the mind.
You pick the rule, you live by the rule, and the rule trains the mind.
And anybody who deal, any man, any man who's married knows that he is married to a different kind of creature than himself.
I mean, any guy who sits and talks to his wife and loves his wife is sitting there.
There are days, so help me.
I mean, I've been married now almost 40 years.
There are days, so help me, when I look at my wife and I think, I do not understand what this woman is talking about.
I know she's a brilliant girl.
I know she's got a great heart.
She's the best wife in the world.
I do not understand a word coming out of her mouth.
That is something that marriage trains you to respect and love.
You know, I mean, if you're paying attention, you start to realize there's another way of looking at the world.
And even though it sounds crazy to you, it actually makes a certain amount of sense if you are of the other sex.
So you have these rules that you set and that you follow.
You can get them from your church.
You can get them from the great thinkers like Aristotle, the great ethicists who have talked about them.
You can get them wherever you get them.
You get those rules and you follow those rules by a discipline and they train your mind.
Art trains your mind.
This is one of the reasons I love the arts so much, is they train your emotions.
The arts are a school for your emotions.
And the reason people follow certain rules in the arts is because they know that those are the ways you can school people's emotions.
Even bad people write great works and paint great paintings.
The rules are a way of training your mind.
And so you can find the rules that will do that.
You know.
You know where you're lacking.
I mean, look, there are going to be bad people in this world.
They're going to be people who press the button on the desk and lock the door so they can attack young female staffers.
Those people, you know, are not going to follow the rules, but you have to follow the rules because they will train your mind.
And as your mind becomes trained and as your emotions become trained, you will become a more happy person.
You will become a joyous person.
The rules are not there because every rule works for every person.
The rules are not universal.
The rules are what you turn to to train your mind to become the person that God meant you to be.
Every one of us knows that we were meant to be something better than we are right this minute.
Every one of us knows that.
There's no person who doesn't know it.
Even Adolf Hitler knew down in his heart until he wasn't there anymore, until his soul was gone, which I assume happened at some point in his life.
But everybody whose soul is still there has a little message that's coming in saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, you were meant to be something bigger than this.
The rules are a way of training.
I believe that's the way I read the gospel.
When Jesus says something, I don't think like, oh, I have to do this or I'll feel guilty.
I think, do that.
Judge not lest you be judged, and you will train your mind to see the world in another way.
Look at yourself before you look at the guy across from you, and you will learn to see the world in an eternal, beautiful, brilliant, godly way, and your life will become more joyful.
That is what I have to say on another day when everyone stinks, but things are going great.
So we're going to enjoy it.
Here is Ken Stern.
We recorded this a little earlier.
He was an NPR CEO, and for I think like 10 years, and he one day decided he was in a bubble and he was going to leave and go see the country and talk to the conservatives.
He wrote a book about it called Republican Like Me, How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.
And here is the interview we just recorded earlier.
Ken Stern, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on the show.
So you are, you were the CEO of NPR, which to my audience is like the heart of liberal darkness.
So you were really coming from a place of sheer left-wingery, but you found that you started to feel that you were in a bubble.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, so in addition to NPR, I live in a 94% Democratic war in Washington, D.C., 100% Democratic household.
So yeah, I live in what clearly is a liberal bubble.
And so what motivated you to actually try and get out?
So I think there are a couple things.
One is just a deep concern about the growing partisanship in this country and the polarization, the fact that we're increasingly living in a place where the right and the left don't know each other.
And when you don't know each other, it becomes really easy to demonize the other side.
So I can't do much about that on a sort of global basis, but I want to do something for myself and get out.
And Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird, if you want to understand someone, you have to see things from their point of view.
And I wanted to do that.
Okay, so what was the procedure?
What did you start to do?
Yeah, so I mean, it's actually that's such an obvious thing in what you do when you want to see things on the other side.
So there's, in fact, a lot of different things I did over the course of almost two years.
I traveled the country.
I spent a lot of time in evangelical churches.
