Andrew Clavin mocks tech giants’ alleged anti-conservative bias—Twitter shadow bans, YouTube demonetizations—and the FBI’s hypocrisy in targeting Trump while firing Andrew McCabe over his wife’s $675K Clinton PAC donations. He frames McCabe’s ouster as unrelated to Mueller’s probe but slams media narratives linking it to Trump undermining justice, contrasting it with Brennan and Power’s hostile tweets. Shifting to Irish-American history, Clavin cites 19th-century oppression—British courts erasing Catholics, 1847 emigrant mortality rates of 19%—and compares their rise via civil society (churches, temperance) to Black Americans’ post-1960s welfare decline. He warns government entitlements breed resentment, like Dinesh D’Souza’s forced sandwich analogy, before pivoting to The Twilight Zone as a metaphor for left-wing censorship, where Zuckerberg and Dorsey enforce a dystopian "good life" through fear—silencing conservatives risks backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
Internet Corporations Silencing Conservatives00:02:59
You know, nowadays a lot of enormous internet corporations are trying to silence conservatives.
Twitter shadow bans us.
YouTube demonetizes our videos.
Google fires employees for anti-left-wing thought crimes like speculating on gender differences and then skews searches so conservative opinions don't come out on top.
Even Facebook has a new algorithm that favors so-called trusted news sources, which in effect means favoring the mainstream news media, which is deeply slanted to the left.
Now, we here at the Andrew Clavin Show believe that whenever the politically correct bromides of enormous internet corporations disagree with our opinions, we should change our opinions to reflect whatever enormous internet corporations want us to believe.
After all, if you can't trust enormous internet corporations, who can you trust?
And if we don't obey them and tailor our opinions to theirs, we could end up having open debate and truth-telling, which would be chaos.
So, from now on, we're going to tailor our news reporting to satisfy the enormous internet corporations because enormous internet corporations must be right or they wouldn't be so enormous.
So, for instance, in reporting the news today about the FBI and Donald Trump, I'm going to follow some simple rules.
When Donald Trump attacks the FBI for dishonesty, that's wrong of Donald Trump because it undermines the people's trust in the FBI.
When the FBI attacks the FBI for dishonesty, that's wrong of Donald Trump because we can't trust the FBI because Donald Trump attacked the FBI, undermining our faith in the FBI, which caused the FBI to attack the FBI, undermining our faith in the FBI, which was wrong of Donald Trump.
When the Attorney General fires someone from the FBI because the FBI said to fire someone from the FBI, that's wrong of Donald Trump because Donald Trump attacked the Attorney General, who was obviously trying to keep his job by firing someone at the FBI because the FBI said to fire him because Donald Trump attacked the FBI, undermining our faith in the FBI, and so Donald Trump is wrong.
When Donald Trump is wrong, it's because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
But when Donald Trump is right, Donald Trump is wrong because Donald Trump is Donald Trump, which is wrong.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is right because he's investigating Donald Trump, but if he finds Donald Trump was right, he's wrong.
Finally, whatever Donald Trump, whenever Donald Trump is Donald Trump, it's wrong.
And when Donald Trump is wrong, it's a constitutional crisis worse than Watergate, if Watergate had happened during Pearl Harbor, which was like Donald Trump, because it was wrong.
I hope by following these simple rules, we'll be able to avoid being silenced by enormous internet corporations because I guess that didn't work.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-ducky wife of the TV.
For the ring and not so sing, and hunky-lucky do.
Issy-dipsy-totsy, the world is easy.
It's a wonderful day, how are you?
It makes me want to sing.
Why You Should Think About Credit Cards00:03:20
Oh, away, how are you?
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
The kid did it better than we did.
You know, I don't have her first name.
Her last name is Beckett, the little girl singing the song.
Oh, her first name is Beckett.
Oh, oh, I'm sorry.
That was Beckett singing our song on Facebook.
I love that.
The Clavelandless weekend has come to an end, and we have Michael Knowles who will be here to tell us all about the Irish and how they succeeded in America.
And we're hoping that he will say something insulting to the Irish, and then we're going to carry him down to the nearest Irish pub and just hurl him in, you know, and see what happens.
I have to say the title of the show was a stroke of genius.
We called the show McCabe and Mr. Mueller.
Now, there was an old movie called McCabe and Mrs. Miller, right, with Warren Beatty.
None of you have seen or ever heard of that film, so you don't get the joke.
So now I'm explaining it to you.
And remember how Jeb Bush said, please clap, please laugh, now that I've explained to you this incredibly clever.
Nobody has thought to do that because nobody's ever heard of that movie but me.
All right.
The thing you should be thinking about, however, is you should be thinking about credit cards.
You know, we all do this, but I do it too.
You spend with your credit card and you think like, oh, it's kind of like magic money.
You don't have to have money.
