Ep. 476 dissects media bias through Trump’s 2017 North Korea diplomacy—313K jobs, record-low unemployment—overshadowed by a 60 Minutes porn star scandal, while NYT op-eds like Maureen Dowd’s "The First Porn President" mocked his achievements. Facebook’s leaked emails reveal suppressed conservative content (e.g., Austin Peterson’s gun giveaway) via left-wing algorithm favors, mirroring YouTube’s SPLC-backed demonetization of figures like Dennis Prager. Lauren Southern’s UK ban under terrorism laws and the Honest Ads Act’s ad-disclosure rules expose identity politics’ censorship risks, framing racial divisions as a threat to universal equality—all while Trump’s foreign policy instincts face media skepticism despite tangible progress. [Automatically generated summary]
North Korea has agreed to discuss denuclearization with President Trump.
The U.S. added a whopping 313,000 new jobs in February, and the unemployment rate remained at a 17-year low.
After 40 years, the black-white labor participation gap has virtually vanished.
After Donald Trump moved to impose steel and aluminum tariffs, our European allies are offering to negotiate and give us better deals in order to avoid the tariffs.
So that's reality.
Here's the news.
60 Minutes is doing an interview with a porn star who says she had sex with Donald Trump.
This is very important because no one would ever have thought that a Playboy billionaire with three wives would have sex with a porn star.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has not let this important story slip by them.
No Sari Bob.
Maureen Dowd wrote an op-ed entitled The First Porn President, Maureen having apparently forgotten the last porn president whom she voted for.
Charles Blow's op-ed is entitled Melania New.
It reads in part, Dear America, come on, you can't be serious.
The ongoing saga over a president, a porn star, and a payoff is so lewd and tawdry that it can't simply be added to the ever-expanding list of horrible misbehaviors of a womanizing misogynist.
America, this is not about partisanship.
Why We Left Media00:02:52
This is about principle.
Each of us must proclaim that this situation is over the line, that women matter, that their voices and their stories matter, that propriety, honor, and character matter.
Unfortunately, most of Dear America couldn't read the rest of Mr. Blow's fine article because they were too busy going to their new jobs and celebrating the fact that they weren't going to die in a North Korean nuclear holocaust.
But I'm sure whatever Mr. Blow had to say was very important too.
Now, my point is not that important things are going on in the world while the media is following its own fetid and obsessive hatred of the president into a mental cesspit of such trivial vulgarity that their relationship with the porn star is worse than anything Trump could have done with her.
Oh wait, that is my point.
Yeah, that's my whole point.
I'm done now.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
The birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bibbyzing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, the Clavinless weekend has ended.
Sir Michael of Knowles is with us.
Michael was knighted.
Oh, no, he was benighted.
I'm sorry, that's different.
He's with us to answer the question, is social media really censoring conservatives?
Meanwhile, do you remember when America's schools would teach you about patriotism and history, and you'd say the Pledge of Allegiance and maybe even say a prayer?
Of course you don't, but I do.
We used to walk six miles on the snow to get there.
I didn't do that.
But anyway, American schools are not anything like that anymore.
And we grew up knowing that, you know, we grew up in safety.
We knew that learning was more than propaganda.
And even though technology continues to offer new opportunities for learning, I think we can all agree the traditional moral values which once were woven into the fabric of the classroom have practically disappeared.
This is true.
We all know this is true.
I mean, they are not teaching what they taught.
Taught us, I was so well taught in American patriotism that I actually was in seventh grade before I realized that Washington cutting down the cherry tree didn't actually happen.
You know, there was just a story.
But this is why, because things have changed so much, you should consider Freedom Project Academy's fully accredited Judeo-Christian classical online school that covers kindergarten through high school.
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Don't Be Dead Europe00:08:20
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At the end of commercials, I'm always telling people how to expel Claven.
There's no Ease in Claven, K-L-A-V-A.
I just have to say this.
There is a review for my memoir, The Great Good Thing, on Amazon.
Every now and again, I go on a check.
It's got over 400 reviews, five-star, a five-star average with over 400 reviews.
If you haven't read The Great Good Thing, it is your assignment.
There will be a test after the show.
So you have to, after the show goes off the air, for The Great Good Thing, so you should read it.
But here's the latest review.
I swear, I swear, I took this right off the site.
I can't say it better than the highest-rated five-star reviews already have.
It deserves more stars.
I heard about this book from Calvin's podcast, K-A-L-V-A-N, from Calvin's podcast, The Andrew Callion Show, K-A-L-Y-A-N, also a five-star production, and it didn't disappoint.
Take it from a confused atheist on the verge of coming to faith himself.
You need to read this book.
But at least they were no ease.
They're no ease.
