Ralph Northam’s 1984 blackface/KKK yearbook photo—initially denied, then "moonwalked" away—exposes Democrats’ hypocrisy: they weaponize racism accusations to silence abortion debates while ignoring their own extremism, like Virginia’s near-birth abortions. The NFL’s 2–2.5% annual youth participation drop mirrors broader cultural shifts—CTE’s 99% prevalence in deceased players and Goodell’s rule changes alienate fans, while leftist orthodoxy dismisses "tests of manhood" as toxic, even as anxiety and bullying surge. From Northam’s infanticide-enabling policies to the NFL’s decline, the episode frames modern crises as symptoms of a society prioritizing performative wokeness over life, health, or tradition. [Automatically generated summary]
Infanticidal Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is in trouble because he appeared in a racist picture in his 1984 med school yearbook.
The Democrat governor, who believes babies should be left to die if you don't want them, apologized for being in the photo, which shows one person in blackface and one in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
Northam apologized for the photo, saying, quote, from now on, I promise to kill babies without dressing up in offensive costumes, unquote.
Although it's unclear whether Northam was the Klansman in the photo or the blackface guy, Democrats scrambled to condemn the baby killer for his racist med school hijinks.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called for Northam's resignation, saying, quote, the Democrat Party is the party of killing children, not the party of the Ku Klux Klan.
Well, okay, it's also the party of the Ku Klux Klan, but not recently.
Now we just do the whole baby killing thing without the sheets over our heads.
The governor must resign so we can stop being distracted by our racist past and go forward into the future with the good work of slaughtering America's children, unquote.
Other Democrat spokesmen tried to cover for Northam.
CNN, for instance, reported that Northam was a Republican, hoping this would deflect blame from their party.
The ruse failed, however, when viewers managed to identify Northam as a Democrat by his Klan outfit.
Democrat Corey Booker, who recently managed to declare he was running for president without anyone noticing, also made a comment, but nobody noticed that either.
Something about this being a moral moment and how much he likes gladiator movies, I don't know.
Tom Perez, the grand dragon of the Democrat Party, told a gathering of Democrats, also known as a press conference, quote, I really feel caught in a crossfire, and I literally mean a cross on fire.
Sorry, that's a Democrat joke from the old days.
I guess it's sort of inappropriate now, unquote.
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-donkey.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is ippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Psychopathic ideas make sane men do crazy things.
That's the price of having a philosophy that makes no sense.
I made a lot of conservatives angry during the Obama years by defending Barack Obama from the charge that he was evil.
The people who said Obama was evil, to my mind, were spoiled Americans who never saw what evil looks like when it's in power.
Here's a hint, there are an awful lot of dead bodies.
Obama wasn't evil at all, but because his socialist and multicultural ideas made no sense and weren't in keeping with reality, he did crazy things with evil consequences, like strengthening this terrorist state of Iran and abridging our precious American freedoms through the abuse of regulatory agencies.
Likewise, the Democrat Party.
In seeking a non-existent sort of equality among human beings, Democrats are trying to declare a world that has no qualities at all.
They want to pretend that all religions are equal, so they ignore the fact that some religions are actually more wise and moral than others.
They want to pretend there's no such thing as the state of being a woman or a man because that's unfair and unequal.
Therefore, they have to believe that pregnancy can have no consequences and can be eradicated by a simple medical procedure with no moral meaning.
They want to pretend that all outcomes would be equal in a perfect world, and therefore they have to pretend that anyone who believes in freedom, which will always result in unequal outcomes, must be a bigot.
And therefore, they've turned racism from a stupid and evil philosophy into a mythic monster hiding under every bed.
The Democrats aren't evil, but their ideas are false and are leading them down evil, crazy paths, psycho-paths.
We'll talk more about that in a second, but first, take a look at this face.
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All right, we've got Michael Knowles coming on.
Valentine Moore's Responsibility00:15:07
We're going to talk football because Knowles was a linebacker, I think, wasn't he?
Oh, no, he was actually the football.
They used him as the ball.
He is the star of Another Kingdom.
Please go on Amazon.com and pre-order the novel Another Kingdom.
It's out in March.
It would really help if you would order a copy today.
And I think you'll get some goodies for it if you keep the receipt.
You know, one of the things that the Democrat Party is making clear is that people like me, who were absolutely shocked by Donald Trump when he first came down the pike and opposed him with everything, were not seeing something.
We're missing something that the people saw.
The people, after being berated and abused by the left, understood that they were undermining our traditions and our ideas and just the traditions of sanity and ideas in ways that were so bad that it was going to take somebody like Donald Trump, somebody as amazingly out of off base as Donald Trump, to stop them.