But in fact, every time you use a credit card, it's called a credit card because you're essentially taking out a loan and credit card debt can be as much as 17% APR.
If you look at it, I mean, if you let your credit card debt build up, you can get smashed by that 17% APR.
Well, let me tell you about Lightstream's credit card consolidation loan, okay?
This is a really smart way to handle your credit card debt.
You get a credit card consolidation loan with a fixed interest rate as low as 5.49% APR with auto pay.
It's 5.49% APR with auto pay, and you could save thousands of dollars in interest, literally thousands of bucks in interest.
You can choose the funding date as soon as the same day.
You see the interest rates before you apply.
Application is 100% online.
And this is a division of SunTrust Bank, so it's not some fly-by-night, you know, a little booth on the side of the road.
And, you know, you have to have good credit.
This is an actual loan.
You have to have good credit to get it.
But if you apply today, you can get an additional interest rate discount on top of Lightstream's already low rates.
The only way for my listeners with good credit to get this special interest rate discount is to go to lightstream.com slash Andrew.
That's lightstream.com slash Andrew, L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M dot com slash Andrew.
Obviously, subject to credit approval rate includes 0.50% auto pay discount available only when you select autopay prior to loan funding.
Terms and conditions apply and offers are subject to change without notice.
Visit lightstream.com for important information about limits on lightstream loans and same-day funding.
Spate Of Western Books00:03:22
So all these books are coming out now.
I mean, it's just a spate of books, as they say, about the state of the West.
You know, I'm reading Jonah Goldberg's book, The Suicide of the West, Steven Pinker's book.
I'm also reading Enlightenment Now.
And all these, they all have this kind of Trump terror.
They are invested with this Trump terror.
This is not to comment on the quality of the books.
You know, these are all really good writers, but they have this idea that suddenly things were going great and science was making life better.
And all that is true, by the way.
Science is making life better.
People live longer.
Poverty is down.
When you live past a certain age, your health tends to be better because we know more about nutrition and exercise.
Medical care is better.
All these things really are great.
The world is at peace and has been at peace for quite some time.
There's not major wars breaking out.
All of this is good.
And somehow the threat to this is the people who went out and voted for Donald Trump.
They're going back into this tribal past.
They're beating drums.
You know how you are, you Trump voters.
You paint your faces and then you go out and beat your drums and do human sacrifices.
Stop doing that.
Stop debating.
It's annoying the neighbors.
But the whole problem with this, and I have this, whenever I'm sitting with my liberal friends or relatives, I get into this argument all the time.
And they think I'm just picking on Barack Obama, but I'm not.
The whole problem with this is it ignores what comes before.
It's as if Trump, with all his flaws and his good things, the things he does are good, and sometimes the things he says are really annoying.
He didn't just grow up out of the ground.
He didn't just spread up because people were sitting around going, you know, I like living longer and having science, but I really need to become tribal.
You know, I want to go, just, you know, like Hillary Clinton was saying, you know, you just want to, you don't like blacks and you don't like women, you know, you don't like anybody.
You just want to go out.
I just want Trump.
I hate everybody else but Trump.
As if there were not, not just the eight years of the Obama administration, but really 40 years of this relentless tirade against everything you hold dear, telling you that if you believed in the Constitution, it was because you believed in slaveholders who wrote the Constitution.
You must be racist.
Telling you America is racist, telling you patriotism is jingoism.
It's the same thing.
Telling you that if you thought, gee, you know, you like women who act like women more than you like women who act like men, oh my God, what a terrible thing.
If women are different than men, you're fired.
I'm sorry, you cannot say that women are different than men.
If you have religious and philosophical objections to homosexuality, you should be driven out of business.
Years of this stuff, years of being silenced and told you're no good.
What did they think was going to happen?
Did they think you were never going to answer back?
Did they think you were just going to sit there and let them step on your neck forever?
You know, like in 1984 picture of Boot stomping on a human face forever.
That's not the way it works in America, you know.
And I think the whole point about Trump is that Trump is a reaction.
He's an answer.
He's a response to this smugness of elites that they had got it right when everything showed that many of the things they were doing were not right.
I mean, science is wonderful.
The world is getting better.
I think it's great.
I'm very optimistic about where the world is going.
Truly, I am.
But that doesn't mean that everything the elites were doing.
In fact, a lot of what the elites were doing were leaving people committing suicide by the dozens by opium.
Firing Andrew McCabe00:03:22
All right, let us talk about the firing.
And this is to the point, but let's talk about the firing of Andrew McCabe.
Yes, it's another exciting adventure of the FBI.
We're talking about Andrew McCabe.
Andrew McCabe is the deputy FBI director.
He was the deputy FBI director.
And Trump has been hammering him forever because he was part of the investigation into Trump collusion and all this.
