Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 535 skewers Democrats for abandoning free speech, citing the New York Times’ hypocrisy—cheering Skokie protests but ignoring Charlottesville—while mocking leftist media for exploiting immigration tragedies to radicalize millennials into socialism, like AOC’s "healthcare, housing" dog whistles. He contrasts this with conservatives’ free-speech principles, then pivots to July 4th ignorance: 70% of Gen Z can’t name 1776, thanks to schools prioritizing Mali over the Declaration’s Enlightenment roots, while modern leftists weaponize language (e.g., suspending David Bossie for "cotton-picking" slurs) to stifle debate. The episode frames leftist policies as eroding both history and unity, culminating in a call for media reform and patriotism. [Automatically generated summary]
A new movement called Hashtag Walk Away has begun, in which liberals, people like me who believe in maximum individual freedom, open-hearted tolerance, and a commitment to the truth, talk about why they walked away from the Democratic Party, which after all is the party of racism, emotionalist groupthink, and dishonest narratives meant to increase government power.
But let's be fair.
Shouldn't there also be a movement in which people reject freedom and democracy in favor of leftism?
So, to counter hashtag walk away, I'm here to begin the hashtag descend into emotional infantilism and become a Democrat movement with five reasons to shift to the left.
Reason one, whereas conservatives reject feminism and therefore treat women with respect and kindness, leftists get to mob and bully women they disagree with.
As a feminist Democrat, you'll get all the fun of treating girls like crap while still thinking of yourself as a good person because you support killing babies in the womb.
This worked for Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein, so it'll work for you as well.
Reason two, if you become a Democrat, all the cool late-night comedians will agree with you and make jokes about how stupid your political opponents are.
And you know, late-night comedians are hip and non-conformists because they all believe exactly the same things.
Reason three, you can tell everybody how loving and compassionate you are right up until the minute someone disagrees with you, then you can call them stinking racist pigs while deploring the decline of civility under Donald Trump.
Reason four to hashtag descend into emotional infantilism and become a Democrat is you can pretend to like black people while setting up the systems of dependence, family disintegration, resentment, and envy that make it unlikely any black child will ever compete with your child for a good job.
And reason five to go left is you will never have to learn the facts about anything because you can just turn on the news and hear your opinions echoed back to you as if they were facts.
Then you can march and scream about crying babies or something.
So, why take the trouble to hashtag walk away when it's much easier to hashtag descend into emotional infantilism and become a Democrat?
Or a knucklehead?
Same difference.
Tricker 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.
Ship-shaped tipsy-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.
All right, we are back after the Clavenless weekend with a full day because later on today we have our July 4th special, which we plan for July 2nd, because there's some reason, I'm sure.
It'll be at 7 p.m. Eastern, and we'll be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day.
Jeremy Boring, the official God-King of the Daily Wire, will descend from on high, where his office is, to host a new edition of Daily Wire Backstage with me, Shapiro, and Knowles to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future.
Secure Borders, Secure Speech00:14:45
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air.
Again, that's tonight, July 2nd, at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, with special guest Jordan Peterson.
And you can find our special live stream on Facebook and YouTube so do not miss it.
I had a really interesting experience over the weekend.
You know, five, six, I don't know, seven years ago, when I'm traveling, I love to watch sports in bars.
I do not know why sports are better in bars than they should be at home, but I like when I'm, instead of sitting around a hotel room watching sports, I'll go to a bar.
I'm in a bar in New York, and I struck up a conversation with a guy next to me who is a struggling actor, right?
Like I said, this is six, seven years ago.
And we exchanged emails and we maybe exchanged one or two emails and then just forgot about each other.
A few months ago while I was on vacation in Oregon, I get an email from this guy, a group email from the guy, saying he is in starring in Henry IV, the Shakespeare play, with Tom Hanks as Falstaff.
And Falstaff, if you don't know, is one of the greatest parts in all of theater.
And Tom Hanks, I think, is a terrific actor.
So he sent us a form where you could get these really cheap tickets because tickets were going up to $500 a piece.
This is kind of cool because I didn't even know this existed.
It's at this big VA facility, a VA hospital, and all the ticket takers and all the people there are veterans, obviously veterans from the VA.
And they have a big outdoor stage and they're trying to build it into an LA Shakespeare festival.
And I got to say, the production was good.
Hanks was unbelievable.
I mean, of all, if you took the 20 top paid movie stars in the country, not one of them has the chops to pull off a Falstaff like that.
It was a spectacular Falstaff wearing a big fat suit.
He looked really good.
And it was really good.
It was a good production.
Joe Morton was also in it, the guy from Scandal, and he played King Henry IV.
And it was great.
And it was great to see.
I won't mention my friend's name because I don't want to, I know he's kind of a big lib and I don't want to ruin his career by toxifying him with my presence.
