Tucker Carlson faces the "great American outrage machine," where leftist activists weaponize old radio jokes—like his satirical take on a racist Democratic president—to silence conservatives, yet he refuses to apologize, defying the system’s power plays. Laura Carno exposes "mother-may culture," where adults defer to government over personal responsibility, citing California’s failing schools and gun laws that harm law-abiding citizens while empowering criminals. Meanwhile, Andrew Clavin debunks the "Lena Dunham fallacy," revealing how Hollywood’s glorification of anti-family lifestyles harms the poor, mirroring 1960s elite hypocrisy—proving culture wars aren’t just about politics but systemic betrayals of individual agency. [Automatically generated summary]
The Democrat National Committee has chosen Milwaukee, Wisconsin for its 2020 national convention.
DNC Chairman Vladimir Lennon, no relation, says he's thrilled the party will be traveling somewhere it's never been before.
In a statement released to a gathering of 85-year-old civil rights leaders with nothing better to do, Lennon said, quote, When I was first informed there was a populated area between New York and Los Angeles, I was like, Yeah, right.
But then I heard some of these wastelands include sentient creatures who can stand upright and use rude tools.
So I said, What the hell?
Hand me my gun and camera and let's go exploring.
I'm just hoping there won't be anyone there who prays to God or knows the Pledge of Allegiance by heart.
That's just creepy, and it's not who we are as Americans, unquote.
Former something or other Hillary Clinton says she'll be making an important speech at the July convention if she can get out of bed in time.
In a statement released to the rim of her toilet, Clinton said, quote, I'm looking forward to visiting Wisconsin for the first time and finding out why those SOBs didn't vote for me.
It's probably because they're a bunch of deplorable, backward-looking, undynamic pessimists who don't like blacks getting rights and women getting jobs.
But who knows?
Maybe it's something I said.
In any case, I feel sure once they see me in person, they'll change their minds.
The 2016 results will be reversed, and I'll wake from this living nightmare to find myself president.
And then, so I'll give up drinking.
I'll give up drinking.
Unquote.
The people of Wisconsin say they're looking forward to having the Democrats come to visit, as Green Bay Packers fan Berry McCheeseface told a reporter after wrestling him to the ground in a hitlock.
Quote, most of those Democrats are socialists, and anyone who knows that little about economics should be an easy mark when it comes to selling them plastic souvenir mugs at $65 a shot.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, I think, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is ippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Man, I don't know who that guy is, but he cracks me up.
All right, right this minute, Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson is the most important person in America.
That would probably sound silly even to Tucker Carlson, who I suspect is under no illusion that he's Winston Churchill or even Thomas Sowell.
But as Andrew Jackson once said, one man with courage makes a majority.
And Tucker, with the backing of Fox News, has found the courage to stand for what's right in the most important fight we're in, the fight to be free American men and women who can say whatever is on our minds.
If Tucker proves to be a one-man majority, if he stands firm and wins or even survives, he will have done an immeasurable service to his country.
Tucker made some comments on a dopey shock jock radio show 10 years ago.
Most of his comments were silly, naughty boy jokes.
Some were borderline offensive.
Some were over the borderline.
So what?
Let me repeat that.
So what?
People, especially us guys, make rude remarks, rude jokes, sometimes even say bad things, cruel things, even racist things.
When we lose our tempers, we're just blowing off steam or maybe to make a point or just because we're in a stupid mood and think it's funny.
Such is life.
No one is shocked.
No one is hurt.
No one is triggered.
But leftist activists and the press, but I repeat myself, pretend they are outraged and want you to be outraged too for one reason only, power.
The left thrives on silence.
Their ideas are bad.
Their ideas die when exposed to thoughtful opposition.
So the left thrives on demonizing the opposition as racist, sexist, phobic, whatever.
It's a political ploy to seize power.
We all know it.
No one says it.
Tucker did.
When scientists study evolution, they often examine the fruit fly.
And the reason is that fruit flies live very short lives, so they create a lot of generations in a short time, and you can see them adapt to threats and change.
Social media is kind of like that.
The tactics and techniques that the leftist media have been using for years, censorship, demonization, fake outrage, and intimidation, are used so often that you can see very quickly who dies and who adapts.
Let's hope that Tucker Carlson is among the first of a new, stronger, better generation of conservatives who does not give a damn about fake leftist outrage and will not stand down.
So yesterday we had Michael Knowles on the show and a lot of you wrote in saying, why didn't you use ZipRecruiter?
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So, you know, I like Tucker Carlson.
I like his show a lot.
I often agree with him.