But McCabe's wife, Jill, received something like $675,000 in donations for her Virginia State Senate campaign as a Democrat from a PAC run by Terry McAuliffe, or various organizations run by Terry McAuliffe, a big Clinton pal.
So McCabe retired saying, okay, I'm getting out of here, but I want my pension.
And then he was fired over the weekend by Jeff Sessions, which doesn't mean he loses his pension, by the way.
It means he loses the chance to get his pension early.
So he loses kind of pension bonuses.
I think there will still be a pension for him when he's older.
He's only like 50.
So, okay.
So the DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, this is what happened.
Let's just do the facts first, okay?
So you can understand what this was like.
In fact, before I do that, let's talk about shaving because I want to be able to say all this at one point together.
So let's pause for just a minute and talk about shaving.
Now, you only have to look at me to realize you are talking to an expert about shaving.
I mean, I shave, shaving takes me about three hours in the morning because I have to shave so much.
It's an enormous head, and I got to shave every step of it.
So long before Dollar Shave Club became a sponsor, I was a subscriber to Dollar Shave Club because I didn't want to go and get kind of mediocre disposable blades.
I didn't want to open up the thing in the drugstore and have the alarm go off all the time.
Dollar Shave Club, they just send it to you, send to you these absolutely great razors, plus any kind of accessories that you need.
It's more than just razors.
They have all kinds of things, toothpaste, shampoo, body wash.
And I use a lot of it.
I use, especially like the one they call, what do they call butter, shave butter.
I like anything called butter.
Anything called, all you have to do is call something butter, and I will buy it.
But the shave butter is good because you can put it on C where you're shaving.
It doesn't lather up like some shaving cream.
And these are excellent razors that they send to you once a month.
You could choose whether you want the executive razor, which I use a lot of the time, or the simple two-blade razor.
The executive razor has 472 blades and takes three days to shave because even after you put it down, it has so many blades.
It's still shaving your head.
For a mind-blowing experience, join Dollar Shave Club today, and for just $5 with free shipping, you will get the six-blade executive razor plus trial sizes of shave butter, body cleanser, and one wipe Charlie's and keep the blades coming for a few bucks more a month.
You can get yours at dollarshaveclub.com/slash clavin.
And I know what you're saying.
My face is bleeding so badly from using these crummy disposable blades that I can't remember how to spell clavin.
Michael Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector General appointed by Barack Obama, okay, and everybody respects him.
Everybody knows he's a straight-arrow guy.
He concludes an investigation in McCabe's behavior during the investigation into Hillary Clinton, both her email abuse and the Clinton Foundation and whether it was doing favors for donations.
Okay.
The Democrats wanted this investigation, right?
Because they felt that when Comey came out, remember how Comey came out and said, oh, we have to reopen the investigation because he just found all these extra emails on Anthony Weiner's child molester Anthony Weiner's laptop because they went through Huma Abatton, Hillary Clinton's aide, right?
So here is all this classified stuff.
And he said, I have to re-look at this right before the election.
Hillary Clinton, aside from blaming you and everything and the light and the weather and the dog ate her homework, aside from blaming everything else, blames Comey for doing this.
Okay, when that happened, the Wall Street Journal ran a story called FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton probe.
And it had sources telling the Wall Street Journal that there was, you know, that the agents in the field wanted to go hard against Hillary Clinton, but they were getting pushback from the top.
And the top was saying, let's resolve this, let's get it out of the way.
And so this was a leak.
It was not, it was a sourced story, a leak, part of which was from Andrew McCabe.
Okay, so the Inspector General, these are just the facts, right?
He delivers his report.
This is Obama appointee, delivers his report to the independent FBI Office of Professional Responsibility.
It has nothing to do with the White House, right?
This is the FBI internal guys.
All they want is what I'm sure all the great people who work at the FBI want.
They want this cleared up so they can go back to having the fantastic reputation they have always had.
All right.
So they say, so they come back.
Horowitz comes back and says to the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility, the OPR, say McCabe leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and then he was dishonest about it.
He was less than candid about it under oath, under oath, which is bad, and that is a firing offense.
So Jeff Sessions, what does he do?
He comes out and he says, you're fired.
And he fires him like the day before his extra benefits for his retirement kick in, right?
So he can't get this pension.
Those are the facts.
Obama appointee does an investigation the Democrats wanted, reports to the independent FBI office, the OPR.
The OPR says he should be fired.
Sessions fires him.
Here is Chuck Todd reporting about this on NBC number four.
What I would say is this.
I think the fact that how the president made the McCabe firing happen, I mean, it is an extraordinary, if you look, go back 18 months, the systemic campaign against McCabe to delegitimize him, to raise questions about him to a deputy FBI director that nobody had ever heard of and the president using his bully pulpit to do that.
He gets Sessions, who some believe is firing McCabe quickly in order to save his own job, which would preserve the Mueller probe.