Calvin and Kalion, but they're no ease.
All right.
So I have to talk about the disparity between at this point.
Donald Trump is kind of on a roll.
Things are going pretty well.
The tariff thing, obviously, a lot of conservatives are not happy about it, but so far, it looks like a kind of negotiating technique.
Today he revealed he released the White House plan for guns, and there was nothing about confiscating weapons.
There was some study group looking at maybe raising the age for guns, but basically it was making schools safer by making schools safer and letting people training teachers to carry and all the things that we think might actually help.
So he's really doing well.
And obviously the press is just has stooped from, oh my gosh, Russia is running America to, oh my gosh, Donald Trump slept with a porn star.
And again, is there anybody who didn't know that Donald Trump was doing stuff like that?
I mean, even Melania, when Charles Blow says Melania knew, then what business is it of yours if she knew?
If she knew, what difference does it make?
Anyway, before, but the one thing I do want to say is there's still a lot of people on the right who don't like Donald Trump and have reservations about him.
And one of the things about Trump is, you know, Sebastian Gorka, who is a big Trump supporter and very eloquent about it, says he's got great instincts.
He's got great instincts.
And that is the thing about Trump.
He's not a man of ideas.
And I keep saying when people say he's playing chess, I always say, no, he's like a running back.
He senses where the daylight is and he senses where to go.
That's why he frequently opens his mouth and says things and then has to take them back because he's playing with instinct.
And there is indeed a danger with going after a man of instincts and not ideas in that he can't, you're essentially following the man himself.
And that is everything that a republic is not supposed to be.
We're not supposed to follow people.
We're supposed to follow laws.
We're supposed to follow ideas.
That is the way it's supposed to be.
Obviously, we want good men in there to operate and put those ideas into motion.
when you follow a guy of instinct.
That's why I asked the question the other week when I asked you what would it take for you to dump Donald Trump.
I mean apart.
I just wanted to make sure that there was something, something that he could violate, some principle that he could violate.
When I voted for Trump, I voted for his instincts because Hillary Clinton is a person of ideas, but her ideas were so bad and so damaging and she herself was so corrupt that I thought this could seriously, after eight years of Barack Obama's radical leftism, this could seriously end the American experiment.
We could wind up like Europe, and the thing you have to understand about Europe is Europe is dead and you don't want to wind up dead.
One of the good things about being a country, one of the most important things about being a country is don't be dead.
That is, I think we could say that's a basic rule.
However, however, while it is true that I feel with Trump we have to sort of trust him in ways that I'm not that comfortable with myself, to think that we on the right are the first people to follow a person instead of ideas.
I just have to read you two.
These are two things, very brief.
Here is a piece that was published on CNN's site from Julian Saliser, a history and public affairs professor at Princeton University.
This was once one of the greatest universities in the world, right?
And here is a history professor at Princeton University, and he edited a book called The Presidency of Barack Obama, A First Historical Assessment.
And he says, this is what he says, his historical assessment of Obama, is that Obama could never accept about American politics how ugly American politics had become.
He just couldn't accept it.
In many ways, this always had been the president's greatest political weakness.
His confidence in our democracy prevented him from doing more to stand firm against the destructive forces that were shaping our country during two terms in office.
Obama's election in 2008 was supposed to signify that our country was finally moving in the right direction.
A country born with slavery had elected an African American to be president.
As president, Obama never let go of this hope.
That was what made him so endearing to millions of Americans and shaped much of what he did in the Oval Office.
Obama had clearly articulated his understanding of the nation when he came into the spotlight during the Democratic national.
He was just too good for this world.
That was the problem with Barack Obama.
He was just, I mean, can this guy hear himself?
Can he hear himself?
This is the guy who, you know, used the IRS to shut up his opponents, who used the Justice Department to make sure that none of his people got indicted for the obviously illegal things they were doing, including Hillary Clinton.
I mean, he was just too good for this world.
This is the other thing.
I remember not that long ago, Jill Abramson, who had been the editor of the New York Times, saying, The New York Times plays it straight.
We're not on the left, we're not on the right.
And I just thought, does she not know?
I mean, she's dealing with the Democrat provda.
Does she actually not know?
So here, this is our guy, Joseph Curl at the Daily Wire, writes this.
He says, in his last column for the New York Times, public editor Arthur Brisbean said that liberalism virtually bleeds through the fabric of the Times, adding that reporters approach some liberal issues, such as gay marriage and the Occupy movement, more like causes than news subjects.
But Jill Abramson, then the Times executive editor, said not so.
In our newsroom, we are always conscious that the way we view an issue in New York is not necessarily the way it is viewed in the rest of the country or the world, she said.
Of course, says our guy, you know that's a crock.
