Andrew Clavin and Sarah Gonzalez dissect the New York Times’ retracted Nikki Haley curtain scandal as politically motivated, then pivot to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, exposing inconsistencies in Christine Blasey Ford’s 1982 rape claim—her 2012 therapy notes omitted him entirely. They dismiss the allegation as a Democratic "Anita Hill playbook" tactic, framing teenage mistakes (like abortions or drunken misconduct) as inevitable yet politically weaponized. Gonzalez warns of a "post-fact era" where accusations without evidence destroy careers, while both critique Trump’s combative Twitter rhetoric as counterproductive, despite his policy wins. The episode ends with a call for higher-ground discourse amid media bias and generational distrust in the Constitution, jokingly closing with a nod to their chaotic co-host dynamic. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, is apologizing for being the New York Times, a former newspaper.
In the midst of running hit pieces against Republicans that are skewed, biased, and often untrue, it ran a hit piece against a Republican that was skewed, biased, and untrue, and so has taken time out from unfairly denigrating Republicans to apologize for having unfairly denigrated a Republican.
The piece that squeezed the sullen little apology out of the leftist birdcage liner was an attack on U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
The article by Times State Department correspondent Gardner Harris was linked to the headline, Nikki Haley's View of New York is priceless, her curtains, $52,701.
A picture of Ambassador Haley accompanied the article.
The first paragraph went like this, quote, the State Department spent $52,701 last year buying customized and mechanized curtains for the picture windows in Nikki R. Haley's official residence as Ambassador to the United Nations, just as the department was undergoing deep budget cuts and had frozen hiring, unquote.
Six paragraphs down, the Times added this little tidbit, quote, a spokesman for Ms. Haley said plans to buy the curtains were made in 2016 during the Obama administration.
Ms. Haley had no say in the purchase, he said, unquote.
That's right, the curtains were ordered by the Obama people, probably so then-Ambassador Samantha Powers could close the curtains so no one could see her unmasking and spying on U.S. citizens.
New York Times editor Blithering Prevarication III issued an apology for the article, writing, quote, in our mad rush to unfairly denigrate a Republican, we accidentally unfairly denigrated a Republican in a manner that made it apparent that our once great paper, while still maintaining its former appearance, has now become a corrupt and dishonest mouthpiece of the socialist wing of the Democrat Party.
We regret revealing that and will be careful to unfairly denigrate Republicans more subtly in the future.
Okay, the New York Times didn't really print that.
That would have been the truth, which has no place in the New York Times.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are back after this sad and lonely clavenless weekend that you were going through, not me.
But we will talk about Brett Kavanaugh, of course, and Sarah Gonzalez from The Blaze is going to be here in the studio with us to talk about the news and how it works and her new show about the news.
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This thing about Kavanaugh, I'm sure you've all heard it.
A woman has come forward, a professor who says that in high school, Brett Kavanaugh got drunk, lay on top of her, tried to pull off her clothes.
She felt he was trying to rape her, and then she escaped.
They were both drunk.
Everybody was drunk.
And she has now come forward.
At first, she didn't, she didn't, it was a letter that Diane Feinstein, Senator Dianne Feinstein, had in her possession for weeks and weeks.
And then she finally said, I'm turning it over, but the woman wasn't named.
And now she has come forward and has says she will testify.
Kavanaugh says that the whole thing is untrue and that he too will testify.
He completely denies it, but he says that he will now, he's willing to go back and testify about these things, which he just says never happened.
Now, I want to talk about this.
I'm going to talk about the fact that I don't believe these charges and why I don't believe the charges.
Sorry, I just want to make sure I know what I'm talking about here.
Why I don't believe the charges.
But before I talk about that, I want to talk about something else.
I want to talk about the fact.
What about if the charges are absolutely true?
What about if the charges are absolutely true?
Her name is Christine Blasey Ford.
Is that her name?
I forgot her name.
Christine Blasey Ford.
I think that's it.
So I want to talk about what if this 53-year-old man of impeachable character, what if one night in high school when he was 17, he got drunk and felt up a high school girl who was also drunk?
I don't care.
I don't care.
I don't give one rat's hair about that.
I do not care if, now, I don't care.