Here I am a nice agnostic Jew from Washington, D.C., spending time with evangelical churches.
I went hunting and pig hunting in Texas.
I went to NASCAR races.
But, you know, I also did lots of things.
Like I just went to Pikesville, Pikeville, Kentucky, and spent a couple of days there.
I spent a lot of time in Youngstown, Ohio.
I just spent a lot of time with people who I ordinarily wouldn't spend time with trying to understand their perspective and their point of view.
I did a lot of listening in this trip.
And was it a shocking experience?
Yeah, you know, so yes and no.
I mean, let me actually sort of step back.
The Washington Post did a couple of years ago what they call a word cloud.
They went to Democrats and said, give us one word to describe Republicans.
And they did the same with the Republicans.
And it all came back nasty.
I mean, Democrats said sort of the worst things about Republicans.
They're bigots and they're greedy.
And Republicans had equally bad things to say about Democrats.
And so I had to sort of say to myself, you know, I don't believe that, you know, there are 80 million really bad people on this side.
But, you know, somewhere deep in me, deep inside, I knew those words were there too.
So I went out and, you know, both surprising and unsurprising, I found lots of people who I admired.
Lots of people trying to do the right things for their families and communities.
Sometimes I didn't agree with them, but I always found them to be sort of thoughtful and interesting.
And when you get out, you find that people, Americans actually almost ruthlessly moderate when you get talking to them face to face.
They tend to sort of move towards the middle, maybe not in polls, but in real life.
And that was one of the great things that I found.
It was always easy to find common ground when you were face to face with people.
It really is interesting to me.
One of the things that happened to me as a kid is I did the same thing as I was a kid.
I wanted to be Jack Herouak, so I wandered all over the country.
And one of the things that always shocked me was that people have much more complex moral worldviews than the people who are supposed to be their superiors in the media.
That the people in the media are always lecturing them, but they actually have a much more complex and interesting moral worldview.
So you're an agnostic Jew.
You're sitting in an evangelical church.
Were you listening to things that shocked you?
You know, shocked is not the right word.
I think it was interesting when I sat down with Pastor Steve.
So let me tell you, so I ended up spending a lot of time in an Assembly God church, Assembly of God church in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
And I was actually counseled to go, you know, having been to a megachurch, go find a small assembly God church.
I said to myself, where the hell am I going to find an assembly God church?
And I ended up Googling it and finding out there were 100 different congregations within a stone's throw of me.
So I picked one randomly and ended up with Pastor Steve at the Freedom Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
And we actually had tons in common.
We actually had, we were similar age, similar family structures, a wife and a 10-year-old kid, similar backgrounds, different views on faith, but really lots of things we agreed on.
And I met other people who had some of the same experiences.
On any 10 things, we probably agreed on eight of them.
So why are we fighting about the two when we could find eight to find common ground on?
You know, I actually do believe this.
I believe that about 70% of the country agrees on 70% of the issues, and we constantly are talking about the, because it makes better TV.
Did your mind change about anything?
Did you change your positions?
Absolutely.
So you have to start.
I mean, my mindset was had to start with the notion, like, how could I be right on everything?
You know, I'm as self-infatuated as anyone else, but I had to say, look, I can't possibly be right on.
But I picked a bunch of issues which I thought I was going to be right on, but I knew I wasn't anywhere close to being an expert on.
Gun control, climate change, poverty programs, things where I had sort of well-honed life instincts, but I knew my knowledge was thin deep, sort of surface deep.
And I went out and found experts.
I spent a lot of time with John Lott, the conservative economist, learning about gun issues.
I spent time at a lot of research.
I spent time hunting and going to gun shows and talking to lots of people who knew a lot more than me.
And you know what?
Not surprisingly, I actually came away with a much more nuanced view of the issues.
I wasn't converted necessarily to being a gun rights guy, but I have a very different view of the issue.
Just to tell you a bit of a story, so I went hunting in a place called Gonzales, Texas, went pig hunting and had a great experience there.
It's about eight miles as the crow flies, but 30 miles by road from Sutherland Springs, where they had the last church shooting.
