Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles critique the intellectual right’s timidity, using Hannity’s combative response to Kimmel as a model for pushing back against leftist suppression—from Kevin Williamson’s firing at The Atlantic over "hyperbolic" remarks to Scott Pruitt’s media smears. They expose California’s one-party governance as a Venezuelan-style debt trap and condemn campus protests like Ithaca College’s "I hate you" chants as ideological indoctrination, comparing it to "child abuse." The episode also dissects Chappaquiddick, defending its portrayal of Ted Kennedy as a hypocrite, and slams the medicalization of mental health, citing 15.5 million Americans on long-term antidepressants while dismissing faith or community as solutions. The takeaway: conservatives must fight harder—or risk irrelevance. [Automatically generated summary]
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton takes on the job of national security advisor this week in the aftermath of a chemical attack in Syria.
Bolton is proposing a new approach to the Syrian civil war and released a statement to reporters saying, quote, Before we respond to this Syrian chemical attack, I think we should all drink a soothing cup of mint tea and maybe do some meditation.
I'm thinking if we drop plane loads of beautiful daisies on Damascus, we might put the leadership there in a more peaceful mood.
Then we could park ships off the coast, playing John Lennon's Imagine over and over so that Bashar Assad can begin to think about the world living as one and maybe attain a higher state of consciousness with a greater appreciation of the blessings of peace.
Some yoga might also help, unquote.
The White House later issued a clarification saying the statement had not come from Bolton, but from 60s artist Peter Max, who has a similar mustache, which is what got them confused.
The real Bolton says we should bomb the Syrian Navy into radioactive splinters, although he liked the idea of playing the John Lennon song while we do it.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety boo.
And birds are wingy, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshape dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
That was a little inside baseball, a little John Bolton humor there.
Mission Control Magic00:03:25
So I'm back.
We have Michael Knowles here to discuss Chappaquitic and explain exactly why he left that poor girl in the car.
And tomorrow is the conversation at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2:30 p.m. Pacific, featuring Andrew Clavin, who is absolutely great.
I highly recommend him.
If you haven't already joined the conversation, it's our monthly QA hosted by Alicia Krauss, where we answer any and all questions from the politics to the personal.
Not personal about me, but I will answer personal questions about Michael Knowles.
The episode will stream live on Daily Wire's Facebook and YouTube pages, but it's only free and it's free for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
To ask questions as a subscriber, log into our website, dailywire.com.
Head over to the conversation page to watch the live stream.
After that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box where I will answer questions as they come in for an entire hour.
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Join the conversation.
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So that was a really interesting trip.
Every time I talk to these college kids, it gives me weeks of stuff to think about.
I'm watching these kids basically, some of them just being deprived of their right to hear about who they are, how the Constitution came about, what Western civilization is about.
It really is sad.
I mean, it's just, it's almost a form of child abuse that these kids are not getting the kind of basic civics education, what we're doing here, why we're in these conversations.
It is, you know, it is troubling, I got to say, and we'll talk about it more.
In fact, Knowles and I, we're both in the same area.
We'll talk about it when he comes on.
The travel was great, though.
You know why?
Because I have got people here.
We've got Caitlin, we've got Candace, people that I can call at any time.
It's like being an astronaut with a mission control.
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Michelle Obama's Student Loan Complaints00:15:32
So here's a cool idea that some tech guy, Peter Layden, had.
He decided that the future will be stamp out conservatives altogether and just have one party.
No one's ever thought of this idea before.
It really took a Silicon Valley genius to come up with the notion that every place should be California, where essentially we only have one party.
And he wrote this big piece saying, the next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it.
Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America's political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can't get done.
And then he basically says we should just wipe out the right.
He says it's a civil war, not a bloody civil war, but we should just crush them the way they essentially, I mean, there's now no Republican Party here in California.
And even that's not entirely true.
California is so huge that there are plenty of Republicans here, but they have been eliminated essentially from government.
So he puts out this piece saying, and look how well he says California is running.
That's the other thing, because California had this debt crisis.
They raised taxes and now they claim, oh, we're running at a surplus.
So I'll talk about that in just a minute.
But the thing I want to point out is when he published this article, Jack Dorsey of Twitter retweeted it with the line, great read.
Great read.
And this is Jack Torsey, whose pinned message on Twitter is, we're committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.
Let me translate that for you.
We are going to screw conservatives because we hate them.
That's what that means.
And that's why they're apparently even shadow banning Ted Cruz.
Apparently, Ted Cruz can't get his message out.
So, I mean, this is what they're talking about.
Now, just to pause for a minute and talk about California, this absolute fantasy that we have beaten our debt project and now everything is great because the people voted higher taxes.
The people did vote higher taxes.
It did eliminate the immediate debt that we have.
So now you've got higher taxes and fewer services, right?
I mean, the same amount of services, so we're paying more for less.
But what they don't tell you is that there is a tidal wave, a tsunami of pension debt that has been building up in this state that somebody's going to have to pay for, and that means the state will go broke.