But it was great to see that Tom Hanks is that good.
So the left is finally becoming itself.
It is finally becoming what we always said it was, what we on the right have always said it was.
For years, they have despised constitutional governance and they've been rewriting the law of the lands from the Supreme Court bench and from other courts.
And they've pretended that they were liberal because they were liberal about things like sex and drugs.
They're only liberal about things that will make you a slave.
Unbridled sex and drug use will make you a slave to the state.
But that's what they're liberal about.
They're not liberal about what you think.
They're not liberal about what you say.
They're not liberal about what you do or how you behave.
All that stuff they want to control and they want to control it through the government.
But they always have said that they were liberal and pretended to be.
The way they do it, I call it the hitman system, right?
They're only, in any given mob, only a couple of the guys are hitmen, right?
So like any mobster can say, well, you know, we're not all hitmen.
Only a couple of the guys are hitmen.
You know, just we're only two hitmen.
That's the way the Democrats are.
You know, we're not all screaming, man-hating feminists.
We're just feminists.
You know, it's like saying we're not all hitmen.
We're just mobsters.
We're just, you know, we're not all, we don't all want to like force you to, we're not all the people who riot when Ben Shapiro comes to speak at campus.
We don't support that.
That's not us.
But we're glad they're there because they enforce what we want them to enforce.
So after a couple of weeks, they hate Donald Trump so much.
And after a couple of weeks in which the Supreme Court said the government can't force a baker to abandon his religious convictions and decorate a cake for a gay wedding, it can't force abortion opponents to advertise abortion.
They can't force public sector workers to give money to Democrat causes.
The left has just openly now abandoned its support for free speech, right?
I mean, now this is, I'm not talking about like the odd hitman here who goes out and beats somebody up who's trying to speak on campus.
The New York Times, and we will not play Knucklehead Row because this sounds like an op-ed, but it is not an op-ed.
This was the lead story in the newspaper over the weekend.
You know, the lead column is the one all the way over on the right.
It was by Adam Liptok, how conservatives weaponize the First Amendment.
And of course, he's quoting Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice who was so upset that you can't be forced to give money to a union if you're a public worker.
You can no longer be forced to give money to a union, which will then give it to a left-wing candidate.
They want you to be forced to do that.
And Elena Kagan was so angry about that.
She said they're weaponizing the First Amendment.
She's like, it's supposed to be weaponized.
And even her argument was bad.
She said, speech is everywhere.
It's a part of every human activity.
So every time you make a law, that's going to affect speech.
Well, guess what?
You're not allowed to make a law that requires speech or that limits speech.
You are just not allowed to do it, says so right in the Constitution.
When it says Congress shall make no law respecting freedom, that's what it means.
It means no law.
So here is just an excerpt of how conservatives weaponize the First Amendment, the lead story in the New York Times.
Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples, and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and guns.
Now, the New York Times doesn't even realize that that's commentary.
They think that's an ⁇ when they say that they are justifying discrimination against gay couples, the Supreme Court has never justified discrimination against gay couples and was not doing that.
They were simply saying that this Christian Baker did not have to use what he considers his art to express approval of something of which he disapproves.
The New York Times doesn't even know that that's commentary.
They think it's just the news.
And by the way, when they say they justify unlimited campaign spending, they're talking about Citizens United, which is supposed to have flooded the campaign, the political world with money so that nobody has any power.
And yet, they never bring up the fact that Donald Trump spent half as much as Hillary Clinton and knocked her into the next week.
So I don't understand what they're talking about.
All right, here they go.
Now they quote Floyd Abrams, who has been on this show, who came on the show and I told him, even though he was a liberal, that he was always welcome here because he would defend free speech.
And if you defend free speech, I'm on your side.
Floyd Abrams has quoted, he says, the left was once not just, and by the way, Abrams is the guy who argued Citizens United, and he also argued the Pentagon Papers, and so he's been on both sides of this discussion.
He says, the left was once not just on board, but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections.
Now, the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.
So they make it sound like Abrams is complaining about this, but he's not.
He believes in all free speech.
Many on the left, the article goes on, many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.
They're now sensitive about free speech.
You know, if you're sensitive, then you can take people's free speech away.
Take pornography and street protests.
Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship.
Now, many on the left see pornography as an assault on women's rights.
And I love the fact that they're exposing themselves.
They no longer believe in the American system.
They no longer believe in freedom.
In 1977, he goes on, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois.
Far fewer supported the free speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Virginia.
There was a certain naïve té, he says, in how liberals used to approach free speech, says Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
He goes on to say, Schauer says, because so many free speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless.
But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that.
The question then is why the left ever believed otherwise.
Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.
So one more quote from this.
When I was younger, says Lewis Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties, and I've gradually changed my mind about it.