I think the reaction by the president's attorney that this McCabe firing means time for the probe to end, I think that's most significant because I think it signals this president is no longer cooperating with Mueller.
It's time for war.
Shame on you, Chuck.
I mean, really, every word of that was absolute imaginary stuff, except for the fact that the Trump lawyers and Trump have been loudmouthed about this, which I'll get back to.
That is important, and they shouldn't have been.
But that's just nonsense.
I mean, Trump did not get McCabe fired.
He wanted McCabe fired.
He hated McCabe.
He was constantly tweeting about him.
And the White House has continued to say and continues to say they're not going to fire Mueller.
Mueller's not going to get fired.
And that they're cooperating.
He didn't say Chuck Todd assumes that they've stopped cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
There's no evidence of that that I know of.
Nobody has said anything in any responsible news outlet.
And just to show that it's not an isolated incident, I also just have to play this hilarious clip from CNN's Washington presidential historian, Douglas Brinkley.
So it's not that he gets a little overwrought about this.
Listen to him.
Kid, is there any comparison to Nixon's Saturday night massacre?
Yeah, I mean, this will be known as the Friday Night Slaughter.
You know, this was the very idea that Jeff Sessions hasn't released something to inform the public what this is.
It's done in a kind of cloak of secrecy late at night in a bizarre fashion.
The fact that he was about to have his pension and they couldn't let it go.
It's something very cruel and sad that's occurred tonight.
And I think our country now hopefully is going to wake up.
I mean, Donald Trump is struggling for his life.
He is paranoid.
He felt that McCabe was too close to Comey, and he decided to get rid of anybody and anything that's standing in his way of kind of survival mode right now.
But I think we can say tonight that the Trump White House is at war with our FBI.
The war is still on.
I mean, really, Trump should be paying these guys rent because he's living in their heads.
Now, let's take the other side of this.
To be fair, Donald Trump should have kept his mouth shut over this because he got what he wanted.
It was absolutely, his fingerprints are not on this side, no matter what Chuck Todd says, he had nothing to do with this.
And it was about the Hillary investigation.
It was not about the Trump investigation.
But Trump can't keep his mouth shut.
So he tweets, Andrew McCabe fired.
A great day for the hardworking men and women in the FBI.
A great day for democracy.
Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choir boy.
He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest level of the FBI.
Then he goes on, and he, Trump, links the Mueller's collusion investigation to this.
He says the Mueller probe should never have been started and that there was no collusion and there was no crime.
It was based on fraudulent activities and a fake dossier paid for by crooked Hillary and the DNC and improperly used in FISA court for surveillance of my campaign witch hunt.
All of which is true, but has nothing to do with McCabe's firing, which had nothing to do with any of this.
And the special counsel shouldn't have been, as I said at the time, should not have been appointed.
There was no crime to investigate it.
That is why you appoint a special counsel, is to investigate a suspected crime.
And he really has not, there is no suspected crime.
Collusion, even if it happened, isn't it a crime.
There's no evidence of it.
Okay.
But the McCabe is not about this at all.
But again, my whole point here is the absolute panic about Trump and the big words.
It's a Friday night slaughter.
It's war.
All these big, ridiculous words that they use about Trump just completely ignore the fact that the world into which Trump stepped was a corrupt world that Obama had rigged against him.
You know, he has a gripe.
He may be a big mouth.
He may not say things in the right way all the time.
He may not know when to turn it off and when to turn it on.
But he walked into a world of corruption and belligerence and bullying of the American people.
So McCabe puts out his statement, right?
And he says, here's the reality.
I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey.
The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey's accounts of his discussions with the president.
But listen to this.
He then goes on and says, the OIG investigation has focused on information I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs office and a legal counselor.
This was leaked information.
He is quoted as a source, not as Andrew McCabe.
He says, as deputy director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that.
It was not a secret.
It took place over several days and others, including the director, James Comey, were aware of the interaction with the reporter.
So he leaked to a reporter and James Comey was aware of it.
The problem with that is that Comey testified to the Senate under questioning from Chuck Grassley in May of last year.
He testified that that never happened.
So here's cut number five with James Comey.
Director Comey, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?
Never.
Question two on relatively related.
Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?
No.
Has any classified information relating to President Trump or his associates been declassified and shared with the media?
Not to my knowledge.
There have been a variety of leaks.
Well, leaks are always a problem, but especially in the last three to six months.
Okay, so now, so McCabe says, I leaked, yes, but I have the right to leak if I want to, and Comey knew about it.
But there is Comey testifying that no, in fact, he never condoned anything like that.
So somebody is maybe.
So, and now Trump is crowing about that.
Trump puts out a tweet.
Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator Grassley when asked, have you ever been an anonymous source or known someone else to be an anonymous source?
