Andrew Clavin dissects the media’s "Trump anxiety disorder" satire, mocking CBC’s dystopian framing while demanding outlets like The New York Times abandon false neutrality—proposing conservative journalists to counter bias. He ties media hyperbole (e.g., Handmaid’s Tale abortion comparisons) to real violence, like Rep. Scalise’s shooting, yet blames Trump for escalating rhetoric without addressing press incitement. Contrasting Trump’s 4.1% GDP growth with leftist $3.3 trillion spending plans, he dismisses socialism as "slavery" and ridicules AOC’s tax fantasies. Clavin and Michael Knowles reject Orrin Hatch’s "Geneva Conventions for the Culture War," calling leftist norm-shifting (e.g., flag-saluting as "political") aggression, and argue Trump’s combativeness over conservative restraint is the only path to cultural victory—warning that mirroring leftist tactics risks losing the war. [Automatically generated summary]
America's therapists say there has been a rise in what they are calling Trump anxiety disorder.
I am not making this up.
According to a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and I've translated this from Canadian into English so that it includes people's actual genders and the fact that most terrorists are Muslims.
But anyway, according to the CBC, Trump anxiety disorder is becoming more and more common.
Symptoms of Trump anxiety disorder include a fear that the world is going to be destroyed while you're at work because you actually have a job for the first time in eight years.
There's also a feeling of loss of control or helplessness because you no longer have an unelected government agency telling you what to do every minute.
And another symptom is spending an excessive amount of time on social media discussing how you now literally live in the dystopian world of the handmaid's tale and are literally being forced to wear restrictive clothing and give birth to children, even though literally none of those things is literally happening.
One sufferer from Trump anxiety disorder agreed to speak to reporters on condition of anonymity and told them, quote, I just feel as if my entire life has been a mockery and a waste.
My hopes and dreams are in ruins.
I'm drinking too much and becoming sloppy and haggard.
And all I do is stare at myself in the mirror and think, if only I'd campaigned in Wisconsin, I'd be the first female president today, unquote.
Another Trump anxiety disorder sufferer put it this way, quote, yes, the economy is booming.
And yes, our constitutional rights to free speech and to bear arms are no longer under threat.
And yes, our enemies are on the run and our friends are no longer abusing us.
But Donald Trump cheated on Melania with a Playboy Bunny and that's really important.
Good night from CNN, unquote.
As treatment for Trump anxiety disorder, therapists recommend that patients try to shut up and stop bothering people and go to work now that you have a job and all.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Play The Commissioner00:02:39
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, the Clavelins weekend.
What a weekend it was.
I finished the rewrite of Another Kingdom.
We're going to start recording that this week.
I think we're going to start recording the podcast this week.
I guess it'll be out in September.
And I also got to see Mission Impossible, whatever it's called.
Did you see this?
Did you see that?
It was pretty amazing.
It is pretty amazing.
The stunts are unbelievable.
They really are.
And it just really works on every level.
Cruz is great.
I have to say that Cruz is just getting a little, he's just on the cusp of being a little too old to be the, I mean, obviously he's got the physical thing.
He can do it all.
But I'm afraid like the next one is just going to be him running around with a cane saying, you know, you dad gum terrorist with your nuclear weapons.
And in my day, we didn't go around blowing things up.
Everyone, you're supposed to play the commissioner.
That's the thing.
You get old enough, you just have to play the commissioner of police.
They always need a big guy who used to be a big star to play the commissioner so he can intimidate the new big star.
You know, so it's like Bruce Willis has to be the commissioner.
Anyway, here in LA, everything depends on our cars, right?
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Right now, you can get fixed F-I-X-D for as low as $39 each for each one of these plugs.
Plus, my listeners will get an additional 10% off when you enter the promo code Clavin at www.listentomycar.com.
That's www.listentomycar.com and then enter the promo code Clavin for an additional 10% off the already discounted price.
And if you plug it in, it will tell you how to spell Klavin.
That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
It doesn't really do that.
I just did it, so now you know.
You know, as you know, if you listen to this podcast, I am a big believer in knowing what you want from any given political situation because they purposely use emotionalism and crisis to get you confused about how you want to solve problems.
Guardian Bias Debate00:15:17
And I think you have to know what you want so you know how to get there, obviously, right?
When you say, oh, there's children being separated at the border, my question is, all right, what do you want?
Open borders or you want legal borders?
You want a wall?
What do you want?
And that's how we're going to solve this problem instead of getting swept away.
So with the press, I think it's really important to say this because the New York Times, I'll talk about this in a minute, but the New York Times and Donald Trump got in a little feud over the weekend.
The editor of the New York Times, Blithering Prevarigation, Prevarication III, as we call him here, got in a feud with Donald Trump.
And I was thinking to myself, well, what do I want from the press?
Because I am a First Amendment purist.
I believe you should be able to say anything you want.
Yes, you can't cry fire in a crowded theater and you can't threaten me with death or something like that.
But other than that, you should be able to express any opinion you want.