And having had all these experiences when that happened, you know, I sort of viewed it very differently.
I mean, I sort of saw all the liberals running out, immediately saying gun control, gun control, gun control.
But I knew the issue was much more complex because of the time I spent on the issue.
So the book is called Republican Like Me, How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.
So that's a little bit of an exaggeration.
Is that fair to say?
I mean, you're not actually, you wouldn't actually do anything shocking like vote for a Republican, would you?
I might.
So it's yes, heresy.
You know, I'm a lifelong Democrat.
I mean, avowedly Democrat, spent time in Democratic politics.
But for the year that I did the book or a year and a half, I actually went and changed my party registration.
I became a Republican and tried to, I mean, really sort of live that life.
And when I was done, you know, knowing a lot about sort of my research and motivated reasoning, I was open to the possibility I would stay Republican.
In the end, I didn't.
But I didn't become a Democrat either.
I'm now a registered independent because I see value of both sides.
And also, I've become very skeptical about both parties and their ability to represent the country as a whole.
So I would vote for the right Republican, and then I would vote for the right Democrat, depending upon who they are.
Now, I started out as a liberal and became a conservative over time.
And one of the things that happened to me was I found that my liberal friends were genuinely intolerant.
They were genuinely intolerant of other opinions.
They could not listen to me.
One thing I found almost repeatedly was that they could not listen to my changing opinions for more than 30 seconds without cursing, without cursing.
Suddenly, I found that their language became incredibly obscene.
So I would be talking to someone I thought was the nicest person, and suddenly this foul language would become.
Did you have that experience at all?
Did you find that as you became sympathetic to the right, that your left-wing friends became less sympathetic to you?
So my 10-year-old son has been known to boo my television appearances.
I went on Tucker Carlson at the beginning of, as soon as my book came out, and he backed me, I'm told by my wife, he booed my appearances.
And I think there's actually a sort of a moral story there.
He's not like, he thinks he's right about everything, even if he doesn't know anything.
Social Media's Groupthink00:07:18
And I think that's a truth of the matter for a lot of us.
The bad experience I've had coming back, something coming back, is social media.
And sort of the, you know, if I learn to love the right, which to me doesn't mean necessarily agree with everything, but it means to sort of feel the bonds of affection that Lincoln talked about.
I must also be a white nationalist or a gay hater or Bennett.
All I've been called by people who haven't read the book.
And, you know, there is that strain of intolerance that you're describing that I've experienced personally.
I think it's a lot of places inside, not just on the left, but I certainly have seen a bit of it and has left me with somewhat of a jaundiced view of some of my former friends of the left.
But the people who read, just I will say that I don't want to get carried away by social media.
It's still a thin slice of America, thankfully.
When I talk to people about it, whether they're conservative or liberal, often have good conversations about it.
So there's hope for us yet.
Now, you were the CEO of NPR, and one of the things I truly think that drives people crazy, and I attribute a lot of the division in the country to this.
I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with certain Supreme Court, like Roe v. Wade, that didn't give us a chance to argue it out.
Even if we had come to some kind of compromise, at least we would have fought with each other and talked to each other and confronted each other when the Supreme Court makes a diktat like that.
I think it's very difficult for us to resolve our hearts, even though the law gets resolved.
But one of the things that I have to say, that as a right-winger, I just feel a lot of animosity toward the media.
And I think that they are not, it's not just unfair.
They are actually hostile and dishonest.
And it means that instead of talking to my liberal friends, because I still do have liberal friends who I love and who actually are people of goodwill, instead of that, I'm listening to the New York Times, you know, guys like Charles Blow at the New York Times, who I don't think should be allowed to write anything anywhere.
You know, I think he should be allowed, but I don't think he should be published in a major newspaper because he's a hysterical child.
So do you look back on your time at NPR and do you think like, yeah, maybe we could have handled that better?
Maybe we could have hired a couple of conservatives somewhere along the way.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I've lost my life membership to the public radio conference now because my book's not about media.