What I've come to see is that it's a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.
In other words, what they are saying is, we believed in free speech when we were getting what we wanted, but we don't believe in free speech when you're getting what you want.
That is essentially it.
It's always, this is the thing about, this is what makes them infants.
This is what makes them children.
They don't believe in the process.
They only want the results they want.
They're like Erdoyan in Turkey who said democracy is like a streetcar.
When you reach your stop, you get off.
That is what the left feels.
They have reached their stop and now they want to get off the free speech train.
And this walk away thing I was joking about at the beginning, this is real.
This started with a gay hairdresser, right?
I've always said this about gay people, as I've defended gay people in venues that were hostile to my point of view.
I've always said they are natural conservatives.
They are people who want to, you know, they are high achieving people who want to keep the money they make, who want to be free to do what they do, who don't want the cops kicking down their door to find out how they're having sex, and they don't want the cops kicking down your door to find out how you're having sex.
So here's this guy, Brandon Stracha.
He's a gay hairdresser, and he made this video, walk away video that went viral.
That's cut 10.
I reject the acceptance of junk science and superstition to advance ideological agendas.
I reject hate.
These are the reasons why I became a liberal.
And these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.
For years now, I have watched as the left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded, and at times, blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric.
Liberalism has been co-opted and absorbed by the very characteristics it claims to fight against.
For years now, I've watched as people on the left have become anesthetized to their own prejudices and bigotry and the prejudices and bigotry of those around them who echo their values.
I have watched as formerly sensible people who claim to reject racism have come to embrace the principles of universally hating and blaming all of society's problems on all people who have white skin.
I have witnessed the irony of advocacy for gender equality morph into blatant hatred and intolerance of men and masculinity.
I have seen the once earnest fight for equality for the LGBT community mutate into an illogical demonization of heteronormativity and the push to vilify and attack our conventional concepts of gender.
This is great.
I mean, this is really good stuff and it is instructive to the right as well that we should open our tent and let anybody in who believes in freedom because we can make the argument that it is the process that keeps us free.
On the other side, see, they've got this problem with the press.
I know I keep picking on the press, but I only pick on them because they're the enemies of the people.
The problem for the press is that they amplify the worst rhetoric.
You know, think about this with the immigration debate.
What if a leftist came up to you and you're a conservative and he came up to you and said, look, I get it.
We have to secure the border.
70% of the people in this country believe that we have to secure the border.
He said, you have to secure the border.
But all I ask as a liberal, as a kind of wet liberal, all I ask is that you do it in a humane way.
Can I try and make sure that the places where people are held are nice, that you can keep your kids with you and all that stuff.
I think that we on the right would say, yeah, I get that.
I can meet you there.
I can find that place where we can get together.
But if you go out and you say, well, let's take a look at CNN.
This is cut number one.
Here's a discussion on CNN about Donald Trump trying to secure the border.
Listen to the rhetoric and listen to what they essentially allow to pass for left-wing speech.
It's incredibly important to understand that people are identifying with people because they understand we could be next.
There is nobody who is safe or protected from the bigotry and from the resistance to humanity that this president has evinced.
So we've seen this before in terms of the separation of enslaved human beings from their children in internment camps.
We've seen this when immigration came in this country.
So this is something that is a replay of a horrible movie.
It was terrible the first time.
The replay is even more atrocious.
How do you see this, Cornell?
Because, I mean, talk about the power of the protest and how people have felt galvanized.
First, it was the women's march, which was incredibly impressive the day after inauguration.
And we have the government, our government, engaged in the practice of immigration deterrence by administrative kidnapping.
That's intolerable.
And so how is it that this administration can afford that kind of point of view or even assessment, especially now a day after we hear that this administration didn't even have a plan in place?
This is these right-wing Republicans who have been vicious in their denial of the humanity of these people.
We can't stress this enough.
See, the thing is, you see what you focus on, right?
You see what you're looking at, and you don't see everything else around you.
And the press has made sure that you see these 2,000, 2,300 kids who've been separated from their parents at the border.
And by the way, I think that should be fixed.
I don't think that's a good thing.
I don't think we slough that off as right-wingers.
We say, I don't care about them because they're from a foreign country.
No, you know, these are the least of Jesus' brothers, man.
We've got to pay attention to them.
There are 400,000, more than 400,000 foster children in this country.
Every single one of them was taken forcibly away from his parents, but they're not focusing on them.
So then you have to ask, why are you focusing on the 2,300 and not the 400,000?
Easy, because this happened before Donald Trump.
This was going on all the time, and they're doing it for a political purpose.
They are doing it to get you to become leftists.
And only infants, only people who are emotionally infantilized, fall for this.
And they're out on the street and they start talking in that dire way.