Even things that I find reprehensible, like burning the flag, I believe should be protected as speech because it is a protest that you are making.
I think it's disgusting.
I think you should turn your back on anyone who does it.
I think you should be rejected socially.
But I think it should be legal.
I just think that that is essential to owning yourself, to being a free person.
So I don't want anything to happen to the press by the government.
I think the press should reform itself.
And in fact, there's some small naive part of me that cannot understand why the press won't do this.
What I want is an American press, because in Europe, the press is the way our press has become.
And in Europe, for instance, when I lived in England, there were three major papers.
There were a lot of papers.
That was the best thing about it.
I love newspapers, and there were a lot of papers.
But if you were a liberal, you read The Guardian.
If you wanted to know what liberals were thinking, you read The Guardian.
If you were in the middle, you read The Independent.
And then if you were a conservative, you read The Telegraph.
And I just noticed over time, that was kind of when I was going through this transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And I noticed over time that I just started picking up the Telegraph, that The Telegraph made more sense to me.
I was reading the conservative paper, but you knew what you were getting.
So you knew, like, well, wait, you know, if something wasn't right in the Telegraph, you went to The Guardian to get the left-wing point of view.
And that's the way our press has become.
But in the 50s, back when we had a consensus, when there was kind of a general idea of what Americans were and what we wanted, and we were really fighting over the 50-yard line all the time, you know, the conservatives were on the right of the 50-yard line.
The leftists were on the left of the 50-yard line.
When we were doing that, the press had began to develop the idea that the American press should be objective, that we should get both sides of the story from every good paper.
And that's why you have a New York Times that said, all the news that's fit to print, right?
Well, now we still have that slogan.
The problem is, in Europe, you have, yes, we are the left-wing paper.
We are the socialist paper.
The Guardian is the socialist paper.
That's what you're coming here for.
But now, what we have is we still have the vestige of that American system, all the news that's fit to print, on the masthead of a newspaper that's a leftist rag.
If the New York Times said, you know, power to the people, if their masthead said power to the people, you know, workers of the world unite, then I wouldn't bother me to pick up the New York Times and hear that during the Soviet Union, women had better sex.
Then I would think, like, yeah, it's the Soviet paper.
That's what it has.
But when it says all the news is fit to print, it is a lie.
And what I would like is I would like to see the papers and the news channels that pretend to be objective or even think they're objective, because I actually think Brian Stelter thinks that CNN is objective.
I would like to see them become objective.
How do they reform?
Simple.
You know, I wrote this for the LA Times.
I think it must be 15 years ago.
I wrote an op-ed said, hire some conservatives.
You want to save the news business?
Hire some conservatives.
What does it take to put people in the position to regulate the news, editors who have their say over what goes on?
What would it take to just put a few in there who maybe voted for Donald Trump?
After all, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump and a lot of people like him.
What would it take to do that?
It would reform the news system entirely because every time somebody sat down to write, Donald Trump lied today, there would be somebody sitting next to him to say, well, wait a minute, you know, that may just be a negotiation ploy.
Maybe calling it a lie is a little bit biased.
Maybe you're not really living in the handmaid's tale just because some people think that an unborn baby has a right to life.
Maybe that doesn't make this the handmade tale.
Maybe it just means there's a debate going on, even though the Supreme Court essentially took our power of debate away.
So that is what I'm looking for when I see these people go.
And the thing is, every time I hear the reporters talk, I hear self-deception.
So Trump has a meeting with A.G. Sulzberger, right?
And it was supposed to be off the record, but Sulzberger says Trump violated that by tweeting about it.
I have no doubt that's true.
I'll leave Sulzberg on that.
Sulzberger issues a statement.
He says, I told the president directly that I thought that his language about the press was not just divisive, but increasingly dangerous.
I told him that although the phrase fake news is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists the enemy of the people.
I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.
I repeatedly stress that this is particularly true abroad, where the president's rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists.
I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country's greatest exports, a commitment to free speech and a free press.
And this, of course, was echoed on CNN by a CNN panel.
This is cut 10.
Nobody knows quite when the rhetoric becomes an excuse for somebody that it's not inconceivable that people have attacked journalists before.
I mean, I think we all know about the paper in Annapolis and that five people were killed.
Now, that is not something that seems like it was tied to what the president was saying.
But the point is, it's not completely out of the realm of possibility that people take physical action to harm and kill members of the press.
And with the president continuing to step up his rhetoric about how not just the news is fake, but the people who are behind it are bad, nobody quite knows when that slippery slope becomes something that crashes into a wall.
And that's, I think, something that has been a concern on the minds of many people.
And now you're seeing the public display of what went on behind closed doors at the New York Times.
Michael Shear, who works at The Times, I guess I would add to your publisher with one other beat.
I'm not just concerned that the president describes the media as the enemy of the people.
I'm really concerned that there's such a reservoir of support for that sentiment in the country.
Yeah, you're really surprised.
Now, before I respond to this, let's just get Trump's response.
