Ben Shapiro dissects the U.S. political divide, exposing media bias through Don Lemon’s slanted reporting and Rachel Maddow’s retracted "dead drop" claim while mocking The New York Times’ spy-novel collusion coverage. He frames socialism—pushed by AOC’s Medicare for All and Sanders’ drug-price controls—as a threat to American principles, citing Venezuela’s collapse and Nordic countries’ reliance on U.S. wealth. Criticizing Biden’s MeToo scrutiny as politically motivated, he contrasts Buttigieg’s "freedom from" coercion with conservative "freedom to be left alone," warning that moral posturing obscures constitutional limits. Hollywood’s Georgia boycott is dismissed as hypocrisy, while Trump’s pragmatism is praised over ideological purity, concluding that fleeting scandals risk overshadowing foundational values. [Automatically generated summary]
Some people think the mainstream media so bungled the Russian collusion story, they revealed themselves to be the dishonest and servile toadies of a single political party with a bias so extreme.
It amounted to the sort of corruption one usually only finds in the bowels of a prison populated by the lowest miscreants on the face of the earth, whose foul and twisted hearts conspired to create a criminal empire so soaked in evil.
It's tantamount to a living hell.
Other people think other things, But now journalists are speaking out in self-defense, figuring what the hell?
People can't hate them any more than they already do.
On CNN, for instance, Don Lemon spoke privately to a few close friends by going on his show and saying, quote, while it is true that virtually every story we released was slanted to condemn and indict a president who now seems to have told the truth about his activities, and while it's also true that every mistake we made did tend to reveal the seething bile that had transformed our hearts into black organs of unadulterated hatred, I feel we were justified in our actions because of something having to do with the Constitution or maybe something about race.
I'm not sure, unquote.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow made her statement to a room full of cartoon squirrels saying, quote, I now regret reporting that the President of the United States established a dead drop with his Russian handlers in order to pass military secrets to the Kremlin that would result in the enslavement of the nation to an oppressive foreign regime.
I believe there was no dead drop and he probably used the same subatomic brain implants that allow me to communicate with the planet Meldar, unquote.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, announced it was so proud of its collusion coverage it would soon publish it in novel form as an exciting spy thriller starring themselves.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-y-doo.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Well, you've heard me say this before.
Politics Makes You Stupid00:02:18
Politics makes you stupid.
It makes you stupid because it forces you to boil complex issues down to a yes-no vote.
It makes you stupid because it elevates power-hungry men and women and encourages you to turn them into heroes over the real heroes, the cops and moms and firefighters and soldiers who sacrifice for the safety and benefit of others.
But politics also makes you stupid because it gets you all excited about the issue of the moment and rarely pauses to let you explore the underlying values at the heart of the debate.
I've been watching the Democrat politicians gather, listening to their speeches, and I've been thinking about President Trump's promise that this country will never be socialist.
He said, we were born free and will stay free.
And I've been wondering if that's true, because as I listen to what the left is saying, it really does seem to me that we're no longer in an American debate between left and right, but in a debate between the American way and the left, between liberalism itself, real liberalism, with its emphasis on human freedom and leftism.
We talk a lot about our political divide, but it seems to me that what we really have is a values divide, and that is a lot more dangerous.
We're going to talk about all that in a sec.
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Why We Left Google00:15:30
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease.
In Clavin, I just make it look this easy.
So I'm watching these Democrats.
Oh, hey, by the way, I'm in Hillsdale.
I'm in the middle of nowhere.
It is what a beautiful campus this is.
You know, I drove here last night.
I arrived last night and the driver took me out here.
It was like I thought I was in Texas chainsaw massacre.
I'm in the middle of, absolutely, it's true, right?
You come in this absolutely this dirt road, this forest crowding in around you.
I just expected to see like a specter standing in the road.
And then out of nowhere, out of nothing, this beautiful, beautiful campus arises.
I'm going to be teaching a seminar or holding, I'm not sure you teach a seminar.
I think you hold a seminar here for two weeks.
So I will be broadcasting from here and will look just as beautiful as you see me now, or possibly even better if we get our devices in line.
Anyway, well, I'll talk more about that.
And as the seminars go on, I'll let you know how they go.
It really is a beautiful, just a beautiful place to be.
And I'm really happy they've taken me in for a couple of weeks.
So as I say, I'm watching the Democrats.
And I don't feel like I'm in an American debate.
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Back when we were talking about gay marriage and gay rights, and people on the right were really upset.
And you know, I'm pretty liberal about this.
I really couldn't care less what people do.
And I felt that the marriage, as we knew it, had fallen apart anyway.
But people were saying to me, oh, this is the end of it.
If we have gay marriage, that's the end of America.
