Ben Shapiro dissects how media hysteria—from Sam Nunberg’s erratic Trump attacks to CNN’s Thai sex coach "Russian meddling" stunt—mirrors his own past panic over a nonexistent hurricane threat, exposing fear-driven irrationality. Listeners’ measured responses on Trump’s red lines (guns, courts) contrast sharply with media overreactions like framing Russian trolls as a "Pearl Harbor" threat, while historian Michael Barone ties polarization to the collapse of mid-century consensus on abortion, guns, and gay rights. The episode traces Trump’s 2016 "trade" of white college voters for non-college blocs, predicting midterm struggles despite demographic shifts, and pivots to gun violence, blaming fatherless households while dismissing feminism as anti-maternal Marxism. [Automatically generated summary]
So as many of you know, I spent most of my life as a novelist.
If you listened to Another Kingdom or read Werewolf Cop or True Crime, you know that I'm actually incredibly good at it.
And I've studied stories all my life.
And very early on, I came upon an essay by a famous essay by a German, I think he was a mythologist, who wrote about the following incident.
A professor is at his desk.
He's trying to work.
His little daughter is annoying him.
And finally, just so he can concentrate, he takes three matchsticks that have already been burnt, so they're not dangerous.
And he hands her the three matchsticks and he says, go and play.
So she'll leave him alone.
So she goes off and plays with the three matchsticks.
And one of them is Hansel, and one of them is Gretel, and one of them is the witch.
And she's playing with the matchsticks.
He goes back to work and he's working for about 20 minutes when suddenly his daughter lets out a shriek of terror and the professor leaps up and he looks at her and says, what's the matter?
What's the matter?
And she says, the witch, take the witch away.
I can't touch the witch anymore.
It's a matchstick, right?
And then the professor writes about the fact that this is the way stories and mythology work, that they transfer power from the imagination to the emotions.
So we all go through this when we're watching a movie or watching a TV show nowadays and the heroine dies saying we all cry even though we know she doesn't exist.
She doesn't exist and yet our hearts are broken that this girl is dying because we've had a transfer from the imagination to the emotions.
Here is a story about myself in which I behaved like a total idiot many, many, many years ago and I was still out of my mind.
I was working as a newswriter for a big New York radio station and it was very intense, very high pressure work.
We had to deliver stories, a whole newscast every half an hour.
Sometimes we had to write on a deadline of a minute.
Sometimes we just had to get things on the air as fast as possible, gather the facts, put stories on the air.
A hurricane was coming and our orders were basically to terrify our audience because when you terrify the audience, they listen.
They want to know what's going on.
So a hurricane was heading toward New York City, toward Manhattan.
And all morning long, every half an hour, we were terrifying the audience.
We had, we told you what was going to happen when this hurricane hit.
All the windows in your apartment were going to blow out, taped them with duct tape to make sure the glass doesn't fly all over the place.
We had experts on.
We had public officials telling people to stay indoors and not evacuate and all this.
Finally, just like the little girl with the matchstick, I panicked.
I panicked.
My wife and my little daughter were at home in an apartment where one entire wall was made out of glass.
And I could just see the glass coming in, flying through the window as the hurricane came roaring into New York, blowing the glass out and just cutting them all to pieces.
And I called my wife and I said, get some duct tape, type up the windows.
And she said, what?
Are you nuts?
But being a loving and adoring wife and devoted wife, she actually, poor woman, went out and taped with duct tape.
Of course, the hurricane never came.
It never hit, you know, it was just us because it was a slow news day.
It was just us trying to keep our listeners engaged, terrifying them.
And I had had a transfer from my imagination to my emotions.
This brings me to yesterday on the news as the press went entirely insane.
Today I'm going to read your letters that you sent me in answer to the question, what would Trump have to do to get you to desert him?
You, here is the spoiler alert.
You are sane and intelligent.
The people on the news are out of their minds.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-diggy.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, put some duct tape on the windows.
It's going to be a hurricane of a show.
My wife has never forgiven me, by the way.
That does come up every now and again.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
So you want to get your letters in?
How do you do it?
You may ask.
You go on thedailywire.com.
You have to be a subscriber.
So while you're there, what is it?
$9.99.
I keep saying it's a lousy $10.
It's not even $10.
It's just $9.99.
You still have to pay.
It's your salary.
It's Rob's entire salary.
What is it?
$99.99 for the entire year.
Plus, plus, right?
The left-wing tears, the left tears tumbler.
You get to subscribe and you get to ask questions.
My answers are guaranteed 100% correct.
You can ask about anything.
My answers will change your life on occasion for the better.
Go on thedailywire.com, hit the podcast thing at the top.
Then it says Andrew Clavin podcast.
Hit that.
And then it says mailbag.
I think it's a symbol, but it represents a mailbag.
You can do this.
I know you can do it.
And then you just type in your questions.
I will answer them all.