Trump tweeted back: when the media, driven insane by their Trump derangement syndrome, reveals internal deliberations of our government, it truly puts the lives of many, not just journalists, at risk.
Very unpatriotic.
Freedom of the press also comes with a responsibility to report the news accurately.
90% of media coverage of my administration is negative, despite the tremendously positive results we're achieving.
It's no surprise that confidence in the media is an all-time low.
And he goes on to hit the failing New York Times and the Amazon Washington Post, as he now has called it.
Now, here's my question.
I get a little antsy when he calls the press enemy of the people.
That's pretty rough rhetoric.
I love it when he takes the press to task.
I love it when he calls them fake news.
I love it that he fights back against them.
Enemy of the people is pushing it.
But where's the violence?
Where's the violence?
It's Steve Scalise, congressman who got shot down by a Bernie bro.
It's the Homeland Security Secretary, Kirsten Nielsen, who was surrounded by an angry mob in a Washington restaurant, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who got kicked out.
It's Trump supporters.
You know, there was a brawl here in Hollywood.
They dug up the star on a Trump star on the Walk of Fame.
And when people came back to restore it, they dug it up twice, I think.
They burst into a brawl twice.
There were two brawls.
Here's just a little bit of a video of that.
And just listen, it's the Trump supporter.
The guy is in the face of the Trump supporter.
I didn't say you are.
No, I can say if I want to, bro.
I mean, I can say if I want to.
You don't get to tell me what to do.
I don't want to talk and use the word I use.
I use it.
I don't give a f.
We're deeping you.
What's deep bread?
Get out of my house.
We're deep.
Get out of my home.
We're deep.
Why are you talking about me?
Get out of my way.
Hey!
Hey!
And it becomes a genuine Donnybrook.
I mean, this violence, let me ask you a question.
Who do you think is more likely to get punched in the head?
A guy in a MAGA hat or a guy in a Shea Guevara t-shirt?
That's the guy in the MAGA hat every single time.
So my question is this.
Why, if Donald Trump is responsible for potential violence against the press by his rhetoric, why isn't the press responsible for this?
Why isn't the press responsible for this violence?
Why isn't the press responsible when a guy goes out and shoots at Scalise and Congressman Scalise?
Why isn't the press responsible when women are being surrounded and bullied because they're part of the administration?
I don't understand why the conversation can't be, all right, all right, I'll tone down my rhetoric, but what about you toning down this handmaid's tail coverage, this idea that people are being oppressed by this dictator?
You know, the other day, last week, Trump said he was going to pull the security clearances of guys like John Brennan and James Clapper and James Comey.
I'm not even sure Comey actually has a security clearance.
But this is this kind of stupid thing where these guys continue to have a security clearance.
The original idea was that they could come in and consult with people in the government, the new people who come in and get them up to speed.
But why should they continue to have a security clearance so that they can sell their expertise to CNN in order to accuse Trump of treason?
It's not like they're criticizing him.
They're accusing him of treason.
John Brennan is, and by the way, just so we know, John Brennan, let's put up this picture of John Brennan, and now put up this picture of Thanos from Infinity War.
Do that again.
John Brennan, Thanos from InfinitiWar.
Do you notice that we never see these two guys at this?
Do you want this guy to have Thanos to have security clearance?
I say no, no security clearance for Thanos.
But look, it's a perfectly legitimate thing to say that these guys are using, they're monetizing their security clearance in order to call the president of the United States a Russian spy, which is what they're doing.
These guys who abused their positions when they were in them and are now abusing their positions afterwards.
Let's just see for a minute how the press covers this is cut eight.
They call him a dictator again and again and again.
This is cut eight.
If you look at what happened last week in that meeting, you don't have to go back.
You don't have to look very hard to see a direct parallel to what the president is trying to do now.
Look at what Vladimir Putin proposed in that meeting.
He proposed using the arms of government to retaliate against critics of him, to retaliate against Bill Browder and Mike McFaul.
The kind of thing you expect to see from Vladimir Putin, the kind of thing you see from Erdogan in Turkey, the kind of thing you never expect to see in liberal democracies.
That's what the president is trying to do here.
So this idea of punishing your enemies or those critical of you, well, here's the thing.
It's straight from the playbook of those the president admires, including strongmen, like the Turkish president, Erdogan.
So here's what he's doing, or wants to do.
Silencing critics.
That's right.
Even an effort, though, to distract everyone is worth reporting because it's what dictators and want to be strongmen do.
They try to silence critics.
I'm not comfortable with vindictiveness because to me, that's very dictator.
That's his middle man.
This threat sounds more like he leads Turkey or the Philippines, not like he leads the United States.
He wants to pull security clearance from guys who are no longer in the government and are calling him a Russian spy and accusing him of treason.
And he's Erdoyan?
The Turkish dictator?
Why isn't that responsible for the violence in the streets of Hollywood, you know, five minutes from my house?
Why isn't that responsible for that?
You know, why isn't it responsible when people debate over abortion rights, whether a child, whether the child's right to life is more important than the woman's right to abort the child?