And I thought, you know, I don't see it that way for a simple reason.
We're talking about American values.
One side is talking about freedom to be whoever you want to be, which is an American value.
Equality, straight people can get married.
Maybe gay people should be able to get married.
And the other side was also talking about freedom, but it was talking about the mechanisms by which freedom is preserved.
The family is the basic unit of government in a free society.
A family creates a government, creates responsibility, teaches people how to live, how to make decisions on their own.
People were afraid, it's a legitimate argument, that if you change the definition of marriage, you were pulling away the bedrock of the way a free society worked.
And I thought, you know, that's a good argument too.
Those are both American arguments.
It stops being an American argument when you hunt down some poor guy who's baking cakes in Colorado and try to hound him out of business simply for not kowtowing to your perspective on how things work.
Being gay is not the same as being black.
Being gay entails actions.
It entails deeds.
And you can make moral judgments about actions and moral judgments about the way people relate and the way things they do to one another that you simply can't make about the color of a guy's skin.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
Racism never made any sense.
It doesn't make any sense now that the left is doing it.
It didn't make sense before when just the Democrats were doing it and not the left.
But racism doesn't make any sense, but making judgments about the way people relate to one another, the way families are built, all those things made sense.
It stopped being an American argument when you started taking away people's religious rights because that is a very, very basic part of the American plan, of the American founding.
So once you did that, we were outside of American values.
Now, a lot of people who were against gay marriage said, oh, that's what they're planning all along.
I'm sure that was true of some activists, but I don't think it was true of a lot of gay people.
You see the point.
Same thing with the borders, by the way.
And, you know, someone who says, hey, we have to be charitable and let people in when they're hurting, when they're being chased out of their countries, that guy's making a Christian argument.
Somebody who says, you know, if you do that, you destroy the rule of law and you also ruin the lives of the poorest people in America.
That guy is also making a Christian argument.
Those two people can get along.
They can make compromises.
They can find a way forward.
But once you're telling me that there are no borders, that the land belongs to Mexico anyway, or that we're the bad guys and anybody can come in and wants and the rule of law doesn't matter.
Now you're just talking, you know, you're just blithering at this point.
And we've lost the American debate.
We're no longer having an American debate.
So I'm listening to the Democrats, and I'm listening to this clown, Alexandria, Occasional Cortex, right?
And, you know, we talk about the fact that we talk about her so much.
We talk about her a lot.
I talk about her a lot because I feel that she is not only a socialist, which I think is a bad thing, but I think she's the avatar of socialism.
She's the incarnation of socialism.
She's attractive.
She's stupid.
She's dangerous.
That is socialism.
Socialism looks good because it looks like it's going to solve your inequality problem.
It's stupid because it's based on premises that don't work, like that the worker gives the value to property, which simply isn't true.
Ideas give value to property, to materials.
And she's dangerous because she doesn't know what she's doing.
And she would take this incredible economy that has brought so many people out of poverty and created so much great stuff for all of us and made our freedom so enjoyable.
And she wants to destroy all that in the name of a kind of panic about equality.
So she's talking, first of all, she made this comment about the good old days, the good old days of leftism under FDR.
This is cut number seven.
When we look into our history, when our party was boldest, the time of the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, and so on, we had and carried supermajorities in the House, in the Senate.
We carried the presidency.
They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure Roosevelt did not get reelected.
And there were so many extraordinary things that were happening in that time that were uniting working people.
Now, a lot of people made fun of dear Alexandria because she made this comment about they had to pass a constitutional amendment to keep FDR from getting re-elected.
And of course, FDR was re-elected four times.
He died in office as the war was drawing to a close.
They passed the constitutional amendment limiting the president to two terms after he was dead.
But I'm actually not going to pick on her for that because they were talking about passing the amendment before he died.
It was the fact that he ran for office four times.
It doesn't occur to her to wonder whether it's a good thing that he ran four times.
It doesn't occur to her to wonder whether the people who passed that amendment were right.
All she wants is that power.
She's saying, look how successful we were.
We stayed in power.
But think about the American founding.
How did the American founding happen?
What is the signal act that turns America into a republic, puts it on the path to becoming a republic instead of a kingdom?
It's George Washington turning over power.
It's George Washington surrendering his sword to the civilian authorities, turning over the power over the army who would have followed him into hell, who had followed him into hell, and the people who would have crowned him king on the spot.
That's the thing that turns America into a republic.
And when Washington became president, as it was destined he would, who else could hold the office, it was him resigning after two or stepping down after two terms that set that precedent, that made it almost impossible for any president before to run again.
So really, FDR in running four times had violated something very basic to the American sensibility.
And that's my problem with what she's saying.