The once great paper is heavily skewed to the left, giving Democrats a pass on everything while hammering away at conservatives and Republicans.
That liberal bias in the age of President Trump has prompted some journalists, as veteran reporter Bob Woodward said, to become emotionally unhinged.
That includes Jill Abramson.
This is what she says.
This is Jill Abramson talking to The Guardian.
I'm sorry, writing in The Guardian.
It's easy to look at what's happening in Washington, D.C. in despair.
That's why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse.
I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive African-American president until very recently.
Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump's America.
Now, to be honest, I carry a Barack Obama on the doll too, but I also have some pins to stick in it.
So I think that's a little different.
But the former executive editor of the New York Times is carrying around a little Barack Obama comfort doll so she can get through with the horrible things that are going on.
One of the horrible things is the Koreans have announced that North Koreans leader Kim Jong-un wants to sit down with the president and discuss denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, not just North Korea, but the whole peninsula.
And Trump has said, yes, he'll do it.
So in the first moment that this happened, if you want to see the media turn, you can watch it turn in real time.
It's just, this is actually amazing.
The first moment, even MSNBC is celebrating because they had just been so sure, so convinced that Donald Trump was leading us all into nuclear holocaust.
Suddenly, Aaron Burnett and the whole, on CNN and the people in MSNBC, suddenly they're celebrating.
Twitter Goes Nuts00:02:58
And of course, opening the door to the big question.
If President Trump can truly solve this problem, that would be going down as a great president.
And there's no way around that.
That is the reality here.
This is actually a moment that very few of us thought we'd ever see.
The North Koreans agreeing to put denuclearization on the table, agreeing to talks with the South Koreans, inviting the President of the United States to have the talks, agreeing to suspend their nuclear and missile tests while they're doing it in exchange for what?
In exchange for nothing.
But this is definitely an initiative worth pursuing.
The talks themselves, while they go on, will freeze the program.
That is a major national security achievement.
This all came up just in the last few hours that this was going to be announced tonight.
Now, I think back to what the president said just six days ago or five days ago at that gridiron dinner here in Washington where he said he would be, of course, open to talks if, in fact, North Korea committed to the potential for denuclearization, abandoning its nuclear weapons program.
And it seems like that's where we are.
So how long, how long do you think this lasted?
We will find out in just one minute, which is about how long it lasted.
But first, we have to talk about why I look so fabulous.
It really is impressive, isn't it?
I know that's what you're thinking.
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All right, so one moment, for one moment, the press was ecstatic.
Conservatives and Conspiracies00:15:30
Maybe we're not all going to die in a nuclear conflagration.
Over.
First of all, Twitter went nuts.
Twitter, people on Twitter are going, I know it doesn't really matter what people on Twitter say because there's always somebody who will say something, but people on Twitter were saying, how can you call Trump a great president when Russia invaded our election?
You know, it's like 13 trolls on Facebook spending less money than most people advertising exercise machines.
And this is the worst thing that happened.
But let's just go to Chuck Todd on Meet the Press.
He's talking to Andrea Mitchell, where suddenly there's absolutely no way this can be a good thing.
How does any meeting between Trump and Kim not turn into a victory for the North Koreans?
It's hard to imagine how it doesn't.
First of all, they've had a victory by setting the terms and by having the meeting itself, as you were pointing out.
This is what all North Korean leaders have wanted.
Three generations have wanted a meeting, legitimacy from an American president.
It is not prepared.
There was no letter, despite hints that there was.
So we do not yet know what he's really offering.
And the Treasury Secretary with you repeated the phrase, denuclearization.
Our objective is denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
That is a trap.
The Korean Peninsula means we eliminate our nuclear umbrella from our allies.
What we want is for him to give up his illegal weapons, not for us to give up our nuclear security umbrella for South Korea and Japan.
This just shows you the lack of, shall we say, competence or familiarity with these details.
Like Trump needs Andrea Mitchell to explain to him which side we want to get rid of the nuclear weapons on.
Oh, thanks, Andrea.
I didn't think of that.
You want to see hypocrisy in action?
We have to travel.
Let's travel to Knucklehead Row for the op-ed page in the New York Times.
So Nick Kristof, a steady member of a card-carrying member of Knucklehead Row, here he is last year talking about how Trump's behavior is leading us to nuclear disaster in North Korea.
This is cut number three.
I went to North Korea not feeling particularly optimistic.
I came back really feeling that we are not going to be able to stop them, that talks, meaningful talks, some kind of a deal is not possible, and that we are, nobody really wants a war, but we could well have one because of mismanagement.
Well, Joe, I think that he is trying to intimidate the North Koreans and aims to get them to pull back.
I don't think that's going to happen.