I didn't see that until he actually became president and started doing, I think, a good job.
I don't always like him, but I think he has done a pretty good job.
But the people saw this before the intellectuals.
You know, let me talk about Ralph Northam, this whole thing.
I'm sure you've heard they found a right-wing site, found his medical school yearbook, and he was in there, apparently, we will say, opposing in a picture.
There was a guy in blackface and a guy standing next to him in a Klan outfit.
There's the picture if you're watching.
And we'll get into his whole excuses and everything like this.
And I want to say something about this first.
Dressing up as a Klansman, I was alive.
This is back in the 80s, 25 years ago.
He was, I guess, 25.
It's more than 25 years ago, right?
It's like 35 years ago.
It's back in the 80s.
Doing this, it was offensive then.
It was offensive, stupid.
I myself feel like people should be allowed to do offensive, stupid things and recover.
You know, everybody is saying this is the terrible thing he did.
For me, the terrible thing is calling for babies to be left to die if you don't want them.
And on the least excuse, that was the law they wanted to pass in Virginia and didn't, but kind of like the law they did pass in New York.
When he said that, I thought that should have been the end of his career.
I thought two police officers should have come in, picked him up as advocating child murder and carried him away.
This, you know, I'm sorry, if people cannot be jerks, you know, I know a med student who took a severed hand from a cadaver and left it at a toll booth, okay?
Handed it to the guy in the toll booth.
Med students get up to hijinks.
They're, you know, working 100 hours a day.
They're going crazy.
They're sticking their hands in dead bodies all day long.
They go a little nuts.
You know, I don't know.
Is he a racist?
You tell me.
I don't think he's a racist.
However, however, he is a hypocrite.
He has been dishonest since this happened.
And he is an infanticidal maniac in his philosophy.
So I just want to put that out there.
I'm not, I feel that what the right has done is we've adopted, we've been hit.
You know, the left hits us on racism no matter what we say.
Oh, we want to protect our borders.
You're a racist.
Oh, you know, we think people should be free.
You're a racist.
We think welfare is not such a good idea.
It destroys families.
You're a racist.
So everything, oh, you said this, you're a racist.
You put this in this way.
We're not even going to ask.
Like when they tag Trump with being a racist, it's always for something that he said that could be interpreted another way, but they never ask.
They never say at Charlottesville, when you said there were people, good people on both sides, what were you talking about?
Which both sides were you talking about?
Because it's absurd to think he was talking about white supremacists and Nazis.
He was obviously talking about the argument over statues and whether statues should be taken down.
Not one reporter has asked.
They've just posed in front of the camera and called him a racist.
Not one, not one.
Somebody send me a name of one reporter who has said to him, could you clarify what you meant by that?
They don't want to clarify.
They just want to get him.
So we hit back with this stuff.
We start to say, oh, here's a picture you took in med school and it's offensive.
And it is offensive.
I'm not excusing it.
I'm just saying if people can't be offensive in their youth, the only people who will be run for office were not only just women, they will be the most prissy, uptight, humorless women imaginable.
That's the only people who'll be able to run because guys get up to a lot of hijinks in their youth and that's part of being a guy and boys will be boys.
So first of all, this is exposed.
Nobody found it before.
They found every trace of what Brett Kavanaugh ever did, but somehow the Washington Post could not unearth this because democracy dies in bloviating Super Bowl ads about how wonderful you are.
They never found anything like this, completely lost this.
The OPO research never came up with it.
Now they came up with it.
So the first thing he says, he comes out and he apologizes and he admits that he's one of the people in the photos.
He can't remember whether he's the Klansman or the guy in Blackface.
This is cut number six.
My fellow Virginians, earlier today I released a statement apologizing for behavior in my past that falls far short of the standard you set for me when you elected me to be your governor.
I believe you deserve to hear directly from me.
That photo and the racist and offensive attitudes it represents does not reflect that person I am today or the way that I have conducted myself as a soldier, a doctor, and a public servant.
I am deeply sorry.
I cannot change the decisions I made, nor can I undo the harm my behavior caused then and today.
But I accept responsibility for my past actions and I am ready to do the hard work of regaining your trust.
So he accepts responsibilities for a while.
And we should mention, by the way, just talking about hypocrisy, this guy won an election over Ed Gillespie, the Republican.
And we played the ad at the time.
Remember, there was some Latino PAC after Gillespie said something about MS-13 gangs operating in Virginia and said that this was a problem.
We should take care of the border.
A Latino PAC ran an ad.