Listen to this protester.
This is cut number eight.
This is abolish ICE.
Abolish the people who protect us at the border.
And here's a protester talking about them.
Well, because ICE is basically a terrorist organization and we're a peace organization.
And they, I mean, it's beyond a terrorist organization.
Protesters Against ICE00:09:32
What is it to take a nursing baby from the breast of her mother is a level of insanity and cruelty that's kind of hard to even think about, certainly feel.
Tell me about the significance of being in front of an ICE facility right now.
Well, right now, to be in front of the place that's making the problem.
But besides that, is people inside of ICE are human beings.
People who work for ICE are human beings.
And when you get close to them, they have to feel the lack of integrity they have as a human being and what they're doing.
And there's already an uprising inside of ICE to abolish ICE itself.
And Kirsten Nelson, who's on one of our signs, you know, here she is, you know, she won't apologize.
I mean, we're women.
We're a women's peace organization.
And it is the violence of the United States government.
It is the 60% of our tax dollars that's spent on weapons and war that creates the immigration refugees and our, you know, economic policies.
So we have to be responsible.
We have to bring them in and hold them, not violate them further than our policies have already violated them.
I mean, that's lunacy.
That is every word that you said is lunacy.
It's our policies that are creating this.
If it's our policies that are creating, why are they coming here?
Why are they coming here if this is not the greatest country on earth?
No, you know, they just got a leftist president elected in Mexico.
So I expect to see all these people escaping across the border into Mexico, right?
Because now there's going to be a leftist socialist paradise.
So they should be climbing.
I mean, you know, no wonder they want to abolish ICE.
They're trying to get out.
They want to get out and go to Mexico.
Hooray.
You know, not one of them is leaving.
Not a single one.
Why?
Greatest country on earth.
That's why.
I mean, it's that simple.
So it's all nonsense.
It's all emotionalism.
It's all childishness.
And who does it work on?
It works on children.
The millennials are starting to become more acceptable of socialism.
And millennials should ask themselves, and this is not an attack on millennials because youth and ignorance are synonyms.
You cannot be knowledgeable as a young person.
you just haven't had time to become knowledgeable.
But the youth should ask themselves, if they support socialism and older people don't, is it because they're stupid?
Maybe it is.
Maybe it's because they're ignorant.
Maybe it's because they haven't lived long enough to see it.
Socialism takes 70 years to destroy a country, destroy a continent like Europe.
It takes 70 years, so your entire life can be wasted fighting for something that is slowly strangling your society.
And by the time you get it, you're 70 years old and you say to the young people, don't do this, don't go this way.
And they go, oh, you're old.
We're young.
We're the new people.
We believe in socialism because they're ignorant, because they're ignorant.
And so you get this girl like Alexandria Acasio-Cortez, who gets, you know, who is now the candidate in this district for the Congress in this district in New York.
And they're talking to her about her socialism.
And Chuck Dodd is doing everything he can to find a way to frame this socialism, which is such a destructive philosophy, such a death philosophy, a philosophy of equality, which is always death.
Only dead people are equal.
Living people are all different.
And listen to her talk.
Listen to her try to explain this away.
Some Democrats are afraid of the S-word.
They feel like that social.
It has older Americans hear socialism and they tie it to sort of ugly governments from Europe and the past.
Yeah.
How do you sell this to an older generation?
Well, I think, you know, as the clip from Schumer showed earlier, Democrats are a big tent party.
You know, I'm not trying to impose an ideology on all several hundred members of Congress.
But I do think that, once again, it's not about selling an ism or an ideology or a label or a color.
This is about selling our values.
Are you a Democratic socialist?
Is that what you call yourself or you don't want that label?
I mean, it's part of what I am.
It's not all of what I am.
And I think that that's the very important distinction.
I'm an educator.
I'm an organizer.
And I believe that what we're really seeing is just a movement for healthcare, housing, and education in the United States.
I love this part.
Being a socialist is part of what I am.
It's not all of who I am.
I think that's what Goering says.
Being a national socialist, you know, it's part of what I am, but I also love the dance.
I love the opera.
You know, it's only a little part of me.
It says, I am a Nazi.
That's part of who I am.
And she's a politician.
That's her politics.
So, you know, the press encourages this, and it protects this thing, and it protects extremism, and it sells extremism because extremism gets views, gets an audience.
There was a shooting at a small paper in Annapolis, Maryland, right?
Total lunatic who had been, didn't like what the press had written about him.
And I don't know what you want to go into because I don't want to give him any press.
But he goes in and he kills five people, including the brother of Carl Hyason, one of the truly terrific mystery writers.
Carl Hyacinth wrote, oh, I don't know.
He wrote Striptease.
I think it was a Demonis Moore movie, but the books are just really wonderful.