Why is that the handmaid's tale?
When you call that the handmaid's tale and you gin women up and you know how emotional women are.
I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.
When you, you know, you make people hysterical like they're living in some kind of dystopian world, why aren't you responsible for the violence?
So, you know, if we were having a real debate and honest, and you want to see, you want to see whether the press is, I know you don't have to be told that the press is incredibly biased, incredibly corrupt, and incredibly powerful organ of the Democrat Party.
That is who they are.
Last week, just this was after we were on, I think, they announced the GDP numbers, I think when the Clavenless weekend began.
They hit 4.1%.
And it's interesting.
I'm not an economist in any way, shape, or form.
But when they were saying, as they were saying, Trump will never be able to uphold his promise of getting our economy to 3%, let alone 4%, I said, that's just not true.
I've seen this happen before just from wisdom and experience.
I know that it can be done because I know what the American economy does when you get out of its way, when you stop telling it it has to pay for health care, when you stop taxing it, when you stop regulating it like crazy.
I know what this economy does.
These are Americans.
They build stuff.
You just leave them alone.
You get out of their way.
The guy walks into his garage and says, oh, I know what I'll do.
I'll build Apple.
I'll build Amazon.
I'll do this stuff.
If you just stop bleeding them for money, right?
So here is Trump announcing the great GDP numbers and taking a victory lap as he very well deserves.
Moments ago, the numbers for America's economic growth, or GDP, were just released.
And I am thrilled to announce that in the second quarter of this year, the United States economy grew at the amazing rate of 4.1%.
We're on track to hit the highest annual average growth rate in over 13 years.
And I will say this right now, and I'll say it strongly.
As the trade deals come in one by one, we're going to go a lot higher than these numbers.
And these are great numbers.
During each of the two previous administrations, we averaged just over 1.8% GDP growth.
By contrast, we are now on track to hit an average GDP annual growth of over 3%, and it could be substantially over 3%.
Each point, by the way, means approximately $3 trillion and 10 million jobs.
Think of that.
Each point, you go up one point.
That doesn't sound like much.
It's a lot.
So, you know, I subscribe to this newsletter called The Flip Side.
It's by a moderate left-winger who just gives you what the right and the left are saying.
She just gives you a fair look at what both sides are saying.
The people attacking the numbers, when she has, it's like in two columns.
One says from the left, one says from the right.
Here are the people attacking them.
Protecting Press Freedom00:15:19
It's the New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, right?
So that's what I'm talking about.
And if you want to see an example of it, we've just heard 4.1%.
You go on PBS and they have their PBS News Hour with Judy Woodruff, and it's got these two people debating, right?
It's David Brooks and Mark Shields, a column.
They both column this.
It's like just a little, what does it take to get a little diversity on television?
Here's them talking about our great economy.
The U.S. is now becoming like this black hole that they just don't want to get involved.
And there are plenty of ways to invest in China.
There's plenty of ways to invest in Africa or Europe or Asia.
So why get involved in the U.S.?
And as a result, foreign direct investment is plummeting here.
You mean because of the controversy.
They just don't want to be involved with Trump.
They just don't want to be involved.
And they get the sense that America is no longer the central nation.
It's the iDynamist themselves where the U.S. is imploding.
And so we should be seeing surges of people want to invest here.
Our economy is doing pretty good.
But we're not seeing that.
And second, you see this pattern of Trump when we saw it with the EU this week, where he'll make an attack, and then he'll sort of backtrack and have a sort of peace deal.
And that's sort of the drama that he likes.
But it means that you can never count on him.
I mean, if he does something good or do something bad, there's always going to be a backtrack.
So there's just permanent instability in the U.S. presidency.
So even, Mark, if he does cut a deal with the EU, which he says he's done, to come up with some trade agreement, it may not alleviate some of these hard feelings that have already built up.
The hard feelings don't go away, Judy.
It's a nightmare.
So my question is this.
My question is not that they shouldn't have the right to their opinions.
My question is, if you've got three people on a panel, shouldn't one of them disagree?
Shouldn't one of them say, you know, 4.1%.
Let me play.
I'll end this by just playing one clip here from Ian Bremer, a guy from a consultancy firm.
He's one of those guys who kind of tells businesses how their risk looks in certain situations.
And he goes on CNN.
You've got to see this.
If you haven't seen it, it is just wonderful.
And he breaks the news to CNN that things are going well.
And they're like, okay, let us have it.
Give us the bad news.
And the bad news is that Trump is doing a good job.
And the look on his face is like, I hate it.
He's like, he's telling their mother died.
Just play this.
This is great.
This has been a good week for Trump.
Wow.
I mean, look, we get out of CNN land for just a second.
Give it to us.
And 4% growth in the United States.
The Europeans back down on trade.
He now looks like a winner on that front.
The North Koreans, more progress with Remains coming back.
And stuff about Michael Cohen.
I mean, is he credible?
He was Trump's lawyer.
If you are a Trump supporter, this is just blah, blah, blah.
