Andrew Clavin and Hannah Scherlacher expose how Obama-era scandals—like Susan Rice’s email shielding FISA abuses tied to the anti-Trump Steele dossier—fueled partisan investigations, yet Congress remains powerless without DOJ cooperation. Meanwhile, conservative students face lawsuits, harassment, and grade penalties for dissenting views, from Berkeley’s protests against Ben Shapiro to professors rewarding anti-conservative activism while punishing conservative speech. The episode ties campus bias to broader cultural shifts, like "porn literacy" classes normalizing online porn’s influence on teens, and warns of a potential backlash against sexual liberation—mirroring history’s cycles of prudery. Ultimately, it frames systemic censorship and media manipulation as threats to free debate, demanding legal and public pushback. [Automatically generated summary]
Are we more interested in discussing our concerns over deficit spending or chatting about naked people having sex on film?
Take your time and think about the pros and cons.
If we talk about the budget, we can look very serious and display our virtue by lecturing each other about the spiraling federal debt.
If we talk about porn, we can look very serious and display our virtue by condemning degrading and exploitative sex, while at the same time picturing images of degrading and exploitative sex in our minds.
Possibly sex involving two women at the same time.
Just possibly.
If we talk about the budget, we might learn where the true sources of spending trouble really lie and begin to conceive a realistic idea about the actual problems facing our nation that politicians aren't going to do anything about.
If we talk about porn, we might learn about a few offbeat sexual techniques that will drive your partner to wildly ecstatic new heights of self-disgust and hospitalization.
Maybe we should combine the two subjects.
For instance, we could talk about the budget while naked or have sex while going broke, which is actually the story of my life.
The truth is, whether you're talking about the president's budget or porn, you're probably going to end up discussing outlandish scenarios that are almost certainly never going to happen.
And if we're going to talk about outlandish scenarios that will probably never happen, why don't we talk about something really interesting, like whether anyone in the corrupt Obama administration will ever be held accountable and go to jail?
But feel free to take your clothes off while we're talking.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-deeky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the rubber zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, hooray, it's the mailbag tomorrow.
So come on over.
We always have to give you these instructions.
Come on over to thedailywire.com, hit the podcast button, then hit my podcast, the Andrew Clavin podcast, and then hit the mailbag, ask your questions about anything you want, personal life, religion, politics, answers guaranteed, 100% correct, and will change your life sometimes for the better.
But you have to be a subscriber to ask the questions, so subscribe.
It's a lousy 10 bucks.
Come on, 10 bucks a month.
I'm going to solve all your problems for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
For a lousy $100, you get a full year subscription and the leftist tears tumbler, which automatically and magically fills up every time I speak.
Well, you know, we also have tomorrow is Knowles answering questions.
But see, Knowles doesn't know anything, so it doesn't matter.
But the good thing about Knowles is tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so you will have somebody to laugh at on Valentine's Day besides your boyfriend.
So tomorrow, it's February 14th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
The conversation streams live on the Daily Wire Facebook page and the Daily Wire YouTube channel and will be free for everyone to watch, but only subscribers get to ask the questions.
Everybody gets to laugh at Knowles.
To ask questions as a subscriber, log in to the website, dailywire.com, watch the live stream, head over to the conversation page.
After that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box and Knowles will give you his ridiculous answers to your questions as they come in for an entire hour.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by the sad and dateless Michael Knowles this Valentine's Day, which is tomorrow, February 14th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
Enjoy the conversation.
You know what I was thinking about when I'm reading that?
I'm thinking, Valentine's Day, I should get flowers.
But anyway, you know what else home makes a good gift?
A watch.
Now, you might say that's an expensive gift for Valentine's Day, but not if you go to movement.
Because movement, of course, is MVMT.
And you may say, look, that really is a good-looking watch.
How can that be inexpensive?
It's because they leave out the vowels.
See, vowels are expensive.
They have to ship them from ancient Sumeria, and it costs a bundle.
And that's why watches, when you go into stores, cost so much.
If you go into Macy's, it's two vowels.
M-A-C-Y, it's a small word, but you've already got two vowels.
With movement, you get no vowels, but you get a beautiful timepiece that will, they really are, they're reliable, and they're really good looking.
You get a lot of compliments with them.
This is started by a little, just two guys who liked watches, like me.
They like watches, but they didn't like paying the big prices.
And now they've not only come from being two crowdfunded kids working out of a living room in the past year, they've not only introduced a ton of new watch collections for both men and women, but also expanded to sunglasses and fashion-forward bracelets and all kinds of new stuff.
It really is good.
Go on the website, just take a look.
I really love their watches and been wearing them.
Now I wear them almost all the time.
They're all about looking good, keeping it simple, and they start at just 95 bucks.
Okay, these are watches that with vowels, with vowels, they would cost you like $400.
And nobody ever misses the vowels.
Nobody ever comes up to you and says, nice watch.
Let me see your vowels.
Nobody cares.
So here's what you do.
You can get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns by going to movement.com, mvm.com slash Andrew.