It wasn't Northam's campaign, but a PAC ran an ad in which a guy with a Confederate flag and a pickup truck and a Gillespie bumper sticker tried to run down minority children.
He was going to drive over them, okay?
And Northam never denounced the ad, and instead he actually kind of used the ad and said, accused Gillespie of racist rhetoric and fear-mongering.
So this is a guy who has played the race card.
He played the race card.
I remember because, of course, Charlottesville is in Virginia.
He played the race card against Trump when he said those things, those kind of insensitive and tone-deaf things that I don't believe were racist, but they were tone-deaf and insensitive.
And he went after him for that.
So he has been playing this a lot.
So now, first he says, he says, oh, yes, I accept responsibility.
And everybody's calling for him to resign.
Even Democrats, all the Democrats are calling for him to resign.
Not so much responsibility, please.
Sit here and hypothesize or speculate how it happened, but I can only imagine that if there are a number of photos laid out on a table and someone is pasting those on page after page, that one could get mistakenly put on the wrong page.
And as I said earlier, this has happened numerous times in this particular yearbook, and I suspect that's what happened in this case.
Governor, how do you expect people to believe you?
Because yesterday we're accepting responsibility for this.
And then within less than 24 hours, you say, no, it wasn't me.
You can find it hard to believe how good people are having a heartbeat that people are having a hard time.
Why should they believe?
I'm accepting, excuse me, accepting responsibility that this photograph was on my page in the yearbook.
I regret that.
It is horrific.
It made me sick when I saw it.
But I will tell you that my word, I will stand and live by my word.
I was the president of the VMI Honor Court.
Our code there is a cadet shall not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those dudes.
That's the most meaningful thing to me in my life.
I tell the truth.
I'm telling the truth today.
That was not my picture.
I don't believe you.
I don't believe you because if I was in a picture like that, I would remember.
And he said he was in it.
And I just don't believe you would make a mistake about this.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing I got to play.
This one thing.
He did admit that he was in Blackface playing Michael Jackson and doing a moonwalk in some kind of performance.
Clearly, this was something going on at the school.
And a reporter asked him, his wife is standing next to him.
And reporter asked him, can you still do the moonwalk?
And he almost breaks into a moonwalk.
Listen to this.
Are you still able to move?
Inappropriate circumstances.
My wife says, inappropriate circumstances.
He's still the same jerk.
He's still the same guy.
He would have done it right there.
He'd have put on blackface if his wife hadn't been standing next to him going, no, don't do the don't know blackface.
Don't do that.
It's inappropriate.
It's like, I got to admit, that's why we have wives because we're all kind of jerks.
But that guy is still the same guy he was in med school.
So like he's having a hard time.
People are calling for him to resign.
He's digging in, which is not going to look a good look for the Democrat Party.
But we'll get back to this in just a second.
First, let us talk about Valentine's Day.
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My wife should be here going, that's inappropriate.
This isn't an appropriate moment.
Anyway, the guy is a complete buffoon.
And like, you know, the way he handled this has been so bad.
But what I love about it, what I love about it, is it's really about they will do anything to distract from the fact that they are baby-killing loons.
They are baby-killing loons.
They do not want to talk about it.
Stephen Moore tried to bring this up on CNN.
He tried to bring up the point that this comes right after his extremist abortion views.
Listen to the CNN panel gang up on him and shut him down.
You want to talk about a politician who has had a bad week.
I mean, you kind of didn't exactly report what happened this week when I think it was quoted as relax the abortion restrictions.
I mean, this was basically a bill that he supported that literally allowed, I mean, almost literally allows an abortion up until the time you cut the umbilical cord.
That's not the point, Steve.
All I'm saying is that the first came out this week.
I don't want to get into the debate about abortion.
That's what he said was concerned.
But he's under assault for that, too.
And I would make the case that was an even worse offense than this picture.
Okay.
Okay, well, now you just now.
Let's talk about.
No, no, no, no.
Steve, we want to talk about the issue of racism.
And I know you would like to divert the issue to a conversation that's more comfortable for you.
What's more comfortable to Moore about abortion than racism?
What is he accusing Moore of being a racist?
It's absurd.
Why can't Moore say that you're trying to divert the conversation to something that is easy for you?
And the reason is they blame the whole thing on Donald Trump.
It's all Trump.
Whenever they're, it's not them being racist.
It's them trying to set an example.
This is what the New York Times said.
They're setting an example.
They're setting an example to Donald Trump.
Watch us.
We're going to get rid of Ralph Northam.
That's the way you should be.
You should get rid of yourself for your racist nonsense.
Here is Brian Stelter pulling this on Howard Dean.
It's just a wonderful, wonderful exchange.