Everyone got so worked up that Trump was so embarrassing to American national interests during the press conference that he held in Helsinki.
It was really weird.
And yet, if you look at concrete policy deliverables coming out of it, the U.S. is still spending a lot more on defense under Trump.
They're not suspending any military exercises in NATO countries under Trump.
Advance forces rotating it out of the Baltic states.
They're in Poland.
The United States isn't pulling out of Syria.
They're not recognizing Crimea.
And I suspect that we're going to see more sanctions against Russia from Congress this year.
Really hard for Putin to want to come over to the United States and run another, hey, you're my buddy buddy.
So the fact that Trump said we're going to wait until, he said, after the witch hunt is over, which may imply that there aren't any more meetings that happen between Trump and Brown, I suspect he'll change his mind on that.
But the fact is that for as angry as everyone, including mainstream Republicans were on the back of this Helsinki meeting, very little concrete that we know of has actually come out of it.
So basically, he says when you get out of CNN world, nothing CNN says is actually true.
So my question here, my point here is that I will call on Donald Trump to tone down his rhetoric against the press because it might possibly cause violence against the press.
But when is somebody going to call for the press to tone down its rhetoric against Donald Trump?
Because it is causing violence, right?
They already have caused violence, and why don't they take responsibility for it?
And why don't they reform?
Nobody can force them.
They've got a First Amendment.
They should have it.
Nobody should be able to force them, but they should do it themselves.
Meanwhile, the other side is selling socialism.
We're going to have Michael Knowles coming on to talk about some of this and some of the things that maybe people can do about it.
But before that, I just have to point out that the other side is now selling socialism.
Stephen Colbert, who should know better, Stephen Colbert is on TV.
This guy's supposed to be a comedian.
He is selling socialism to people.
And I don't have time to go through this again, but socialism is slavery.
That's all it is.
It says you're, even if it worked, which it doesn't, but even if it worked, it would mean that your life belonged to the state.
The state had the right to decide how to spend your money.
Listen to Colbert.
Colbert is a Catholic Sunday school teacher.
Listen to this.
You know that God's a socialist, right?
Jesus didn't charge the lepers a copay.
Look, I'd cure your blindness, but you're out of network.
My feeling about that is when the government can cure people the way Jesus cured them, fine.
We can have universal health care.
But as long as they're actually paying and not performing miracles, what kind of argument is that from a Sunday school teacher?
It's absurd.
It is absurd.
You know, this woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who actually is a fair target.
You know, you say, well, she only got 15,000 votes in Queens.
And if her opponent had actually shown up or picked up the phone, he would have beaten her.
But she's now become their star, and they're talking about her as the future of the party, and they're touting her all this stuff.
She is with Bernie Sanders is putting forward a universal Medicaid, Medicare, or whatever it is, idea, and that would cost $3.32 trillion.
Okay, that's what it would cost.
First of all, I don't understand if Donald Trump is a dictator because he pulls a clown like Brennan's security clearance.
What is Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, who supported Daniel Ortega?
Why isn't he, I mean, what if he'd honeymooned in Nazi Germany?
Just as bad, just as bad.
Why isn't that held against him?
And when she parades around with him and she's like his daughter, you know, like a granddaughter, I guess at this point, you know, why isn't that, why doesn't that tar her with a man who has given credence to murderous dictatorships because they supported his philosophy?
All right, so now she wants this thing and she goes on and even Trevor Noah, to his credit, asks her, how are you going to pay for all this?
And her answer is just an absolute, it's kind of like a little song in the musical about how stupid socialists are.
Listen to this.
If people pay their fair share, if corporations and the ultra-wealthy, for example, as Warren Buffett likes to say, if he paid as much as his secretary paid, 15%, if he paid a 15% tax rate, if corporations paid, if we reverse the tax bill, but raised our corporate tax rate to 28%, which is not even as high as it was before.
If we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that's $2 trillion right there.
That's $2 trillion in 10 years.
And one of the wide estimates is that it's going to take $3 to $4 trillion to transition us to 100% renewable energy economy.
So we got $2 trillion from folks paying their fair share, which they were not paying before the Trump tax bill.
They weren't paying that before the Trump tax bill.
If we get people to pay their fair share, that's $2 trillion in 10 years.
Now, if we implement a carbon tax on top of that, so that we can transition and financially incentivize people away from fossil fuels, if we implement a carbon tax, that's an additional amount of a large amount of revenue that we can have.
And then the last key, which is extremely, extremely important, is reprioritization.
Just last year, we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn't even ask for.
They're like, we don't want another fighter jet.
They're like, don't give us another nuclear bomb.
They didn't even ask for it, and we gave it to them.
First of all, that's not true.
I mean, Mathis was lobbying for an increase, so that's utterly absurd.
Everything she says, though, she said, we move away from fossil fuels.
To what?
To what?
Water?
I mean, what are you going to run your car on, lady?
You know, I mean, what is she talking about?
Move away from fossil fuels to what?
That is what runs democracy is fossil fuels.