Oftentimes I don't.
Doesn't matter.
The thing is, this statement he made yesterday in response to Media Matters was brilliant.
It was perfect.
Media Matters obviously is a left-wing hit organization.
It is their job to bring down powerful right-wing voices.
Any powerful right-wing voices, they go into your past, they go into anything they can, anything that they can make to get to show that you're racist or sexist or whatever, their latest thing is, and shut you up.
It is a measure of how effective Tucker is that they have been after him for weeks.
And they go after your sponsors.
Nobody likes to lose money.
It's a good thing that Fox is standing behind Tucker.
But let's listen to actually what the statement he made yesterday, which I thought was terrific.
This is cut one.
Great American outrage machine is a remarkable thing.
One day you're having dinner with your family, imagining everything is fine.
The next, your phone is exploding with calls from reporters.
They read you snippets from a press release written by Democratic Party operatives.
They demand to know how you could possibly have said something so awful and offensive.
Do you have a statement on how immoral you are?
It's a bewildering moment, especially when the quotes in question are more than a decade old.
There's really not that much you can do to respond.
It's pointless to try to explain how the words were spoken in jest or taken out of context, or in any case, bear no resemblance to what you actually think or would want for the country.
None of that matters.
Nobody cares.
You know the role you're required to play.
You are a sinner begging the forgiveness of Twitter.
So you issue a statement of deep contrition.
You apologize profusely for your transgressions.
You promise to be a better person going forward.
With the guidance of your contrition consultants, you send money to whatever organization claims to represent the people you supposedly offended.
Then you sit back and brace for a wave of stories about your apology, all of which are simply pretexts for attacking you again.
In the end, you get fired.
You lose your job.
Right.
That is exactly the way it works.
The apologies don't matter.
Nothing matters.
It is a point to get you fired.
It is the point to ruin your life because you are a conservative who wants to keep power among the individuals, not give it to the government, which is the left.
Okay, and so what Tucker said, again, you know, it doesn't matter to me what Tucker said.
And I'll tell you something else that doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter that he said it 10 years ago.
If they caught him making a joke off mic that was rude or something or saying something rude, that wouldn't matter to me either.
Yesterday, it really would not matter.
It's not that, you know, I've said this a million times.
I'm going to say it briefly.
I believe racism is a sin.
I believe it is a sin against the image of God.
I feel sorry for people who live with racism in their hearts.
But racism is a specific thing.
It is a philosophy and an attitude that other people are inferior morally or in some important way because of their race.
That is what racism is.
It's not an offhand remark.
It's not a remark that's insensitive.
It's not that you hold onto your purse when a black guy gets into the elevator because you've heard there's more black crime than white crime.
It's none of those things.
It's not the little tribalistic electric sparks that go off in our mind.
It's a philosophy, a way you live, and a way you react to the world.
If you think Tucker Carlson is a racist, you shouldn't watch a show because then everything he says is kind of poisoned by that stupid philosophy.
But if he says things that are offbeat at some point, if he makes a nasty remark, if he's out of a bad mood or he thinks it's funny, whatever, it doesn't matter.
If I say something to my, if my wife says to me, oh, you're being stupid, I don't think my wife thinks I'm stupid.
And if I reacted to her as if she were being serious, it would be a power play.
It would be a way of silencing her.
Don't you call me stupid?
How could you do it?
Because I know her.
I know that's not who she is and what she thinks of me.
So it's ridiculous to do it.
And that's the way they work.
They take things that you say out of context.
He's absolutely right about this.
But what really got me about this statement is he goes on to say that you're supposed to play along with the illusion.
This cut to how bad it gets, no matter how despised and humiliated you may be, there is one thing you can never do, one thing that is absolutely not allowed.
You can never acknowledge the comic absurdity of the whole thing.
You can never laugh in the face of the mob.
You must always pretend that the people yelling at you are somehow your moral superiors.
You have to assume that what they say they're mad about is what they're actually mad about.
You have to take them at face value.
You must pretend this is a debate about virtue and not about power.
That your critics are arguing from principle and not from partisanship.
No matter what they take from you in the end, you must continue to pretend that these things are true.
You are bad.
They are good.
The system is on the level.
That, see, the reason this is such a great statement is because what we usually do when this happens is we play the what about game.
We say, well, what about when you said this?
What about when you said that?
You know, if I say, you know, if I say something, women are, I have women in binders, and I'm Mitt Romney, I get swept away.
If I kill my mistress by leaving her in the drink, I'm the lion of the Senate.
That's the game we play.