If he were a left-winger, if he were as left as left could be, if he used the Constitution for toilet paper, I would want him turned down from the Supreme Court for that, but for this, no freaking way.
I don't care.
This is, if it's true, which I don't think it is, I want to be very clear about this.
If a man of unimpeachable character, right, this is a guy that everybody says is a great guy.
The FBI has investigated him six times, six times, nothing has come up.
They pull this at the last minute after the hearings are over, so he can't defend himself.
He has to come back to defend himself.
So the press has a chance to go through the whole weekend just absolutely attacking him.
But let's just say, let us just pretend for a minute that this is true.
I don't care.
If this were a young woman being appointed judge and it turned out that she had had an abortion, which at least is permanent, is something you can't take back, right?
I mean, this is, you know, he felt her up, but he didn't rape her or anything like that.
That would be a different story.
That's not the story we're telling.
It's a story that he just got on top of her and he mauled her.
If this were a woman who had had an abortion when she was 16 or 17, said, you know, I did a terrible thing.
I really feel bad about it.
You know, but I was 16, 17, I panicked.
I wouldn't care either.
Why not?
Because teenagers have got to be able to be teenagers.
What kind of compassionless, small-minded, puritanical, pinched, closed-hearted view of human life are we going to live with to serve our politics if people cannot be teenagers and make a mistake?
That is obscene to me.
I've told you many times that I think a new Victorian age is coming in lots of ways, in lots of very positive ways.
But if it means, if it means that a person cannot get a job, a high-placed job, because he did something one night when he got drunk in high school, again, not a rape, not a murder, not something that's completely permanent, destroys lives, just a little bit of bad behavior as a high school.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
Which of us, I mean, nobody can survive that.
We've all done bad things.
Everybody has done a bad thing.
And who in Congress, what man in Congress, surely is not going to have some story from his high school.
You know, is that really the standard that the left wants to set?
Is it really the standard?
And I say this again, if he were a leftist, I still, still would not hold this against him.
If we can't be children, if we can't be teenagers, if we can't have flaws, if we can't be human beings, who's left?
Who is going to be a judge over us?
Who's going to sit on the Supreme Court?
Someone who knows nothing about the foibles of humankind?
Everything about our Constitution is built with a knowledge of the foibles of humankind.
That's why they pitched powers against each other.
Are we really to serve our lousy politics, our mean, ugly, stupid, low politics?
Are we really going to abandon our compassion for human beings such that we only will allow people who have never done anything to serve us?
That is absurd.
I don't care.
If it's true, now here's why I don't think it's true.
I mean, there are lots of reasons why I don't think it's true.
This lady, you know, I'm not going to attack her.
Maybe she remembers this.
Maybe she doesn't.
She told it to a therapist in 2012.
This is the first thing.
She told it the story to a therapist in 2012, 30 years after it happened.
He had never told it to anyone before that he was trying to take off her bathing suit.
The story in the therapist's note don't match the story that she's telling now.
They don't name Kavanaugh, and they say that there were four men in the room.
Now she says that there's two men in the room.
But she says that's the therapist's fault.
She took the notes wrong.
How on earth, how on earth do you defend yourself against the charge like that?
How on earth do you defend yourself?
So I dismiss it on that.
The woman, Christine Blasey Ford, has a hazy recollection of the incident.
She was drunk.
She doesn't remember what happened.
The idea, I mentioned this before, but the idea that they released this charge after the healing was over, they did the same thing.
This is the Anita Hill playbook.
This is the Anita Hill playbook.
Anita Hill came forward, and I didn't care about that either.
With Clinton, I didn't want Clinton to be impeached for what he did.
The only thing about Clinton was it was revelatory of his constant character.
Bill Clinton's affair that he had in the offices that we pay for was revelatory of his constant character.
He was constantly using and abusing women for his pleasure.
He was constantly using and abusing Hillary for his power.
You know, I mean, he treated her like garbage, and she didn't like it very much, according to all accounts.
So that said something about his character.
This says nothing about the guy.
However, again, Kavanaugh has been investigated six times.
There are all these women who have come forward and said that he was a wonderful guy.
I think 65 women signed an affidavit.
And the left's response to that was, that proves he's a bad guy.
Why would he have to have so many people come forward if he wasn't defending himself against something?