You want to invent something else?
Go ahead.
At least you'd be doing something useful with your life.
The money she's talking about, you know, we took in, the government took in over $3 trillion in taxes this year.
She wants to double that, but she's talking about over 10 years.
She's talking about over 10 years.
This is going to add to the deficit right away, $3.3 trillion.
It's all nonsense.
It's all make-believe.
You know, the Boston Globe had a headline, Americans actually like socialist policies.
And my response to that is, Americans like opiates, too.
These are the things we're trying to cure.
All right, we're going to bring on Michael Knowles, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com and you can listen to the show or watch the whole show if you only subscribe.
What are you doing with that 10 bucks?
What are you going to do?
Give it to the poor?
Come on.
No, that's not what I meant.
Wait, wait.
$10 a month.
You can subscribe.
You get Shapiro.
You get me.
All right, you get Knowles, but we'll take a little bit off the price for that.
And if you put in $100, you get the leftist year's tumbler.
You get a subscription for the entire year.
That's probably a saving.
We'll ask Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how much you're saving, but I think it's about 20 bucks.
All right, come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
Noles!
There he is.
How you doing?
All right.
Why do I always say such nasty things about you?
I actually kind of like it.
I do get some tweets sometimes.
They say, why are Andrew Clavin and Ben Shapiro so mean to you, Knowles?
I say, well, what else would they be?
I don't have any frame of reference for any other way to be treated by them.
Well, I'm mean to you because we're two New Yorkers, and this is the way we talk to each other.
Shapiro's mean to you because he hates you.
That's totally, totally different thing.
That's right.
However, just so you know, I finished the rewrite of Another Kingdom and we're ready to record.
I mean, you are about to become Austin Lively again.
I can't really, and the thing is, Drew, you can be as mean to me on the show as you want because you're the only guy in Hollywood who still casts me.
I can't wait for this second season.
You know, we got so many views on that first season, and I believe the marketing budget was equal to my salary from the Daily Wire.
That is $0.
But I can't wait to get this thing started there.
There's a lot of new stuff planned.
We've got some visual components that are being planned for this.
Very cool.
Very cool.
We're taking it up to the next level.
I got to say, I'm so happy with this book, with the second season.
I am so happy with it.
I mean, I really, it came out.
You know, I was kind of thinking it's supposed to be three seasons.
It's supposed to be a trilogy.
The middle book in a trilogy is usually the weak one.
So I started out kind of not as hopeful, but I finished it yesterday, and I was actually crying at the end of the story.
This is great.
That's pretty good.
I'm usually crying in Hollywood, but not because of how great the product is.
All right.
So I wanted to talk to you about a Wall Street Journal op-ed I saw by Orrin Hatch called Geneva Conventions for the Culture War.
So first you should probably explain what a Geneva Convention is for people.
Well, this is a great point.
You know, people probably heard of the Geneva Convention because the Geneva Convention protections were the slogan of the Bush era among Democrats, even though they never had any idea what they are.
The Geneva Convention protections are protections that the international community has agreed to to protect civilians in times of war.
So the idea is if you go along with certain rules, if you say, okay, we're not going to use certain weapons, we're not going to use chemical weapons, for instance, we're not going to torture civilians, we're not going to do this, that, or the other thing, then your soldiers will be afforded certain protections if they're captured by the enemy or when they're engaged in times of war.
But that's the purpose of the Geneva Convention protections, is to protect civilians, which is why when the left said we need to extend Geneva Convention protections to terrorists, it never made any sense because terrorists target civilians.
If you give them protections, you undermine the whole thing.
Right.
And it was also, the soldiers were supposed to be uniformed soldiers.
So if you're a terrorist and you're disguising yourself as part of the populace, you're not covered by the Geneva Conventions anyway.
That's exactly right.
So this totally misunderstood thing.
But Orrin Hatch, good old Republican conservative senator, he says we need Geneva Conventions for the culture war.
And I see where he's coming from.
He lays out four ways that we can simmer down the rhetoric in the culture war.
He makes the good point that we need to have a culture war, that culture wars are a feature of democracy.
They're not a problem with democracy.
You need to hash out views on changing cultures among people in a democracy.
But he says the rhetoric has gotten so crazy.
There was an angry mob that cornered HHS Secretary Kirsten Nielsen the other day at a DC restaurant.
There was a Virginia restaurant that kicked Sarah Sanders out of there and said, we won't serve you.
A group of men screaming in Transportation Secretary Elaine Chow's face, which is a huge mistake because Elaine Chow is Mitch McConnell's wife.
And Cocaine Mitch is going to find you like Pablo Escobar.
He's going to track you down and kill you, buddy.
So watch out.
I know.
He has that peaceful face, but it's a lie.
That's right.
Behind the turtle smile is a killer's instinct.
And so anyway, so that is true.
There are all of these aspects of this, which should be a civil debate, that are becoming increasingly violent, increasingly aggressive.
But what Orrin Hatch does is he says, activists on both sides need to tone down the rhetoric, tone down the tactics, and agree to abide by these protections.