Meanwhile, our education system is one of the worst in the country.
It is a terrible education system.
And people are leaving.
I mean, you have to understand that California is paradise in terms of its weather, in terms of its atmosphere, in terms of its beautiful views and its coast area.
It is paradise.
It is being wholly owned and supported by the tech industry, this left-wing tech industry.
But people are leaving in droves, like something like a million people net, as more people come in and people leave.
A million people a year are leaving and heading for the better red states where there's jobs and stuff.
And who are those people?
They're the middle class.
The rich are coming in.
The rich are coming here because they can afford the high taxes and the high property costs, and they can put their kids in private schools.
They don't have to go and become slaves to the teachers' unions.
So this state is becoming Venezuela.
It's becoming Venezuela.
Communism always guts the middle class.
It leaves the hyper-rich and the poor.
And then the hyper-rich get eaten last because the powerful people say, oh, now we take all their money and we can keep buying the loyalty of the poor before they set us all on fire.
California is going down the drain.
And that's the truth.
And this whole thing that is just going great, we've got one party, so there are no arguments, is ridiculous.
But it points to an important point.
They are not in an argument.
We are in a discussion.
We are in a debate.
They, the left, is not.
They are in a war of eradication.
And that is why I want to focus for just a minute on this kind of silly thing that happened between Sean Hannity and Jimmy Kimmel.
Okay.
Now, I understand.
This is a country where we once had the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and now we have Hannity and Kimmel shouting homosexual slurs at one another.
But it's important to just watch this because people make fun of Hannity, especially like the intellectuals, but Hannity could teach them all a lesson right here.
Kimmel went out and he made fun of the first lady's accent.
She was reading books to children on Easter, and he made fun.
Do we have that clip?
No White House Easter celebration would be complete without story time from our First Lady.
Never stop exploring because life would be boring.
Be clever and curious, just like a cat.
Ask lots of questions about this and that.
About these and that.
Kimmel, you realize what this means?
You could be First Lady of the United States.
So Hannity goes after him on Twitter.
He says, stop picking on a woman who can't fight back.
And he calls him Mr. Harvey Weinstein Jr. because he says because of shows he did that he remember he had the man show and he was always doing these hoaxes on girls in the street and so he played a couple of them Hannity just said I'm gonna just play all this stuff to remind you of who Jimmy Kimmel is in this world of me too and he played here's a clip of Kimmel going out on the street and playing this prank on girls who are going by this game show is called Guess What's In My Pants?
Now, I've stuffed something in my pants and you're allowed to feel around on the outside of the pants.
You have 10 seconds to then guess what is in my pants.
You ready?
Set?
Go.
You should use two hands.
Two hands.
You're going to make a fine wife before, haven't you?
All right.
Right there?
Yeah?
Just do a few more seconds.
How old are you?
18.
Okay, good.
You're sure of that?
Because Uncle Jimmy doesn't need to do time.
Maybe it would be easier if you put your mouth on.
You've got a nice technique there.
You could get in the Olympics with this, let me tell you.
So the debate, ever elevating the cultural conversation, Hannity calls Kimmel an ass clown, and Kimmel goes insane.
First of all, Kimmel says, when your clown makeup rubs off on Trump's ass, does it make his butt look like a creamsicle?
So he starts in with this, you know, homosexual stuff.
So now he's in trouble with gay people for using them, so to speak, as the butt of his jokes.
Sorry, but I kind of walked into that before I knew where I was going.
And now Kimmel goes on the air with this, and he really just goes absolutely crazy.
This is cut 11.
I do not speak ass clown, though.
What even is an ass clown?
I was thinking about it this morning.
Is it an ass that's a clown or is it a clown that actually lives in an ass like a little bozo bird in your butt cheeks?
I honestly don't know.
And more importantly, why is Sean Hannity openly fantasizing about clowns in the ass?
Is this what you, is that your thing at night when you have your at 2 a.m., you got your laptop open at Breitbart, you sneak into the den to hump a pillow from the Ivanka Trump collection quietly so your wife doesn't wake up and force you to go to church.
So Sean just won't stop and he just hammers Kimmel and he hammers him and he keeps bringing up the creepy jokes and he keeps bringing up the creepy jokes.
And finally, Kimmel surrenders.
Hannity says, I'm going to keep at you until you apologize to the first lady.
And Kimmel finally sends out a tweet saying, while I admit I did have fun with our back and forth, after some thought, I realized that the level of vitriol from all sides, mine and me included, does nothing good for anyone and in fact is harmful to our country.
Even in 2018, the vile attacks against my wife and wishes for death on my infant son are shocking.
And I encourage those who made them to give their words and actions thought.
I too will give my words more thought and recognize my role in inciting their hatefulness.
I will take Sean Hannity at his word that he was genuinely offended by what I believed and still believed to be a harmless and silly aside, referencing our first lady's accent.