So the more people who come forward to defend you, if you happen to be a conservative, that condemns you.
That's what condemns you.
The other thing about this woman, and this is important, well, let me get to that in a minute.
I want to talk about the way her students, she's a teacher, a professor.
I want to talk about the fact that the way her students react to her.
But first, Kavanaugh's mother, who was a circuit court judge, once ruled against her parents.
That's something that may give her a grudge.
And finally, she is a very left-wing, Bernie-supporting Democrat who donates to left-wing causes and has previously signed an open letter challenging Trump's border policy.
Some people said, for instance, that, well, when she first talked about this, it was 2012.
And so Kavanaugh, but she didn't mention Kavanaugh at the time, it seems like.
So why would she say it if then Kavanaugh wasn't going to be in the Supreme Court in 2012?
But Mitt Romney said he would pick Kavanaugh too.
He put Kavanaugh very high on his list so that she may have had a grudge against him, a political grudge against them too.
So I'm going to get back to her students in just a minute.
But this is such baloney.
It is such a baloney thing to do.
These guys will do anything to protect, the left will do anything to protect their power from the Constitution.
They do not want that evil Constitution coming and taking their power away.
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One more thing about this, the accuser, Christine Blazingford, Dr. Christine Blazingford.
She has rated her students.
You know, students give ratings to their teachers.
Some of the things they say about her are, for instance, something is wrong with her.
She says she holds grudges against students who cross her.
Here's one of the things a student wrote.
And these are before these charges came forward.
These are like from 2014.
Christine Ford is the worst educator I have ever experienced.
Avoid taking her class and avoid any interaction with this person.
I feel like she has something wrong with her.
And I'm surprised no one has caught this.
Another one, Professor Ford is unprofessional, lacks appropriate filters, and I'm honestly scared of her.
She's like, you know, both Roger Kimball and Myron Magnet, two of the smartest human beings I know.
Myron Magnet, who is at City Journal, and Roger Kimball, who often writes for The Spectator, they are two of the smartest people.
I always tease Kimball because he wears a bow tie.
Say he's the only man in America who wears a bow tie and means it, because that's how smart he is.
They both were comparing this to the Anita Hill playbook.
Anita Hill, they told Anita Hill she wasn't going to have to testify.
Ultimately, it became this enormous circuit circus.
They will say anything, they will do anything.
They will slander anyone to stop their power from being taken away by the Constitution.
I have to say, it's like watching some kind of demon snake writhing in the hands of the people who are trying to pry the snake off the tower of its power.
You know, it's like, you cannot give me, I am the snake of power.
You will not take me away from my power.
It's insane, the viciousness, the viciousness, and the idea of what it is doing to our sense of what it means to be a human being is, it's despicable.
It really is.
It really is terrible.
Press Lost Sense of Integrity00:07:12
You know, there was so much, that Nikki Haley story, which is appalling, that thing where they basically accused her of buying these curtains for whatever it was, $53,000.
And it was really Samantha Power in the Obama administration.
They buried that.
It's only because they got caught.
I mean, they just ran, they finally ran this note at the top of the story.
That was a little unfair of us, you know, maybe.
But we still don't like her.
You know, it's like, what on earth?
What on earth do you, when you go to work at the New York Times and you're tying your tie or shaving your face in the morning or putting on your makeup in the morning and you look at yourself in the mirror, what do you think of yourself if you're working for that paper?
You have to think that you are so wonderful, yet your philosophy is so great that it is worth lying and twisting things.
The other one was this hurricane story, the hurricane story of Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma, which hit three weeks earlier in Puerto Rico.
And they put out this story that there were an estimated, it was the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University found that from September 2017 through this February, there are an estimated 2,975 excess mortalities in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, meaning 3,000 people who died, who wouldn't have died if the hurricane hadn't hit.
And so President Trump pushed back and he tweeted last week that 3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and that when he visited soon after Maria, the toll was between six people and 18.
So just to show you the measured, careful way that the press reacted, judging these 3,000 people who wouldn't have died against Trump's tweet.
Here's a perfect example of the way the press treated this.
Jennifer Rubin on MSNBC.
Donald Trump has killed those people twice.
Once through neglect and oversight, and secondly, disgracing that they died at all.