Terrible tragedy, absolutely dishonest, and absolutely tragic.
And the press on Twitter jumps on this and starts blaming Donald Trump because Donald Trump fights back against their leftist bias, their incredible leftist bias.
And of course, who, when it comes to being dishonest, when it comes to blaming Donald Trump, when it comes to who is always in the lead, it's Jim.
Look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, who is just like, it's unbelievable.
Trump had nothing to do with this.
This had nothing to do with Trumpian rhetoric.
It had nothing to do with anything, no matter what you think of Trumpian rhetoric.
It had nothing to do with it.
Trump goes to a thing at the White House where he is celebrating the tax cuts because the economy is going through the roof.
I think it's 3.8% GDP.
And remember, that's a number, but that means a job that somebody didn't have before.
That means food on your table.
Acosta is so far back.
There is no possible chance that Donald Trump can hear what he's saying, and he starts screaming.
If he can't see the video, the guy standing in front of him turns around and tells him to shut up, but not Jim.
Look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, because then people would stop looking at him.
And watch the self-satisfaction on his face.
Mr. President, will you stop calling us the enemy of the people, sir?
Will you stop calling the press the enemy of the people, sir?
Mr. President, will you stop calling the press the enemy of the people, sir?
So Steve Krakow, that is Jim Acosta.
Acosta went on, who was he talking to with stelter.
Let's play that clip.
When you're in the back of the room, like you were on Friday, and you shout a question to Trump, and he probably can't even hear it.
Isn't it true that you're kind of doing that just to get attention?
Well, isn't that part of what you're doing?
On Friday, when I was shouting that question, I thought, first of all, he keeps calling us the enemy of the people.
You know, somebody ought to ask him after what happened in Annapolis, are you going to continue to call us the enemy of the people?
And so they had an event.
They put him on all the other way, the other side of the room.
But there was a moment towards the end of that event when he was walking towards us.
And I thought, well, here's a chance to perhaps shout a question to him.
And we have seen on occasion when we shout questions, he does answer the question.
We have to find opportunities to ask those questions.
Kind of like Sam Donaldson did decades ago.
That's right.
And listen, if they want to send me to hell, I'll still be shouting at the devil is the way I look at it.
Yeah, you'll probably get that chance, Jim.
But I think that, you know, it's just, it's the self-satisfaction and the dishonesty.
If you'd watch the video, there is no possible way Donald Trump could have heard that question.
It was purely for them.
Former CNN senior digital producer Steve Krakauer tweeted truly that Acosta was truly an embarrassment on multiple levels.
Jim Acosta's self-serving antics give all good journalists a bad name.
On a day journalists could honor the memory of fellow reporters tragically killed due to a deranged person with a vendetta going back years.
Acosta tries to shift the blame to Trump, thus validating many Americans' feelings about the Acela media that existed long before Trump.
The Acela is the train that goes up the Washington to New York corridor.
It is an embarrassment, and it's embarrassing that in a moment, at a moment when our hearts go out to the relatives and friends of these reporters who are killed, at a moment when it goes out, Acosta reminds us why we hate the press so much.
The press reminds us of why we hate the press so much.
Look, the press needs to be reformed.
And because of the First Amendment, which I support with all my heart, which I have no qualms about, even though it allows Jim Acosta to be Jim Acosta, even though it does that, I support the First Amendment with all my heart.
But because of the First Amendment, the press has to reform itself.
And the way you reform yourself, if you are an ABC or NBC or CBS or the New York Times, is put some people in positions of power with the power to say, yes, this news story runs, this one doesn't run, who voted for Donald Trump.
It is that simple.
That's half the country.
Trump's ratings are up to 48% job approval way over where Obama's were at this time.
If you are reporting the news and you've got no one on your staff in a position of power who represents half the country and you are only reporting the news for half the country, if you are running stories like that story in the New York Times that doesn't even know it's commentary because there's no one around you to say, hey, that's commentary, that's not news, you are an enemy of the American system.
Why The 4th Matters00:15:02
Trump is right about you.
It's a harsh way to put it.
And I'm terribly, terribly sorry for the tragedy in Annapolis, but it's true and the truth matters and you should start reporting it.
We got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we have Michael Knowles coming out.
So run for your life.
And we got to talk to Knowles about the 4th of July because we needed somebody who actually knows what the 4th of July is about.
But come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can listen there.
And while you're there, you can subscribe and you could just watch the whole thing streaming live.
All right, there's Knowles Knowles.
Before we started, we're going to talk to you about the 4th of July.
But before we start, I want to play this PragerU video.
Will Witt, for some reason, went down to the Santa Monica Beach to talk to girls in bathing suits.
I have no idea what the person would do something, would do such a thing.
But while he was there talking to girls in skimpy bathing suits, he was asking them what the 4th of July is.