Mrs. Trump almost certainly has enough to worry about without being used as a prop to increase TV ratings.
It's a snarly apology.
When you get down into it, he's not really apologizing.
He's not really saying it's wrong.
But it actually was strike back.
It actually showed that Kimmel couldn't take the heat because Kimmel is a hypocrite.
Kimmel is a guy who does anything that he thinks is going to work and keep his audience coming in.
And he has been an absolute pain.
He's been just absolutely wrong to use a network show, which is on the public air to attack one side relentlessly over and over and over again.
And I'll talk about why I'm talking about this in just a minute.
But first, we have to talk about ZipRecruiter because I know a lot of you, you know, you come into the Daily Wire, you read our terrific articles, you listen to our wonderful podcast.
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All right, so why am I talking about this?
Here is a meeting.
The left held a meeting to discuss their attitude toward the right and how they want to have the debate between left and right in this country.
Here's the left speaking at that meeting.
I want him dead.
I want his family dead.
I want his house burnt to the ground.
I want to go to the middle of another one.
They are not giving any quarter.
So people make fun of Sean Hannity and they say, oh, you got down in the dirt with Jimmy Kimmel.
Oh, you know, you lowered the level of our conversation by talking about ass clowns and all this stuff.
But when people say, remember when people would say, well, Trump is this and Trump is that, but he fights.
At least he fights.
And the intellectuals were saying, oh, no, oh, no, he's so awful.
Well, Trump may be awful.
He may be rude.
But the fighting part, the fighting part can be excised from that and remembered.
Let me give you an example.
My friend, Kevin Williamson at the National Review.
Call him a friend.
Maybe I should call him a pal.
He's not a close friend, but he's a guy I know.
I met Kevin Williamson on an NRO tour, and he was obscure then.
He wasn't very famous.
I didn't recognize him.
I didn't know his name.
I hadn't read any of his stuff.
We got to talking on the bus going to the cruise ship.
I was talking to him for about 90 seconds when I realized, oh my God, this guy is brilliant.
This is a brilliant cultural guy.
And he was so brilliant that when he recommended that I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, I did.
It took me three months.
It was awful.
I made fun of it in Another Kingdom in our podcast, fictional podcast, Another Kingdom.
I made fun of it.
I called that a novelist who published a book called A Thousand Pages of Self-Referential Drivel.
That was the name of the book.
That was Infinite Jest.
I told Kevin I was never forgiving him for this.
So Kevin is an acerbic, deadpan, hyperbolic, terrific writer and a strong anti-Trumper.
He hates Trump, but he's a conservative.
And he says shocking things and he does it with a deadpan sense of humor.
And so The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, hired him to bring a little diversity of opinion to his magazine, his left-wing magazine.
And so the hits went out against Kevin right away.
They started saying, oh, he said these terrible, terrible things.
And they do what they always do.
The left has this trick where they take jokes and they make them sound serious.
And then they can always get a couple of women upset about that.
And the women start screaming about it.
And then finally, they say, this is such shocking.
So Kevin Williamson opposes abortion, and he said that women who have abortion should be hanged because it's homicide.
And he said this several times.
Kevin has an absolutely stone-dead face, deadpan sense of humor.
He will say these deadpan things.
He did clarify in a speech at Hillsdale College that he didn't actually believe this, but that didn't stop anything.
Media Matters, the David Brock Soros group, right, which is just all it is, is a left-wing hit group.
And David Brock remembers the guy who started this fake news thing so he could worm his way into Facebook and Twitter and Google, which he did, and get left-wing censors of conservative speech.
That was a, it was a planned thing, and it was really well done, and it has succeeded.
They put out this thing saying, oh my gosh, this hiring of Kevin Williamson is so, so terrible.
Here are some horrible quotes that Kevin Williamson has said over the years.
And they put out this piece.
We're probably waterboarding people somewhere.
I certainly hope so.
And no matter how you feel about it, no matter what you want to say about it, no matter which pronouns you deploy, Laverne Cox is a man masquerading as a woman.
Eastern European engineers are one thing.
We've got 13 million Mexican peasants that we've imported over the last 20 years who aren't really contributing.
Well, white supremacy, like, you know, privilege and parasitic things, they're the floggest on of political rhetoric, right?
You know, it's an imaginary substance, but it can be used to explain anything.
People should start using, you know, Elmer Fudd's deer rifle in crimes.
They would actually be much, much more dangerous than these so-called assault weapons, which are sort of scary looking, but they're not actually very dangerous guns.
Maya Angelou essentially was a kind of cultural mascot.
A sort of literary character that we tend to attach to Older African-American women, kind of cultural avatars that are sent here to teach white liberals the meaning of life.
One of the things that always has kind of offended me about Michelle Obama is that every speech she gives, she gripes about having to pay back her student loans and how hard it was to pay back her student loans.
Where I come from, when someone loans you money to do something that you want to do, that's a favor.
And they don't want a national registry if he runs guns because they do believe that at some point they'll be seized.