And that's what death denial, that's what Holocaust denial, that's what all these denial syndromes are all about, is killing the person twice.
Well, that seems fair.
Donald Trump sent out a tweet.
It was like he flew to Puerto Rico, denied the Holocaust, and then leapt upon these people and strangled them to death.
You know, it's exactly what it was like.
Jake Tapper, he just called it a lie.
He was citing the governor of Puerto Rico who wants to be a Democrat presidential candidate.
It's insane.
So Mary Anastasius O'Grady, I love her name.
She sounds like a nun.
But in fact, she is the Latin America correspondent columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
So she wrote a piece today, and she said, you know, Trump is in the right of this.
He was being treated unfairly.
Excess mortality, first of all, is not the normal way that you judge how many people died in a hurricane.
You judge how many people die in a hurricane by how many people are killed during the hurricane.
Excess mortality studies aren't the way you count the dead because who knows why people died?
Who knows?
How can you say, well, you know, his car crashed into a tree, but it might not have if there hadn't been a hurricane three days before.
You know, it's just not fair.
But the point about this is, is that there aren't any other measures, other hurricanes that have been measured in that way.
So there's no way to compare the deaths in Puerto Rico to other places, other hurricanes.
So because the case they're trying to make is that Trump and FEMA kind of botched the hurricane thing and then they sell this on CNN.
Oh, he doesn't care about brown people.
You know the routine.
They do it 100 times, a million times.
You've seen it and seen it and seen it.
But it's all ridiculous.
I mean, and the point that Mary O'Grady makes in the Wall Street Journal is that the attack on Trump is a disservice to Puerto Ricans.
This is her writing.
She says it helps the island politicians dodge their own responsibility for the loss of life.
The failure of medical equipment due to power outages, for example, may have been one cause of numerous post-storm deaths.
But as Mary Williams Walsh detailed in a New York Times story titled How Free Electricity Helped Dig $9 Billion Dollar Hole in Puerto Rico, island officials mismanaged the power company for years, which left the grid highly vulnerable when the storm hit.
In fact, she says local government was thoroughly unprepared for Maria.
According to the George Washington University study, neither the Department of Public Safety nor the Central Communications Office in the governor's office had written crisis and emergency risk communication plans in place.
The Health Department's Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response had an outdated emergency plan.
You know, I'm trying to make a general point here, a general point.
Because of the left, because the left owns the press, because the left owns the media, because they have been hysterical about every Republican since Reagan and are now hysterical about Donald Trump, who I will admit gives them more cause for hysteria, both by the fact that he's more effective than most presidents and by the fact that he behaves badly at times.
They have lost all sense of what they are supposed to be doing.
They have lost all sense of truth.
They have lost all sense.
Just, you know, this Russian thing, the Russian collusion investigation.
If it comes out, as I'm almost positive it will, that Trump had nothing to do with, you know, was not colluding with Russia to do whatever colluding means.
I mean, there's not even a law against colluding, not even a legal term.
But if it turns out that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia during the campaign, as I'm almost certain it will when Mueller is finished with his investigation, what have they been doing to us for the last two years?
You know, what have they been doing to us for the last two years?
Let me pause for just a second.
I'll talk about that a little bit more.
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So Bob Woodward, you know, brought out this book, Fear, or as I call it, Fear, Fear!
News Matters00:15:55
It's a Donald Trump's presidency.
And all they talk about is, oh, Donald Trump is chaotic and he's crazy and all this stuff.
But they forgot that they didn't read the book.
And I haven't read the book either, but Hugh Hewitt has.
And Hugh Hewitt had Woodward on his radio show and asked him, did you find any evidence of collusion?
Here's Woodward's response.
Did you, Bob Woodward, hear anything in your research and your interviews that sounded like espionage or collusion?
I did not.
And of course, I looked for it, looked for it hard.
And so, you know, there we are.
We're going to see what Mueller has.
And Dowd may be right.
He has something that Dowd and the president don't know about, a secret witness or somebody who has changed their testimony, as you know.
That often happens and that can break open or turn a case.
But you've seen no collusion.
I have not.
All right.
So there, you know, legendary reporter, as they call him, when he attacks Trump, is he a legendary reporter now?
Is he a legendary reporter now that he's got Trump off the hook?