But playing that game is essentially admitting that the system is serious, is the system is right.
But the system itself is just a mirage.
The system of outrage is just a mirage for seizing power.
And that is the problem.
Let's finish.
I can't play his whole statement.
You should go on and listen to it.
It was a great statement.
But listen to this next cut.
What if we stopped pretending for a minute?
What if we acknowledged what's actually going on?
One side is deadly serious.
They believe that politics is war.
They're not interested in abstractions or principles, rules, or traditions.
They seek power.
They plan to win it, whatever it takes.
If that includes getting you fired or silencing you or threatening your family at home or throwing you in prison, okay.
They know what their goal is.
If you're in the way, they will crush you.
What's interesting is how reliably the other side pretends that none of this is happening.
Republicans in Washington do a fairly credible imitation of an opposition party.
They still give speeches, they tweet quite a bit, they make concerned noises about how liberals are bad.
But on the deepest level, it's all oppose.
In their minds, where it matters, Republican leaders are controlled by the left.
They know exactly what they're allowed to say and believe.
They know what the rules are.
They may understand that those rules are written by the very people who seek their destruction.
They ruthlessly enforce them anyway.
Republicans in Washington police their own with a never-ending enthusiasm.
Like trustees at a prison, they dutifully report back to the warden, hoping for perks.
Nobody wants to be called names.
Nobody wants to be Trump.
Nobody wants to be Trump.
That's the purpose of what they're doing to Donald Trump.
That is the purpose of what they're doing to Donald Trump.
Because let's not forget, they did the same thing to George W. Bush.
You saw the movie Vice.
They did the same thing.
They demonized them.
They're racist.
They're hateful.
They're bombing people for oil.
They're doing all these things.
And Trump doesn't care.
Trump doesn't react.
And that's what's making them so insane.
Trump doesn't care.
Did he say something a little insensitive at Charlottesville?
Yes.
Is he a racist?
Obviously not.
If he were a racist, black people wouldn't be doing so well under his administration.
He is not being a racist president.
I don't know what's in his heart.
I don't know what's in anybody's heart, but mine.
But he is not doing racist things as president of the United States.
Their whole thing is to get him like this.
And the fact that Trump doesn't care is what is driving them insane.
Tucker, who is not Trump, he's not the kind of borish, outsized personality that Trump is.
He has to make a statement, and the statement is exact.
And what's shameful here is the people who are against him.
I'll get to that in just a minute.
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Defending Tucker Carlson Jokes00:06:41
So it's shameful to me that the people who thrive on free speech are the people who are ganging up.
They help this outrage machine along.
They're ganging up on Tucker Carlson.
Here's Stephen Colbert going after him.
A lot of people say terrible things.
And by a lot of people, I mean Tucker Carlson.
He has been saying just awful stuff for years.
In fact, between 2006 and 2011, Tucker spent an hour a week calling into a shock jock radio show hosted by a gentleman named Bubba the Love Sponge.
By the way, Love Sponge, the least effective method of contraception.
The most effective?
Tucker Carlson.
Okay, really funny, except every day, every day, this former comedian, Stephen Colbert, goes on TV and blasts the president, right?
What would it look like in a world with no free speech where no one could blast the president?
Oh, yeah, the Obama administration.
But I mean, really, what would it look like?
This guy would be carted away, like in Venezuela, where they're about to accuse the opposition leader of sabotaging the electric grid so they can arrest him.
That's what it would look like.
He should be defending Tucker Carlson.
He should be saying, well, the guy said things I disliked, but we're not going to knock people off the air for that because maybe I did that 10 years ago.
Maybe 10 years from now, when it's like everybody thinks, oh, Trump did a really good job, they go back and unearth what Stephen Colbert was saying and say, you know what?
It's no good to be a left-winger anymore.
You're out of work.
That's not the way we want to live.
Watching Twitter, watching this outrage machine, is like watching the French Revolution.
It's like watching people run from door to door, dragging people out of their houses and beating them to death for the things they said maybe 10 years ago, maybe yesterday, maybe were overheard, maybe were misinterpreted.
Chris Cuomo is the other one.
I mean, after all, you know, he's making a living doing the same thing.
Is there nothing that they could find that he said?
Is there nothing that he said off Mike?
Nothing he said to his wife, nothing he said to his friends, nothing after a couple of drinks that he had said that they could get him on, but he piles on to.
They've seen this president make it to the White House in part by doing the same thing.
Now, a lot of this stuff that's coming up, at least about Carlson, is from years ago when he was desperate for attention.
Here's the test: Would he say the same things today?
No, no, he's too busy playing the victim.