I don't think that's an entirely irrational or paranoid logic.
So was there anything in there factoring in his sense of humor and factoring in a little hyperbole?
Was there anything in there that was untrue?
That was so shocking to Media Matters that he said that you should pay your loans back.
That's what was shocking?
Or that a gun registry upsets gun owners because they know the left is looking to repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate all those guns, which they clearly are.
Pruitt's Ethical Dilemma00:07:37
I mean, did he say anything in that?
You know, we could hear the danger music in the background.
Jeffrey Goldberg fired him after two weeks.
So you hire a guy away from his job, right?
You hire him away from the job where he is a respected member of his community and his work space.
You offer him this great big job.
Oh, we love you because you hate Trump.
We're going to make you part of our wonderful mainstream media.
And then you fire him.
You leave the guy unemployed with no, you know, that is a crappy thing to do.
It's cowardly.
It's mean.
It's small.
And it just shows you.
I mean, here's the, and so here's the thing.
The right, I understand the left hates the guy.
They're targeting the guy.
But the right kind of dithers about this stuff, right?
So Essie Cup, and I love SE Cup.
She's a wonderful person.
She does a great job on TV.
But she says, you know, you can't really defend this guy because he was saying that women who have abortion should be hanged.
And, you know, if you have a respect for life, it has to be a respect for life on all ends.
And, you know, I can't defend the things that he said.
And other people, Ross Duthot, is saying, well, he's an abortion extremist and all this.
Again, I think the hanging remark is a joke.
But the point is, I don't agree with a lot of what Kevin writes.
I love reading his stuff, but I don't agree with a lot of what he writes.
I didn't agree with his over-the-top Trump attacks.
I didn't agree with some of the stuff he wrote about hillabilities.
I mean, he had a very difficult upbringing, Kevin, so he has no patience with people who are on the dole and people who are using opioids and things like this.
And he talks about them, he disparages them.
I don't agree with this.
I loved reading his pieces because they were brilliantly written, really well-reasoned.
Oftentimes, I disagree.
But here's the point.
When I disagreed with him, I didn't explode.
I didn't burst into flame.
I didn't melt and die or anything like that.
You know, the internet meme, Did You Die?
I didn't die.
I just kind of honed my own arguments against Kevin's, and that made me smarter.
And then went on and lived my life.
And this is true of even people that I hate and even people who have opinions that I despise, racist opinions or Nazi opinions or whatever.
They can't touch me.
It's when you suppress them.
It's when you repress them that they become powerful.
It's not when they meet other arguments.
I can argue against all those guys and they don't bother me.
But Kevin is a respectable guy, you know, a respectable guy.
He's not filled with hate.
He's not a hate monger.
The left has moved that bar so far where whatever you say that's conservative is suddenly fascist, unacceptable, dangerous, it violates my safe space or whatever.
So they can silence you so they can eradicate these opinions.
And it's serious.
It may not be, I mean, I think Jeffrey Goldberg does a terrible thing.
I think he's a man of respect.
He's a man who sent a message to the community.
Oh, these opinions are not acceptable.
It's not acceptable to be against abortion.
It's not acceptable to make jokes.
And it's always the right.
It's never the left's jokes.
I mean, the left sits around saying all kinds of crazy stuff, but their jokes are fine.
But it's always the right.
But it becomes serious.
For instance, in the matter of Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt has been the victim.
First of all, Scott Pruitt has been great.
He has been one of Trump's best people.
He has done all this stuff where he's eradicated all these environmental rules that weren't improving the environment, but were damaging business and were giving the government too much power over your workplace and where you were.
So he rescinded.
This is one year.
He rescinded the Waters of the U.S. rule that sought to regulate every pond in America.
Reading this from the Wall Street Journal, proposed to repeal the Clean Power Plan rule that sought to put coal out of business, urged the president to withdraw from the Paris Climate Pact, made a priority of cleaning up genuine pollution problems like Superfund sites.
And this week he began revising the destructive Obama-irafuel economy standards.
So they went after him and they had all these bogus ethics charges against him.
He rented an apartment from a friend who might have been a lobbyist, whose husband was a lobbyist, whose firm might have brought stuff in front of the EPA.
He gave a raise to people in his business.
So he went on air with Ed Henry, who's an excellent reporter over at Fox, and Henry really laced into him.
I'm just going to play one clip of that because I want to get to Michael Knowles, but he really grilled him.
So let's play the first Ed Henry Scott Pruitt cut.
Why does it matter when the ethics officials look at the lease and the terms of the lease to determine whether that's ethical?
Why does it matter?
It's because you're renting it from the wife of a lobbyist.
Who has no business before this agency?
Hold on a second.
Who has no business?
Mr. Hart is at Williams and Jensen, right?
Major lobbying firm.
ExxonMobil is the client.
Mr. Hart has no clients.
ExxonMobil has business before you.
Mr. Hart has no clients that has business before this agency.
ExxonMobil has no business.
His firm.