He said strongly, never know.
He lied.
So Trump is talking about that.
But more to come, but let's talk first about Wondery's new podcast, This Is War.
It is a very touching, very well-produced story about veterans telling their real story, what it's really like to be at war.
We just don't listen to them enough.
We don't hear enough from them.
Sometimes we elevate them and call them heroes, but we don't always listen to what their stories are.
And these are personal stories from the brave men and women who serve in our armed forces, first-hand accounts of what it's like to fight and survive combat in foreign lands protecting our freedom, the bonds that are formed and the psychological toll it often takes on a person and what it's like to return home trying to figure out how they fit in and heal the physical and emotional wounds from their time in combat.
Try out the first episode.
You'll meet Ian Mearns.
And a month before his senior year in high school, when he was just 17 years old, he walked into a recruitment office and signed up.
That was August of 2001.
So obviously, a month later, everything had changed, and he was entering the military under very different circumstances than he had anticipated.
A heartbreaking and amazing story.
Go listen to This Is War on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
Visit wondery.fm slash Andrew.
That's wonder with a Y at the end.
Wondery.fm slash Andrew.
Wondery.fm slash Andrew.
Subscribe and listen to it.
You really will not regret it.
Now, the whole thing about this is that, you know, all those people chanting Drain the Swamp, those people that Hillary Clinton said were just hating on black people and women, and especially hating on Indian Americans, because she was in India at the time, so she wanted to make Indians feel bad.
This whole idea that there's a deep state.
Now, you can take this too far, that making the deep state a conspiracy.
John Brennan, Obama's CIA guy, who has just been a big mouth throughout this, he tweets in answer to the McCabe firing.
Listen to what John Brennan tweets.
He says, when the full extent he's tweeting to Trump, when the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.
You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America.
America will triumph over you.
What the hell is going on?
A guy got fired because he lied under oath, and it had nothing to do with Trump.
It had to do with Hillary.
What the hell is that?
You know, if you don't want people to be afraid of the deep state, maybe don't make threats.
Maybe deep staters shouldn't make threats against the president.
And UN Ambassador Samantha, former, Obama's UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, who unmasks all those people, right?
She's unmasked hundreds of people.
We have no idea why.
She tweets, not a good idea to tick off John Brennan.
They're threatening him.
They're threatening the guy.
I mean, the only person on the left who supports the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, is a congressman, a Democratic congressman from Long Island, Tom Swozy, who was asked, what do we do?
What do we do if Donald Trump doesn't obey the law?
Listen to his answer.
If he does not execute that mandate, what does our Constitution say should happen?
How much time is he allowed?
How much time is he allowed?
I don't know the answer to the question.
It's really a matter of putting public pressure on the president and making it public, which is hard to break through the news cycle and all the different things.
And it's probably about going to the courts as well.
And then, you know, I mean, this is where the Second Amendment comes in, quite frankly, because, you know, what if the president was to ignore the courts?
What would you do?
What would we do?
Confederate.
So.
What is the second thing you should say?
First Second Amendment is the right to bear arms.
That's the lily we have on our right side.
That's the lily hand.
So it's all right.
Trump may be breaking the law.
He may be at war with the FBI.
But we can always kill him.
You know, I don't know if you could hear that.
It was a little muddy.
The audio was a little muddy.
But basically, he said, if everything else fails, we resort to the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms.
So in other words, he's saying we can always assassinate the president.
So, you know, this is the thing.
And it really would help if the deep state were not threatening the president all the time.
It would really help us feel a little bit better about the government that's already there and a little bit worse.
And maybe we judge Trump a little bit worse.
My point is only this, that Trump is an answer to 40 years of disdain for American values, disdain from the left that was echoed in the echo chamber of the mainstream media.
I don't know if you saw Shapiro on with CNN where he told Brian Stulter to his face, you guys are egregiously biased.
You know, I think that this is the thing.
And they are egregiously biased, but they don't understand.
And the internet companies don't understand that when you silence people, they don't just go away.
They smolder, they get angry, they react, and they maybe overreact.
But, you know, Trump and everything he is doing, everything that gives him his popularity, it's you guys on the left.
It's you and your abuses.
It's you and your corruption.
It's you and your hatred of American values that brought this answer upon.
Society's Complex Responsibilities00:11:35
You brought it down on yourself.
And that is where Trump support comes from almost entirely, including for me, including for me.
I mean, I support what Trump does when he does really good conservative things, which he has.
But I also laugh when he attacks these people, even when he is being rude.
I laugh because you guys have been awful.
These people have been awful.
All right, we got Michael Knowles coming up, but I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You can listen, I think, on YouTube.
You can continue listening.
Come on over to thedailywire.com, though.
And if you listen there, while you're listening, you can subscribe.