And, you know, if you can make a woman feel stupid, you might get somewhere with her.
So here's Will Witt from Prager U. Significance of 1776.
I don't know.
What's the significance of 1776?
I don't know, you know what that is.
It's a year.
Yeah, yeah, I figure.
Why do we celebrate the 4th of July?
What is the year 1776 about?
About the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
What's the significance of 1776?
Yeah, I don't know.
Not a history person.
I can tell.
What's the significance of 1776?
Christopher Columbus.
Why is the year 1776 significant?
It's the Civil War.
Close.
End of slavery.
1776, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
That's why they say it, because it rhymes.
1776, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
They say it because it rhymes.
I'm leaving the country.
So I thought I'd ask you.
You're a millennial, right?
Do you have any idea what July 4th is about?
Well, as a millennial, as a millennial.
Well, as a millennial, I first have to observe, was that guy, Will Witt, was he constructed in a laboratory for social media?
Everything about him, it's like he's made for Instagram.
He is.
He actually is only this small.
He's only three inches tall, so he fits right there to a YouTube screen.
It is really depressing to see that video, except, of course, it backs up what we know from all recent polls about this.
Marist did a huge poll in 2011 about what Americans know about July 4th, 1776.
According to 14% of American teens, and this is 2011, I don't think things have gotten better since then.
But according to 14% of American teens, 1776 is when the United States declared independence from France.
According to 5% of Americans, that's when the United States declared independence from Canada.
35% of Americans, when asked to pinpoint the century in which the American Revolution took place, really only four that there could be in the history of this continent, 35% of them don't know when it took place.
Wow.
Wow.
So the big number from this survey is that 42% of Americans do not know that America declared independence on the 4th of July.
This number, that number alone is terrifying, but what's scary is how it varies by age.
So nearly 70% of Americans younger than 30 do not know that.
Now that drops to 41% between ages 30 and 44, and that drops again to 25% among ages 45 to 59.
So the older people at least sort of remember that the United States declared independence.
The younger Americans just don't know.
And in part, it's because people are not taught civics anymore.
In part, it's because they're raised in this culture where they hate the United States and they're told to disregard it so we can learn about, you know, three centuries of the Mali Empire and all of the great achievements of Tim Buck II or whatever.
It's when the left took over the universities and the schools.
It's the left taking over the schools and they hate the country.
That's right.
But the story of 1776 is so incredible.
And it's now because we have this privilege narrative, we think, oh, those were old rich white guys.
I mean, this is what Howard Zinn writes about, right?
These are old rich white guys who are trying to protect their own money, and it's not about anything else.
The men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence were signing their death warrant.
There's no other way to put it.
They actually joked about this.
We know from the, there aren't like minutes from the account of this, but we do know some of the people who were there talked about it later.
It was a suicide pact.
I think one of the members wrote that a pensive and awful silence pervaded the House as we were called up one after another to the table of the President of Congress, what was believed by many at the time to be our death warrants.
Benjamin Harrison of Virginia said to Elbridge Jerry of Massachusetts, Harrison was much fatter than Jerry.
Jerry is the guy from which we get the name gerrymandering.
But he turned to him, the much fatter Harrison, and said, I shall have great advantage over you, Mr. Jerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing.
From the size and weight of my body, I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body, you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.
Oh, man.
This is the kind of gallows humor.
And it's not like people were laughing.
This is the kind of gallows humor that was going on as these men were clearly signing their own death warrants.
Jerry himself was nearly caught and hanged on the night of Paul Revere's ride for Lexington and Concord.
You know, at the time they signed this document, the Revolutionary War had already been going on for a year at this point.
People sort of forget that.
This wasn't the beginning.
The beginning happened in 1775.
I have a little tie to this.
You know, most of my ancestors were derelicts, but two of them fought at Bunker Hill, actually.
Really?
Yeah, John and Simon Knowles.
And John died from his wounds at Bunker Hill.
And Simon went on, served with Washington, Valley Forge, and all that.
I'm impressed.
I know.
I thought you were just related to Beyonce.
That's really important.
And Hillary Clinton, you know, as my fourth cousin once removed.
It's true.
Well, just like knowledge of American history over the generations, the quality has declined a little bit, I think it's fair to say.
I think it's true.
But it was built, you know, it was building over time.
This didn't come out of nowhere.
And the other lie that we hear today is this was just this political maneuver.
The Declaration of Independence was just about protecting people's property.
This was a profoundly philosophical document.
It was a practical political document, but it was profoundly philosophical.
You know, this all began with the Continental Association in 1774 that instituted a trade boycott with Great Britain, you know, and actually that included the slave trade.
This will play an important role in the Declaration.
In 1774, they decided we're not going to import slaves from Great Britain anymore.