Also, on today's show, we have Michael Barone, the mighty Michael Barone.
What I like about Michael Barone, he writes this almanac of American politics and he knows everything.
When you meet Michael, the first time I met him, he's exactly, you know, he's exactly like he is on TV.
You say, how are things, Michael?
Well, 30% of the people say they're okay, and then 40%, you know, he just knows every fact and figure.
So we asked him to put the news in perspective a little bit because we know the news people aren't going to do that.
That will be in the second half of the show.
Meanwhile, brush your teeth, right?
Because, you know, another true story.
I was at the dentist last week and the dental hygienist was cleaning my teeth.
And she said, there's a little, there's some darkness on one tooth, but it may just be a void.
And I said, that sounds very existential.
It's like I have a French novel stuck in my face, you know, man's search for tooth.
And she said, turn this way, please.
I actually didn't care about my existential jokes about my teeth.
But she did say, she did say, you know, she cleaned my teeth.
And I said, wow, that was really good.
That didn't hurt at all.
She said, you must be using an electric toothbrush.
She really did say this.
And that is true.
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How do you spell get Quip?
G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash Clavin.
You can get your first toothbrush for $25, and you'll get your first refill pack free.
New Sex Coach Offers Russia Info00:07:29
So I keep saying that he whom Donald Trump would destroy, he first makes mad.
And I think he has done this to, it really is an example of mythology.
Their own mythology is just like the hurricane, made me hysterical, even though I was trying to scare other people.
They've been trying to scare other people about Trump, and now they have lost their minds and actually bought into their own mythology.
So yesterday, this guy, Sam Nunberg, Hope Hicks called him a highly self-destructive individual.
Obviously, not a well guy.
He was a Trump hanger-on.
He was a Roger Stone hanger-on.
He was questioned by Robert Mueller for the investigation.
He was subpoenaed.
His Mueller subpoenaed material.
He went on just every station, basically out of his mind, saying, I'm not going to obey anything.
Katie Tour has him on, and he says, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, they've got something on Trump.
By the way, if you want a career in TV, that's all you have to say is yes, yes, there's I have something on Donald Trump.
I have something, and they will, Michael Wolf, nothing in his book is true.
Doesn't matter.
If he has something nasty to say about Donald Trump, CNN, put him right on, bring him right on here.
So here's Sam Lundberg talking to Katie Tour.
Do you think that they have something on the president?
I think they may.
Well, I think that he may have done something during the election, but I don't know that.
Why do you think that?
I can't explain that unless you were in there.
Explain the atmosphere.
The way they ask questions about anything I heard after I was fired from the campaign to the general election to even November 1 is insinuated to me that he may have done something.
If you got that sense, if you got that sense from the special counsel's investigators, why would you not want to cooperate with them if you got a sense that something because I'm not interested in handing all my emails over that I communicated with Steve Bannon, with other people, and with Roger Stone?
He's not interested.
I'm not interested in following up on a subpoena.
You know, I'm just, it bores me.
So he goes after Sarah Sanders, and he's calling in to all the stations.
So here he is.
Here's his professional assessment of the Washington White House press secretary.
This is cut number nine.
You know what?
You know what?
If Sarah Huckabee wants the ones to start debasing me, she's a joke.
Okay, fine.
Yeah, she's unattractive.
She's a fat slob.
I'll be fine.
But that's not relevant.
The person she works for has a 30% approval rating.
Okay.
So if she wants to start attacking me, she can do that.
That's fine.
But we know it's a joke.
Everybody knows it's a joke that she's working there.
She's a fat slob and she's ugly.
So that's it.
You know, one of the things I hate about feminism, one of the many, many things I hate about feminism, is feminism by being so hysterical and anti-male delegitimizes some of the absolutely legitimate complaints that women have.
I mean, why did nobody, nobody assisted him?
Well, the one thing, Aaron Burnett did say, gee, asked him if he's drunk, which I think, I think drinking would have probably improved the guy.
Just play cut number 14 just to finish this.
Talked earlier about what people in the White House were saying about you.
Talking about whether you were drinking or on drugs or whatever had happened today.
Talking to you, I have smelled alcohol on your breath.
Well, I have not had a drink.
You haven't had a drink.
So that's not.
No.
So I just, because it is the talk out there, again, I know it's awkward.
Let me just give you the question.
You can categorize it.
No, you haven't had a drink.
My answer is no.
I have not.
Anything else?
No.
Besides my meds.
Okay.
Antidepressants.
Is that okay?
No, I mean, I'm not, I'm just trying to understand.
Well, look, look, they can say whatever they want.
I don't really care.
Once again.
See, I would ask why this guy is on TV at all, except we already know they have traumatized kids on if they'll sell gun control.
Anybody who'll attack, how bad would it be?
It's not like CNN would travel to Thailand to interview a Russian hooker who says, who's in jail in Thailand, but says she has dirt on Trump if they'll let her out.