He'd only say that he was naughty, but he wouldn't repeat them tonight.
Why not?
Come on, big man.
Read the list of all the things that you said and do it again and show that you mean it.
Come on.
You're not more about the money now than you are about the truth, are you?
He says, apologizing to the mob costs people their jobs.
What a coward.
Why don't you repeat what you said if it's not such a big deal?
You're not going to apologize.
Guards, Dave.
Hey, why?
Hey, my wine, Mama's boy.
I bet you're going to cry.
Come on, Mama's boy.
I see you cry.
Come on.
He's a bully.
Chris Cuomo is a bully.
You know, what he's saying is, you know, oh, why don't you apologize?
You big man, big man.
He's pushing.
Why?
Because even though Chris Cuomo has maybe, I don't know, a tenth of Tucker's audience, he knows that all the big people are behind him.
He's got all the thugs behind him, CBS, NBC, ABC.
He knows they will all stand behind him and back him up.
And all Tucker Carlson has, one group, Fox News.
And we know what they think of Fox News.
Fox News does not deserve to live, does not deserve to exist because they disagree, because they disagree.
And so they're demonized all the time.
Anything anybody says on Fox News, he should be fired.
Jean Pirra made a ridiculous statement about he jobs the other day, and oh, and they're lumping her together with Tucker Carlson because it's all Fox News.
Let's listen to what Tucker said.
But let's listen first of all.
Here's a clip from this is from the Huffington Post, right?
So it's part of the attack machine, part of the Media Matters attack machine.
Their headline is: Tucker Carlson was open to a racist president 10 years before Trump.
So Trump, obviously, a racist president.
Just remember, George W. Bush was a racist president back in his day.
So this is no change.
It's only a matter of degrees.
It's not a change in kind.
So Tucker Carlson was open to a racist president.
And then they have this clip of things that they've edited together of what he said.
And it sounds pretty, pretty darn ugly.
This is on this guy, Bubba the Love Sponge.
So it's obviously a shock jock boy's radio.
So here he is.
Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate monkey bears.
But I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture, a culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks.
And the way they treat women, you know, I agree with you.
Their culture is, but you're in their homeland and you're over there as an American who they hate and they want nothing more than the Americans off of their soil.
So they're not going to play you.
I mean, they can just shut the up and obey, is my view.
How could you salvage Iraq at this point?
I don't, you know, it's beyond our control.
I mean, if somehow the Iraqis decided to behave like human beings or something.
He needed to say, look, I'm a bigot, okay?
I'm a bigot.
I don't like Islamic extremists.
Like, if you are really heavily into Islam, I really don't.
I'm sorry.
I just don't, I don't care for you that much.
And I don't care what that sounds like.
You can call me a racist.
You can come where the fk you want.
And at this juncture, you could say that and not catch a lot of shit.
You certainly could.
I'd vote for you if you said that.
So what is he saying?
He starts out with saying, oh, these Iraqis are monkeys, all Iraqis are monkeys or something like this.
But what he's talking about, he's making a joke.
They're doing a routine together on this Shock Jock radio show about that a Democrat could win an election if he just came out and was racist.
That's what he says.
If there were a Democrat to come out in the 2008 election and say, you know what the problem is?
It's Islamic extremism.
It's not terror.
It's not some indefinable threat out there.
It's these lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals.
He's making up quotes for this Democrat presidential candidate.
And I'm going to kill as many of them as I can.
If a Democrat were to say that, he would be elected king, okay?
And so the co-host says at one point, so basically, this is Bubba, I mean, Bubba the Love Sponge says, so basically we need a racist president.
We need to get these Mexicans out of here in the Islam.
Let's kill all the Muslims.
And Carlson says, well, wait a minute, whoa, Here, now Carlson says, this is what he says.
He says, you know, I think that you're onto something.
I mean, I'm not someone who's like a Klansman or anything, but someone who's totally unbound by PC rules, who will just say whatever the hell he wants.
You know, someone who really will, and everyone claims, oh, I say it like it is, but nobody actually does.
The guy who does, who says, I'm unabashedly pro-American, screw the French.
Who cares what they think?
The Belgians, they don't like it.
They can pound sand.
University of Wyoming Counterpoint00:05:10
You know what I mean?
That guy is going to get elected.
So he's making these jokes about a Democrat candidate who could get elected, and they play it as if these are the words coming out of his mouth.
These are the things he believed.
If I turned on Tucker Carlson and he was saying those things every day, I wouldn't watch them.
I don't think a lot of people would watch them.
I don't think Fox would support him.