I mean, this is this Russian collusion thing, which, by the way, when Mueller comes out, if Mueller comes out and says, you know, there's no collusion between Trump and Russia, it will vanish like that.
It's already vanishing.
All they do is they go from collusion when that doesn't work.
They go, oh, he's insane.
Then they go to the next thing.
He's insane.
Whatever the next outrage.
Oh, he's killed.
He flew down to Puerto Rico while denying the Holocaust and slaughtered 3,000 people twice.
He brought them back to life, then killed them again.
I mean, they are out of their minds.
They're out of their minds.
And if nothing else, it's making him look great, which is like not that easy to do.
All right.
Coming up tomorrow, September 18th at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, 3:30 Pacific, don't miss our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage with Ben Shapiro, the one and only, the God King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, with me and Alicia Krauss.
And guess who will join us?
Glenn Beck.
Not bad.
Not bad.
We like to bring Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck doesn't drink, and I don't think he smokes, but we like to bring him into a smoke-clouded room and drink in front of him.
It's just a way of torture.
We just like to get him.
But he will talk about his new book, Addicted to Outrage, and more.
We might let Noel Sky.
Are we going to let Noel?
Ah, come on.
Noel's going to be in there.
He brings the cigars.
We got to let him in.
And we'll be taking questions, but only from Daily Wire subscribers.
So make sure to become a subscriber today.
That's tomorrow, September 18th at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
Join us for Daily Wire Backstage with our special guest, Glenn Beck.
It will be worth it just to watch Glenn cough.
We'll be talking to him about his book, Addicted to Outrage.
Become a subscriber and ask your questions.
We'll answer them all.
From The Blaze, we have the lovely Sarah Gonzalez coming in in just a moment.
But I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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Come on over to thedailywire.com where you can listen to the rest of the show.
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All right, Sarah Gonzalez is a reporter, producer, and host of The Blaze Show, The News and Why It Matters.
Sarah has written for several publications, including The Blaze and Red State.
How are you doing, Sarah?
It's good to see you.
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
What is the news and why it matters?
The news and why it matters, which, by the way, I did not pick the title.
I realize it does not flow off of the tongue as you might want it to.
However, it is very important because we live in an age where we're just inundated with all of these different media outlets, just pummeling you with all of these different stories, some of which really may not matter to you in your life.
So we try to take the stories that actually matter to our audience and to America and just try to fit it into a 30-minute show on television.
And then we go overtime on on-demand and on podcasts where we fit in a little bit more, a little bit extra.
But we just, Americans don't have that much time to sift through what's important to them.
So we try to help them out with that.
So you pick the story that matters.
What story matters today?
Today.
Today, we're going to be talking Kavanaugh.
It's got to be Brett Kavanaugh.
Yes.
Now, I said something maybe a little controversial at the opening of the show.
I said, even if he's guilty, if this story is true, which I don't believe it is, but if it's true, I don't care.
So you tell me why I'm wrong.
Well, I'm not going to tell you that you're necessarily wrong.
I am going to tell you it matters to America just based upon the fact that it's something that everyone wants to know.
But being that he, even if this was true, he was 17 at the time.
Kids are allowed to make mistakes in high school.
And I mean, we live in an age now where even adults can make mistakes, let's say James Gunn.
You can make a mistake.
You can repent for it.
You can apologize for it before it even surfaces in the mainstream media.
Then you get attacked for it.
And then you lose your career over it.
And I think that we're seeing this happen to everyone at such a rate that eventually we're going to get to the place where nobody's going to be able to keep a job because everyone's done something in their past that could come back to haunt them if we judge everyone by what they did 30, 40, 50 years ago.
It's a horrible way to look at the world.
It's a horrible way to look at humanity without, you know, you know the comedian Norm McDonald?
Yes.
He said recently that when you admit to these, especially these Me Too offenses, when you admit to them, you get destroyed.
Yes.
Whereas if you deny them, you might survive.
Yeah.
I mean, it's kind of unfair.
Well, it is.
And I mean, we're living in a time where, you know, we're supposed to live in a country where we are innocent until proven guilty.
But the court of public opinion is a very harsh court.
And apparently, you know, you can lose your job, lose everything just based on what someone accuses you of with no evidence.