It's not that she gets the history a little wrong.
We all know she's an ignoramus.
It has nothing to do with that.
What bothers me is that the way she's saying, what she's essentially saying is we too could violate the premises of the American founding if only we would be as bold as FDR when he essentially put the country on the road towards socialism when if he hadn't panicked and if he had allowed the free market to take care of it, the depression probably would not have lasted as long as it did.
In the same way that when Obama took office after the 2008 crash, if he had let the market take over instead of regulating it to death, instead of tying the barbell of Obamacare to its ankle and letting it sink, if he had done that, that crisis would have ended as it ended 20 minutes after Donald Trump became president because he simply knew how the economy works.
But she wants to bring that crisis mentality, the crisis mentality that FDR used to transform this country, and he certainly did, and to transform it away from its founding principles, away.
Remember, he's the guy who kind of bullied the Supreme Court into approving a lot of programs that never, the kinds of programs that never had been approved before.
He threatened to pack the court.
He threatened all kinds of things.
And the court kind of caved into him and just blueprint and just rubber stamped his programs after that.
So what she's talking about is if we, oh, oh, oh, if we could only have that kind of crisis again.
And in her mind, that crisis is playing right now.
This is cut number eight.
I also was looking at our issues of social justice, social and racial justice, of which we are, which we have a nexus here in the Bronx.
And what I started thinking about to myself was, listen, we're looking at all of these issues, Medicare for all, a living wage, tuition-free public colleges and universities.
And there's this false idea that we need to put them all in a line and say, do this or do that.
Do you care about health care or do you care about the economy or jobs?
And then I started to realize that these are not different problems.
These are all part of the same problem.
And this is in the past, when we've confronted this type of stagnation and this type of systemic threat as a country.
First of all, we've been here before.
We've been here before with the Great Depression.
We've been here before with World War II, even the Cold War.
And the answer has been an ambitious and directed mobilization of the American economy to direct and solve our problem.
It's sometimes hard to comment on occasional Cortex because she is such a blithering idiot.
And it's like it's almost not fun to run somebody down when they, it's like, it's like hurting a child, you know, they can't fight back.
She's such a blithering idiot.
And she says, we've been here before, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Depression.
Is she looking around?
I mean, people, there are so many jobs open right now that they can't fill the jobs.
The stock market is soaring, not crashing.
People are doing better than they did for the eight years under the Obama administration.
Where is the crisis?
I mean, I know we're all going to be dead in 12 years, but hey, 12 years is a pretty good run for me.
I mean, for some of you younger folks, that's not so long.
But for me, I'm fine with that.
No, I'm joking.
Obviously, no scientific study anywhere says that 12 years has anything to do with the end of the world.
Only in AOC's imagination is that taking place.
So she's selling this crisis, saying we've had crises before, and in those crises, we mobilized to do what?
Well, what did we do?
We mobilized to defend democracy in World War II.
We mobilized to defend freedom against socialism in the Cold War.
It's only in the Great Depression, it's only in the Great Depression that we mobilized to expand the role of government to allow a president to run for four terms.
And that's the kind of thing she's looking for, but she's just playing to an empty theater on that.
I mean, she's playing to a bunch of people in whose imaginations, the Jussie Smolletts of the world, in their imaginations, they're oppressed.
In their imaginations, things are at crisis stage.
But you can't sell the imagination to all the people all the time.
So they're selling socialism.
And socialism is, as Donald Trump has said, he is right about this.
Socialism is outside the American debate.
And, you know, when we listen to them, conservatives who tend to kind of have this practical streak, they want things to work.
They know what they're against.
They don't always know what they're for.
They tend to say things like, well, how are you going to pay for that?
Oh, you know, AOC says, well, we need all these things.
And when you say, how do you pay for it?
She says, well, how did we pay for World War II?
I mean, okay, she's a dope.
But still, still, that's not the answer.
The answer is, what right do you have to take 70% of my income?
What right do you have to take the sweat of my brow?
What right, you know, it's people who don't know what money.
I mean, here's Bernie Sanders talking.
I think it's on MSNBC, selling, he's going to cut drug prices, okay?
And listen, he gets asked one question.
She never follows it up, and he makes a response that really tells you where all this socialism leads and why we oppose it.
I think we should join the rest of the industrialized world, guarantee health care to all people as a right, end the absurdity of the United States spending twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation, while our life expectancy is actually going down and our health care outcomes are worse than many other countries.
And by the way, we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
Margaret, let me make a campaign promise to you, and you can repeat this, play this tape over, if I'm elected president.
And that is, if I am elected president, I'm going to cut prescription drug costs in this country by 50% so that we are not paying any more than other major countries are paying.
How are you going to do that?