Great Britain foisted the slave trade on us.
We're not going to participate.
We're not going to buy tea from them either.
But as early as 1775, Thomas Jefferson still sort of liked the British.
He says, believe me, there is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves the union with Great Britain than I do.
But we want to fix some of these imbalances and whatever.
By the time that 1776 rolled around, the colonies hated their imperial overlords.
I mean, they were at a boiling point.
And you see this totally different view.
The British believed from 1688, from the Glorious Revolution, that Parliament was the supreme authority.
Parliament couldn't do anything unconstitutional by definition.
Parliament is the supreme authority.
But the United States already at this time had the idea that the Glorious Revolution, the Constitution of 1688, protected fundamental rights that we could appeal to heaven for.
Parliament couldn't control them.
The first flag, one of the first flags of the United States, was the pine tree flag.
It said, an appeal to God, an appeal to heaven.
So after Thomas Paine published Common Sense in 1776, all hell breaks loose.
These men pick Thomas Jefferson for the Committee of Five to draft the Declaration of Independence.
And already at this time, there were about 90 resolutions throughout the colonies.
We are going to declare independence.
The United States is ready to do this.
The future United States is ready to do this.
The Lee resolution passes.
Coincidentally, as it is today, not on July 4th, but on July 2nd.
I know, you know, John Adams thought this was going to be the great celebration.
And what's kind of touching about that is Adams was always getting screwed because he was a short, ugly, obnoxious little guy.
And Thomas Jefferson was a tall, handsome guy.
And so Adams, who convinced, who made the famous speech that convinced them to vote this death warrant, this separation from Great Britain, thought, oh, well, this is going to be history forever.
But instead, Thomas Jefferson got all the credit because they signed the Declaration on the Reformation.
On the fourth, you know, this does make me think about all those poor political pundits.
You know, like, I love Charles Kraathammer, but he predicted a lot of things that didn't happen.
Right, right.
And, you know, all political pundits do that, right?
And this is the most famous one ever from John Adams.
The second day of July, 1776 will be the most memorable epic in the history of America.
Almost no cigar.
So they passed the Lee Resolution, which formally declares independence from Britain today on the 2nd.
And then two days later, they ratify it, and Jefferson gets all the credit.
But what's quite interesting, a lot of things were taken out of Jefferson's first draft because they had to get the southern states on boards.
One of those was ending slavery, ending the importation of slaves.
So Jefferson said, I guess the first draft was a little harsher on England than the second one.
So they took that out.
They said the clause two, this is Jefferson writing years later, the clause two, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complacence to South Carolina and Georgia, South Carolina, the state that has caused every problem in the history of the United States, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.
Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.
So for all of those who say this was not a philosophical document, America was built on slavery, from the very beginning, the entire country is uncomfortable with this.
The Declaration is uncomfortable.
And even the Northerners, who didn't have a lot of slaves, they felt the taint of being the traders of slaves, of importing them to the United States.
The document is in two parts.
This is why people don't understand it.
Part of it is this very plain complaint, political, serious grievances against the king.
So a couple ones that are never quoted these days, but I really like them, are the king, he has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.
We need a little more manly firmness.
Manly firmness.
I know, no.
Then we'd have to listen to the New York Times talk about how the right has pounced on manly firmness.
Toxic manly firmness.
And then my other favorite one is, he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
I love our founding philosophical document, includes the phrase, merciless Indian savages.
So there's that practical part.
But then on the philosophical part, you get from Jefferson, first of all, a lot of the Constitution of Virginia.
But you also get Locke, you get Hutchinson, you get Berlamachi, a lot of philosophers from the Scottish Enlightenment, from who were writing at the time.
You get a lot of them almost word for word.
But because it was so in the air, there are little Americanized changes to the language.
What's also interesting about this, and you'd think that the Declaration would have been forgotten between 1776 and 1860, maybe, rather than now, because it wasn't referenced a lot after the formation of the country.
It was Lincoln who brought it back, you know, the second birth of the nation.
The Gettysburg Address.
And in the Gettysburg Address, he pulls it back and he really points to it as the philosophical underpinning of the United States.
And when you think of the men in America, there are a lot of great men in American history, but the ones who both drafted the document and who have referred to it admiringly, they are the best people in the world.
Strangely enough.
But they don't write for the New York Times.
I got to stop you there.
That's all right.
You can bring Charles Blow on next to explain why I was wrong.
To tell us why you should be, we're just going to have two guys coming in to arrest you.
I think the New York Times, that's the way they want the country to be run.
What are you talking about on your show?
Today I'm going to talk about why the F everybody is so effing profane these days.
I got into a long Twitter battle with Kathy Griffin last night where she called me all sorts of words.
And I think Rubio is really onto something here.
I saw that.
I saw that.