I mean, we live in a post-fact era for sure.
Well, now, at the Blaze, I mean, one of the things I've always admired Glenn for is that he's actually living on air in real time.
You can see him change his mind sometimes.
You can see him.
And he has been, you know, he's written this book, Addicted to Outrage, and he's talking about the fact that we're at each other's throats.
Yes.
Is there anything that you feel, like as a person in front of a camera with a microphone, is there anything that you feel that you should be doing to mitigate that?
Well, what we try to do, especially on the show, which generates some really great conversations, is we try to just look at things objectively.
And you can say, you know, for instance, we had a conversation not too long ago about being pro-life.
You know, obviously we're all very, very pro-life.
And we had a story come up about the death penalty.
And so, you know, I posed the question, you know, we say that we're very pro-life.
We're all on the side of pro-death penalty.
So how do we reconcile that?
So I think that the key to that, the key to understanding America is addicted to outrage and we need to break that cycle is we have to be introspective and we have to look inside ourselves and say, okay, we need to make sure that we're being objective and we need to make sure that we're making sure that, you know, we're calling out ourselves before we call out the other side.
I mean, I think that that's very, very key.
Absolutely true that we have to do that.
What do you say to people?
Because this is the response I get to this all the time.
Just this week, this Nikki Haley last week, the Nikki Haley stuff.
Yes.
I mean, that was scurrilous.
And it was not a mistake.
That was not an accident.
Absolutely.
They did a good job on Nikki Haley, the hater.
And they do it every day.
I mean, I read the Times every day, mostly for the satire, but I mean, they do it every day.
So what do you say to people who say, if we play by the rules, and if we get into the ring wearing gloves and saying we're going to fight by the Marcus of Queensbury rules, and they get in with an axe, it's not fair.
I mean, shouldn't we fight back?
It's a very slippery slope.
It's a very slippery slope.
And, you know, you can only do that to a certain point until we just, we've completely destroyed each other and there's nothing left.
So, you know, I do think that there is some sort of awakening happening right now.
Even with the left, you know, you look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a lot of the mainstream moderate Democrats have come out against her and said, what are you talking about?
Or you have no idea how you're going to pay for this.
You know, we need to look at something better.
So I think that there is a little bit of an awakening happening.
And if we can use that as the catalyst and take the high ground instead of constantly getting down in the mud with the other side, we're going to come out better.
Wow.
That's the most optimistic thing anybody said to me in 2018, I think.
Well, I work with Glenn Beck, so I have to find some way to get some optimism in there.
Yes, that is absolutely true.
Where do you place Trump in all this?
I mean, what do you think the effect of him has been?
Hurricane Trump is what we have.
Yes, Hurricane Trump.
I mean, he certainly doesn't help it.
I do know, you know, Stu Bergier, Glenn's co-host, does always like to say he just doesn't like to pay attention to anything that he says, that he tweets, anything like that.
Just look at policies in particular.
I can see why he would want to do that.
But, you know, anytime that our president is coming out saying anything controversial, I just wish someone would take away his Twitter, really.
Just take away his phone.
But he doesn't help that.
But he's fighting with the media and he's in this constant battle with who is going to be the martyr and who is going to be the winner in this one particular battle.
And it doesn't, I feel like as the president of the United States, he should take the high road.
It doesn't always happen.
I wish that he would because then we could at least say, hey, the leader of the Republican Party is the one setting the example for everyone else.
But someone has to do it first.
And it sure ain't going to be the media.
Well, that is the thing.
I mean, that is the answer to this.
You know, I know a lot of people, sometimes me, who say, if, you know, I mean, if we could take Trump's Twitter away, the guy would be on the $20 bill at this point.
He has accomplished a lot.
He has done a lot of good things.
Everything has.
And done a lot of things with the press screaming that we were all going to die.
I've seen that before.
I mean, Giuliani did that in New York.
He transformed New York.
He was called a racist every single day by the New York Times.
Reagan did it, and he was called all those names.
They said everything about Reagan that they say about Trump, obviously different people, but still.
What do you say to people who say he's fighting back?
I mean, we watched George W. Bush, and Karl Rove has admitted this.
We watched George W. Bush just take him on the chin day after day, too dignified, too presidential to fight back.