Those are not the things he's saying.
That's not who he is.
Again, if you take these things out of context, what they do is they reduce it to sexist, racist, homophobic.
Nobody goes and checks it out.
Nobody goes and sees what he says.
And so then they come and they take your job away and they take your life away.
Only to conservatives.
Kill your girlfriend and you're a leftist.
You're the lion of the Senate.
Say you put women in binders.
You're Mitt Romney.
You're out of here.
That is the way it works.
So why take any of it seriously?
Why take any of it seriously?
Again, racism is a sin.
I get it.
If you live that way, I'm not going to follow you.
I'm not going to watch you.
I will argue against you.
I will stand up to you.
But that's not what Tucker Carlson is doing.
That's not who he is.
That's not the show I watch.
I don't watch it every night, but I watch it often.
That's not the show that I watch.
And here is the thing about what Tucker did, about the fact that he stood up for it.
The Wall Street Journal, I think it was over the weekend, they wrote an editorial.
It starts out, after Evergreen State, the university, and the University of Missouri caved to identity politics demands.
They were shunned by alumni, parents, prospective students, and fans.
Those are cautionary tales, but the University of Wyoming provides a counterpoint.
The University of Wyoming unveiled its new marketing slogan, the world needs more cowboys.
The campaign lauded self-reliance, grit, and courage and suggested that anyone with the caliber of character can be a cowboy.
All right, so what happened, right?
Two dozen faculty members complained.
Communications professor Tracy Owens Patton said that what goes behind the term cowboy is erasure, racism, sexism.
They wanted them to take the slogan down.
Racism, sexism, heterosexism, genocide.
The university's committee on women and people of color wrote in a letter that the marketing campaign risks casting UW as a place where only people who identify with white male and able-bodied connotations of cowboy belong.
So what did the University of Wyoming do?
They told these people to pound sand.
They voted unanimously to keep the slogan.
What was the result?
Students, alumni, and sports fans apparently weren't offended.
The university bookstore sold out of the world needs more cowboys t-shirts the first week they hit the shelves.
Responding to demand, the University of Wyoming put the slogan on other products and sold roughly 5,000 items in the first six months.
Between July and December, royalties were up $38,000 over the same period as the year before.
The school licensed 143 different products with a tagline to third-party vendors, including a coffin, by the way, that said the world needs more cowboys.
Plus, of course, their applications went up.
You stand up, you win.
You go woke, you go broke.
And this is the thing.
I've told you before that it's not the majority who rules.
It's the intellectual majority.
That's what they're trying to control.
Chick-fil-A is the other example.
They stood up and now they're much bigger than they were.
You know, the counterexample here, by the way, is Deborah Messing, who on Women's Day, on International Women's Day, she put out a picture of empowering vagina cupcakes.
And she was attacked for being transphobic because not all women have vaginas.
And by the way, all women have vaginas.
It's one of the things that gives them away.
That's how you can tell.
But just saying, they piled on Deborah Messing.
She had to apologize for her cute little vagina cupcakes.
She had to apologize for being anti-trans.
The point is, and this is the point that Tucker's making.
You know, in the novel 1984, if you've never read it, you should.
It's a playbook for this stuff.
The torturer, O'Brien, has Winston Smith, who is the guy they're trying to convert to Big Brother.
And he's torturing him.
And he keeps saying, how much is two plus two?
And Winston says it's four.
So they shock him.
I can't remember what they're doing to him, putting rats on his face, something like that.
They shock me.
He says, if the party says it's not four, but five, then how many is it?
And he says, it's still four.
So they keep giving him shocks and giving him pain.
And finally, just to stop the torture, he says, all right, it's five.
And the guy says, no, no, no.
Now you're lying.
You know it's four, but you say it's five.
It's as many, two and two is as many as the party says it is.
That's what they're up about.
That's what they're trying to get to.
Gender is what the party says it is.
Marriage is what the party says it is.
Race and racism, what the party says it is.
And if it's one thing one day and one thing another day, that's what it is, as long as the party says what it is.
Sexism is saying you've got women in binders.
Is it also raping, being accused of raping, something?
No, that's not sexism if you're for abortion.
Is it driving your woman, your girlfriend into the drink and leaving her there to drown?
No, that's not sexism.
It's what the party says it is.
And the party had a slogan in 1984, who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past.
And that's what they're trying to do is control the present.
Government Control Issues00:14:47
Helix Sleep, I'm very excited about this because I've got a Helix mattress on its way.
It's a Helix mattress is on its way and I've been using their Helix pillow.