They'll get her out.
It's not like they do.
Oh, wait.
Yes, they would.
They actually did that.
CNN sends a report to Thailand to talk about.
She calls herself a sex coach.
I shouldn't call her a hooker.
She's a sex coach, which is how what you do in Thailand.
That's why people go to Thailand for coaching.
He's coaching in Thailand.
Watch this.
New tonight, a self-described sex coach is offering inside information on Russia's election meddling.
The woman is currently imprisoned in Thailand, but says she's willing to trade what she knows for asylum in the United States.
Our senior international correspondent, Ivan Watson, actually met with the woman.
He's joining us now live from Bangkok.
Ivan, tell us how that went.
I just came out of this detention center where I spoke with Anastasia Bashukevich.
It was loud and hot and chaotic.
And talking through the bars, she says that she witnessed meetings between the Russian billionaire Aleg Deripaska and at least three Americans who she refused to name.
She claims they discussed plans to affect the U.S. elections, but she wouldn't give any further information because she fears she could be deported back to Russia.
This poor guy.
This poor guy.
I started out to be a journalist.
He's probably going home drinking vodka, you know, in the Russia.
Oh, I started out to be a journalist.
Now I'm doing this.
Trying to establish, you know, he wants to get sources in the Kremlin.
Instead, you know, yeah, go interview the sex coach because she says she has something on Donald Trump.
That's how nuts they are.
That's how nuts they are.
I have to do one more.
This is, you know, I was talking about some of the jokes that Trump made.
This was at a meeting with donors at Mar-a-Lago.
And he's at a meeting with donors and he says about the president of China.
And this is something we should talk about.
We won't talk about it today, but we'll have someone on to talk about it.
He says, President Zi Qi, I guess he's pronounced.
He has made himself basically president for life because China is essentially a dictatorship.
So Trump is joking about this.
He says he's president for life.
That's great.
He said, look, he was able to do that.
I think it's great.
Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday.
And everybody laughs because they know Trump and he's, you know, Trump makes these jokes.
So who would take that?
Who is stupid enough to take one of Trump's jokes seriously?
Chuck Scarborough does.
When Republicans, Jane, are just saying it's just a joke, or when Republicans ignore the fact that this man is talking about being president for life, if they think that Donald Trump is joking, then they're fools.
And I don't think they're fools.
I think they know exactly what he's saying.
The New York Times editorial board runs a headline.
Donald Trump sure has a problem with democracy.
He was surely joking about becoming president for life himself, but there can be little doubt that he truly sees no danger in Mr. Z's great decision to extend his own rule until death.
Why Trump Isn't Just Joking00:15:01
What they keep talking about is that Trump doesn't diss dictators.
And that is because Trump has a theory.
And the theory may be wrong or it may be right, but it's not that he is a dictator or that he wants to transform America into a dictatorship.
He believes the freedom agenda of guys like George W. Bush is wrong, that we shouldn't go around starting wars trying to impose freedom on other people.
And so he doesn't talk to these people.
He just looks at them as business competitors and he's going to outdo them in the business world.
That is the way Trump looks at the world.
You can say that's wrong.
You can say it's right, but it's not because he doesn't like American democracy or he's trying to endanger American democracy.
And speaking of danger, let us talk.
What I'm going to come back to in just a minute is your letters in answer to the question, what would it take for you to abandon Donald Trump?
And you can compare them to the press.
I want you to compare the level of your intelligence to the level of intelligence of the American press.
While you're at it, you can compare your intelligence to that of Hollywood, whose Oscar show dropped 20% to become the lowest rated ever, but they still won't stop because they need to tell you, they need to make you wise with their wisdom.
We will compare you to them.
Let's talk about Ring, though.
We're talking about danger.
Ring is a terrific, it's a series of devices, really, that you can put on your front door.
It has a camera.
When people ring the doorbell, you can look on your phone.
You can see who it is.
Even if you're not home, you can see who's at your door.
They have one that turns on spotlights.
Ring video doorbell is a really effective way to stop package theft because thieves can't hide with ring.
It's just so you can see who is doing it.
So they do this to me.
They deliver my packages.
They just leave them inside the gate.
People could come along and steal them, but with a ring video bell, which I now have, you can see what is going on.
Do we have a video of this?
We have a video watching this.
Here is somebody trying to steal a package from a front door, but is caught on the ring device.
Hey, put that down.
Dude, I should stop someone from stealing my package.
Yeah, well, yeah, you know, I mean, if you're going to steal things, you don't want to be on camera.
And so Ring guards your house by making these people public.
There's a Ring floodlight cam and a spotlight cam.
It will let you build a ring of security around your entire property.
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And you say, sure, sure, I want to be safe, but how, oh, how?
Oh, how?
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You can save $150 when you go to ring.com/slash Clavin on one of these devices.
I have one.