Other books are about media.
But wherever I went, people wanted to talk to me about it.
So naturally.
So, you know, I got a year's full of feelings about people feeling left out by the media, looked down upon by the media.
And it gave me a lot of time to think about it.
And I don't, things have changed in the media over the decade since I left NPR.
I mean, I think the media is different than it was 10 years ago.
But what I came back and said in a piece, a couple different pieces, was as I look back on my time at NPR, it wasn't that I thought NPR was overtly parsed.
In fact, I think they're almost, they have sort of the, here's the view from the right, here's the view from the left, almost metronome-like, which I personally don't even love that.
But there's an effective groupthink.
Everyone in mainstream media is pulled from the same pool.
And no matter how hard you try, it's going to have an effect.
And what I've said is, look, you would cover race only with white men, no matter how well-meaning and dedicated the craft.
We can't cover politics with people who are mostly liberals.
It's the same thing, no matter how dedicated the craft they are.
That has not been entirely well received by some of my former colleagues.
It is an amazing thing because it seems such a simple.
I mean, I wrote a piece for the LA Times maybe 15 years ago where I said, you know, if you want to stop your subscriptions from dropping, try hiring some conservatives.
Just hire, you know, just hire a few to represent other points of view.
I mean, if there is somebody in the mainstream media who voted for Donald Trump, I would like to meet him because I simply don't think that exists.
So let's talk about Trump for a moment.
But before you get to that, I do want to say, there are, I mean, I think your point there is exactly right.
There are great people in the media, people I really admire, but the trust level for the media is now around 35%.
Some of that is caused just by the nature of the lack of trust in institutions generally, but it's also partly the media's fault.
And I think they need to do much more, much, be much more introspective about it than they are.
So let's talk about Trump because Trump has divided people on the right.
He's divided people on the left.
You know, I have a fairly steady, I've had a fairly steady reaction to him, which is that I've been thrilled.
I've been thrilled by some of the stuff he's done.
I am not so thrilled by the way he behaves, but I do understand it.
I do believe that he is fighting a media that he is fighting on the terms, the media, on the media's terms.
Is this, I mean, at Thanksgiving dinner, we all had these political arguments, of course, and mine was my liberal relative saying to me, this man is destroying the country.
Is Trump destroying the country?
So, look, I'm not a fan, so let's just start off.
No matter how much I learned to love the right, I have not learned to love Donald Trump.
I've learned a lot of people who voted for him and try to see him through their eyes, which is hard.
I think on the setup is, I think the media and Donald Trump have gotten into this cage match, which is actually to each of theirs advantage.
The media gets to fight him, and it drives their numbers up.
And Trump gets to beat on them, and it's virtue signaling to his face.
I think it's destructive from both sides.
I mean, it's destructive institutions that need to be important pillars of society.
And I don't love the way he's divisive by nature.
It's worked really well for him in politics.
I don't think it's the right thing for the president of the United States to do.
Okay.
I'm running out of time, so I want to ask you, going forward, if you could write a prescription and say this is the way out of it, because it bothers me too.
I mean, I am a partisan, but I want to be able to talk and compromise.
I do not want to be constantly at each other's throats.
I don't think it's good for the country.
If you could write a prescription to solve this problem of division, what would it be?
Yeah, so I don't have a good thing.
First, I'd start by getting, if I could wave my magic wand, I'd get rid of social media.
I would support the Supreme Court on gerrymanding because what we have is uncompetitive races around the country, and that allows the extremes to control Congress from both sides.
But mostly, I would say let's get out of our bubbles, stop listening only to ourselves, listen to the other side.
Actually, we have a lot to learn from each other.
If we do that, we'll all be better off, even if we don't agree.
Now, I do agree with you, and I think that time is coming.
I actually think, weirdly enough, that Trump, for all his divisiveness, is going to lead to another time, because I simply do not think we can continue at this level of hatred for one another.
You know, since you started by quoting Lincoln, I mean, he did say we are not enemies, but friends shortly before we all started killing each other.