And in fact, I think it's counterproductive.
This is their turf of these kind of threats.
And it does play into their narrative.
This gives them legitimacy to pursue the kind of nuclear policies that they are pursuing and puts us all on the edge of a cataclysm.
Christoph keeps pushing talks.
We've got to have talks.
We've got to have talks.
They announce they're going to have talks.
Here is Nick Kristoff after the announcement.
I think, frankly, it's a dangerous gamble and a bad idea.
And in some ways, I can't believe I'm saying that because for years I've been arguing that we need to have direct talks between the U.S. and North Korea.
But direct talks are one thing, and we need to have those negotiations.
But any summit should be carefully preceded by going through what the deliverables are.
And this is essentially a gift to North Korea.
North Korea craves the recognition.
It wants to be seen with its leader standing side by side with an American president.
And it's fine to have that as the outcome of a long process where we get what we want.
But to give that away without getting anything back at the beginning, I think is a mistake.
Just on general principles, if you get everything wrong up to an event after the event, shouldn't you just start to listen instead of talk?
You know, I have to say, I seriously wonder now whether the New York Times has issued actual marching orders telling people that they are not allowed to say anything nice about Donald Trump.
I've seriously begun to wonder.
Ross Duthot, Brett Stevens, they have lost their mind.
I mean, Brett Stevens goes over there, a conservative, you know, with some kind of liberal conservative, I guess you'd call him, and suddenly wants to repeal the Second Amendment.
Ross Duthot, who's a really smart guy, has suddenly lost his way.
You know you've gone nuts when the only person talking sense on your side is Bill Maher.
Here's Bill Maher's perfectly sensible reaction to the announcement.
Fat man and little boy are going to have a date.
It looks like Trump is going to travel to North Korea in May.
And of course there are reasons, a hundred reasons, why this is dangerous.
We're talking about, after all, a family that has reneged on every deal they ever signed.
And Kim Jong-un can't be trusted either.
But you know what?
I was watching all the cable news last night and to all these liberals who are reflexively hating on this, A, Obama.
Remember him?
Proposed the exact same thing in 2008 and they loved it.
And B, you know, f ⁇ you, you don't live on the West Coast where a nuke can get here faster than an Uber from North Korea.
I mean, what is this bullsh ⁇ ?
No president has ever done this.
Yeah, and they all failed.
So I'm going to file this one under so crazy it just might work.
First of all, he's the only comedian left on TV who's still telling jokes.
He's attacking Trump, but at least he's pretty funny.
Fat Man and Little Boy, that's a funny one.
So Chuck, Chuck.
So now Trump is in West.
This is the way they're talking about him.
They cannot let anything good happen under this guy.
I mean, jobs, the job creation of February was huge.
Well, the wages aren't going up as fast as they should.
You know, this thing about the black and white participation in the job market, it has not been level since the 70s.
Since, yeah, for 40 years.
It's for 40 years.
And now blacks are finally coming back into the job market in such force that they are evening out with whites in participation.
There's still disparities, still economic disparities, but still, this is good news.
A porn star really, really is.
That even news at all?
You know, they always used to talk about this.
The way they would excuse these sex stories is they would say it's the character issue.
It's the character issue.
Because they wanted to make it sound serious when they were just being salacious and trying to get viewers with sex.
We know Trump's character.
We know what he was.
He was a billionaire playboy who ran beauty contests and slept with everything he could get anywhere near.
So what?
So we know it already.
It's just not new information.
It's not really a story.
So Trump goes to West Pennsylvania to push the special congressional election there, which could be close, which would be very bad, very bad sign.
And he starts going after the press and he goes after Chuck Todd.
This is cut number seven.
You ever see the story?
Where it's 1999.
I'm on Meet the Press, a show now headed by sleepy eyes Chuck Todd.
He's a sleeping son of a b ⁇ , I'll tell you.
Chuck Todd as a personal attack.
But his point was that he's been talking about North Korea all this time.
So now Chuck Todd goes on with Steve Mnuchin, right?
He has Mnuchin on, and he's so, you can see it on his face.
So furious about this that he can't stick to the subject.
The only thing he wants to talk about is Trump attacking him.
Many people, including myself, raise their kids to respect the office of the presidency and the president of the United States.
When he uses vulgarity to talk about individuals, what are they supposed to tell their kids?
Again, I'll be with my kids this morning and I'll be focused on them on what the president is doing to protect the United States, its citizens, and more importantly.
So he's not immoral.
Don't worry about his values.
Don't worry about it.
I've never said that whatsoever, so I don't know why you're putting these words in what I'm trying to say.
Okay.
So again, I am very comfortable with what we're doing.
Okay.