That's a little bit of a lie.
I haven't been using the Helix pillow.
I used it once.
I said, wow, this is comfortable.
Try this out, honey.
That's the last time I saw it because they're so comfortable.
And again, some of you wimpy people who sleep, you know, you're thinking, wow, that would be a really comfortable way to sleep.
That would be really nice.
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Laura Carno is with us.
She is the executive director of Faster Colorado, a training program to provide world-class training to school staff who are authorized to carry concealed weapons on campus.
And she is the author of Government Ruins Nearly Everything.
Laura, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you.
Sure thing.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
I'd have taken out the nearly, but I'm sure you had good reason for saying that.
Let's start with this.
You talk about mother-may culture.
What is mother-may culture?
Yeah, you know, when we're kids, it's completely appropriate for our parents to tell us what to do.
And some people, when they grow up, think that it's completely appropriate to ask the government for permission.
But for goodness sakes, we are grown-ups.
We're adults.
We actually know better how to run our lives than politicians or bureaucrats thousands of miles away.
So why is it that there are so many things that the government, regardless of at what level, tells us what we should do?
I'm trying to break that mother-may culture.
You often hear people say there ought to be a law.
And no, no, there ought not to be a law.
Well, why do they do that?
Do you think it is psychological?
You think it is they want their, they put the government in the place of their parents and they can't break free?
Why do they do that?
Yeah, I'd say refer to it in the book as parenthood by proxy.
There are people who think that there are folks smarter than us that if not for them telling us how to live our lives, we might not know.
And I think there's also another category of people who say, I actually know how to live my life, okay, but it's those people over there who are making bad decisions.
And somebody ought to tell them how to make decisions.
And I refer to it as the betters versus the bumpkins.
You know, if not for those smart people with masters and PhDs and whatever telling us that we should ride bikes instead of cars or eat this instead of that, gosh, what would happen to us?
Probably nothing.
We would be just fine making decisions on our own.
So you've got people who think that they need the government to be parents and people who think that they are smarter than the normal people.
What goes wrong?
I mean, first of all, what does the government ruin?
When you say the government ruins nearly everything, let's get specific.
What kinds of things does government ruin?
I mean, all of it, but in the book, in the book, we take on the four, I call them the fireworks issues, abortion, marriage, schools, guns.
And it's sort of two topics on each side of the aisle where that side of the aisle says government should control these two things, but we should have choice on these other two things.
Flip the issues, flip the side of the aisle.
And so I ask the question: are we smart enough to make our own choices?
And if we're concerned about those issues, if we want fewer abortions, better marriages, schools that work, and less gun violence, why in God's name would we turn them over to the government to fix?
It breaks things.
And I have a chapter called It's a Matter of Incentives.
And so we've all seen these stories play out time and time again.
The government identifies a problem and it says, oh, we must throw bazillions of dollars at this problem.
The problem never gets better.
Never gets better.
It always gets worse.
You can look at just about anything.
And so the answer then, when the government says, oh, my goodness, it didn't get better.
What's the answer?
More money and more control over people.
So I, and at the end of the book, the beginning of the book, I say, here's why it's not working.
An early reader described it as if your neighbor is ticked off at the government and doesn't know why, read this book.
That's the first part of the book.
The second part of the book is those four issues, and they're very contentious, of course.
But I look at, I offer, I hope, a hopeful message for folks.
If these are the issues waking you up every day, saying, gosh, I have to do something about this.
And we know that the government isn't the place to fix it.
Here's some hopeful stories of people who are today outside of government doing good work that's actually making a difference in these areas.
Well, let's talk about that for a minute.
If you say government ruins marriage, for instance, I mean, most of my life, the government has said something to say about marriage.
Should the government have nothing to say about marriage?
Yeah, I mean, the purely libertarian way to look at it is this is a contract between two people and it's not really anybody else's business.
We currently have marriage laws, but you look at the marriage penalty in Obamacare.
You look at all of these kinds of things that government puts out there and says, okay, if you are a mom who is getting public assistance, is there an incentive or a disincentive for her to marry the father of her kids?
It's a disincentive.
And so government's making all those sorts of value judgments over and over.
And I think all of us, if you ask somebody, can government make marriage better?
It's almost laughable when I say this when I speak in audiences.
I wait two seconds and everybody starts getting it.
I mean, they chuckle.
No, government's not interested.
And in fact, it places disincentives to marriage.
So what about something like education?
I mean, this is the one that people are always saying, well, the government has to give us, we need people to be educated.
More education should be free.