Leave the vowels in Andrew because I'm an expensive guy.
That's why movement keeps growing.
Check out their expanding collection.
Go to movement.com, M-V-M-T dot com slash Andrew, and join the movement, move, move, move.
Hard to pronounce, but cheap.
You know, I actually am going to talk about porn later in the show, which is kind of an important subject.
But what came into my mind as I was thinking about porn is, you know, the scenarios in porn are unrealistic and they never happen, but they're very powerful in your imagination.
I was thinking the same thing is almost true about almost everything that we talk about in politics.
So Trump put out his budget yesterday.
And of course, the president's budget never gets enacted.
It's always just a kind of dream, a kind of a vision statement, as you would, if you will.
And he puts this out and people start talking about too much spending, it's too much debt.
And I was thinking, even these things, these crises that exist in our imagination, sometimes they can create themselves.
And that's why everybody is always battling to own the territory of your imagination.
But even the debt involves your imagination.
Just because something exists in your imagination doesn't mean it's imaginary.
I think Harry Potter said that.
I wrote it many years ago, but I think it's also in Harry Potter.
Just because something exists, lots of important stuff goes on in your imagination.
The country.
The country exists in your imagination.
We believe this is a country, therefore it's a country.
But one of the most important things that exists in people's imagination is money.
If you are running a store and you think, boy, if I can just earn enough money, I can buy a pair of shoes.
And you get enough money and you buy a pair of shoes and you come to me, the shoemaker, and I say, yeah, I don't take money.
I don't do money.
Your money is worthless.
If I stop imagining that this money.
But the big question always is, does your imagination line up with reality?
I imagine the country of Brazil.
If I go to Brazil, will it really be there?
Money, once we all agree to it, actually does represent something real.
It represents the value we put on things.
And that's how money gets its value, from the imaginary trust we put in the money.
The reason the debt is so important is because if the debt goes up beyond our GDP, if we start to owe more that we can possibly pay back, people lose confidence in our money.
And so they stop imagining that the American dollar is the bulwark of the global economy.
Why Rice Seeks Justice00:07:56
And that's bad, right?
That's bad for us.
That's what happened to Greece, basically.
People stopped saying, well, I'm not loaning Greece any money because they can't possibly pay it back.
And suddenly, you know, we don't want to become Greece.
When they talk about us becoming Greece, they don't mean we're going to have ancient buildings and beautiful beaches.
That's not what they mean.
We're not going to be able to get any food.
And you're going to be pushing wheelbarrows full of cigarettes.
So that's why the debt is important.
I mean, that's why the imagination is important.
So I was thinking about this.
I'm thinking about all these investigations.
And we're investigating, you know, was the Hillary Clinton investigation mismanaged?
We're investigating investigations.
We're investigating, of course, the Russian collusion.
And now we're investigating, was the investigation into the Russian collusion mishandled and was it untrustworthy?
And all this stuff.
I'm thinking, you know, people keep saying, why isn't anybody going to go to jail?
You know, and do people ever go to jail?
Is this whole investigation thing just a kind of political show where nobody ever, ever gets, you know, held accountable?
I mean, we now are fairly certain that, you know, to coin a protest sign, Obama spied and Hillary lied.
You know, we now feel, I feel pretty sure that the Obama administration used Hillary Oppo research to get a FISA warden to spy on an American.
Now, that American, Carter Page, had worked about a month before for the Trump campaign.
And so it just seems likely to me that when they were spying on him, they were really spying on the Trump campaign.
There's been some really weird developments in this recently.
Just now, Susan Rice on Inauguration Day, she sent herself an email, okay, about a meeting she had with Obama in which Obama told investigators, the law dogs and the FBI and the Justice Department, I want everything handled by the book.
This is Susan Rice writing to herself because Trump is being, and you remember after Trump was elected, there's all this talk about they still could stop the election if only the elector, the electors wouldn't give him the electoral votes and maybe there'd be something else that would happen, maybe a recount, who knows?
They were talking about all this different stuff.
They really did not, could not believe that this was actually going to happen.
And so Susan Rice writes herself an email saying Obama wants this Russian investigation by the book.
And Lindsey Graham has written a letter to Susan Rice.
She was the national security advisor.
She was the woman who went on and lied about Benghazi like five times in one morning.
She went on five different talk shows.
So Lindsey Graham was talking about why he thinks she wrote herself this letter.
What I'm worried about is it's an effort by the president to basically get himself on the record through Susan Rice to make sure that from his point of view, everything was done by the book.
The question is, did the president know anything about the FISA warrant application?
Did Susan Rice know that the warrant application included a dossier from Mr. Steele when he was on the payroll of the Democratic Party coming from Russian sources, that he was a political operative being paid by the Democratic Party, and that the information in the FISA warrant application was a dossier that was political in nature and that Mr. Steele hated President Trump, candidate Trump, and was trying to do everything he could to beat him.
That's not exactly by the book.
That's not exactly by the book.
And now they're talking about what did Obama know and when did he know it?
And that's serious stuff.