They work really well, and they're very cool because even if you're not home, you can look at your phone and see them.
So let's look at your answers.
I asked the question after Trump made those remarks about, oh, we don't need due process to take people's guns away.
And, you know, let's put Dianne Feinstein's restrictions, possibly on semi-automatic weapons, into the law.
Remember, Diane Feinstein jumping around like a girl.
And now he's talking about tariffs.
And I'm not, listen, I'm not an economist with tariffs.
That's why I haven't been talking about it in detail.
I do, I am very educated in the English language.
And Trump is always afraid of a trade deficit, but they call it trade because you're trading stuff.
So it doesn't really matter if there's a deficit because people are getting stuff on both sides of the equation.
But I just wanted to know what it would take.
So here, your answers were incredibly nuanced and intelligent.
I couldn't believe these were people listening to my show.
I mean, they were so smart and nuanced.
Unbelievable, unbelievable.
Intelligent people listening to my show.
What is the world coming to?
From Justin, he says, so I am off the Trump train for sure.
This, I guess, the gun remark is the straw that broke the elephant's back.
To your point, I understand that anything that comes from Trump's mouth should be taken with a grain of salt, but that is precisely why I'm no longer a fan.
I don't want a weather-veined president.
I want a rock.
Unpredictability is great in sports and movies.
It does not belong in the Oval Office.
My neck hurts from the whiplash.
So the very thing I see as a kind of defense, Justin sees as a problem.
Like I say, well, he says these things, but he doesn't do them.
He says, yeah, but that's not the way the Oval Office should work.
And it's a very intelligent point.
Stop making intelligent points on my show.
You will ruin it.
From Sandra, I cannot think of one thing that would cause me to vote for a Democrat instead of President Trump.
That is because I do not have to agree with every single policy the president supports or implements.
I do hope to agree with the majority of his policies.
Because the recent years in which Democrats have been running things in this country have been so abhorrent to me in terms of economics, social engineering, packing our country with people who clearly mean to harm our country with drugs as well as violence and everything else that made me so uncomfortable in my own country.
The level of offense that President Trump would have to commit in order to make me vote for a Democrat is incomprehensible.
As for his personal life, who am I to judge?
It does not affect my life.
Well, I agree with you there.
And, you know, I mean, I have to assume there is some level that Trump could go to be worse than Democrats.
But, you know, Sandra is right.
I mean, what Democrats have done, and she's talking about drugs.
Remember, Obama ditched the DEA's investigation into Iranian drug running in our country just so he could get his stupid deal and endanger us with Iranian bombs.
So, yeah, the Democrats have been that bad.
From Eric, the question of how far I will go in support of Trump is defined in the negative.
So he says this too.
The question you should ask is how bad is the left?
Everything I've seen in the Trump era confirms my worst thoughts about the left.
And then some, this tells me not only that the medicine is working, but proves the virulence of the disease.
Apart from some criminal or fascistic turn, I'm with Trump.
And even then, it would be a matter of degree.
Such is the sad state of our union.
So he recognizes that this is not a good thing, but it's the way it is.
Richard, for me to bail from Richard, for me to bail on President Trump, he would have to purposely commit a crime from which you could not look away.
As for the politics, compromise should be used, just like you said, to a point.
I am not a big fan of his Twitter use, yet I enjoy him fighting the liberals.
David says, I have a red line that Trump can't cross, and it's not like Obama's red line for Assad.
My line is the courts.
Trump's been excellent so far because he's delegated nominations to Leonard Leo.
It's conceivable that he could reverse himself on that too if the Democrats win control of the Senate.
If he betrays his commitment to the Federalist Society, as he appears to be doing with the NRA, then he's dead to me.
From Cooper, in my opinion, what gets me about this, though, is people are thinking in clear terms about what they stand for and what Trump stands for.
And I didn't get, well, I went through a lot of those letters, and I did not get one that said Donald Trump do or die.
Not one.
You know, I mean, sometimes what I wonder, sometimes I get those on my blog at PJ Media.
I'll get people saying, you know, Trump forever, God bless president.
And what I wonder is, are those people actually leftists who go, you know, who go on pretending to be crazy right-wingers?
But people are thinking about their country.
Cooper, in my opinion, I think Trump is pacing and leading the left, much like he did with immigration in the campaign.
He's working on the other side of the aisle.
If he wants to lose 2020, he can do a repeat of Bush 1.0.
He made the NRA turn on him.
Guns are not something Trump wants to mess with.
That is one of the only issues that would dramatically affect support from his base.
I don't think he would make such a dumb mistake.
From Alex, I'm a 23-year-old paramedic.
I live and grew up less than 30 minutes from the Stoneham Douglas school shooting.
I have supported the president since the day he announced.
I remember exactly which emergency department room I was in, what I was doing when he announced, and when he won.
I have been to the White House to see him and heard him speak all over the world.
The day President Trump takes away the rights he swore to protect is the day I can no longer support him.