Trump fights back, and a lot of people, especially his base, say, yeah, it's about time.
There's a way to fight back in which you're still not going negative.
So you could point out, you know, the New York Times had a misleading article about me.
It was completely false.
And then you could say, you know, look at the economy, look at the statistics, look at the jobs, and you could say you can fight back in a way that you're not getting down in the dirt.
You're not calling the press the enemy of the country.
You know, you're not making these inflammatory remarks, but you're still pointing out, look at all these things that I've done a good job on.
Look at the economy numbers.
I mean, these are actual statistics that he could be spouting off to everyone anytime anything negative is said about him.
And he just, he chooses to get in the mud every single time instead of sticking to all of the positive things he could say.
I mean, one of the reasons I think he is both effective and harms himself is he's actually one of them.
He is one of the media.
He's a media guy.
And so he understands, he understands that he can't let the attacks stand, but he also fights back in the same way they fight with him.
I mean, everything they do to him, he does back to them.
And a lot of us, I mean, I get a lot of glee out of that when he's right, but it can be awful.
So when I look at the polls and I look at the economy, and I think everybody is thinking this, like, where is his popularity?
And there's a lot of reasons why he doesn't have it.
If you're talking to an ordinary person, by which I mean somebody who's not in the media, there must still be people left who are not in the media.
Lucky them.
Lucky them.
What would you say to them?
If you were going to write a book said, how to watch the news, what would it say?
How to watch the news.
Don't.
Is that an answer?
Don't watch the news.
I think that you have to decide for yourself what your principles are, what is important to you.
So, you know, I mean, a big part of the reason that Trump won that the Democrats completely overlooked was what we call flyover nation.
So there are these people that, you know, they're middle class and they're historically Democrat, right?
They voted for Obama, but they were finding that the Democrats were not paying attention to them.
They were paying attention to the LGBTQ XYZ brigade and they were paying attention to the bathroom rules and they were paying attention to all of these things and they left out a giant portion of the nation.
So these people are saying, my paycheck is important to me.
You know, where my money goes is important to me.
You know, my job is important to me.
And they're leaving all of those people out.
So I think that they need to watch the news according to what is important to them and their life, which, again, is why we have the news and why it matters.
That is very good advice.
And yeah, the news and why it matters is a good thing.
I have to ask you one more question, a personal question.
Okay.
Because I saw this online.
This is the only reason.
For those many people listening to the show, if they can't see you, you're absolutely lovely and you look like a fashion model.
Thank you.
You weighed 100 pounds more.
Yes.
I saw a picture of you.
You were unrecognizable.
I was fat.
We can say that.
How did you fix it?
We're not PC around where I'm from.
Yes, I was.
I was very fat.
So it was a little over, it was probably 12 years ago.
And I was in my last semester at college.
And I just decided I wanted to go into law enforcement.
And so I wanted to get ready for that.
I knew I couldn't do it being so overweight.
So low carb, exercised every day.
So no sugar, no bread.
Wow.
Yes.
And I did it.
It took me two years.
Well, it should tell you 100 pounds.
Yeah, I did it the right way.
Right.
I did it the right way.
So it took me two years.
And I got pregnant, gained a little bit of weight back with pregnancy and then lost it again.
Wow.
Just with the same style modifications.
And do you still live that way?
I do.
Wow.
I do.
I'm impressed.
Yeah.
I haven't touched a carb in 10 years now.
Every once in a while.
Every once in a while, I make an exception.
Very impressive.
Sarah Gonzalez, the news and why it matters on the blazer.
Really nice talking to you.
And I hope you hope to see you again soon.
Thank you so much for having me.
I have to show you one thing from the weather channel.
If you haven't seen this yet, it's been all over online.
But do we have this clip of this guy pretending that he's walking into the wind to show you how bad the hurricane is?
Just play this clip.
Okay, picking it up here in Wilmington, North Carolina, right at the Intra Coastal, and we're in one of these bands.
This is about as nasty as it's been.
We had some fans like this last night, and then the eye wall this morning, we were not on TV.
It was the dark and raucous night at the hotel.
And this wind gusting again over 60 miles an hour.
He's blowing by pieces of limbs.
Hilarious.