Of course, they're only talking about it on Fox News because the rest of the news media is doing its best to colonize your imagination so you don't get outraged at what your government was doing, you know, when Obama was in office and running basically the federal government like it was an arm of the Democrat Party and using the levers of power against his political opponents.
The other thing that came out that has just come out, and this is Byron York, who's just doing such great work.
He was writing about the, he says, according to two sources familiar with the meetings, James Comey told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Mike Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them.
And this is important because Flynn confessed to lying, but now it seems that they had nothing on him.
Remember, Flynn was supposed to have talked to the Russian ambassador.
And we know, some reporters, I think at the Post have seen the Washington Post, I think have seen the transcript of that discussion.
And we know he didn't do anything wrong.
He was allowed to do that.
Trump had been elected.
He was contacting a Russian ambassador.
They have the transcript.
He didn't do anything wrong.
But Mueller, Robert Mueller, says that he lied to them.
Flynn is now letting it out kind of through sources that he was just stuck.
He was running out of money to defend himself.
He was tired of being hounded by the feds.
And, you know, the feds and police do this to you too.
You know, they pull you over and they say, were you driving?
And you say, no, well, we're going to charge you with reckless endangerment.
You'll go away for 10 years unless you confess to drunken driving and then we'll give you a slap on the wrist.
And so people, there's all kinds of pressures they can bring to bear to get you to confess to things you didn't do.
And this is stuff.
So one investigation really does seem to be unraveling.
This Russian investigation seems to be unraveling.
New York Times, a former newspaper, published a piece today, a QA, where people were allowed to write in to have it explained to them about the Russian investigation.
And somebody wrote in, a liberal wrote in and said, you know, I'm tired of this.
This is like this anti-Russian Cold War stuff.
Is this investigation mean anything?
And the answer, you should go read it for yourself because the answer is like, yeah, it means Mike Flynn confessed to something and then another guy, and that didn't have anything to do with Russia, but yeah, it's important.
You know, like basically, no, they got nothing.
So now, now the conservatives are saying somebody has got to pay for this.
Louis Gohmert was going crazy about this.
Louis Gomert, who was one of the congressmen I really like and trust.
And this is CUP 13.
He says the stuff that's coming out about Obama and Hillary is so bad, someone has got to pay.
I am shocked, really shocked, that no FISA judge has put anybody in jail yet, yet we have found total disregard for a propriety before the FISA courts.
And somebody should have been in jail long before now over the improprieties that were submitted to the court.
So Devin Nunes, you know, because I get asked this question all the time.
We get it in the mailbag, I get it on Facebook.
Is anybody going to go to jail?
Devin Nunes explains, he's the head of the House Intel Committee.
He explains why they can investigate forever, but they can never put anybody in jail without basically the American people starting to realize what all this stuff means.
In the legislative branch of government, we provide oversight, right?
So we look at these agencies, we can investigate them, and at the end of the day, we can make criminal referrals, but criminal referrals only.
We don't have people that can go out and arrest people and bring them down to the Capitol and hold them in the bowels of the Capitol.
All we can do is make criminal referrals.
So if DOJ and FBI are not going to prosecute what seemed to be very clear cases like with Christopher Steele lying to them, or if they're not going to investigate clear felonies like the leak of very highly sensitive classified information in terms of phone calls that were intercepted,
if they're not going to go after those, at some point the buck's going to have to stop with someone and we will continue our investigation, but I think ultimately it will be the American people who will put the pressure not only on Congress, but the other branches of government to make sure that justice is served.
Congress has no police force.
It has no jail.
It can't arrest people, even if they're held in contempt, even if they lie.
It cannot do anything to these people.
It needs you.
It needs us.
It needs the people to start to say this because basically they're asking the DOJ to investigate the DOJ.
They're asking the FBI to investigate the FBI.
Cnn Stamps Narrative00:15:21
And you know how that story ends.
So basically, when I said before that money gets its power and its reality, money does mean something, but it only means something if we all agree to that meaning that it will be the thing that means that thing.
The same thing is true with these investigations.
They only matter if we agree that no, you know, no, it's not all right for the Obama administration to spy on the opposing party.
No, it's not all right for them to dump an investigation that would have put you and me in jail just because it's dealing with Hillary Clinton.
We have to get outraged.
And that's what all this stuff is about.
It is fighting to keep you from seeing that, from to keep you from feeling that, to keep the American people from knowing what's going on, not just in their minds.
We kind of know what's going on in our minds.
It's knowing in your heart, in your imagination, it's imagining that this has to be, that justice has to be done.
I will go on with this in a moment.
I forgot, did I forget to mention that Hannah Scherlacher is with us?
I think I did.
She is coming on after the break.
She's from Campus Reform.
They're the ones who do those great videos in which they expose leftist bias on campus.
So we're going to talk to her about those and about what is going on on our campuses.
First, though, we have to talk about the post office.
And as you know, I'm a big post office fan.
Writers live and die on the post office.
You know, most of my life I've spent standing.
Who was it?
Was it Snoopy?
Charlie Brown used to stand next to the mailbox.