The day he turns his back on us is the day we turn our backs on him.
It doesn't have to be about guns.
It has to be about the policies.
He can say whatever he wants, and he says lots of crazy things, but you have to take them with a grain of salt.
The day he puts into action the policies of tyranny instead of freedom, true tyranny, not the leftist BS, is the day I'm done with him.
And that's a guy, see, there's a guy who loves Trump, has been with him from the start, but he just says, you know, if he violates what he said, he violates his policies.
I'm out.
Let's see, I will just do one more.
Well, let's do a couple more.
From Chuck, if Donald Trump caves at all on the Second Amendment, he will lose my vote.
From Robert, physical gun confiscation from me or my community.
I would turn against God himself if he came for my gun.
From John, if Donald Trump follows through with not standing up for the Second Amendment.
So guns are a big deal.
A lot of people wrote in about guns.
He says, from Norman, I think I have my finger on the pulse of knee-jerk Trump supporting conservatives when I say there are two categories.
Rhetorical, if Trump ever stops being the anti-PC culture war mercenary that I hired him to be, I will not support him.
And the other is policy.
There are a couple of policies like the abolition issue in the 1800s that simply have no compromise, abortion access, religious free, and religious freedom.
So really very nuanced, very intelligent, very thoughtful answers.
If you're that bright, you should be doing something else with your time instead of listening to us.
But no, I really, I'm serious.
I really appreciate it.
And just to compare it to the conversation on the press, in the press.
I mean, to compare it to them, we're sitting around going, oh, 13 Russian trolls, it's worse than Pearl Harbor.
I talked to Michael Barone about that.
We have that coming up.
We're going to have to take a break.
But first, let me tell you a new episode of the conversation is coming up.
Tuesday, March 13th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
None other than Ben Shapiro.
I have heard of him.
He is great.
So you'll want to hear that.
Subscribe today to be part of this hour-long live QA.
You can ask Ben questions about everything you ever wanted to know, get Ben's thoughts on politics, culture, comic books.
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Michael Barone is coming up.
Got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can listen to the rest.
And while you're there, subscribe for The Mailbag tomorrow and The Conversation next Tuesday.
All right, Michael Barone is an historian, journalist, political analyst.
He's the principal author of the Almanac of American Politics.
If you have never seen this, like every political fact on earth is in this book.
And they're all in his head.
I mean, I swear he must memorize this thing.
You can watch or read Barone's special weekly feature, Michael Barone's Guide to Government, which is intended to provide brief, simple, educational, and enjoyable lessons for high school and college students at www.guide to government.org.
Michael Barone, I always like talking to him.
He stays calm.
He puts things in perspective.
Here is our interview.
Michael, thank you for coming on.
I always love talking to you because you actually know stuff.
You don't just go off the feelings of things.
You actually know things.
And so I want to check something with you.
You wrote a column in which you were reacting to an onion headline, 90% of Americans strongly opposed to each other.
And recently, Marco Rubio sent out a tweet after the Parkland shootings, and he said, the debate after Parkland reminds us that we the people don't really like each other very much.
True or false?
I think there's a lot of truth to it.
You see that more when you've got people talking about politics, which is always at least partly an adversary process.
You know, everybody laments that we don't sit down and say kumbaya together.
But the fact is that you have elections.
One side wins, one side loses.
Elections, even decided by a small mark, in 2016's case, unexpected margin, can have big policy consequences that mean a lot to a lot of people.
So aside from the fact that everybody who disagrees with me is scum.
Yes, that's also a problem.
That's also a problem.
But yeah, we're in an adversarial position, but I just was rereading portions of the historian Kenneth Stamp's book, America in 1857.
And if you think we had divisiveness now, you can go back and read about 1857, which was followed four years later by something called the Civil War.
Well, that is one of the things that I feel is going on is a lot of hyperbole.
You mentioned this in your column that this Russia spying, they indict these Russian trolls, and people are actually on TV saying this is the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor.
And I've heard actual commentators say that this is the most defided time since the Civil War.
It is hyperbole, right?
Well, it is hyperbole.
I mean, you know, Russian influence in election.
Lots of foreign powers have tried to influence American elections.
And if you go back to the election of 1940, for example, you had British agents in the United States trying to affect the election and gain the reelection for Franklin Roosevelt.
You had the Communist Party in the United States, totally subservient to Joseph Stalin, opposing Franklin Roosevelt.
This was the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, remember?
And the progressives were supposed to think that it was okay to be allied with Hitler and you shouldn't aid Britain against Hitler.
Roosevelt actually made a speech during the campaign where he said, I know what it's like to be opposed by the extremists of both the right, and he's thinking of the German-American Bund, and of the left, the Communist Party.