So much about it worth talking about.
Let's listen to that.
I noticed you retweeted Obama-era healthcare, Administrator Andy Slavet.
He wrote this on Twitter.
He said, if you've worn blackface or you've repeatedly said President Obama was born in Africa, you should resign.
The point here is clear.
It's a remark about President Trump's own racist history.
Do you see a double standard at play, Howard?
Oh, sure, there is.
I'm on the Republicans.
I mean, they have no morals at all.
I mean, the Republicans are happy to ask Ralph Northam to resign.
They have a much worse guy who's heading their party.
It's ridiculous.
Republicans have no morals at all.
That's the usual measured Howard Dean take on it.
But I mean, the fact that Trump promulgated that whole birther nonsense, and it was nonsense, but I didn't think that was racist either.
I thought Peggy Noonan pegged that when she said, you know, it was just that Obama was not a typical American president.
He didn't have the patriotism.
He didn't believe in American exceptionalism.
He went around apologizing for America to tyrants.
He didn't feel like he was one of us, not because of the color of his skin, but because of the color of his patriotism.
That's why.
And that's why that Kenya thing made sense to a lot of people.
It was not, I don't believe, racism.
But the thing is, it's all about deflecting from the madness, the psychopathy of their philosophy.
You know, you want to see a wonderful thing?
Here's a wonderful moment in which Michael Moore tells the truth.
The filmmaker Michael Moore goes on and says, we've got to stop with this being moderate.
We've got to be extremist all the way.
If you're moderate, stop being moderate.
Take a position.
All right.
There's no middle ground anymore.
There's no halfway point to should somebody be paid a living wage.
Well, I'm a moderate, so I think they could be paid half of a living wage.
You know, on the issue of choice, there's no halfway there.
You're either for it or you're against it.
You know, do you believe in equal rights for women?
Do you believe that we should have an equal rights amendment?
Yes or no?
There's no middle ground.
This is no time for moderation.
He's absolutely right.
There is no middle ground between killing a baby and not killing a baby.
You can't sort of kill the baby.
You can't a little kill the baby.
You kill the baby or you don't kill the baby.
Their philosophy has taken them to this place.
It has taken them back to paganism where they're going to start sacrificing children.
It is absolutely, he's absolutely right about this.
And this is the thing that the left is scrambling to cover up because this is what the biggest gun that Donald Trump has in his arsenal.
Conservative Confusion00:03:43
You know, there was a piece by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine that was so wonderful because Andrew Sullivan, I don't know if you remember, he's the writer, he's gay, and he kind of announced himself as a conservative, which was total nonsense.
But he called himself a conservative.
And he was the one who went crazy about whether Sarah Palin's child triggered was actually Sarah Palin's child.
And I've always felt that the guy was a little bit loopy and he had this kind of weird craziness that kind of swooped every now and again into something that sounded like common sense.
So in New York Magazine, he has an article called The Nature of Sex.
And he starts out talking about a radical feminist organization called the Women's Liberation Front that went on a panel to the conservative Heritage Foundation and argued that sex was fundamentally biological and not socially constructed.
And they were given a route.
This is his words, giving a rousing round of applause by the Trump supporters, religious right members, natural law theorists, and conservative intellectuals who comprised much of the crowd because they were talking common sense.
They were talking against something called the inequality of the equal, oh, they were talking about the Equality Act, the Equality Act, which is a big thing that they're trying to get where trans people will be treated as whoever they want to say they are.
It's a federal non-discrimination bill that's been introduced multiple times in various ways and would add gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Here's the problem with this for gay people.
And I'm going to use my own words, but this is basically what Andrew Sullivan says: is that if there is no such thing as gender, if gender is not a biological fact, then gay people cease to exist.
What is a gay person?
A gay man is a man who wants to sleep with another man.
A gay woman, a lesbian, is a woman who wants to have sex, who is attracted to other women.
If a guy can say that he's a woman and sleep with a woman, therefore be a lesbian, the meaning of lesbianism just disappears because once you start talking nonsense, you get into a nonsensical world.
I'm going to tell this old joke.
This will probably get me in trouble, but I'm going to tell it anyway.
Two gay guys standing outside Sachs Fifth Avenue in New York, and a gorgeous, gorgeous woman walks out.
And the two gay guys are riveted.
They stand and they look at this beautiful, beautiful woman as she walks out.
She's classic New York, gorgeous, model-like beauty.
She gets into a cab, she swoops in the cab and disappears.
And one gay guy turns to the other and says, wow, don't you sometimes wish you were a lesbian?
And the reason that's a funny joke is because it shows you that gender and preference are real things.