What's happening is, if you can't see it, he's pretending to lean into this powerful wind while two people stroll by in back of him, clearly unaffected.
And if you watch the plants, the wind is blowing in the same direction as he's leaning.
So he's not even leaning in the right direction.
Constitutional Misinterpretation00:05:00
So if we distrust the news media just a little bit from time to time, like feeling they're all a bunch of liars and lowlifes, that's why that is a perfect, it's like a metaphor.
It's like a metaphor for the rest of the media.
All right, our crappy culture.
Today, as I'm sure each and every one of you knows, is Constitution Day.
Did anybody know that but me?
Yes.
Everybody.
That's why I like that.
I love to see this.
Constitution.
Judge Don, federal Judge Don Willett, has a piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he recounts the famous story of Benjamin Franklin, who made the last great speech of his life urging the signing of the Constitution with, as he said, all its flaws.
And after he signed it, he came out and the people, the crowd in Philadelphia shouted at him, what have we got?
Have we got a monarchy or a republic?
And Franklin said, you've got a republic if you can keep it.
And Judge Willett writes that the Constitution inaugurated a revolutionary design, Madisonian architecture infused with Newtonian genius, three separate co-equal branches locked in synchronous orbit by competing interests, ambition counteracting ambition.
But the truly extraordinary element was that these three rival branches derive their power from three unrivaled words inscribed on the page in supersized script, we the people.
And he talks about, he quotes Thomas Jefferson, wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
So let's see here's how informed the people are.
My friends at Campus Reform, we love these guys, went out, and now this is actually two years ago, I think.
They went out and asked people whether the Constitution was being treated as if it were too important.
If people were paying too much attention to the Constitution, here's what they said.
I feel like sometimes people use the Constitution as an excuse to not think and to not work towards progress.
I come from North Carolina, and there are a lot of people in that area who, I think, take the Constitution too seriously.
The Constitution was written.
It was kind of vague and used in the language that we don't use anymore.
A lot of people just don't understand what it means.
In a large part, I think the text of the Constitution itself and a lot of the amendments are probably taken a little bit too seriously.
That attitude has a lot to do with sort of like our, I don't know, path-dependent reliance on the Constitution and the way we're sometimes afraid to think, I don't know, in more utopian ways.
A lot of arguments and in some saying, oh, well, this is what the Constitution says, so therefore this is what it is.
People tend to want to read the Constitution very strictly when in reality it's a living document.
It changes with time.
You know, we have to keep updating.
Like we would update anything after, you know, like the dictionary is updated like once a week.
I mean, I think the Founding Fathers definitely didn't intend for the Constitution to have, I mean, just direct interpretation.
I don't believe in direct interpretation of the Constitution.
So we're in deep, deep trouble.
I like the girl who said, it prevents us from thinking utopian thoughts in a more utopian way.
That's its purpose.
That is the purpose of the Constitution.
It was written by people who knew, it was written by people who understood what human beings are, how flawed they are, how sinful they are, how ambitious, how selfish they are.
And it pitted us against one another to keep the government from taking away our freedoms, which is its natural, the natural thing that it does.
Study more, learn more, don't be a moron, you know, figure out why they wrote the Constitution.
It can be changed.
There's nothing wrong with changing it and updating it, but it is one of the greatest political documents.
It is the greatest political document ever made.
You know, there's only one original, radical political thought, one, and that is that you should govern yourself.
Everything else is Pharaoh.
Everything else is Pharaoh.
It may be Pharaoh for equality.
It may be Pharaoh for, you know, because we can run the economy better than you can.
It may be Pharaoh because we're the experts and you're not.
It's all pharaoh, except for the Constitution, except for the idea that you should govern yourself.
It's a radical idea.
We do not want to lose it.
We should cling to it with everything we have got.
All right, some of you may have noticed that Michael Knowles wasn't here today.
I didn't, but some of you may have.
That was because he had a little accident.
I accidentally backed over him with my car three times.
No, no, no.
We just, we were plays.
He's coming up.
He'll have his show and he will be back.
We didn't fire him.
Ben hasn't fired him yet.
I'm the last guy to get the memo, so he hasn't fired him yet.
Tomorrow, we will be back.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin show.
year.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Accident Alert00:00:19
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.