And again, I think you're trying to take this out of perspective and implying something I'm not saying.
Fair enough that what are you supposed to say when he's using these vulgarities to kids?
Again, I think you should be focused on what the policies are.
He's using those vulgarities in the context of a campaign rally.
So what is Trump supposed to tell his kids when Chuck Todd literally can't imagine how a negotiation between the U.S. and North Korea could ever result in anything good?
I mean, they just, you know what they're like?
They're like little kids who hit their big brothers and their big brother finally turns around and smacks someone and they're like, you can't do that.
You hit me.
It's like the idea is that you're supposed to be able to attack Republicans.
You know, I started this show by saying there are serious issues about Trump that we should really be talking about.
None of them have to do with porn stars.
There are serious questions about whether he has principles, whether he's going to stick to the things that we think are right for the country.
How good are his instincts and when we should pull away from his instincts?
All kinds of questions I'd be willing to debate, talk about, think about.
Porn star, do not care.
Do not care.
Sorry.
I hope you had a good time.
All right.
Tomorrow, it's the conversation is back.
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Sir Michael of Knowles is coming up to talk about censorship on social media.
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
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You can watch the whole thing right on the site and then join the conversation tomorrow.
All right.
We've got my, oh, there you are.
For a minute, I had a picture of Steve Mnuchin there, and I thought, you have turned into a strange, pasty-faced zombie.
I don't know what.
So here's the thing.
I wanted to ask you about this because conservatives do have a tendency to get a little in their own, they get a little in their own space, they're talking to themselves and they start to think there are conspiracies.
Someone pointed out to me the other day that if you Google the image for white couples, you get mixed race couples.
You get a white person and a black person together.
Whereas if you Google Asian couples, you get Asian people.
But it's very possible that that happens because it will also turn up. the same thing for black and white couples.
So in other words, the algorithm hears black and white couples and just gives you the last two words, white couples.
So it's possible that's actually not intentional.
So I wanted you to look into whether or not we are being censored on social media.
What did you find?
Well, I'll tell you what couldn't be coincidental is that when you search for conservative news on Google, you get mixed search results.
You get some real news and you get some fake news too.
So just on this one point, if you search for the Daily Wire, say, you will immediately get left-wing so-called fact-checking websites, which aren't facts.
They're just opinion columns, but they call them fact-checking now because we've gone fully Orwellian.
And when you search for conservatives, you'll get those left-wing opinion columns.
But when you search for left-wing news and left-wing outlets, you don't.
You get the left-wing outlet.
If you search for Huffington Post, you get The Huffington Post.
If you search for the Daily Wire, you get PolitiFact or some of the other left-wing fact-checkers.
Right.
Because they are left-wing.
That's right.
I mean, that is no coincidence.
That was a particular decision by Google.
I will say, though, sometimes we go too far.
It's easy to say all of social media are stacked against us.
All of these tech giants are trying to kill us.
We should be precise in what we're saying, because that isn't quite right.
The situation is terrible, but that isn't quite right.
There was this excellent piece in Wired magazine that came out a few days ago, and it's on Facebook's evolution and how they got to this new algorithm, which is killing publishers.
It is one of the first instances of journalism I've seen in a very long time.
Yeah, surprisingly.
I saw this piece.
It was great.
It was a very good piece.
And it traces that evolution.
What we can see from Facebook is that they're killing all publishers, but not just conservatives, even though conservatives bear the brunt of it.
What I mean by that is Facebook has an open platform for a while.
When it was first started, it was basically an open platform.
In an effort to kill Twitter, Facebook decided to start serving more news in its newsfeed.
That's when you got fewer cat pictures and fewer pictures of your nephew or whatever, and you started getting news.
Then, all hell broke loose when a contract employee of Facebook took some screenshots of emails that went out to the team.
I will assure you, at Facebook offices, there's a lot of left-wing propaganda on the walls.
You'll see things all about how important it is to say black lives matter, how it's awful to say that all lives matter.
A lot of rainbow flags and transgenderism is great.
And it is fully left-wing in that environment.
So this contract employee starts taking a couple screenshots.
He leaks them to Gizmodo, not thinking that, hmm, maybe the largest tech giant on the face of the earth can find your G-Chats.
So they call him up.
They say, hey, did you leak to Gizmodo?
He says, what, what?
Who's Gizmodo?
Gizmodo who?
He says, we have all of your information, dum-dum.
We're Facebook.
So they fire him.
And now, all of a sudden, this starts to leak.
So Gizmodo runs a piece on this.
You know, there's a lot of information now that Facebook is selecting news stories in trending news.
This came up in 2016.
Conservatives Have a Voice00:14:56
It's selecting news stories to benefit Hillary Clinton, to benefit the left-wing, to hurt conservatives.