I was ashamed of you for even talking to her.
All right.
I'll see you later for the July 4th show.
See you, Drew.
All right, take care.
Really interesting.
You know, if you study the Declaration, all the things they complain about the king form the backbone of our constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights.
So they were actually thinking about what they didn't like when they formed, when they started to protect things like our speech.
All right.
Our crappy culture.
So I mentioned this before, but I have to mention it again.
David Bossey, an acquaintance of mine, a guy I always talk to in a friendly way whenever we bump into each other, and a guy I admire because he was Citizens United.
So he defended free speech in this country at the Supreme Court.
He had to apologize as he was a commentator on Fox News, and he got into an argument with Joel Payne, who is a black guy, and he said to him, well, here's the clip of Bossy and Payne.
Michael Hayden posted a picture of Auschwitz.
Dying Doyle, talking to liberal Michael Hayden.
Yeah, that screaming out of Michael Hayden.
You're out of your cotton-picking mind.
Cotton picking mind?
Let me tell you something.
Let me tell you.
I got some science.
I got some relatives.
This is ridiculous.
This is what I say.
You guys want me like that on TV?
You're out of your mind.
Gentlemen, we're going to leave it right there.
This is ridiculous.
This is what's going on in America.
This is what we're about.
All right.
So Bossey was suspended for a week for saying cotton picking mind to a black guy.
Poorly Served By Politics00:03:32
And of course, that's just an expression.
It has nothing to do with black people.
It has nothing to do with anything.
And he had to apologize during a heated segment on Fox and Friends Today.
I should have chosen my words more carefully and never used the offensive phrase that I did.
I apologize to Joel Payne, Fox News, and his viewers.
Now, I don't blame David for doing that.
wants the gig and it's not a hill to die on and all this.
But it is, it's really important because the left does this in order to make sure that the right, cotton picking is not a racist phrase.
It has nothing to do with anything.
It's just a phrase that David would have said to me if we had been arguing.
It would have said to anybody who would say, you're out of your cotton picking mind.
All right, it's an American terminology.
The left does this to make the right watch its step, every word that we say.
If we tell a joke, they take the joke seriously.
They say we're really saying these things.
We're supposed to walk on eggshells all the time.
We know that when they say something, it just gets excused because it's fine because, you know, I mean, if Harvey Weinstein goes out and rapes somebody, that's fine because he believes the right thing.
But if David Bossi says cotton picking and happens to be talking to a black guy, you know, then it's somehow a bad thing.
And the advantage they get out of this is hopefully, they hope, making us think about every word we say, making us tread on eggshells, making us afraid to open our mouths.
That's the advantage they get.
The disadvantage, I would argue, is so awful, is that now you cannot speak to Mr. Payne as you would speak to anyone else.
You cannot treat him as an equal.
You cannot treat him as a fellow American.
You cannot treat him as a guy talking to a guy as pals who yell at each other and argue at each other.
You have to watch your step around Mr. Payne.
And that makes him less than he is.
I think black people are so poorly served by this.
I think women are poorly served by it.
I think every race is poorly served by it.
So what you get, the benefit you get of making right-wingers think is a benefit for the left, but the left does not serve black people.
And Mr. Payne gets a really bad rap here because now, and he started it, he did it right on the air.
Now nobody can talk to him without thinking about the color of his skin.
He did that.
The left does that.
The second thing you get when you get people to be worried about every word they say, they finally get fed up with it.
And they begin to think that people who come out and say disgusting, truly racist things are bold and courageous and are not intimidated.
And in some ways, they're right, but they're also disgusting.
And you have to be able to tell the difference between somebody who's saying something that's truly hateful.
There's nothing great about coming out and saying something truly hateful.
And somebody who's just talking.
If you make ordinary language political, if you politicize ordinary language in order to get the advantage on your friends, get the advantage on your opponents, you ultimately short change yourself.
You know, I think that blacks, women, gays, they've all taken this short-term advantage.
Oh, yeah, we can bust the guy at the cake shop.
We can force the religious guy at the cake shop, go out of our way, drive 40 miles till we hit the right cake shop where the guy will turn us down.
We can force him to do it.
That's a small-term advantage because over the long term, people hate you more.
That is one of the reasons I really disagreed with the Supreme Court decision forcing gay marriage on the states.
I did not believe that the Constitution covers that thing and that the states had the right to do whatever it was they pleased.
And I just think it makes people hate you more.
It is crappy culture and it all comes from the left.
So tomorrow is Tuesday.
Supreme Court Disagreement00:00:50
Do we know who we have for a guest?
We have a couple of choices.
Oh, we have choices.
All right.
Well, we'll get back to you on this.
All right.
All right.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Tune in for at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.
Tune in for our backstage special about July 4th with Jordan Peterson.
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