That's the story of my life.
That is me.
I love the post office, but like everything else now, you want the post office in your computer, right?
That's what stamps.com provides.
It's the easiest way to access all the great services of the post office.
It brings you everything right to your fingertips.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printer.
I like it a lot for the cool factor.
You know, you put an envelope in and it prints out, comes out with stamps.
I mean, that's an actual new thing.
And stamps.com makes it easy.
They send you a digital scale.
It automatically calculates the exact postage and it'll even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs so you don't overspend.
I love stamps.com.
It saves me the trouble of sending my wife to the post office.
I mean, that's the important thing about it.
And you can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale.
You go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin.
And you think, Clavin?
Clavin, how do you spell Clavin?
There is no ease in Clavin.
That's right.
There's no ease in Clavin.
It's never easy being Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Go to stamps.com and enter Clavin and try it.
Just try stamps.com.
You'll find out how much easier it makes your life.
So that's what's happening on the right.
That's the right trying to get hold of your imagination, which I think are increasingly seeming to be the facts.
The left, of course, is stuck on Rob Porter because they feel, basically they feel that women can be gulled.
They feel that women are gullible and they can fool them.
And you got to hear this.
You know, Rob Porter, he's the guy, right?
Was accused by two of his wives of abusing him.
One says it was emotional abuse.
The other put out a picture of her with a black eye that apparently Rob Porter took the picture.
We don't know.
We don't know why this guy, why this guy wasn't fired before.
Trump has been kind of ham-handed in his Trumpian way.
He hasn't come out and said any, you know, the president should come out and say, well, it's never right to hit your wife, you know, unless she's really annoying.
You know, Donald Trump, that's what he would say.
But he would say, no, but Trump should come out and say something about this, but he doesn't.
He keeps saying, you know, well, Porter says he's innocent and the allegations are, you know, untested allegations are bad and all this.
And all that is fair, but you do want to talk to women.
So the left is just going after women as hard as they can, trying to get them really ginned up about this.
And here, this is, I love this.
You know, CNN has become postmodern.
You can actually watch them building a lie into a narrative and building a narrative into a news story.
And here they are.
This is cut number four.
Here is a CNN panel telling itself that, yes, we are winning.
They're buying.
These stupid women are buying our narrative.
Listen to this.
You're going to make a prediction that this is sort of the beginning of something that actually, I mean, let's just assert it.
The Russia investigation has not done Donald Trump much political harm.
Do you think that defending men who abuse women and men accuse of sexual misconduct is going to be the thing that starts to eat away even at his 35%?
I think it's been chipping away at him ever since the Access Hollywood video had his voice saying the kind of derogatory women, the language of sexual assault coming in his own voice from his own mouth.
And I think that it's continuing now to the Stormy Daniels payoff that's a lot of people.
I disagree.
But, but, but, my husband needs a job.
But, Melania's behavior, you can tell from Melania's bearing and the way that she publicly is handling herself in the White House that she's not happy.
This narrative is sunk in.
I love he says, but my husband needs a job.
Like, that's not as important.
These guys, what, but reality?
These people want reality.
We have a narrative.
We have a narrative.
And, you know, unbelievably, CNN brings on a panel of Republican women who speak such common sense to them.
Obviously, obviously, nobody is in favor of spousal abuse.
We all know it's a villainous, horrible thing to do.
But these Republican women come into CNN and they speak such clear truth to them that it kind of gives you hope that maybe the people are listening to reality instead of to the news media.
Let's just play this.
This is kind of a long cut, but it's worth listening because it's just the only time on CNN you ever hear any kind of common sense.
If the president walked on water, the press would say he doesn't know how to swim.
He's become a little bit, I guess, over-criticized.
These Republican women from Miami all support President Trump.
And to say strongly would be an understatement.
But what about this weekend's tweet about how people's lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation?
It was just right.
He said some are guilty and some are not.
And not every accuser is telling the truth.
And I think that's important to know.
In his tweet, the president didn't mention Rob Porter by name, but he also failed to mention Porter's two ex-wives who claim they were physically abused by the now former White House aide.
Some might look at this tweet and say the president is dismissing Rob Porter's ex-wives.
I think that he's speaking generally.
I think he's speaking from his own position as someone that has been accused, wrongfully accused.
So I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Do you think the president's compassion may have been misguided?
I don't think that it means that he doesn't have compassion for women.
I think that if you leave something out of a sentence or you leave someone out, it doesn't mean that you're not thinking about them.
I think that we're victimizing the president, if you will, by the sense that every single word, every single tweet that he puts out is being scrutinized to the last molecule.
I think what he voiced is valid.
Should we take the victims into consideration?
Absolutely.
But should lives be condemned without due process?
Absolutely not.
So despite this tweet, you all do believe that he is a great supporter of women and stands up for women's issues.
Absolutely.
As women, do you expect your president to be a voice for women?
He's not my moral leader.
He's not my marriageal counsel.
He is our president, and he's doing a great job.
Just like I love it, if he walked on water, they say he couldn't swim.