All of this leaks, so Zuckerberg freaks out.
He invites a ton of conservatives to a meeting at Facebook.
So you remember that big meeting with Glenn Beck was there?
Yeah, yeah.
Glenn was very impressed.
He was very impressed, that's true.
But Facebook, because they're pretty crafty, they invited a bunch of conservatives intentionally who would all fight with each other as conservatives.
If you've got two conservatives in a room, they're going to fight with you.
It's easy, exactly.
So they do this.
Nothing really comes of that meeting, as you recall.
Glenn Beck was impressed with him.
Other people said it was a farce.
Nothing happened.
They continued to select against conservatives.
Then Murdoch threatened, Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, threatened Zuckerberg and said publishers weren't making enough money.
All the meanwhile, publishers are slowly putting all of their ad revenue through Facebook.
Facebook created a mechanism called Instant Articles whereby they started hosting all of the ad revenue for these publishers.
So now they've got them on the hook.
All of a sudden, Facebook doesn't want to be seen as anti-conservative, so they hire some journalists to clean it up.
Of course, they hire Snopes.
Of course, they hire CNN employees.
This is the thing that kills me.
I mean, Jill Abramson, we were talking about the fact that she's walking around with a Barack Obama doll in her purse, but she thinks the New York Times is a straight-arrow publication.
I mean, do they not know?
In fairness, I walk around with a Barack Obama dollar.
It's a little voodoo dollar poking thing.
I beat you to that joke.
Did you damn?
Ah, too bad.
Great minds.
Great minds think alike.
But I mean, do they not know that Snopes is a left-wing site?
It is hard for me to imagine that they don't know, but it is a bubble.
I mean, clearly, I know that Mark Zuckerberg reads the news because all the news goes through his website, but it is quite a bubble.
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is prey to that as well.
They certainly don't have any respect for right-wing views.
We know, I'm having Austin Peterson on the show.
He's a candidate for Senate in Missouri.
He's a libertarian.
He gave a gun away as part of a fundraiser on his Facebook page, and Facebook shut him down.
It was on Facebook shut him down?
Yeah, and we know that the COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, has donated the maximum amount to the Democrat incumbent in that Senate race.
So that we know what the political atmosphere is like there.
That said, these algorithm changes, I think, are not intentionally aimed at conservatives.
I think they just take them out for a couple reasons.
One, the Russians, through that media group, spent about $100,000 on the election to buy Facebook ads to cause some chaos.
That is not a lot of money.
There were reports that they spent millions.
Didn't happen.
They spent $100,000.
Media companies spend that in a second.
I mean, that is not a lot.
We know that some organic websites, for instance, right-wing news, was able to reach just as many people as the Russians did in a year.
They reached them in a week.
Now, Facebook is clamping down, shutting down all of these things, and only referring to trustworthy news sources.
This is the way that they're killing conservatives, is that Facebook created the new media.
The old traditional media had a monopoly on news for 50 years and over 50 years in this country.
New media broke through.
All of a sudden, conservatives have a voice.
Facebook allowed that to happen.
Now Facebook is killing it again to privilege the New York Times and those traditional sources.
So in other words, when you privilege the traditional sources, which used to be center-left during the kind of great consensus in the 50s and 60s, when you privilege those, you're now privileging sources that no longer are because that is the whole thing about leftism.
It eats things out from the inside, but continues to portray them as if they were the same place.
So the New York Times continues to pretend to be a center-left thing, but it's actually now a leftist newspaper, which it is.
It's just a totally, I mean, if you read the headlines today, it was hilarious what they were reporting on and even telling you, they were telling you that Trump was going to fail in North Korea, that the RAND deal was very important.
It was just total leftism.
So when you privilege mainstream media, you're privileging the left.
That's exactly right.
And so in this way, depending on how you look at it, Facebook is either fairer because some left-wing fringy companies have also gone out of business.
So the left-wing kind of new media companies and the right-wing new media companies are getting hurt almost, not really equally, but there's a little more fairness.
But you might say it's more insidious because by reverting to that old system, you are privileging the New York Times, the most ridiculous, clickbaity left-wing website on the internet.
Other tech companies are less crafty about it.
They are just targeting conservatives.
Twitter admitted to targeting conservatives.
They admitted on video to James O'Keefe that they're shadow banning conservatives.
So conservatives are not just banned.
They don't even know that they've been banned.
They just find that people are interacting less with their profiles.
We know that YouTube is explicitly censoring conservatives.
They censored Prager famously.
Here are just a few videos that YouTube has demonetized from Dennis Prager.
Why America Must Lead?
Why did America fight the Korean War?
You know, that controversial, you know, that very controversial second-year war.