If you subscribe for a lousy $9.99 a month, a lousy $99.99 for a year, if you do that, then you can watch the whole show right there.
You don't have to bounce around.
You don't get cast into the exterior darkness where there is great weeping and gnashing of teeth.
And also, if you subscribe for a year, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
Some call it a mug, some call it a tumbler.
It is, in fact, a tumbler, and it automatically fills with leftist tears whenever I am speaking.
And leftist tears, of course, will cure all your diseases.
All right, Knowles is coming up.
There you are.
Hey!
Happy birthday.
Hey, thanks.
By the way, thanks for coming out.
We sent out that little picture of me lighting my stogie on my birthday sparkler, which was pretty fun.
Thanks for it.
I appreciate it.
And I should note to everybody, Drew brought me a bunch of Catholic books so that I can bother all of the Protestants at the Daily Wire.
I did.
Really nice.
That's exactly why.
I was going to get you Hillary Bellock on Muslims, but then I realized we don't have any Muslims here, but we do have Protestants.
So I got to.
Plus, I read that one every night.
No, it's an old one.
You didn't show on Twitter how you almost set the entire bar on fire by blowing on that sparkler.
The sparks were going all over the place.
Yeah, well, you know, I don't want to tell any tales out of school, but I'd had a couple of Coca-Colas at that point, you know, a few adult beverages.
Wasn't quite in my right mind, so I almost burned down West Hollywood.
Well, it was an excellent party.
And it was on St. Patrick's Day.
That's right.
Is your birthday St. Patrick's Day or?
My birthday is the following day.
But I realized, you know, I'm part Irish.
My grandma's Irish.
Oh, Knowles.
We always call you O'Noles.
Oh, Knowles.
Oh, Michael O'Knowles.
No, what we always say is, oh, Knowles.
That's good.
I couldn't help but go out on St. Patrick's Day in honor of the McMullen and McDade side of my family.
But I felt two days of binge drinking was excessive even for me.
So we did it all in one day.
And it's really important, I think, to cover St. Patrick's Day, to delve into the culture, because in our intersectional culture, we can focus on one of the most oppressed, victimized groups in history, the Irish Americans.
As you know, if you had the luck of the Irish, you'd be sorry and wish you were dead.
If you had the luck of the Irish, you'd wish you were English instead.
Who is that?
I believe that's John Lennon.
John Lennon, okay.
Little liver puddling philosophy.
They were, I mean, they were one of the worst treated groups of people in American history and in British history as well.
People don't understand this.
There's actually a big move on the left now to push back and say, oh, the Irish didn't have it that bad.
Oh, they were indentured servants, but they weren't slaves for more than seven years.
Jason Riley put a good piece in the journal just reciting a lot of facts that people don't really remember.
And even left-wing outlets like The Root will occasionally admit this.
Noel Ignatiev, writing in The Root, explains that the Irish and black Americans come from bizarrely similar historical circumstances, except the Irish in many ways had it worse.
The Irish who came to America in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were fleeing caste oppression, a system of landlordism, the penal laws that governed every aspect of Irish life and established Irish Catholics as an oppressed race.
We remember the Dred Scott decision where Justice Taney decided that black people could never become citizens.
There were similar laws in the United Kingdom.
So, for instance, on two occasions, the judicial authority in Ireland declared, the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.
You know, when the Irish got to America in the mid-19th century, they regularly worked with freed blacks doing manual labor.
They were mocked in similar ways in popular culture.
There was Jim Crow and Jim Dandy for the blacks.
There was Bridget and Patrick for the Irish.
And on the ride over here, the conditions were actually worse for the Irish.
Thomas Sowell writes, no other contemporary immigrant group was so concentrated at the bottom of the economic ladder as the Irish.
Wanted ads in America read, wanted any color or country, except Irish.
You know, 19% of Irish emigrants died on the way to the United States in the year 1847 alone.
That compares with just 9% of slaves who came over on the British slave ships.
Still pretty high, but more than double the rate.
And that's because the British at least vaguely wanted to keep their human chattel commodities to sell them at market.
Nobody cared about the Irish.
So if they died, they'd throw them overboard.
Now, what happened?
Today, Irish Americans have poverty rates that are way below the national average, and they have a median income that is way above the national average.
You know, don't lose your place.
Keep where you are.
But I just want to point out here, it's important to point out that lest anybody think that we are making any kind of a racial argument, the Irish in Britain were treated the way blacks were treated in the South, in the American South.
They were treated exactly the same as a racial matter.
It was a problem with the race of Irishmen.
So here's what happens when Irishmen leave the islands where they're treated badly and they said that, oh, their race can never make it.
And now they come to America where they're still treated badly and yet they're free.
Here's what happens.
This is exactly right.
It's why racism is so stupid.
It's so stupid.
It's because to be a racist, I guess you have to be kind of smart enough to see categories of people, but still so dumb that you don't see the categories that matter.