That is absolutely true.
And listen, you know, I've always talked about the problems I have with Trump, this things that he does that I don't like.
But the media has just blown themselves up, attacking him so desperately, and they have no other strategy.
CNN is now talking about laying off some of the guys in their digital divisions because I don't, you know, they say that the Trump bump, as they call it, has given them all these new viewers and better ratings and better profits, but they're talking about laying people off.
I mean, soon there's going to be CNN people, ex-CNN, laid-off CNN people standing by the side of the road with little signs that say, you know, we'll lie for food.
And I think, you know, it's very sad, but at the same time, I think they're failing.
I literally think that the voice of reality is overwhelming the voice of the culture.
Let me just play one last thing that is on this show Homeland, which Homeland had one good season, the first season, and now it's kind of gone off the results.
It was a showtime, I think it is.
So now they have a female president they introduced last year, and she was supposed to be, I guess, like Hillary Clinton.
Maybe when they realized that wasn't going to play out, they've now turned her into Donald Trump.
And there was an assassination attempt on her, and she is now arresting members of Congress.
You know what?
Let's not play it.
It's ridiculous.
I don't even want to play it.
But I mean, this is what they're selling you.
They're selling you this whole world of danger and crisis and scandal that's not actually happening.
And it matters.
That matters.
The imagination of the people become the reality of the country.
Just like when we imagine money, it takes on value.
When you imagine that a crime is worth punishing, suddenly people are held accountable who would not be otherwise held accountable.
So you are in charge of your imagination, and your imagination is in charge of the country because they have to serve it.
They have to.
And that's why, and that's why I'm always yelling and screaming about taking back entertainment, taking back news media, not just complaining about them doing it, and especially taking back the universities and speaking to the universities.
We're about to talk to a woman, Hannah Scherlocker from Campus Reform.
But first, I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe and you could watch the entire show just sitting there with a beer.
What is it, like 10 in the morning?
Forget the beer.
All right, come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
All right, we have—let me start by just showing what campus reform does.
We play campus reform videos all the time.
They just, one of the things they do is they go on campus and they talk to students about their kind of left-wing ideology, their ignorance, the things they know.
Here is one they put out of talking about how conservative women are treated on campus.
The conservative women are sort of looked at as anti-women.
Personally, I think they're just like not educated or maybe hiding something.
I don't know.
There has to be something wrong.
Power to everyone that has their opinions, but I feel like most women need to be liberal in today's day and age just because we obviously are still not treated equally.
What would you say the response towards conservative women is here on this campus?
It's definitely more of a negative approach to conservative women.
Yes, people aren't very comfortable sharing that because they're afraid of backlash.
I just think that like liberal women are more welcomed on college campuses because they're so liberally biased.
I would say definitely more beneficial to be liberal or progressive here.
I feel like if you're, this kind of sucks.
I feel like if you're a conservative woman, you kind of get like people who don't really respect you as much and they're kind of harsh to you or think there's been more backlash against conservative ideas.
If you have opposing views to the majority, I guess it's not very accepted.
It's not very accepted.
Well, Hannah Scherlacher is one of these conservative, ill-educated, bigoted conservative women.
She's the programming manager as well as an opinion writer for campus reform.
I just love their stuff.
We play it here all the time.
Her last piece at Campus Reform deals with how and why being an open conservative on today's college campuses is a risky proposition.
She also founded an anti-sex trafficking nonprofit, and I'd love to talk to her about that if there's time.
Hannah, have we got you?
Yeah.
Oh, there you are.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to hear you.
I can't see you, but I'll assume the people can see you.
So, oh, there you are.
Good to see you.
You know, let's start with campus reform because all I really know about them are these videos, which I love.
Where did they come from?
How did they get started?
So the videos are just one part of what campus reform does.
really we publish about nine to ten stories a day just really exposing the liberal bias and abuse on college campuses.
So we started with the Leadership Institute.
We planted about 1,900 conservative and libertarian student groups on campuses across the nation and these students started running into a lot of problems like free speech zones and they started getting their grade docked for things like not being politically correct or using gender neutral pronouns and they found themselves in a really difficult situation.
They were being treated unfairly for their conservative views and nobody was reporting on it.
No one was paying attention to these issues.
No one knew what was going on.
The mainstream media ignored it.
So there was really a void and that's where campus reform kind of came in in 2009 and we started reporting on these issues and exposing them and it turns out the American people were really interested in these stories and now almost every conservative outlet has a section dedicated to higher education because people are really concerned.
You know, parents want to know where they're sending their students.
Taxpayers want to know what their taxes are going to funding these ridiculous programs, which I'm sure we'll get into later.
But it really is just crazy to see what these institutions of higher indoctrination, as I like to call them, are turning into.
Well, is it really that bad?
I mean, I know conservatives get so upset about this.
And we have, you know, we have Ben Shapiro here who goes out and gives speeches and starts riots, you know, which is unbelievable.
You know, and they keep saying, you know, well, Ben is making the campus unsafe.