He's a member of a law firm.
To take his relationship and extend it to the agency.
ExxonMobil have business before you.
To extend it to third parties and his firm is absolutely a stretch.
But Ed, let me say this to you.
You asked me whether this is about the toxicity in Washington, D.C.
And I will tell you it is.
It's about the mission that we're engaged in here.
And this arrangement is, again, been signed off, as I've indicated to you.
And it's been stated by the ethics officials here, career ethics officials.
This individual doesn't have clients that have business before this agency.
And at the same time, we are doing these very important things.
And the criticism, I think, this is just one of things that people bring up.
Okay, so I've an answer to ExxonMobil has business before you.
The firm Steve Hart does not represent ExxonMobil.
So this interview was called Disastrous of Points.
Pruitt was stuttering.
Henry was hammering him and hammering and hammering him.
I want to be clear.
Ed Henry's job is to hammer public officials.
I hope he does it to every single public official who comes on.
So Henry is doing his job, but you can do this to anybody.
I could hammer you about the last couple of things you did, and I could make you look bad and you would stutter.
And at one point, Henry even admits that Obama's people did this.
This is the thing.
Nothing, nothing that Pruitt has done wasn't done by officials before him.
And Henry's point was, yes, but you're supposed to drain the swamp.
Okay, fair enough.
Pruitt should understand that he's the position he's in.
He should understand that he's a target.
He should be like Caesar's wife above suspicion.
I get it.
But we should not in any way.
I mean, you know, the chief of staff, Kelly, was telling Trump to fire him, according to sources.
Don't fire this guy.
He's one of the best guys you get.
You know, if he needs to clean up his act a little, tell him to clean up.
But we have got to fight these people because, you know, this is the thing.
I'm all for conversation.
I'm all for debate.
But when their idea of debate is you're shadow banned, you're banned.
We're changing our algorithm so you don't, your show up on our Google searches.
We're defunding your videos on YouTube.
When that's their form of debate, they are instantly in the wrong and we need to fight back.
We shouldn't dither about this stuff.
It's not a question.
I mean, I'm perfectly happy to talk about whether Kevin Williamson is right on one day or wrong on another day.
Nothing, this has nothing to do with it.
But Goldberg should be ashamed of himself.
The Atlantic should be ashamed of themselves.
Pruitt should be defended.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
You know, you don't want, if you don't want people fighting like Trump with the insults and the meanness and the over-the-top remarks, if you don't want people fighting like Hannity, getting down at the level of Jimmy Kimmel and using that kind of language, then fight at a higher level, but fight.
These guys are popular, and that kind of rhetoric is popular because the intellectuals are dithering and they're letting this campaign of silence go on without standing up to it.
So if you don't want to fight like Trump, don't fight like Trump, but fight like Trump at least.
At least do what Trump does and fight.
Debating Kennedy's Legacy00:10:54
All right, we got Michael Knowles coming up.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You are hereby cast into the exterior darkness where there is great weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But you can come over to the dailywire.com.
You can listen to the rest of the show while you're there.
Subscribe.
Allows you 10 bucks a month.
And you can be in the mailbag every week or on the conversation tomorrow, which will be with me.
And you can ask me all the questions that you have.
I will solve all your problems.
Your life will be like a gleaming new thing that you can hardly even recognize.
All right, we got Michael Knowles coming up.
Knowles, can you hear me?
Yeah.
There he is.
No need to wake up.
You're on the air.
I can't believe it.
I was just trying to get a good nap in.
That's mostly what I use Movie Pass for now, by the way.
Speaking of our topic today, is now with MoviePass, all the movies are free.
So even if the movies are terrible, which most of them are, I'll just go and take a nice nap.
It's pretty nice.
It is.
It's dark.
It's quiet.
Nobody's bothering.
So you were traveling almost the same time.
We were kind of traveling at like the opposite weeks or something like this.
And you were giving speeches to kids too, right?
This is the longest you and I have gone without drinking and smoking cigars since I moved out here, I think.
I noticed that.
I think we have a moral obligation to reconnect.
That's right.
But yeah, I gave a speech at Yeshiva and I gave a speech up at Ithaca College two weeks ago.
And then you were gone all of last week.
Right.
And it was a pretty interesting experience because the crowds were a little different.
And I was protested at Ithaca with one of the best lines I've ever heard, which is, I don't know who you are, but I hate you.
I've always felt that way about you.
That's right.
I feel that way about you today.
I don't know who you are, but I hate you.
Yeah, what was your trip like?
You know, it was, first of all, I did this thing after I did Hobart, Williams Hobart, which is right up in the Ithaca area.
I went down to New York and I did a thing at the Manhattan Institute, and that was great.
I mean, it was very, very, it was kind of their big young contributors to the Manhattan Institute, and they just interviewed me and we talked and we had a dinner for a select few of them afterwards, and that was sensational.
I mean, people, really engaged, really intelligent people with a lot on the line.
At the college, I had a great time.