And yet, it does seem here in California, where we pour money into the basically into the mall of the teachers union, we have terrible, terrible schools rated, I think it's number like 48th in the country.
I may not have that exactly right, but it's very low.
Why can't the government get that right?
I mean, all we need is education.
What are they doing wrong?
They're controlling education from Washington, D.C.
So anybody who has more than one child knows that you can't raise two of the exact same child given the same genetics and the same upbringing.
So why would we think that government thousands of miles away is going to create a curriculum that works for everybody, much less my two grandbabies who are completely different children?
And I look to the school choice movement that really has become very, very nonpartisan as all moms and dads want their kids to do good.
It used to be more of a conservative as opposed to liberal, but gosh, look at Waiting for Superman, and it breaks your heart that these children, they have a great chance at life if they have a great education.
And here in Colorado, where I live, we have great charter school laws here, meaning you can get together.
You've got to meet some pretty stringent guidelines.
But if you want a school dedicated to art, if you want a school that's really good for kids on the spectrum, there are all kinds of communities coming together and saying we can do a better job.
And in Colorado, when you look at the top 10 schools from SAT scores, college entrants, that sort of thing, eight of the 10 are charter schools here.
Wow.
And they're doing it on less money because the part of our charter school laws here that isn't great is there is unequal funding.
So when you talk about in California, the billions poured into schools that do the things that teachers unions want done, we're doing it with less money here.
And it's serving children and parents in those communities.
So let's, I mean, you're not, obviously you're not a thoroughgoing libertarian.
You believe that the government can set standards, for instance, and make sure, especially local governments, which are always better than the federal government.
But people, liberals especially, look at gun violence and they say, oh my gosh, we have all these guns.
We have more mass shootings in other countries.
Does the government not have to do something or is the government, does the government make that worse too?
Yeah, the government makes it worse.
So where government butts in, I mean, I know it's like a spoiler alert, right?
Where the government butts in and just think about Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, where the government butts in and says, we are going to clamp down.
It never gets better.
Where government says we're going to loosen that up, it acknowledges that gun laws in specific aren't followed by criminals.
Criminals, by definition, break laws.
So you look at, let's just say the Aurora theater killing that we had here a few years ago in Colorado.
Awful, awful situation.
Does anybody out there think that one more law would have stopped that guy?
He broke, I don't know, 30.
Nothing else would have stopped him.
But what happens is people like us, law-abiding gun owners, are going to say, gosh, I'm law-abiding.
It's right in the title I just gave myself.
I don't want to risk my freedom and liberty and be put in jail for something.
I'm going to follow the law.
So all it does is makes it harder on people like us to defend ourselves from criminals who aren't following the law.
So over and over, we see tighter gun control laws, more gun crime, looser laws, less gun crime.
So if you're an activist, if you're worried about something, what do you think is the right way to go in terms of dealing with problems that, you know, all societies have problems?
Should you not go to the government?
How do you start?
You know, I think you almost should start with the government and say, what is the government doing that's causing this problem?
So first stop the government, yeah.
Okay.
Sure.
I mean, you look at anything from, you know, Social Security has been around a really long time.
And there's lots of people who just don't remember a time where we didn't have Social Security.
So let's say you wake up and say, gosh, my grandma is retired.
She's living just on her social security check.
It's not enough.
How can we make Social Security give her more?
I would challenge folks to say, what if instead of being forced at some point in the past to give her money to Social Security and the government invests it, I'm putting air quotes around invest, invests it and delivers unto her $600 a month or whatever it turns out to be.
What if kids today had an option?
You can go into the social security system or, you know, I'm not saying that I want the government to control anymore, but what if there were choices?
So I would just ask that question, if to save the grandma of the future from being in that situation, shouldn't we give the kids today a choice not to have to be in those situations?
Yeah, that's good thinking.
Laura Carno, very, very interesting, author of Government Ruins Nearly Everything.
Again, I praise your charitable nearly in there, but I'm not sure I agree.
Thank you very much for coming on, Laura.
It's good talking to you.
Thanks so much, Andrew.
Let me end with a final reflection that takes us to one of our favorite neighborhoods, the op-ed section of the New York Times, a former newspaper, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
Oh, hey, ho.
Let us go all the Knucklehead Row.
You know, there is a guy who identifies himself as a conservative, Timothy P. Carney, who is the author of a book called Alienated America, Why Some Places Thrive While Others Clap.
I'd like to have him on the show, actually.
He sounds like an interesting guy.
But he writes what I think is a misguided editorial called the Wrights Lena Dunham fallacy.
Why do conservatives keep blaming liberal millennials for social decay?