And I keep thinking Ben comes in here every day and we're all perfectly safe.
It's not him doing the, the, causing the trouble.
But is this, is this really as bad a problem as conservatives think it's?
It really is.
And, you know, sometimes we can laugh at it when we see the courses out there like fighting fat phobia at Princeton or the University of Pennsylvania course called How to Waste Time on the Internet.
We laugh at those.
But, you know, for the students I work with, I work with a network of 100 student journalists on all different campuses across the country, public and private.
And they really are.
They're risking their reputation, their academic standing, and often their safety just to stand up for their most basic First Amendment rights on their college campuses.
And they really do face the backlash for it.
We have students, look at Berkeley.
They're in the middle of several lawsuits, the college Republicans are right now.
So these students, they go to school thinking they're going to have a good time, you know, drink some beer, get an education, hang out with friends, but they're learning at 19, 20 years old how to file a lawsuit, how to stand up against their administrators and professors.
It really is bad.
It's a daily struggle for them just to exist as a conservative on college campuses.
They're routinely spit on, harassed, and stalked at Berkeley alone.
You look like you were talking about Ben Shapiro.
I mean, he can't even speak on a college campus without absurd security fees and protests and riots breaking out.
You know, I get people write to me all the time.
Students write to me all the time.
How can I live with integrity in this atmosphere where it's going to cost me grades, cost me, you know, friends?
People must come to you all the time.
I mean, I just imagine when I see those guys going out and doing those videos, I just imagine people, students must come to them and say, basically, help get me out of here.
Campus Silence Crisis00:08:06
Do you have advice for people?
Like, how do you maneuver through college without getting thrown out, without getting ostracized, and yet have integrity?
What would you tell those people?
Well, you really can't guarantee they won't face the backlash or be ostracized in class.
That's honestly the reality of the climate on campus.
But the most important thing students can do is know their rights and know their principles.
I always tell the students I work with, know how to defend principles and not people, know your rights, know how, know your school's policies.
A lot of times students are told they can't speak or they can't hand out constitutions or host an event.
But really, when you look at the school's policy, the schools are breaking their own rules.
So as long as students are aware of their rights, aware of their campus policies, even on the private schools, knowing the policies they have, that can really help students along the way.
But like I said, we can't guarantee they won't face being ostracized.
But at Campus Reform, we put these students on national television and we're really starting to see students get their voice back.
They see other students go on TV, talk about their stories on national television, and you can see they're starting to feel empowered.
They realize groups like Campus Reform are standing behind them to expose their stories, to give them the legal action they need to stand up to their universities.
But it's a long, arduous battle.
It's so funny to see how the campus left is reacting ever since Trump got elected president.
The political correct ceiling is just absolutely shattered and college campuses are just in a perpetual state of outrage and they will do anything to silence conservatives.
You know, I work out here in Hollywood and obviously this situation is kind of the same.
But the one difference in Hollywood is of course they have to make money.
And so there is this little shift going on where there is some conservative entertainment, some Christian entertainment being made because it pays the bills.
It brings in the money.
So they do their woke identity politics garbage, which bombs repeatedly.
And then they will occasionally make something for actual human beings who want to see it.
What is the recourse?
I mean, parents especially are paying money to have their children turned into little monsters who can't even have a discussion without feeling destroyed.
What is the recourse?
I mean, what is the best way that parents and the rest of us can fight back?
Well, like I said, just knowing their rights, really knowing their most basic principles, and also just exposing the stories and calling your lawmakers, calling local officials, holding professors and administrators accountable is the biggest thing.
A lot of times, you know, these universities, they cower to their donors and their alumni.
Once the stories are out there, the biggest thing is just spreading awareness of what's really going on on these campuses.
A lot of times what we see, this is a top-down approach.
It's not so much, I always say you can't blame the students for being indoctrinated the way that they are.
This is coming from a top-down approach from administrators.
We see administrators not only turn a blind eye to what's really going on, but they reward it.
So the professor at Orange Coast College who called Trump's election an act of terrorism was awarded faculty of the year.
And the professor at California State University, who was caught on camera, as we reported, punching and physically assaulting a college Republican on campus, he was recently just reinstated.
So this behavior is rewarded.
So what we really need is accountability.
We need to constantly keep putting pressure on the schools to do something about it.
We at Campus Reform, we keep track of what we call campus victories where we see a policy change or a university apologizing for an extreme liberal bias or abuse.
So that number continues to grow only because students are, they keep coming to us with these stories.
Sometimes they have to send an anonymous tip because they're so afraid of the backlash.
In that case, we report on it.
But it's really just about the pressure, keeping pressure on.
And what about Trump?
You know, you mentioned him and you mentioned the backlash.
I mean, that's something I've seen in Hollywood too.
It just drove the left insane.
He drives the left insane.
But the other thing that I hear is that people, college-age kids, do not like Donald Trump, that they don't like the cut of his jib.
They don't like the way he talks.
They fear that they take on board some of this idea that he's racist, which actually that I don't think is true.
But they do seem to dislike him.
Do you get that feedback as well?