I thought the conservatives who invited me were wonderful people.
What were they called?
The Young Americans for Freedom, I think it was.
And they were great.
And the kids who objected to me were all incredibly polite and incredibly reasonable, but I just felt that they were so imbued with this race narrative and this sex narrative that they actually cannot hear what you're talking about.
And it's a way of stopping them from thinking.
And I actually think that it's like a form of child abuse.
Like at one point, to counter my speech, they gave a speech praising communism.
And I just thought, you know, dude, if you are teaching communism as a good thing to children, you're not a good person.
That's not a moral thing to do, you know?
It's also sad because of the people who object.
Some of them, I think, were earnestly trying to find some reality.
They were trying to hear some political reality that they'd never heard of.
But they're so profoundly uneducated and uncultured.
And I don't mean that like children, like they're like children who were neglected in their education and their acculturation.
So to even hear of some of these ideas, to even hear the name, I don't know, Aristotle, is shocking to them.
It's never happened before.
I agree.
I agree.
I actually asked, I don't like to quiz people, you know, because it seems unfair.
But I actually asked if anybody knew who Aristotle's student was.
And when one guy raised his hand, I was so glad that somebody knew that he had taught Alexander the Great, you know.
Right, right.
All right, let's talk about Chappaquittic.
Talking about depriving people of information.
How is it?
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm really eager to see it.
It is so good.
I will say, put down your Aristotle and go see it.
It's so, so good.
It finally depicts Teddy Kennedy for the absolute abject degenerate that he was.
It's unrelenting in its portrayal.
And there was a guy who wrote this guy, Neil Gabler, who wrote in the New York Times, I guess he's doing a biography of Ted Kennedy, and he's very upset now.
He said it's a character assassination.
Teddy Kennedy's character committed suicide a long time ago.
Doesn't need to be assassinated.
I like Teddy Kennedy.
He gets assassinated, but it's Mary Joe Kopeckney who's dead.
Yeah, that's an amazing way to get assassinated.
He says that the film was dishonest, but he never actually points out any dishonest portrayal.
The one thing is he says that Bruce Dern as Joe Kennedy Sr. should have slobbered around a little bit more or something.
That's the only historical inaccuracy he points to.
It's just a lot of innuendo.
And they're really upset because finally the lion of the Senate is exposed for being a womanizing, cowardly lout, for being just a man basically immune to virtue.
None of the virtues, excuse me, none of the virtues did Ted Kennedy possess.
And they really did.
I mean, it just is absolutely true that the left defended him to the day he died and the day he died.
When remember Andrea Mitchell saying, oh, the heavens are weeping for Ted Kennedy because it rained on the day they buried.
I mean, they did defend this clown the entire time.
The thing that we can owe all of this movie to, it's not that there are conservatives now infiltrating Hollywood.
That isn't happening.
The director came out and he said he was asked to do an interview on Hannity.
He said, no, F and Way, I'm not embracing the right.
Okay, so these were not conservatives finally exposing.
That would be too much to ask.
Not at all.
That would be too much to ask.
It wasn't that.
Basically, everybody associated with this movie appears to be politically left.
What I think this is, is not because Hollywood has embraced Republicans, but because Democrats have embraced the left.
So there's this intersectional narrative now that in the age, finally the Clintons are no longer politically useful.
Finally, the Kennedys are no longer politically useful.
We're in a new age where straight white men are the enemy.
That's the new moral framework of the intersectional left.
And so a guy like Teddy Kennedy, he's the prime case of the Me Too movement.
He got absolutely smashed.
He tried to cheat on his wife.
He took this single girl off into the woods somewhere and then drove off a bridge and killed her and left her to drown.
I think they're finally willing to turn on him.
Is that a good thing for the culture?
I don't know that that's really an improvement other than we can finally watch them smack around Bill Clinton and the Kennedys, but it is fun to watch the hyenas of the intersectional left devour the lion of the Senate.
You can get some popcorn to watch that.
You know, I also think in some ways it's a good thing that we finally see that the Democrat Party is the vehicle for communist thought.
In the same way, in the same way that the Republican Party is the vehicle, but not the, it's not the exact same thing as those people who believe in the Constitution and believe in freedom.
I mean, we conservatives, we who believe in the Constitution, we kind of travel along with the Republicans because they're as close as we can get to a popular point of view, whatever the hell the Republicans believe, I have no idea.
But I mean, the conservatives travel along with them in the same way the Democrats, the communists essentially, travel along with the Democrats and have now taken over the vehicle.
They are now, the Democrat Party is now a left, fully fledged leftist party.
And the fact that they would go on and attack Teddy Kennedy is just the circular firing squad.
It just shows you that they will devour their own.
They're finally eating their own, which is really nice.
And the byproduct of this, which is probably not a good thing, it's probably, I suppose it's more honest now that the Democrats have fully embraced the left.
It's probably not a good thing for the culture.
But one of the benefits is we get a little bit of truth 30 years too late, 40 years too late, about this absolute derelict.