Just pure racism.
Pure racism.
The world's most persecuted minority Christians who are being slaughtered in the Middle East.
And this is one they felt was just not.
It was just not safe.
It's just too extreme.
The Ten Commandments do not murder.
So wait, so they're not taking them down.
They're just making it impossible for them to make money to earn a living, basically.
Not just that, they are making it impossible for them to earn a living to try to drive them out of business.
They're also restricting where they can be seen.
So Prager University, which does five-minute videos on pretty normal topics like the Korean War and the Ten Commandments, now cannot be viewed from high schools or universities on certain videos.
So that is pretty brutal censorship.
And then obviously, the left-wing is not being demonetized.
So John Oliver, who is a foreigner interfering in our elections and our politics.
Those Brits, they always want to get us back.
They've been doing it for centuries.
His videos where he rants about conservatives constantly, those haven't been demonetized.
Plus, YouTube partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which calls anybody to the right of Hillary Clinton terrorists.
They are.
The SPLC is a hate group.
They're also a hate group.
Yeah, no, there's no question about it.
So is there anything conservatives can do to fight back?
I wish I had some better news for you.
Frankly, these people have a monopoly on information.
And I'm not suggesting that we can break them up as a monopoly because you'd have to show harm to the consumer.
You'd have to show who the consumer really is.
There is going to be a lot of legal work that has to happen to figure out how to deal with these new media companies.
They're so disruptive.
The one thing we can do, though, and the one place where they should be regulated, is that Facebook is the largest publisher in the history of the world.
The reason that Facebook has tried so desperately to both not target conservatives explicitly and certainly not to appear that they're targeting conservatives is that they want to remain a technology company and not a publisher.
Doesn't matter.
They are the largest publisher in the history of the world and they're not regulated at all as a publisher.
That has to change.
That's one way to fight back.
You can try to start your own Twitter.
You can try to start your own YouTube.
There will be a ghettoizing effect because the whole way these networks work is that everybody's there.
That's all of their value.
Is that going to work for conservatives?
There's a company called Gabby that has tried to become the conservative Twitter.
Hasn't really worked thus far.
I think probably the stronger way to do this is not to try to target these people with regulation, but to apply regulations fairly or even close to fairly to these major companies.
And you might see a leveling out and some of a decrease in the capriciousness that is going on at Facebook and YouTube.
Really interesting.
And your argument about the mainstream trusting in the mainstream media because they've been around for a long time.
It really is basically like it's 1770 and the broadsides are going back and forth and will only trust stuff that comes from the crown.
Because you can always trust the crown.
For my money, this is really the most insidious strategy.
If Twitter and Google were smarter, they would be taking this up because it's so defensible for people to say, oh, well, they're just going for those trusted news sources and they're able to achieve exactly the same result much more effectively.
Michael Knowles, the Michael Knowles show coming up with Austin coming up.
Austin Peterson, Libertarian candidate for president and now a Republican candidate in Missouri.
And we're going to talk about exactly this problem, his experience of it, and what he thinks of 2018 elections.
Cool.
Really interesting, Knowles.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
And with a natural segue, we go right from Michael Knowles to our crappy culture.
Why are you always so mean to Michael Knowles?
It's because we...
Because he and I are New Yorkers.
If I was nice to him, he would get confused.
So here's something that happened over the weekend that I just find really disturbing.
Lauren Southern, who we had on the show, a Canadian YouTube conservative.
Knowles just had her on a couple of days ago, was banned from entering the UK under a law banning terrorists.
She was coming from South Africa where she had been documenting attacks on whites by blacks in South Africa.
And she was hauled in by the police as she tried to get into Britain and questioned.
And they asked her about her Christian beliefs and they asked her about how she felt about driving over Muslims with cars.
When does that happen?
What part of the gospel is that in?
And then they banned her.
And they banned her and they banned two other people who identify more as identitarians, which is basically a new word for white supremacists, as I believe, white nationalists, not white supremacists, white nationalists.
Now, I liked Lauren when I talked to her.
I asked her several times to disavow racism, and she didn't in ways that I kind of found disturbing.
I don't agree with where she's going on some of this.
I don't think she is an identitarian, which I thoroughly disagree with.
Listen, racism, I've said this before, but let me just reiterate it, it's literally against my religion.
It is literally banned, in my opinion, by anybody who follows the God of the Bible, whether the Old Testament or New Testament, which tells you that all people are made in God's image to love, and in loving God, you also have to love your neighbor.
And it doesn't say which neighbor, it just says your neighbor.
So obviously not making racial divisions there.
The people who write to me about this are clowns, as far as I'm concerned, who talk to me about genetics.