I hope we can avoid that this time.
Anyway, Ken Stern, Republican like me, how I left the liberal bubble and learned to love the right.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Loving Arrested Development00:03:32
I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks.
I enjoyed it.
All right.
Bye-bye.
All right.
It's nice to know that a liberal can come and talk to us and not open fire.
Stuff I like.
I have discovered a couple of TV shows recently that I love, and I'm going to talk about one of them.
I'll talk about another one next week.
But if you're not watching Search Party on TBS, you have got to watch this show.
It's so well plotted and so well acted and so well written.
I'll give you the story.
I'll set up the story and I'll show you just a little bit of it.
It's basically about these four millennial, empty, vain, narcissistic, meaningless people living meaningless lives on the edge of the New York art scene.
And one of them, Dory, her name is, she's played by Aaliyah Shockott.
And none of these people have a big history.
None of them have big credits.
But one of them is just a little bit smarter and more sensitive than everybody else.
And she kind of starts to realize her life is meaningless, but she doesn't know what to do about it.
And she doesn't know, has no way to address it.
And so she becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a girl she met like once in college.
And it just starts to obsess her and she starts to search for this girl.
It's called Search Party.
She starts to search for this missing girl as a way of bringing meaning into her life.
And what's so great about the show is it's genuinely funny and a terrific picture of narcissism and millennials and all this stuff.
And it's got this actor who plays the gay guy, John Early, who is a gay comedian, who is so good that they just, every now and again, they'll just cut away to the look on his face and it cracks me up.
But the thing that makes it so good is that it's kind of cute.
It's not, you know, laugh out loud.
You won't always be laughing out loud.
But then at the end of every show, the mystery just ratchets up a little bit.
And so it's really well plotted.
Here's just a little bit of like the trailer for the first season.
It's in its second season now.
Do you guys remember that girl, Chantal, with her bottom?
Oh, she sucked.
Well, she's gone missing.
What do you mean, gone missing?
She's like a missing person.
Well, where is she?
That's the question.
She's out there.
And I'm going to find her.
But I need your guys' help.
Okay, I love, love, love, love this idea.
Chantal!
What does Chantal have to do with you?
I'm just tired of things that don't matter.
Yes.
Let's put the pieces together.
Let's figure it out.
This stuff scares me.
This is just the beginning.
I want to break into places and learn sleight of hand and stuff.
Drew, what are you doing with a teaser?
Take taser.
Drew!
You have wiggly wrists.
I'm being followed.
Who are you?
Why do you have such a vested interest in that?
I just want to find her.
It's really, I have to say, I don't binge watch.
I binge watch this.
I watched the entire first season in two days.
And it's only a half hour.
Each episode is only a half hour, so you can just eat it like candy.
Jess tells me that John Early was in, what was it, arrested development?
Oh, she was in arrested development.
Oh, Alia Shawcott was in arrested development.
Okay, I did not know that.
And the blonde who plays this, she's kind of slutty, but she's also, you just feel for her because she's so lost and she has an accomplished sister and she's a failing actress.
Her name is Meredith Hagner, she was a soap opera actress.
Anyway, great stuff.
Download Another Kingdom00:02:31
All right, it is not yet the Clavenless weekend.
If you go on and download Another Kingdom on iTunes, I am leaving from here to go pitch it to TV.
I'll let you know how that goes.
I don't have my hopes up.
I have absolutely zero hopes because I just think I'm so politically toxic.
I would be shocked if I sold anything to anybody at this point.
But it'll be interesting.
We will end.
You know, now Advent begins.
We're going to be talking a lot about Advent as we go forward.
This is the run-up to Christmas.
And on the record bestseller list is a record by the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
They have put out their Christmas album, and it is beautiful.
They sing beautifully.
And I think we've been dealing with so many horrible people today and this week that it would be nice to deal with the Dominican Sisters of Mary and go out with their version of the Carol of the Bells.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Please download Another Kingdom, and I will see you all on Monday if you survive the Clavenless weekend.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Albera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.