The Kennedys are a scourge upon American politics.
They have debased American politics from the beginning.
Back when Joe Kennedy was running rum, John F. Kennedy had a lot of irregularities in that election, a lot of evidence that he stole that election.
All of them were just absolute bottom feeders on American politics.
And the narrative that they were glamorous, the narrative of Camelot, has finally been punctured.
That's a good thing.
I can't complain about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, it is something we're all going to have to come to terms with, is the idea that what do we do with bad people who do good things or people who are not, who are imperfect, as we all are, who do good things?
You know, we support, you know, you know, I have my problems with Donald Trump, and I think he had a great first year in office.
I don't know what to say about that.
That doesn't make me, you know, want to leave my daughter alone in a room with Donald Trump.
I mean, it's like, you know, I don't know exactly how to respond, but the only thing that is good about it is that we can now stop accepting slurs and attacks on the character of our candidates, knowing that these guys have been defending the worst of the worst.
And it's not like on the right where you get an occasional person defending a Roy Clark or whatever.
On the left, it has been ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post.
They have been defending this guy who left this girl to drown and then went and changed his clothes so he had an alibi while she drowned.
I mean, do they depict all this in the movie?
I shouldn't say give anything away.
It's a historical thing.
But do they depict this as brutally as it was?
I did a review of this in the Daily Wire, and I had this question.
I said, oh, well, I'm spoiling the movie.
Oh, wait a minute.
We've known about this for 40 years if you've read any actual historical accounts.
They depict it brutally, honestly.
They do not embellish.
There is no embellishment that I can find.
Every single cowardly, awful, vicious action taken by Ted Kennedy is easily pointed to in the historical record.
But they really portray him for just being a terrible derelict and a terrible degenerate.
And one nice thing on this question of bad people who do good things, not that Ted Kennedy did good things, but hypothetically, is what about whataboutism?
They say, you can't say what about him, only talk about your guy.
Why not?
We're finally getting a little bit clearer historical record.
We're seeing reality more clearly.
That's what what about does.
It says, oh, well, this is true and this is true and this is true.
That's a good thing.
I'm glad that that's finally happening.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's right.
And because the left owns the press, because they own the media, what they can do is cover stuff up for 30 years.
And then when you talk about it, they say, well, that's old news.
Dealing with Depression00:07:38
That's right.
And you think like, well, no, it's new news because you didn't report it at the time.
With the Clintons, they cover it up for three weeks and then they say, oh, it's old news.
That's Benghazi.
It's old.
So it's still happening.
So what are you talking about on the show today?
Today I'm talking about a nation of drug addicts.
All of the new information showing that from marijuana use all the way up through antidepressants and opioids, Americans are drugging themselves at record numbers.
And we'll try to figure out why exactly that is.
You know, that is my closing discussion on our crappy culture.
I'm going to talk about that too, and I'll be eager to hear what you have to say because it's huge.
It is a big, big thing, and it refutes all these people who tell us, oh, just look, you know, rule by experts is going great.
Just stay out of our way.
Well, the only reason I'm doing it for my show is I knew that I could hear the end of your show, and then I wouldn't have to write a show.
I'll just say it, you know.
So tune in.
Be sure if you miss the end of Drew's.
I'm here to serve.
I am here to serve.
All right, cigars and whiskey soon.
Let's do it like now.
I don't know.
I'm probably going to spark up right when the camera goes off.
All right.
It's great talking to you.
All right.
Let us move from Knowles with a smooth segue.
you know, it's almost not a segue from Knowles to our crappy culture.
All right, a headline in the New York Times, a former newspaper, many people taking antidepressants discover they cannot quit.
Big surprise, all right?
Long-term use of antidepressants is surging in the United States according to a new analysis of federal data by the New York Times.
Some 15.5 million Americans have been taking the medications for at least five years.
The rate has almost doubled since 2010 and more than tripled since 2000.
Nearly 25 million adults have been on antidepressants for at least two years, a 60% increase since 2010.
And then they go on to say, and I agree with this, by the way, the drugs have helped millions of people.
I don't know if millions, yeah, probably millions.
The drugs have helped people ease depression and anxiety and are widely regarded as milestones in psychiatric treatment.
Many people stop the medications without significant trouble, but the rise in long-term use is also the result of an unanticipated and growing problem.
Many who try to quit say they cannot because of withdrawal system symptoms they were never warned about.
And then later in the piece, they have a doctor, Dr. Alan Francis, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University.
Most people are put on these drugs in primary care after a very brief visit and without clear symptoms of clinical depression.
Usually there's improvement and often it's based on the passage of time or placebo effect.
Now here's what I want to say, because I'm not a fanatic about this.
Like, you know, I think Tom Cruise thinks, oh my gosh, there shouldn't be any psychiatry, there shouldn't be any drugs.
I got depressed when I was, I've talked about this a lot when I was in my, I guess it was like about 9, 18, 19.