So I think that was a little more malign and a little more threatening and had, since they were speaking to a large number of Americans who did not want to enter World War II, a lot more influential than anything we've seen lately, where, you know, they're spending $600 on Facebook ads in Wisconsin and running half of them after the election,
which turned out to be not the optimal timing to want to influence the election.
Voters and the 70s Consensus00:13:44
My old days as a political consultant, I can tell you that.
We got the 15th all booked up here.
Yeah, it did seem a little bit like the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
You talk about the mid-century moment.
And this is one thing that I feel a lot of people feel that we had something here.
We had a kind of consensus where we were fighting, as Barack Obama once said, we were fighting over the 50-yard line, basically.
And we feel that that's gone.
Is that feeling justified?
Has something collapsed?
Well, I think something collapsed that was not capable of being sustained indefinitely.
I mean, the fact is, you know, those of us who were children in that mid-century moment, I think if we were at all attentive to politics and public affairs, and naturally I was, you know, preparing to appear on Fox News and a blog and everything at that point.
You know, there was a sort of consensus about foreign policy, the Cold War foreign policy, bipartisan support, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, et cetera.
And you had on the domestic side, a sort of thinking that, well, we're divided on economics between the unions and the management of big companies.
This was especially true in Michigan where I was growing up.
But that's after all just about dollars and cents.
You can cut compromises.
You can split the difference.
You have negotiations.
And those are just numbers.
And, you know, if the numbers are not perfect from your point of view, they're also not dreadful.
That was, and it was a period where we had confidence in our leaders.
Why do we have a confidence in our leaders?
Well, we just won a world war and we just went into the post-war prosperity boom when everybody thought we were going to go back to the Great Depression, almost everybody.
So, boy, they really seem to have performed well.
Yeah.
And I think we sometimes have the impression that all of American history was a time when everybody had confidence in the leadership and the institutions.
I think that, on the contrary, I think that mid-century moments, in 1945 to 65, date it when you will, was an unusual period in American history after great achievements that had been won by big institutions,
big government, big business, big labor, with the participation of millions and millions of citizens in one way, shape, or form, or another, and participation for which they were rewarded with things like the GI Bill of Rights and honored for their participation in it, in a common effort.
You know, we had 16 million men, few women in the military, and a country that's entered the war with 131 million people.
That's huge mobilization.
It's a huge putting country in uniform, if you will.
And that provided a kind of consensus.
We also had a kind of consensus about religion at that time and about moral views.
Was there a debate about abortion?
No, abortion was a crime.
Was there a debate about gay rights?
No, gay homosexual behavior was a crime.
Was there a debate about guns?
Well, you have Gallup Paul in, I believe, the late 1950s said that a majority of Americans were for banning handguns possession altogether by private citizens.
It wasn't a lively time for the Second Amendment.
We were trusting our leaders and our uniformed armed forces and law enforcement to do that.
And those were attitudes that were unlikely to be sustained.
Go back to, I was reading a book called America in 1957, the historian Kenneth Stamp.
That wasn't a consensus country at all.
That was a country about to go into a civil war over the issue of whether or not slavery should be extended or abolished.
And that was a period when people didn't have trust in all the institutions.
And I think looking over other parts of history, go back and read the rhetoric between forces backing John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800.
But, you know, you said, I mean, I remember the 70s as a terribly depressed, terribly, somebody once called the 70s the decade when the West tried to commit suicide.
And you have said.
Well, with bell-bottom pants and disco music, it wasn't nearly close.
Maybe that's why they tried to commit suicide.
You called it a slum of a decade, but you also say that it's kind of haunting us.
Why are the 70s?
Why didn't we just leave that behind?
Why are the 70s still haunting us?
Well, it's interesting.
You know, the formative career in business and also sort of commentary and public affairs of Donald Trump came in the 1970s.
His father had made a lot of money building housing for people in the outer boroughs of New York and Brooklyn and Queens, helped from political connections and so forth.
Decade of the 1970s, New York City lost 825,000 people.
Population declined.
That's a pretty astonishing number.
Basically, white ethnics were leaving New York City for the suburbs, for Florida, for places farther out, low-tax New Jersey and low-tax Connecticut as they then were.
And Donald Trump said, well, there's no money, not going to be great money building housing for people when you got 825,000, 823,000 people leaving.
But with land prices in Manhattan at rock bottom and the political connections I got through my dad, I'm going to move into Manhattan, buy low, and pay with other people's money.
And that was his strategy and it proved to be a successful one for the Democratic Party.
Well, where, you know, Nancy Pelosi was elected.
The roots of the Democratic leaders go back to the 70s or even before.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi was elected to the Northern California Democratic chairman in 1977.
Diane Feinstein, the senior senator from your wonderful state of California, was elected with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which was then an island of something like sanity back in 1970 and became mayor after the murder of her predecessor in 1978.
You had people like Chuck Schumer elected to the New York Assembly in 1974, a few months after he graduated from Harvard Law School.
No problem with the private sector career in between and so forth.