Sex and preference are real things.
They're part of people's personalities.
And you can't just erase them.
And once you do that, once the left wants to do that, even their own people start to disappear, just like the babies, just like the lives, the real lives of the babies start to disappear once you start talking nonsense.
Once you start talking nonsense, you don't have to be an evil person.
You don't have to be an evil person to start doing evil things.
You only have to accept ideas that do not make sense.
That's why we should distinguish between a guy, you know, classically like Hitler, who sets out to do something evil, like exterminate a race of people, and a guy like Barack Obama, who is in no way evil, but whose ideas don't work.
It doesn't work to treat all cultures as the same.
It doesn't make moral sense to apologize for a free nation to slave states like Saudi Arabia.
That doesn't make sense.
The other day, one of the new Muslim congresswomen said, well, we should treat everybody in the Middle East the same.
Distinguishing Between Ideas00:03:36
And I thought, no, because this little country, Israel, this little sliver of a country, Israel, is a free country and these other countries are not.
We should treat them very differently.
The left has convinced themselves that in order for there to be equality, there must be no qualities.
Nothing must have qualities that can be judged one from another.
And so they've talked themselves into a nonsense that makes even their own condemnation of racism make no sense.
They have really pushed their philosophy to the brink of evil.
When they start talking about leaving babies to die, they're really at the brink of evil and good people are following them over that cliff.
You know, I'm going to, and I know I want to bring on Michael Knowles, talk about the Super Bowl, but before I do, I just want to play this one clip from our friends at Live Action.
They took some women, interviewed them about their views on abortion, and then showed them a picture of abortion.
And I asked that the videos of abortions be cut out, and we just put the women's reactions before and after they actually saw the abortion.
What are your thoughts about abortion?
Abortion, I'd rather no one, I don't really like abortion, I'd rather it didn't exist.
I'm not very for abortion, but there are times when you do need abortion and it's up to that person and their rights and what they want to do.
I didn't know that you'd have to detach and crush and the process it goes through and all the risks that happens with this.
So now that I do know, I just, you can, there's so many other options apart from abortion.
I know it sucks and like the consequences and how it happened and why you might want an abortion, but there's always another option and you just got to suck it up because it's a life.
I did think that rape was like an exception for an abortion, but now that you think of it, some people try so hard to conceive a baby and it doesn't, it's so hard and it doesn't happen.
So you can always put your child up for adoption.
There's always another option.
I think everyone should have a right to it.
It's our body.
It's our decision, right?
So we want to go ahead with the pregnancy or to abort it.
It should be solely on the person who's carrying the baby.
So yeah, that's what I feel about it.
Would you both support abortion all the way up to the moment of birth?
Oh yeah, I do.
I do.
Yes.
That was heart-wrenching, I guess.
I mean, yeah, I mean, until you see something like that, you don't often think that you're going to change your opinion, right?
I mean, that's something I would, I would never want anyone to go through, right?
Not myself, not her, not anyone.
I'm a mom to one, right?
And I had no idea this is how abortion takes place, right?
Looking at that video and the way it was performed, yeah, it's an eye-opener.
So no, I don't think any kid, any baby, any infant, I mean, you know, any fetus should go through that.
No.
That's from our friends at Live Action.
It's an amazing video, but all it is is confronting people.
As long as you're following the psychopathic logic and going down the psychopath, you will get to a place where you say, oh yeah, abortion till the moment of birth.
But once you look at the reality, once they put the reality in front of you, once people are allowed to argue back, suddenly it disappears.
And that's why the left is always silencing people.
It's always like, well, you can't say that because you're not a woman.
You can't say that because you're not black.
You can't say that because it's not politically correct.
You can't say that because it's racist.
You can't say it because it's sexist.
They have to do it because their logic is psychopathic.
And once you get to the reality of it, once you face the reality of it, it all falls apart.
Hey, you know, we had, we scheduled a backstage state of the union, but Nancy Pelosi disinvited us.
Confronting Reality00:15:58
So we had to move it.
But at long last, it is coming back.
The Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, the original Michael Knowles, and me will be taking on all the pressing issues of the day.
And as always, the lovely Alicia Krauss will be classing up the joint as much as she possibly can.
It's an uphill battle, taking your questions as they roll in.
Will we finally see Trump deliver the State of the Union?
Tune in to find out.
Only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions.
So go to DailyWire.com and subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month, $100 for the year.
And you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, which hopefully you're going to need.
We've got Michael Knowles coming up to talk about the Super Bowl and football.
All right.
How you doing?
Long time RC.
It's good to see you.
You're in New York.
I was.