So actually, in this book you gave me from Hilaire Belloc, he explains there are different ways that we can divide humans into category.
Language, for instance, geography.
He says, another line of cleavage, very much more doubtful and often fantastic, lies between what are thought to be racial differences.
He goes on to point out that they keep changing.
So there's the Celt and the Germanic and the Slavic and the Nordic, and now they're a little bit Nordic.
Now they're continental, yada, yada, yada.
He concludes by saying, we shall not have long to wait for some new fashion and this sort of nonsense.
It changes every few years.
But what Belloc points out is an observation that I will make about the Irish, which is that the fundamental categorical differences are both religious and therefore relate to the institutions that come out of those religious cultures.
The Irish had one great advantage in America that unfortunately blacks in America haven't had, which is that the government never tried to help them.
It is almost cliché at this point, but people need reminding that before the 1960s, Thomas Sowell writes at length about this, before the 1960s, when we were told that the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act were finally going to turn things around for black people, before those programs, poverty was dropping dramatically.
Between 1940 and 1960, poverty rates for black Americans had dropped by 40 percentage points.
Out of wedlock, birth was down, murder was down, crime was down, everything was on the way down.
After the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society, all of those trends dramatically slowed, slowed by rates of 50% or more, or reversed entirely.
Such as, and also when welfare programs incentivized the breakup of the family, incentivized out of wedlock birth, what could one be expected to do but to follow those trends?
The Irish didn't have this.
When the Irish came to America, there wasn't a giant welfare state.
They were helped by the civil society, primarily the Catholic Church and all of its outgrowths.
Stereotypes come from somewhere, and the Irish did brawl and drink at much higher rates than average in America.
So out of the church and out of the civic organizations around the church came the Irish Immigrant Society, came the temperance societies, which did work, perhaps not perfectly, but they did curb some of the problem.
And of course, centrally the Catholic Church, which was both a theological, ecclesiastical institution, it was also the center of the community.
It was also the focal point.
In the United States, the government systematically, especially beginning in the 1960s, eradicated all other aspects of that black civil society and especially the great strength of black churches in America.
You know, people think this is an esoteric idea when you say this.
They think, oh, this is getting too heady and too intellectual and it doesn't matter.
But when you have a church at the center of your community and when you are being helped by, as you say, civil society, by people, you develop relationships and relationships cause responsibility and you have responsibility to the help that you're getting.
When you get money from the government, it is, as they call it, an entitlement.
You just think that this is, you know, you think that the money that was taken from someone else and given to you is no longer charity that creates responsibility and relationship.
It's an entitlement which just drops out of the blue and therefore creates no responsibility in you.
And when you say this to people, they think, oh, well, that's very, you know, what are you going to do?
Let the guy starve in the street?
You know, that's a very esoteric idea.
It's not.
It's the way people work.
And really, the way blacks went backwards after the Great Society is proof of it.
And it is so morally perverse because charity is a lovely thing.
Charity is a wonderful person as well.
That's right.
If I give somebody a sandwich or something, some guy wants a sandwich, I give him a sandwich, we both benefit in that exchange.
I have given charity that edifies me, that ennobles me, that allows me to see the world in a more beautiful way.
And he feels gratitude and love and dignity.
And responsibility.
And responsibility to you because you've given him that charity.
And he's been elevated to a human level, to your level.
You know, you've essentially said, yes, I'm a human being, you're a human being.
I reach out to you.
Take my sandwich.
Yeah.
Which the government can't do.
I think Dinesh D'Souza put it this way.
When Barack Obama rides up on a white horse and he puts a gun to my head and he says, give him your sandwich, none of us benefits.
Barack Obama feels pride and power and hubris.
I feel anger and resentment that I have to give up my sandwich.
And the guy who takes my sandwich both feels entitled to it and a little bit resentful because when one is entitled to something but one doesn't have it naturally, one naturally resents not having it.
Why don't I have it?
Clearly something's wrong with this arrangement if I don't already have your sandwich.
It is a totally morally perverse exchange and you can see it in various immigrant groups and various minority groups in America.
You know, it's funny.
I always call this the theory of the empty box.
The left thinks there's a poor man in the box.
I put money in the box.
A rich man will come out.
It's just not the way it works because also in the box is human nature and human nature, the internal experience of being human.
It's what all these scientist guys leave out.
It's why even guys like Steven Pinker and I love his books, but he leaves out that the internal experience of being a human being is the purpose of everything.
It's what everything is all about.
That's right.
They've figured out everything perfectly except anything that matters.
That's true.
So you've got Peterson coming on your show.
We've got Jordan Peterson coming on the show today.
Anthony From It's a Good Life00:06:20
We're going to be talking about the 12 rules for life.