He says family and community are eroding in America.
Family And Community Eroding?00:05:39
Drug deaths and suicide are way up.
Marriage in two-parent households way down.
It is a widespread and complicated crisis.
Yet some conservatives have a simple single target for blame, liberal elites.
Turn on any talk show, open any right-leaning editorial page, and you'll see it.
The reduction in marriage rates and birth rates in America is wholly and singularly the fault of feminists graduating from Wesleyan with women's studies degrees declaring marriage to be archaic and motherhood to be oppressive.
Call it the Lena Dunham fallacy, rooted in a vague perception of the life and work of the girl's creator.
It holds that the behavior we see on HBO or in the lives of some Hollywood stars is the norm among the much broader swath of college-educated Americans.
The true landscape of marriage and family in America is very different.
The zip codes and the demographics where Ms. Dunham probably has the fewest fans are the ones where marriage is most aggressively in retreat.
Meanwhile, in the upper quintile of income and in the country's most educated towns and counties, the same counties that just helped swing the House of Representatives to the Democrats, people are living fairly conservative lives, complete with intact families and tight-knit communities.
Exactly right and exactly wrong.
It is exactly true that upper-class, prosperous liberals live conservative lives.
I know them.
They almost all do.
Almost all the prosperous liberals I know have a single wife or a long-term second wife or husband.
They have kids.
They raise their kids.
They send them to school.
They work hard.
They go to church, a lot of them.
They have a community.
They keep a community going.
All of them do this.
And then they let Lena Dunham, they give Lena Dunham praise for showing other people, for romanticizing and glorifying a life that is not like that.
Charles Murray points this out in his book.
I think it's called Coming Apart, Charles Murray the Sociologist, that the rich first sold free love, you know, sexual liberation.
No, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
And then when the poor bought into that, the rich said, oh, wait, that's not true.
And they went off and lived differently, but forgot to tell the poor that, oh my gosh, we made a terrible mistake.
They let them go because they didn't want to seem judgmental.
So, oh, Lena Dunham's a genius.
How brilliant.
I mean, the show wasn't even amusing.
It was a boring show, but they sell it to people.
And the people who are gullible enough to buy into it wind up poor if they're not poor already, wind up in this trouble, wind up with their families and communities falling apart.
You know, back in the 60s, there was a very famous radical named Abbie Hoffman.
Abbie Hoffman wrote a book, I think it was called Tune In and Drop.
Oh, Steal This Book.
It was called Steal This Book.
And it was all about you should tune in and turn on and drop out.
I guess that wasn't his phrase, but he wanted you to drop out.
And somebody in the 60s said to him, you know, you keep telling people to drop out, but you have a law degree.
And Abbie Hoffman, I remember this personally, Abbie Hoffman's response was, don't haw me, which is Yiddish for don't bug me, man.
Don't bug me.
That was Abbie Hoffman's response.
Yeah, I have a law degree, but you should drop out.
That has been the liberal line since the 60s.
The liberals very quickly, the same people who were Michael Douglas in Wall Street were hippies, you know, 20 years before that.
They figured it out.
They figured out that marriage works.
They figured out that hard work works.
They figured out that religion works, but they didn't want to seem judgmental.
So they don't, as Charles Murray puts it, they don't preach what they practice.
That's why right-wingers attack Lena Dunham.
It's not because of Lena Dunham.
She is who she is.
She's an entertainer.
She's a writer, whatever.
She should do whatever she wants to do.
But the glorification of that on HBO, which also glorified the cat house in Nevada, you know, also glorified prostitution.
The glorification of that life on MTV, teenage pregnancy, all that glorification is hurting.
It's not hurting the rich.
The rich are smart and educated enough to make their own decisions.
It's hurting people who don't know any better, who see that stuff on television and follow that lead into perdition.
And that's the problem.
That's why people attack Lena Dunham.
It's not because of Lena Dunham.
It's because of the people who make Lena Dunham a symbol for a glorified lifestyle that they don't live.
All right, mailbag tomorrow.
Go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag, ask your questions.
I will be here to solve all your problems.
I mean, come on.
It's a pretty good deal.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about Democrats giving up on the dream.
They have given up on impeachment, which is a terrible, terrible tragedy for them.
We'll talk about that.
Also, a man is suing an abortion clinic in what is going to be, I think, a case with great repercussions, great in terms of significance and also that positive repercussions.
A man is suing an abortion clinic on behalf of his unborn child who was aborted against his wishes.
So I want to talk about that case.
And I want to talk in general about how men are so often marginalized in the abortion discussion.