I was in New York.
I was in New Haven.
And I was in the air during the entirety of the Super Bowl.
Were you really?
I was the whole time.
I didn't miss much.
I didn't miss very much.
I don't think I saw less of the Super Bowl than the majority of Americans at this point.
It was kind of interesting because I actually like defense, and the Rams have a couple of great defensive players, but it's not like baseball where a well-pitched game is kind of exciting.
It's like after a while, you're like, could you please score?
Could you do anything?
You know, I landed last night at about 9 or 10 o'clock, and I landed in the terminal where the Rams had taken off from.
So they had all these balloons over the entrance, and it said there, this is where champions depart.
I thought, oh, they got to update that sign.
That's not so great.
You know, very often you have me speak about things that I know nothing about.
Never more has this been true than when it comes to football.
You're not a football guy.
I don't like football.
I love baseball.
Football I don't care about, but it looks like the American people are finally catching up with me.
This Super Bowl has a 10-year low in ratings.
Really?
This is according to deadline just came out.
I mean, the NFL has done everything they can.
Why they let that guy, what's his name, Goodall?
Why they let him stay in position?
He has done everything he can to destroy this organization.
They just think they can go woke and woke and woke and never go broke, and it just does not make sense.
It is an amazing confluence of factors that are, some are political, some are administrative, and some are just scientific and the facts of the game that are driving people away from football.
The future of football is not looking great.
It really is not.
It's not.
Just from a scientific perspective.
We hear all the time about the health effects of long-term football playing.
A study came out from Orlando Health in collaboration with the Concussion Neuroimaging Consortium.
It showed that the lasting effects of football, not the short-term effects, but the lasting ones, now start happening at a much younger age than we expected.
Not just professional, it's college, it can be high school football too.
What the study tested were these biomarkers in blood called micro-RNA, and it found that college football players had elevated levels of these biomarkers, which indicate concussions before the season even started.
So even before the season.
So even during practice, you mean.
Just during practice.
So.
So wait, when you say that this is showing up earlier, you mean they're detecting it earlier because they have better equipment or actually the effects are showing up.
No, the effects that will persist throughout the entire life begin not just in the NFL, not even just in college.
They can begin very, very young.
I know.
So now you've got a parent and is, you know, like, you know, they came and asked me to play football in high school, and there was like 11 guys running over my head.
Yeah, they came and asked me, they said, Michael, you Adonis of a man, can you please lead our team?
I said, I'm sorry, fellas, I got a tap dance.
I got big fast, you know, so they were like, they were kind of drooling you.
You know, yeah, we'll put you on the line, and then everyone will stomp on your head.
It'll be great.
I'd be really good.
What do you want to do?
You want to be a writer someday?
Oh, okay, that's fine.
Same reason I didn't take drugs.
Well, and now there are studies of ex-NFL players after they've died.
They're doing post-mortems, and it's showing some pretty scary stuff.
We know 190% of all professional football players suffer chronic migraines for the rest of their lives.
They have a greater light sensitivity.
They have higher rates of depression and anxiety.
And they also suffer chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
So this is what was that?
It's a thing that I can barely pronounce.
It's a degenerative brain disease.
There was a big study on this in 2017.
Former NFL players after they died, 99% of them exhibited.
CTE, the signs of this degenerative brain disease.
Aaron Hernandez, you remember he committed murder, then he killed himself in 2015.
He showed a very severe case of CTE.
And plus, you've got just simple chronic pain.
88 to 93% of NFL players have chronic pain for the rest of their lives.
You know, one of the things is, I mean, I love gladiatorial sports.
I mean, I love boxing.
I love football and all this.
But you go back, if you look at Muhammad Ali, right, the guy had a body that's kind of a recognizable human body.
He looked like a guy in good shape, you know.
But now you look at like an actor, I mean, that guy, Maroon 5 guy, who took off his shirt.
You look at this guy and you think like that, you know, that is an amazing advance in people being in shape.
So people are stronger, bigger, tougher.
They train better.
But the human head remains exactly as soft as it always was.
So it's like now I watch a boxing match and the guy gets hit once and I'm like, stop the fight!
Oh, dear God, there's an anode.
Look at them.
I mean, they're just machines.
Right.
And this is why now parents are not letting their kids play football.
You saw, I'm about to endorse Kamala Harris in 2020.
20 because of Trump.
Donald Trump said that he wouldn't let Barron play football.
And he then was extolling the virtues of soccer.
I know.
What the hell?
It's impeachment now.
We should impeach.
I'm fine.
I'm impeaching.
One way we could solve this is by bringing back gladiatorial slavery.