I think if I am able to baptize him virtually on the show, I think that gets me an extra big toaster in heaven.
We'll see how it goes.
Everyone should tune in to watch us discuss the book.
And we're going to be giving him most of the show to talk about it.
So it should be pretty interesting.
I told him when he was on this show, I told him he was headed toward conversion, but I don't think he wants to go.
Well, we'll just have to drag him along.
You forget, Drew.
You're a Protestant.
I'm a Catholic.
That's right.
You know, we have ways to make you do this.
You can actually just go in the bathroom and make the whole water holy, right?
That's right.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
I'll see you soon.
Good to see you.
All right.
our crappy culture.
So I want to talk about, I don't think I talked about this last week, and I really do want to talk about it.
A show called It's a Good Life, which was an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Did I mention this last week?
I don't think I did.
On The Twilight Zone, one of the universally regarded as one of the top 10 Twilight Zone episodes.
It was this show called It's a Good Life, and it's about a little boy named Anthony, six years old, who has extraordinary mental powers.
He can change everything with his mind.
And what he has done is he lives in this little town called Peaksville, Ohio, and he wants it to be perfect, so he has cut it off from all other human life.
You know, there's no television communication, no phone communication, and everybody has to be happy all the time and only say things that please Anthony.
And so the whole town lives in terror.
The adults live in terror of this six-year-old boy because he has so much power over them.
And as a result, they all have to say everything is good.
That's why it's called It's a Good Life.
I cut out just this little part of this.
This is just the postman talking to little Anthony and the way they have to talk to him because he has so much power.
Howdy, Anthony.
Mighty good to see you today.
Mighty good.
And it's such a good day, isn't it?
A real good day.
It's a terrible hot day, though.
It's a terrible hot day.
Oh, I wouldn't say that, Aunt Amy.
No, sir, I wouldn't say that at all.
It's fine.
It's just fine.
It's a real good day.
What are you doing, Anthony?
My, that's real good, whatever it is.
I was just wondering what you were doing.
I made a gopher with three heads.
See him?
Yeah.
Yeah, my, he's a real fine one.
I ain't never seen a gopher with three heads before.
I'll make him dead now.
I'm tired of playing with him.
Be dead.
Gopher, you be dead.
My mind, it's real fine that you've done that.
That's real fine, Anthony.
You're a good boy, Anthony.
We all love you.
So I just want to say that this world, Peaksville, Ohio, as run by Anthony, played by Billy Mummy, as run by Anthony, that is the world of political correctness.
And Mark Zuckerberg is the new Anthony.
All these guys who run Twitter's Jack Dorsey, the guys who are censoring conservative thought on Google and YouTube, which is the same company, the guys who banned my pal Stephen Crowder from Twitter and YouTube, the guys who are demonetizing Dennis Prager's videos and who fired James Dammore for thinking about gender differences.
These guys are the new Anthony.
And the reason it's such a good comparison is because they match tremendous power with emotional immaturity and moral ignorance.
This little boy, nobody can teach him because the adults are afraid of him, so nobody can teach him morality.
Nobody can teach him right from wrong.
And he winds up being confused about why the other kids won't play with him.
He doesn't understand why nobody likes him, and it is because they're afraid of him.
You know, this thing about fake news, it started, Cheryl Atkinson has detailed this.
It started as a left-wing movement to silence conservatives.
Donald Trump stole and appropriated the term fake news and used it against CNN and all the other fake newsers.
But the campaign that was started by David Brock and other Hillary Clinton supporters to censor conservatives has worked.
Okay, all these social media companies are now using left-wing people like Snopes and PolitiFact and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is virtually a left-wing hate group.
They're using them to censor their news and to curate their news.
And they are becoming Anthony from It's a Good Life.
And the thing is, they think this is going to stop.
They were so shocked by Donald Trump's victory that they think if they can just silence Donald Trump's voters, that somehow they can stop anything like that from ever happening again.
But I'm here to tell you, and this is what the show has been about: that when you silence people, it just backs up on you.
It's not supposed to be a good life all the time.
And there's supposed to be argument.
There's supposed to be debate.
There's even supposed to be division and hostility.
But it's only when you silence one side that you get rage.
That's when the argument turns into rage.
If everybody is allowed to speak, if we are allowed to come to conclusions, if we're allowed to reach truths and laws together without the Supreme Court stepping in and declaring that stuff that is not in the Constitution is in the Constitution, we can go forward as one people even when we disagree.
It's when you silence people, it's when the media is all on one side, it's when the elites are all on one side and they control the means of communication.
That's when you get rage.
That's when you get division.
And if you want to see war, as these people keep saying we're in, we're not, but if you want to see war, that's how you get there.
Who's on tomorrow?
We got Ward Farrell to talk about the crisis with boys.
This is a really important topic.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Silencing Voices, Fueling Rage00:00:19
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.