Oh, absolutely.
The rhetoric on campus, the anti-Trump rhetoric, is just off the charts.
It's funny, you were playing that video earlier of the sentiment of conservative women on college campuses.
And the campus left likes to tell you, if you're a female, you have to fit inside of the small progressive feminist box that they want to put you in.
And they call that women's empowerment.
But when I look at President Trump and his cabinet, we see more women elected to high-ranking positions than ever before in history.
And then we see professors at the news school tweet a storm of tweets saying, you know, saying to her students, if you're a conservative woman, if you attended the March for Life, then sit down and shut up.
So essentially, the campus left is saying, if you don't look at, or if you don't think exactly like we do, sit down and shut up.
You are morally depraved, unworthy of being part of the conversation.
And this is all rooted in this anti-conservative groupthink, Trump-hating, perpetual state of outrage that we're seeing on college campuses.
And yes, it's very much an anti-Trump rhetoric.
We see courses offered at Ivy League schools on how to resist Trump.
We saw just the other day, we reported on a Northeastern professor, we recorded him in class saying that he hopes President Trump dies.
And this is the norm on college campuses.
It's just typical.
What about on the right, though?
I wonder about right-wing students, conservative students.
I mean, there are obviously people in the conservative movement who don't like Trump.
Are conservative students put off by Trump?
I mean, is he hurting the conservative cause at the millennial level, do you think?
You know, it's a big mix of everything.
The real difference is that the conservatives, from what I see on campus, they're at least willing to have a conversation about it.
And that's the main difference between the campus left and the campus right.
On the campus right, the students I work with range from libertarian to conservative and everything in between.
But the bottom line is they have their differences about Trump, but they talk about it.
They engage in robust dialogue and debate, and they want to understand.
And, you know, they have reasons for not supporting Trump.
Not every conservative college student is on the Trump train, and I respect that.
They at least talk about it, though.
The real problem on college campuses is it's the end of conversation.
We don't want to hear it at all.
We don't even want to hear you say his name.
You know, it's amazing people come in here to the Daily Wire who have worked for left-wingers and are always shocked by the level of debate and openness and conversation and friendly, even though intense debate that goes on.
And they always say they never see that on the liberal side.
So basically, a final question about this.
Are you hopeful about this?
I mean, do you feel like the tide is turning or there's any light at the end of the tunnel, to use as many cliches as I possibly can?
You know, slowly but surely, we are starting to see some differences for the better.
At the same time, it is a scary place to be when we're seeing my entire generation of student entire generation leave campus completely indoctrinated.
I look at Google, you know, the average age of a Google employee is 28 years old.
That's my age.
This is my generation.
And we see James DeMoore get fired for writing a memo about the biological differences between men and women.
This is my generation that pushed him out and completely silenced him.
And I think we're going to see more and more of that infiltrate the workplace if we don't nip this in the bud and start holding universities and higher education accountable.
We can only expect more behavior like that in the workplace.
You know, if students are hiding, running and hiding in their safe space when they hear President Trump's name or a conservative idea, how are we, these students supposed to, you know, enter the real world where they have to deal with leaders like Kim Jong-un or deal with the complex issues we face as a nation.
New Victorian Age00:07:49
So I really do worry about the future, and that's why I work with campus reform because I really do see the implications that this has on society at large if we don't stop this.
Great.
Hannah, thank you very much.
You know, I noticed as I was reading your introduction, which I did not know until I was reading your introduction, that you have founded an anti-sex trafficking nonprofit.
I would really like you to come back on and talk about that.
I feel is one of the buried issues of the day, basically a slave trade going on under our nose.
So I hope you'll come back again and talk to me about that as well.
Absolutely.
Thanks very much, Hannah.
It's really good talking to you.
Thanks so much.
Talk to you, soon.
Bye.
That gives me hope.
Come on.
You know, that makes me feel, that actually makes me, she's worried, but I feel better, you know.
let's go to sexual follies.
So the New York Times Magazine wrote a heartbreaking piece, which was heartbreaking not only in what it said, but in the moral stupidity of the newspaper reporting it.
The world, when you enter the New York Times, you enter the world of the New York East Coast elite liberal.
And sometimes it's a very sad place to be.
And this thing was called What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn by Maggie Smith.
Now, one thing that happens is adults sometimes look at young people and they think, oh, in this day and age, there's so much talk about sex.
There's so much talk about, there's so much porn available.
There's, you know, people say anything.
There's classes that kids must know a lot about sex that we didn't know.
That may be true, but they still don't.
They still don't really know.
Of course, not until you get into the world of dating and loving and interaction with real life human beings.
You don't know anything.
You don't know anything about sex.
And so people are learning from, they take learning from things like porn.
You know, you all remember what it's like.
You go get any information anywhere you can.
And so in this piece, which is well researched, they interview these people and one kid says, it gets in your head, you know, you don't know whether girls want sex or if they want you to do the things that they do in porn.
You don't know whether the girls are going to be disappointed by the fact that you don't look like the guys in porn.