The trouble is, it's all the left.
It's not the right.
This is one of the things that drives me so crazy about conservatives who say, look, we both need to calm down.
No, we don't need to both calm down.
One side is the aggressor.
One side is defending here.
We've been talking over the last couple of weeks about owning the libs, whether or not we should own the libs.
I'm giving a speech in D.C. in just a couple of days on this topic.
What Orrin Hatch seems to be suggesting is unilateral disarmament.
Here are his four suggestions.
Okay, let's hear.
Shield communal spaces from politicization, just like schools, hospitals, churches, and other places are protected from strikes in war.
Okay, that would be a good goal.
I'd be all for that.
So what does that mean, like a restaurant or something?
Yeah, a restaurant.
Or, you know, restaurants, school.
Actually, schools would work in both cases, right?
Tone down the rhetoric.
But for the last 50 years, schools have been the main area that the left have tried to infect and take over so that they can control the culture.
Shielding Public Spaces00:06:38
The Obama administration tried to force the Catholic Church to pay for abortions and abortion drugs.
The left tried to take over health care.
It's a whole sixth of the economy.
They've tried to invade hospitals.
So all of the places Orin Hatch names, the left has been aggressively trying to take over for the last, certainly the last 10 years and really the last 50.
I mean, you're hitting on a bigger point too, which is that inherently our philosophy is leave us alone.
So we're inherently on defense.
I mean, we don't have to attack people to be left alone.
You have to attack us to get control over our lives.
It's really the left that is always on the aggression.
It is always the aggressor because we just want to be left alone.
That's exactly right.
And conservatives also do have a conservative disposition broadly.
We are not the aggressors here.
The left wants to paint the right as the aggressors in the culture war.
We're the conservatives.
We want to keep things relatively conservative.
The second point Orrin Hatch makes is to resist the politicization of everything.
He's referring to sports, the NFL, food, tech companies, all of these things.
And that would be very nice, too.
Who politicized the NFL?
Who politicized chicken sandwiches at a fast food restaurant?
Who politicized Uber?
You know, during the Trump travel ban, during the first stage of that, Uber charged surge pricing at airports because that's what its company does.
Lyft decided that they were going to virtue signal and say, we're not going to charge surge pricing and we're going to take everybody around.
The left in America, friends of mine, made a concerted effort.
They said, we're not going to use Uber anymore.
That's for conservatives.
We're going to use every little bit.
Who politicized plastic straws?
Was it the right?
I don't think it was the right.
It was the left.
Yeah, you're knocking their biggest contribution to the culture in the last 10 years is banning straw.
Trump has solved the economy.
He's dialed back regulation.
He's appointed judges.
But they banned straws.
They banned straws.
Now we have sippy cups to fully represent the infantilization of American politics.
But again, again, if you start by politicizing the flag, if you start by saying the flag is for conservatives, the flag is a conservative thing, and we on the left don't believe in patriotism, which they were saying on the news during the war on terror.
If you say that, then I guess we're just as political as they are because we believe in waving the flag.
We believe in having the flag saluted during the national anthem at a sports game.
So from their point of view, we are political because we believe in America and we believe in freedom.
We believe in the Constitution.
That's a political point to them because that's what they're fighting about.
Well, this is the key aspect of this because one of Warren Hatch's points is that we need rhetorical disarmament and we shouldn't become so personal about everything.
But to the left, from the 1960s onward, the new left, the second wave feminists, they said the personal is the political.
They were going to politicize everything and personal things.
So we might say, okay, saluting the flag, that isn't a terribly partisan thing.
But what the left says is everything about you, everything about your character, about your behavior, about your thoughts, about your country, about your community, about everything.
Everything is political.
And any stance you take, whether it's to just salute your flag or to burn your flag, those are equally political.
So they've politicized all of those things.
And then the final aspect is discouraging the harassment of public figures and incursions into people's personal lives.
But then you have one of, I believe, the oldest congressman in American history, you know, she's been there since 1852 at Maxine Waters, is calling for people to be harassed in public, get in their face, yell at them, swarm them, and surround them.
The reason I think that Orin Hatch's piece fails or will fail is because he's calling for a toning down of speech ultimately.
But politics is speech.
That's always been the case.
I mean, I have to say, you know, the thing that the left doesn't get because they're surrounded by people just like them and they own the media and they all agree with themselves, the thing they don't understand is how uncivil they have been for the last 50 or 60 years.
If you say, you know, I believe we should have border enforcement, they say, well, the people coming over the border are sort of brownish, therefore you're a racist.
And that's not civil.
That's not a civil response to an idea that the country should have borders.
That is an insult.
They called you a male chauvinist pig.
You know, they call you, you know, they call you one name after another.
And then when finally Rush Limbaugh came along and said, well, they're feminized, it's like, wait, where's the civility?
Where's the civility?
I mean, it all only goes one way.
I will say that I hate to see it ramped up on the right.
I hate to see us start calling them Nazis.