That's the only future of football.
I mean, because this isn't just anecdotally that the president says he wouldn't let his son play.
There was a study in Arizona.
Fewer parents are letting them play.
And since 2007, the National Association of State High Schools has noted that there's a drop in football interest.
It's declining about 2% or 2.5% per year.
And that's an acceleration from previous levels of it dropping.
So now people are asking, what's the future of football?
Some have said e-sports, read video games.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to watch a video game of this.
The others, New York Times suggested flag football, so you know that that's obviously not going to happen.
But now more young children, six to 12, are playing flag football than are playing real football.
Really?
Yeah, and it's just not going to work.
We want danger and we want reality.
We don't want to watch some virtual nonsense.
The trouble is the game is best when the game is dangerous.
And now that it's very dangerous, it's going to be tough for it to survive.
And the future is bleak for football.
And everything they do that tries to make it less dangerous makes it worse.
So like they'll tell you when you can hit the guy and you can only hit him here and you can only hit him there.
So their knees go.
If you hit them low, their knees go.
They call, the game gets ridiculous because they throw a flag every two minutes.
I mean, you know, something in my rogue heart just says, hey, you know, it's their choice.
It's their choice to play the game.
Nobody is, you know, I'm joking about gladiators.
You know, these guys have chosen the field.
Many of them love the sport.
I love the sport, but I'm not playing it, but I love watching it.
And, you know, I hate this nanny state where, you know, they say, well, we can't do that anymore.
But I don't hate parents protecting their children.
I mean, that is what it is.
When individual choices kill the game, the game will be killed.
And I don't think that this is going to be imposed from above.
I think Goodall, I think the NFL, as far as an administration, is doing a great job of destroying football.
I think Colin Kaepernick is doing a great job of destroying football.
And eventually parents aren't going to let their kids play it.
And then we'll move on to something else.
I don't really have a dog in this fight because I don't care about football.
I would love to see a return to a better sport, which is baseball, encouraging your kids to play that.
But I fear that the president is right.
I think that the future of football is soccer.
Oh, my God.
It's just not a good game.
I'm sorry.
And you know, it is funny.
When we were all making those jokes during the World Cup, all these people were yelling at us.
They were screaming.
I mean, really, people were really angry.
But none of them actually watched the sport.
Nobody watches.
Nobody watches soccer anymore.
Not in America.
There's kind of an irony to soccer, which is that it's the sport of the third world.
All you need is either a hunk of garbage or a severed human head, and you can kick it down a field.
So there's that.
But it also appears to be the sport of decadent cultures because no one wants to get hurt.
No one wants to do it.
I mean, not to get too high-flung about this, but there is this question to me about the testing of men.
I mean, I think that I got in a lot of fights when I was a kid.
You have the slightly crooked nose to brew it as you.
And, you know, I hated it.
I hated it then.
I didn't like it then.
And I haven't raised a hand in anger, literally.
I think the last fight I got into was outside a bowling alley when I was like 15, 16 years old, and I have not lifted a hand.
I mean, I raised two kids.
They never got even a swat on the backside from it.
I thought it was awful.
But it did teach me I could take a punch.
It did teach me that I could throw a punch and what it felt like so that I wouldn't be afraid if some guy was in my face and people have gotten in my face.
And the minute they look at me, they think like, oh, he's not going to back down.
He knows what this is like.
And it is something.
I hate bullies.
I mean, half the fights I got in were guys bullying other people.
But bullied, these terrible experiences do make men men.
And I do wonder if we take away, if our army is volunteered, so you only have a certain number of people.
Less than 1% of fighters.
I have a 1% of people.
And we don't have gladiatorial sports.
Where do men go to become men?
And you don't have bullying.
I mean, now the answer is if a bully comes in and confronts you, you just run to the teacher.
You don't ever confront the bully back.
You remember that video of the guy, the big kid who was being picked on?
The kid was fat, as he used the word.
And he was being picked on by this kid, and the kid pinched him violently.
The kid just picked him up and dropped him.
And they suspended him.
It was in Australia.
I think they suspended the kid who was being picked on.
I thought, suspend him.
Give him a prize.
Put him up as an example.
You wag your finger at him.
You say, wow, that was.
You shouldn't have done that.
You suspend the bully, yeah, right?
Of course.
And by the way, I think, you know, when we look at millennials and Gen Z, you see way higher than average rates of anxiety, depression, stress, suicide, attempted suicide.
I think a good part of this fragility of the safe space generation comes because they were never taught how to confront a bully, and so they enter into reality and they shatter.
They are horrified by reality.