So that's, you know, Hillary Clinton is active, and Bill Clinton in the chairing the McGovern campaign operation in Texas in 1972.
These folks go back a long ways.
And I think one of the reasons why a lot of Democrats have just sort of assumed that they're going to get rid of Donald Trump, they're going to impeach him.
They're going to get him out of office by the 25th Amendment.
Well, that's something like that happened in the 1970s when they were young and frisky.
And Richard Nixon was thrown out of office.
And, you know, they figure that's what happens when you've got a Republican president you really don't want.
Speaking of Trump now, a lot of people look at Trump and they see an earthquake, but you actually say that he pulled off basically a slate of hand with the electoral votes.
He basically dumped one group of white voters and picked up another group of white voters.
Can you explain that a little?
Well, I call it the Trump trade.
He said basically, okay, I will trade you.
I will give up two to three million white college graduates who voted for Mitt Romney and pretty regularly voted for Republicans going back into the 1990s in this period of polarized partisan parity.
I'll give those up.
In return, I want to grab three to four million white non-college voters.
And what happens?
How many electoral votes does he lose by losing those white college voters?
Well, he does worse in California than other Democrats, a little worse in Arizona, worse in Texas, a little worse in Georgia.
Doesn't change any electoral votes.
The White College, what happens to them?
Well, they enable him to carry places that Mitt Romney didn't carry and to carry Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the second congressional district of Maine, 100 electoral votes.
Bingo.
I spoke to a group here in Washington this morning and I said, okay, I'm going to poll you.
How many of you think this was a brilliant, pre-thought-out strategy and so forth?
And how many of you think it was dumbblind luck?
And three or four people raised their hand on brilliant strategy.
A large number raised their hands somewhat hesitantly on dumbblind luck.
And then I added, and how many think that it had something to do with the deficiencies of Hillary Clinton?
And about the same number raised them.
So that's what happened.
It surprised everybody, some people less than others.
Nate Silver of the 538.com website said there was a 29% chance that Trump would win.
Well, 29% chances happened 29 times out of 100.
And this was one of them.
And the New York Times analyst, upshot analyst Nate Cohn wrote an article back in June.
He said, actually, there's more white non-college voters out there than the exit polls suggest.
And the people conducting the exit poll can see that, in fact, that is true, he said.
And there's a pathway for Trump to go forward if he can pick up these voters in a variety of states, particularly in the Midwest, which of course counted for 70 of his 100 extra electoral votes as compared to Mitt Romney.
So, you know, there was some reason to think that that was possible.
Obviously, you know, there were a lot of disappointed people in the Javits Center somewhere between 9 and 10 o'clock on the not just Javits Center, all over the country, or at least on the East Coast, in Chicago, coastal California, and so forth.
So looking forward then, well, let's go just two last things because I'm running out of time, unfortunately.
The midterms, when you're looking ahead at the midterms, I keep hearing about this blue wave.
And yet I also see little signs that maybe not so much.
What do you think?
Well, I think this is a race.
You know, the House of Representatives, the Democrats need a net gain of 24 seats in order to get a majority and make Nancy Pelosi Speaker.
They, you know, the results in special elections, Democrats have done pretty well.
And they have the Republicans have not succeeded in getting the measure of support from non-college whites that the Republicans have.
Now, offsetting that, special elections are low stakes things where people often will cast a protest vote, knowing that they're not going to change who's in control.
They're just changing one seat.
So they're not perfect indicators of what's to come.
You have Democratic advantages in the generic vote question.
That diminished in mid-February.
It's widened a little bit now.
We're still not out of range for the Republicans to prevail because in equal population districts, the Democratic Party has a disadvantage because its supporters tend to be demographically clustered in central cities, sympathetic suburbs, university towns.
They get 70, 80% there, which means those votes aren't available to win in districts where Republicans have been getting 55 to 60 percent.
So they have a disadvantage there.
I think that the, you know, you haven't also seen the thing play out.
A lot of Democrats are enthusiastically running for office, supporting candidates.
A lot of them want impeachment of the president.
Nancy Pelosi, who's been around, as I said, for rather a long time, says, no, no, we shouldn't be talking about that.
You know, she's, I think, operating on the assumption there's some quantum of voters that like to rebuke the Republicans, reduce Donald Trump's power, give the Democrats the majority.
They don't want to go through another futile impeachment exercise like 1988-99.
So there's a variety of things going there.
The other thing is that Trump's job performance rating, which is about 41% job approval at this point, boy, by historic trends, that's not enough to give his party a majority in the off-year elections.
But when you look at his favorable, unfavorable ratings, they're actually less unfavorable now than in November 2016.
Fatherless Households and Strong Mothers00:06:22
I'll remind viewers of what happened in November 2016.
He was elected president.
Maybe the old rules don't apply to this somewhat unusual president.
I have to stop there.
I'm out of time.
But Michael Brone, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Always fascinating.