If you have a PhD in genetics, I will listen to your stupid genetic theory.
But the fact is, even geneticists do not know very much about this, and it wouldn't matter to me a damn if it does.
I believe that people are made in the image of God.
So I disagree with this entire thing.
But I had Lauren on the show.
I didn't debate her.
I just let her say what she had to say.
I always challenge people.
I try to ask challenging questions.
I don't debate.
I'm not a big debating guy because I don't like conversations where the purpose is to win.
I like conversations where the purpose is to learn stuff.
I don't need to win.
I've got the best wife in the world, love my kids, love my job, have plenty of money, and when I die, I'm going to heaven.
I've already won.
So I don't need to win conversations.
I just want to hear what people have to say.
But this censorship, and this is coming in a country, Britain, where they've just found, they've been investigating another one of these situations in Telford where Muslims were grooming children for sex.
They were running basically sex slaves, as many as 1,000 victims over three decades, some of them only 11 years old, and the cops didn't want to do anything about it because they didn't want to be accused of racism.
So they can't let Lauren in to talk about her views on this, which are shady.
They're nuanced.
I mean, she's young.
She's learning stuff.
When she was on with Knowles, she was a little bit more direct about rejecting racism.
But they couldn't let her come in.
I can let her come in disagreeing with her.
I can let her say anything she wants.
Why do they have, and by the way, just so you know, this is not a UK problem.
This is happening here too.
You know, in October, Democrat senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar with John McCain, who is the worst on First Amendment stuff, they introduced the Honest Ads Act.
This is talking, continuing on from what Knowles was talking about, a bill that would impose, I'm reading this from the Wall Street Journal, the bill would impose new disclaimer and reporting requirements on internet platforms that run paid advertising from Facebook and Twitter to the online news sites of major newspapers and magazines or the Drudge Report.
The disclosure requirements would essentially require digital platforms to publish the name of any American seeking to discuss political subjects through paid ads, which is a chilling standard.
This is their reaction to this $100,000 that the Russians spent on Facebook.
This is their panicked reaction to this.
From LifeZet, we have the story.
Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott signed an education bill on Sunday with a provision that eliminates free speech zones to protect students' First Amendment rights because it's ridiculous.
The First Amendment doesn't need a zone.
It operates everywhere in the country.
But a full bill protecting this did not make it out of committee.
So here is what I want to say.
If you have to censor speech, we don't have to censor speech on the show.
I can have a Nazi, I can have a communist on the show.
He can say whatever he wants.
I know it's going to be all right.
Why?
Because my ideas are better than his.
I know that my ideas are better than his or her, and I'm going to win that argument.
By the time you finish listening to what he has to say fully and listening to what I have to say, I know I will win.
Why?
Because I believe that all people are children of God, because I believe they're all made in God's image.
I can't lose that argument.
I cannot lose that argument.
Why are they losing the argument in Britain?
Because of identity politics.
Why are they losing it on college campuses?
Because of identity politics.
If you believe in identity politics, you are a racist.
And if you are a racist, you can't win an argument against other racists.
If you say black lives matter and somebody comes in and says white lives matter, if you say black should be given the best jobs and somebody comes in and says white should be given the best jobs, you have no argument.
You have lost the argument because you have given away the basic tenet, the basic principle that made racism untenable in the West.
We fought the Civil War because we believed that all men were created equal.
We believed that all men were created equal because we were shaped and formed by biblical logic.
Losing Ground On Campus00:02:04
That's how that happened.
It didn't happen outside of history.
It happened in history.
That's how those ideas developed.
Once you give away those basic ideas of equality, of true equality, equality before God, not equality of income, not equality of achievement, just equality before God and the law, once you give away those, you have got no argument and you've got to start shutting people down.
So once you abandon the first principle that we are all created equal, not better, not worse, once you abandon the first principle, all the other principles fall like dominoes.
And that's why identity politics equals racism, racism equals censorship, because racism is just about power, right?
It's just about power.
It's who wins.
So I was alive when black people were banned from using certain public facilities.
I have no idea how as a parent you would explain that to your child.
Oh, you can't go into that bathroom because your skin is brown.
You can't have this because your skin.
I don't know how you explain that.
That was an evil.
The way to correct that is to stop doing it.
You stop doing it.
You don't then create safe spaces for blacks.
You don't then create bathrooms that whites can't come into or classes that whites can't come into.
When you bite the evil apple, you just become evil.
And now you've got to shut people up because they're going to expose you for the evil that you are.
That's what's happening in the UK, and it's what's happening on college campuses.
Identity politics is racism.
Racism requires censorship because it has no argument against itself.
Tomorrow, we have Christian Toto on to talk about the movies and the culture.
Excellent.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
there then.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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