And the more you take away a little vaccine of suffering when you're a kid, the more you take away of a little exposure to it, you're going to leave them quite fragile when they become adults.
I think it is true.
It's one of these wonderful things that's built into freedom that makes freedom fall apart.
All things fall apart.
What are you talking about on your show?
Today we're going to be talking about whether, and I'd like your thoughts on this.
Do you think it's worse to take an offensive photograph or to slaughter children after they're born?
What do you think?
I was talking about this.
I mean, this is another thing.
We're talking about men.
Like, I think it's an offensive thing to dress up as a Ku Klux Klan and all this stuff.
But can't you be a little bit of a jerk when you're a young man?
Isn't that the definition of being a young man?
Hold on, we're going to talk about this from not just, obviously there's the Northam side of it.
There's a man in India who's suing his parents for giving birth to him without his consent.
We're going to be talking about all of the consistency among the anti-life brigade because it's just, it seems to be the orthodoxy at the global left.
It is wonderful.
I think there's a line in Paradise Lost where Adam is so upset at being expelled from paradise, he says to God, did I request the Maker from my clay to mold me man?
I didn't ask to be born.
I didn't ask to be born.
All right, great to see you.
I'll talk to you soon.
Stuff I like.
Stuff I like.
Stuff I like BTPD.
Listen, over the weekend, I saw this Peter Jackson documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
And I'm a big World War I fan.
That is, I'm interested in it, and I'm fascinated by the fact that I've read, I think I've read at least 20 books on World War I, histories of World War I, and I still don't know why it started.
I don't know the underlying reasons why it started.
Nobody knows.
Nobody actually knows.
And yet it wiped away a generation, a million people, a million people from one side died, from the Allies died.
And basically, European civilization ended because World War II was actually part of World War I with a little bit of a downtime between.
What Peter Jackson has done, there's a wonderful museum in London called the Imperial War Museum.
And I've been through its exhibits, World War I exhibits many times, and they have wonderful interviews with guys who were there talking about describing it.
And so what Jackson did is he took their footage, their archival footage, he colorized it, and he added sound.
They went to the point of like lip-reading guys, of finding old orders that they were reading, like what was that guy reading there aloud, and then dubbing in the voices and mostly the sound brings it to life.
It's not an intellectual film.
It's not a film about the causes of the war or the reasons behind the war or what the war did to civilization.
It's simply about the experience of the ordinary British soldier going to war.
Do we have a little clip of this?
I was 16 years old and my father allowed me to go.
I was just turned 17 at the time.
I was 16.
And I was 15 years.
When they came to us, they were frightened children, and had to be made into soldiers.
Here it comes.
We're in the pictures.
I gave every part of my youth to do a job.
It's just...
It's just a brilliant, brilliant piece of work.
Jackson did a great job on it.
And I couldn't help but think as I was watching it, nothing like this should ever happen again, though it almost certainly will.
And I would never send anybody into this absolute hell of a conflagration that had no purpose and no point and destroyed the greatest civilization on earth up to that time.
But at the same time, I could not help but be deeply moved by the manhood, the simple courage of these guys who said we went to do a job.
I wasn't afraid.
I knew I might get killed, but I went to do it, and it was just something we had to do.
And the stuff that they endured, if you haven't read about it, it's just wonderful to see it, wonderful in the true sense of being a wonder to see it because you can imagine it.
You can imagine yourself there.
You can see what it was like, and it just takes you back in time.
The one thing that I noticed is that nobody is talking about the fact that they don't tell you, Americans don't know the poem that the title comes from.
It's a poem called For the Fallen by Lawrence Binion, who was one of the many, many poets of World War I.
Imagining The Battle00:02:05
And British people know this poem by heart because they read it every November 11th on Armistice Day.
They read it at the ceremony, but it has this, it's a sentimental poem about war.
But it says, they went with songs to the battle.
They were young, straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted.
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.
It is a terrific movie, and cheers to Peter Jackson for doing such a great job.
All right, we will be back tomorrow.
You know, I have to say, even I had a clavenless weekend because watching this Ralph Northam thing, I thought somebody ought to write a funny satire about this.
Oh, that's me.
And I wasn't there to do it, so it was kind of like a clavenless weekend, even for myself.
Don't forget, tomorrow is the backstage, and I will be back here on the Andrew Clavin Show.
I am Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is now denying that he appeared in a blackface KKK photo on his med school yearbook page one day after apologizing for appearing in a blackface KKK photo on his med school yearbook page.
We will analyze the brilliant Democrat strategy to get us all to stop talking about infanticide and start talking about stupid photographs.
Then we'll analyze the culture of life versus the culture of death.