I mean, I do, but I mean, other people may not.
And, you know, it just, it just, the women, obviously, in porn are sometimes mistreated.
It's sometimes rough.
And yet the woman loves just being roughed up and hurt and all this stuff.
And they don't know whether this is true.
So the answer in this article, or at least one answer that's proposed, is a class on what is called porn literacy.
What could possibly go wrong, right?
So this is reading from the article, The Course with the Official Title, The Truth About Pornography, a Pornography Literacy Curriculum for High School Students Designed to Reduce Sexual and Dating Violence, is a recent addition to Start Strong, a peer leadership program for teenagers headquartered in Boston's South End and funded by the city's public health agency.
About two dozen selected high school students attend every year, most of them black or Latino, along with a few Asian students from Boston public high schools, including the city.
So on and on.
During most of the year, the teenagers learn about healthy relationships, dating violence, and LGBT issues, as opposed to English and history and math, but often through group discussions, role-playing, and other exercise.
You know, I mean, so what they're teaching them is that porn isn't necessarily reality.
I mean, that's a very sad answer.
It's a very sad answer.
And yet, and yet, what are the other answers?
Ross Duthot, in reaction to this piece, Ross Duthot is the Catholic op-ed writer who used to be a lot better before Trump, but now I think the New York Times just does not let people write what they actually think.
Anyway, he wrote a piece called Let's Ban Porn.
And he says the belief that it should not be restricted is a mistake.
The belief that it cannot be censored is a superstition.
Law and jurisprudence changed once to allow porn and can change again.
And while you can find anything somewhere on the internet, making hardcore porn something to be quested after in dark corners would dramatically reduce its pedagogical role, its cultural normalcy, its power over libidos everywhere.
And Peter Suderman at Reason, of course, Reason is a libertarian site.
They don't want to ban anything.
He says he answers Du Thought by saying, to start with, you would need to stop the production of porn by business enterprises, forcing at minimum every person who has ever attended the adult video news awards in a professional capacity to immediately find a new line of work.
You would need to find a way to stop a slew of high-profile, incredibly lucrative websites from posting, hosting, or otherwise distributing explicit materials.
After you crack down on the pros, you would need to go after amateurs by finding some way to stop tens of millions of iPhone-wielding Americans from making home movies, many of which would resemble professional products and quality.
You know, what's interesting about this, and I'm not by nature, I'm a libertarian, but I really see this as a plague.
And it's not, the plague is not porn.
The plague is an attitude to the human body and to human relationships that was sold to us by the left from the 60s to today.
And now that they're reaping the whirlwind, they don't like it very much.
It's interesting when you look at the great ages of civilizations.
If you think about the Augustine age of ancient Rome, if you think about the Victorian age, if you think about the American 1950s, they're all marked by at least an outward display of prudery.
And it's always prudery that comes after a libertine age.
So in America, we had the 1920s and the 1930s, and anything goes.
You know, in olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, but now anything goes.
But by the 1950s, not so much.
And that was the golden age of this generation, of this cycle of Americanism.
Victorian age, same thing.
In the 1700s, lots of sex, lots of books about sex.
You know, Tom Jones and things like that.
By the 1800s, by the Victorian age, everybody is, as you know, very prudish.
But that's also the great, that's probably one of the greatest ages of human civilizations.
But one of the things is, is that with that comes a new respect for women in the household.
And the Victorians would call her the, what do they call her, the angel in the house, the angel in the house.
And of course, in the 1950s, the housewife was one of the key elements of all entertainment, all ideas.
So what's interesting is that feminism has always had this reactionary shadow.
Okay, first they say, yes, men and women should have the same kind of sex.
And then, oh my God, you know, women are being abused.
This is no good.
This is no good.
They've always had this idea that men's desires should be prohibited, that sex, that porn was bad.
They've always had a strain of feminism that porn were bad.
And it would be interesting if feminism morphed in the same way that the left has morphed, the side of free speech has now morphed into the side of no speech.
It would be interesting, and I do think this could happen, that feminism morphs into actual feminism, the defense of women in their roles as guiding families, guiding men, civilizing men.
Now, when you say that without women, men would be uncivilized, feminists start screaming at you and say, it's not our role to feminize, to civilize men.
It's not our role to civilize men.
And yet, they don't like living in a world without civilized men in it.
And women are the only things that civilize men.
You know, all this Me Too movement is living in a world where women have lost their power to civilize men, have lost their mission to civilize men, have lost their mission to form men in families and in marriage.
And they don't like so much what happens when that looks like, when they don't like so much what that looks like when that actually actually happens.
So I have many times predicted a new Victorian age is coming.
I do believe that is true.
And it will be interesting to see if feminism morphs into the leader of some of that Victorian prudery and some of that Victorian elevation of the family.
Why Women Civilize Men00:00:49
All right, the mailbag is tomorrow.
Hit, go to thedailywire.com, hit podcast, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, ask any question you want.
Your life will be changed.
And sometimes for the better.
The other times we just don't talk about.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll see you then.
The Andrew Klavan 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 Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.