I know they've been calling us Nazis for 50 years, but I don't think Chuck Schumer's a Nazi.
I think he's wrong.
And sort of a clown.
The most dangerous place in the world is between Chuck Schumer and the TV camera.
You know, that is a good point.
We don't want to just emulate the left.
We don't want to become the left.
But ironically, I think Oren Hatch's piece on the Geneva Conventions for the culture war, it gives us another strategy, which is peace through strength.
You know, nuclear disarmament treaties were not typically favored by the right and by conservatives.
You know, there was always a more progressive solution to the Cold War.
But peace through strength is the bedrock conservative position.
And, you know, if the right disarms right now, rhetorically disarms, we're just unilaterally disarming.
The left is not going to do it.
But we have peace through strength.
If we fight back, if they try to shut down the NFL, politicize the NFL, disrespect the American flag, and we say no, if they go out and try to fire our people and we go out and fire a couple of their people, if we say no, if we put our line in the sand, that might lead to a longer civil peace.
I agree with you.
I agree with you on this, Pal.
I mean, I just think that the right has always been uncomfortable winning.
And I think that that is something that Trump has brought to the table that is absolutely positive.
It's 100% positive that he has fought back against the press, that he has said to us, no, we should beat them.
It's not just that we should sit there and kind of say, oh, you know, the old joke used to be that the Democrats say, let's destroy the country in a year.
And the conservatives say, well, let's do it in two years.
And I mean, you know, I don't think we have to take that out of it.
What are you talking about on the show today?
So today we're going to be talking, I have to talk about my dear friend.
I saw you just talked about her, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She is so good.
But we're going to talk about how the Democrats are running on fumes.
Motherhood in the Age of Fear00:04:06
They have nothing to run on in 2018.
And so they're doubling down on hysterics, going back, trying to reopen historical wounds, and it will not work.
We've got a great guest coming on, a lefty who was a SJW character assassin, all of these, wrote for the Huffington Post, and he has said it's time for the left to cut out the nonsense.
So we're going to talk to him too and keep our fingers crossed for the culture.
Excellent, excellent.
All right, we're going to Washington.
You're going tomorrow.
I think I'm going on Wednesday, and we're going to be talking to the YF.
I'm flying out tomorrow.
Yeah, you'll be out in a couple of days.
We should try to grab a drink at the Gold House, too, the Trump International Hotel.
Oh, what a great idea.
Yeah, that's a money to the president.
He needs it.
That's right.
All right, I'll see you later.
Thanks a lot.
crappy culture.
So the New York Times, a former newspaper, had an actual good piece called Motherhood in the Age of Fear by Kim Brooks.
The subhead is women are being harassed and even arrested for making perfectly rational parenting decisions.
And Brooks starts out by talking about the fact that she left her toddler in a car, the toddler didn't want to go into the store, and it was cool outside, it wasn't hot, and she put down the window and she locked the doors and she left him in the car to run inside and get something.
And she was reported to the police, which really, truly is absurd.
And she writes, we now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal or even criminal to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision even for a second.
And she talks about the reason for this is the reports on TV so emphasize the danger that we're all in because that's what we tune in to watch.
We're kind of evolutionarily programmed to look at danger so they know we'll turn on their shows or hit their click their stories if they put danger in there.
She says we read in the news or on social media about children who have been kidnapped, raped, and killed, about children forgotten for hours in broiling cars.
We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression.
Statistically speaking, according to the writer Warwick Cairns, you would have to leave a child alone in a public place for 750,000 years before he would be likely to be snatched by a stranger.
I mean, obviously that's true.
It's a very, very rare thing.
But she talks about a study, and I really like this study, that researchers, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues presented subjects with vignettes in which a parent left a child unattended and participants estimated how much danger the child was in.
And sometimes the subjects were told the child was left unintentionally.
In other instances, they were told the child was left unsupervised so the parents could work, volunteer, relax, or meet a lover.
The researchers found that the participants' assessment of the child's risk of harm varied depending on how morally offensive they found the parents' reason for living.
And the researcher says, people don't only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral, they also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.
It's not about safety.
It's about enforcing a social norm.
I think that this age of fear is the age of, it's the age of feminism for one thing, but it also is what makes socialism so appealing.
I do not want to lose my job and be in danger.
I don't want to take a risk.
A living country, a virile country, a country that is going to succeed and climb and grow, is a country that takes risks and people take risks.
I mean, you know, that is part of success.
You can't succeed if you're not willing to fail.
And yes, do we need systems to take care of people so that they don't end up in the streets?
Yeah, but they don't necessarily have to be government systems.
They can be social systems.
They can be cultural systems.
And I think that this idea that children can't be left alone is an idea that is part of infantilizing all of us.
And it really is a crappy part of our culture going forward.
Risks and Success00:00:47
All right.
tomorrow who have we got on we've got uh Oh, we do.
Okay.
Sarah Jean Gosny, who joined a radical side of the left and came back to tell the tale.
I will be here.
I hope you will be here.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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