Okay, good to be with you.
Thank you, Andrew.
Always a little different to talk to somebody who actually knows facts.
You know, it just isn't just spewing his opinions.
But really interesting.
The part about the 70s I thought was really interesting that we're stuck with this decade when the West almost killed itself before Ronald Reagan came and Margaret Thatcher and the Pope and kind of brought us back.
sexual follies.
So we're running out of time, but this is kind of a serious topic.
But there is something I want to say about the gun debate.
One of the ideas that keeps popping up under all the hysteria about guns and the fight of the NRA and all this nonsense that really has nothing to do with what happened is how many of these shooters are fatherless kids.
A lot of them are fatherless kids.
And it's not obviously just mass shooters, but Peter Hassen of Campus Reform, we had one of their spokes ladies on, but he wrote an article a few years back where he says, you know, there's a direct correlation between fatherless children and teen violence.
Fatherless children are more than twice as likely to commit suicide, dropping out of school.
71% of high school dropouts came from a fatherless background.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol use.
Two of the strongest correlations with gun homicides are growing up in a fatherless household and dropping out of school, which itself is directly related to the lack of an active and present father.
And, you know, I've been in prisons because from my novels, I'll sometimes do a prison scene.
I vow each time I do it, I vow never to do it again because going to prison, even visiting it for research, is one of the most depressing experiences you will ever have in your entire life.
When the door closes behind you, you think, the first time I went into a prison, I turned to the guard and I said, remind me never to commit a crime.
It's like you do not want to go to prison.
But when you go through, what you see, I mean, maybe if you were a leftist, what you would see is, oh, this person is dark-skinned or something like that.
What I saw, each cell, every single cell, fatherless, fatherless, fatherless.
One of the things we don't talk about about a fatherless household, and this is another reason I dislike feminism so much, is that one of the things a father does, not only does he serve as a probably a stronger disciplinarian than the mother, not in every household, but many households, also serves as a role model of how to be a faithful husband, how to deal with women who are tremendous pain in the neck, as you know, and how to deal with them without violence or cruelty, how to deal with respect for their mothers,
how to walk like a man in the world.
And those are all things that boys learn directly from their father.
But the other thing we don't talk about is that having a father in the home allows a mother to be a mother.
I mean, when people pay tribute to their single mothers because they did a good job, they always say, well, she was a mother and a father to me.
She fulfilled both the mother and the father role.
But that is not optimal.
What you want is a mother who can be feminine, who can pay more attention to the home.
And this is one of the things I hate so much about feminism is that it despises femininity.
You know, when people say, well, there's no difference between a man and a woman, which is just a patent lie, conservatives get so upset and they say, well, here's the science and the science says this.
But what they never say is, why would you even want that to be true?
Femininity is a good.
Masculinity is a good.
Obviously, like everything in life, there are bad sides to femininity, and obviously there are bad sides to masculinity.
But these are good things, positive, godly gifts that each of us is assigned to embody in our gender.
And that there, yes, are there men with lots of feminine traits?
Sure.
Are there women with masculine traits?
Sure.
But we're talking about generalities here.
In generalities, women are much better at being women than they are at being men.
And men are much better at being men than they are at being women, and that's a good thing.
And so, when you have a father in the home, what you have is a mother.
And I think like nobody ever looks at this, is how much of a correlation there is with women who aren't home, who don't pay attention to their kids, who aren't a constant presence.
And that I think this is something little children need.
They need moms.
They need moms.
That's not a stigma.
That's not a habit.
That's not an opinion.
It's the truth.
It is simply the way people were built.
I mean, you know, all these people who are so scientific, they believe in evolution.
How do you think we were evolved?
What do you think we were evolved to do to recreate and survive?
And how do we do that?
We have mothers taking care of little children.
We have fathers taking care of mothers so that mothers can take care of little children.
That is the way the system works.
So one of the worst things about fatherless homes is that it deprives the woman of a chance to do what women, most women, so love doing, which is building a home and taking care of children.
And the feminists who despise femininity because it doesn't necessarily get the big jobs.
Femininity maybe doesn't lead you to be as driven in the workplace.
You know, they keep talking these strong, strong women.
I want strong women.
If I wanted to marry strong, I would have married Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That's not what I needed in my life.
That's not what I needed to make me a better person.
That's not what I needed to make my home a good home for children to live in.
I needed somebody who was a little less strong.
I needed somebody who was a little more emotional, a little more attached to people, less attached to things, a little less attached to work, more attached to relationships.
Those are the things that make a home.
And that, what the Catholics call complementarity, the fact that men and women go together and form a whole, is something that the feminists oppose tooth and nail because all they think about is materialism, because they're Marxists.
They think about money and success and all the things that women have traditionally said not as important as what I'm doing.
And all those women, those traditional women, were absolutely right.
All right, tomorrow is the mailbag.
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I'm Andrew Clavin.
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