I went to college and I fell into what I now recognize as a clinical depression.
I was sleeping 15, 16 hours a day.
I could barely speak.
I was drinking.
I could walk around like with a gray face.
I could barely communicate with other human beings.
And I knew something, at first I just thought I had the longest cold in history, you know.
But after a while, even I, as this kid, when people weren't talking about depression or anything like this, started to realize something is terribly, terribly wrong with me.
Now, I am, I mean, nowadays I have to deal with people socially all the time, and it's fine.
But back in those days, I was very shy.
I didn't want to communicate with things.
I never joined anything.
I forced myself to do it.
I understood that I had to do something to get me out.
I made sure I showed up for my friend's poker game.
I joined the campus radio station.
I did all these things that I had not been doing.
I made sure I was at certain meetings that I had to go to.
I did all those things that I had never done and normally would never have done.
And it brought me up out of my depression.
It brought me up out of the depression.
Now, obviously, I had to go through a crisis later in life to deal with these things, but I dealt with, I never was drugged for any of this.
And at one point, the psychiatrist I was seeing offered me valium.
I filled the subscription, the prescription.
I never took a pill because I just didn't believe in it.
wanted to battle through myself.
Okay, I understand that there are people, they keep telling me this, I've never met one, but they keep telling me that there are people who get depressed and can't deal with their depression, so you give them some drugs and that lightens their load and then they can deal with the depression, then they get off the drugs.
I keep hearing about that, but I also see a lot of people who spend their entire lives adjusting the dosage because it's not quite right and they're just a chemistry set who needs to be adjusted.
Here's my point.
Here's my point.
If somebody comes in and is depressed to a psychiatrist, shouldn't the first thing they do be talk to them?
Shouldn't the first thing they do to recommend to them that they force themselves to get out and that they come back and report to the psychiatrist, did you join this club?
Is there a club you can join?
Is there a place you can go where you can talk to other people?
Isn't that the first thing you do instead of treating people like their chemistry sets?
Because underlying this, and I have read the literature, underlying this, is a theory that essentially that's all you are, that you are just a chemistry set that can be adjusted to get the dosages just right, and then you'll be fine.
And they do this with children all the time, which I think is a sin.
You know, the kid comes in and he's acting up, especially boys, and they say, well, he's got attention deficit disorder.
You know, he can pathologize anything.
Pathologizing means turning something into a disease.
You can say, you know, like, oh, he's attention deficit disorder.
Instead of, oh, he's a boy, you're asking him to sit still like a girl.
Boys don't sit still like girls.
Take them outside and get them some exercise instead of drugging them up to make them easy for you to deal with.
The question we should be asking ourselves is, one, what is the nature of a human being?
What do we really believe about being a human being?
And since the scientists and the experts aren't going to ask it, you have to ask it.
You have to ask it about your kid.
You have to ask it about yourself.
You have to ask it about the situation you're in.
Am I really suffering from a chemical imbalance?
Or is it the fact that my wife just walked out the door that's depressed me?
What is it that is making me upset and how can I best deal with it?
Because the experts won't deal with it because they will always go to the materialist answer.
You have to ask those questions.
Can I join a church?
Can I join a synagogue?
Can I start doing things in my community that will get me out of this depression?
And my question for all these experts who know so much and have made our world so great is don't you give a damn?
Do you not care about these people?
Do you just want to make things easier for you?
Because of course it's easier for you when a depressed person gets drugged.
Of course it's easier for you when your kid stops running around and screaming because you gave him a drug and now he's happy.
He's doing great.
He's doing great because we started, you know, we were reluctant to give him drugs, but once we did, he's doing great.
Is he doing great or are you doing better because he's not bothering you?
I mean, if we are going to turn this kind of thing around, it's going to be us.
It's going to be on the ground.
It's going to be the person next to you.
You know, I know that this is about religion, but even religion, I know that it's because people have lost their God and they don't know what their lives are about and what they're for anymore.
But even with religion, the country doesn't need religion.
You need it.
The guy next to you needs it.
It's not the society that needs it.
The society can only get it one person at a time.
The same is true of curing depression.
It can only happen one person at a time.
And not everybody responds to drugs.
And drugs are not the first answer you should go to.
Because once you do, my question is, these guys who peddle drugs, these psychiatrists who peddle drugs, what's their answer when people say like, oh yeah, I'm on heroin.
I'm on opiates.
You know, I mean, you gave me one drug.
I took another drug.
What's the diff?
You know, I think that it's a whole question of how we view human beings.
Curing Depression One Person At A Time00:00:58
All right, tomorrow.
Who's going to be on, Rob?
Tomorrow is...
Oh, is it Michael Smith?
Is it Schmitz tomorrow?
Yes.
Yes, we have, oh, we have a man.
He has written, he's a Catholic priest, I believe, and he has written a book about how against gay marriage and against gay relationships.
We're going to let him explain and ask him pertinent questions.
Be there for that.
I will be.
And the conversation is tomorrow as well.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.