Because we will look at the average costs of prescription drugs in Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan, and France.
We will look at their average costs, which are 50% lower than they are in the United States, and we will do that.
How do you do that?
Well, we will do that.
It's exactly the way they did it back.
You know, it's like we just send them to the gulags like we used to do in the good old days when I was honeymooning in the Soviet Union.
I mean, that's essentially what he's saying.
We're going to look at the prices that are paid overseas, and then we're going to cut, tell people that those are the prices they can pay here.
We are going to take over the economy.
That is what socialism means.
And she never says, you know, nobody ever says.
I mean, what we always say is, how are you going to afford that?
How are you going to do it?
Nobody ever says, hey, you know, you have not got the right to do that.
Where in the enumerated rights of the Constitution do you get the right to tell somebody what he can sell his product for?
Of course, the whole thing is an illusion to begin with because I mean, I've said this before and I won't go into it forever, but these single-payer health care countries can basically say to the drug companies, we'll pay you this or that's it or we won't take your medicine.
And sometimes they don't get the medicine.
They don't get the medicines that we get.
And we pay more because we're paying for the R ⁇ D, the research and development that they're not paying for.
Now, if you stop paying for that, if Bernie Sanders says, no, we're only going to give you so much, you may not notice down the line that the medicine that would help you as you get older is not there, but it won't be there.
If you get Alzheimer's and they say, yeah, well, we can't cure Alzheimer's, you won't know that it was because of socialism that the R ⁇ D stopped.
You talk to people in Europe.
I've done this because I lived in England a long time and I used to tell people this and they would say, well, at least it's fair.
At least everybody is getting the same bad health care.
And by the way, I did live in England and I got the healthcare there and I felt like I was being treated in the 19th century.
They were very lovely people, but they did not have the kinds of services that Americans take for granted.
So all of this, of course, is based on local ignorance.
Same thing.
Bill Maher.
Americans and Fairness00:05:43
One more thing I just want to add about this, by the way.
This is the guy who's been selling us Cuba.
And Barack Obama was over in Cuba.
And part of what's happening in Venezuela, we keep pointing to Venezuela as if somehow it just kind of magically appeared that their very, very good economy crashed and burned under socialism.
Cuba, with Russia's help, did this.
Cuba are the people who sent their stormtroopers in there and taught them how to kill and torture dissidents.
When Barack Obama was standing in Cuba and saluting with Che Guevara in the background, those are the people who brought torture and death and starvation to Venezuela.
Prince Charles is there now.
I mean, it's like the whole moral, the whole moral scope of what socialism is.
Oh, we'll just find out what the price we want the price to be, and that is the price they will charge.
That is the moral scope of socialism, and that is the way it works.
And those are the arguments that we almost never have.
Here's Bill Maher telling you, oh, yes, but we don't want that socialism.
They're all selling this.
They're selling this to the young.
They're selling this through showbiz.
They're selling it in the academies.
They're selling it on the news.
Oh, we don't want that bad socialism.
We want the yummy socialism.
Republicans have to explain, if socialism is such a one-way ticket to becoming the nightmare of Venezuela, then why do all the happiest countries in the world embrace it?
The UN just came out with their annual world happiness rankings, and the top ones are all socialist-friendly places, like Finland and Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada, and of course, Wakanda.
the right has a hard time understanding the concept that we don't want long lines for bread socialism We want, you don't have to win the lotto to afford brain surgery socialism.
Socialism.
Socialism as an economic model replacing capitalism is bad, but socialism as a supplement to capitalism, good.
So he's talking about redistribution of wealth created by capitalism, because none of those countries is a socialist country.
None of them is.
These half-smart guys kind of drive me crazy.
None of those countries is a socialist country, but he's talking about redistribution of wealth through capitalism, which we already have.
And as he says, he says, Americans like that.
They say they call that socialism.
Americans like that.
But Americans like opiates too.
Not everything you like is good for you.
All those countries are happy because they live off us.
Not one of them has a military that can defend them from Russian aggression or Chinese aggression.
Not one of them.
Not one of them creates the things we create, the new medicines, the new goods.
All of them, if they're using our iPhones, they're living off us.
If they're using cars, they're living off us.
If they're using medicines that we create, they're living off us.
My kids were happy when I was taking care of them.
Of course you're happier when people are taking care of you.
We're not here to be happy.
We're here to be free.
That is the whole point.
And that's why it's not an American debate anymore.
We're having a problem, a crisis of values.
It's really interesting.
See, these values still live.
The values still live in almost every American.
They're in our DNA to some degree.
You can get rid of them.
You can drive them out of people over time.
But they still live in our DNA.
And the thing is, whenever I hear a poll that says, oh, you know, 112% of young people love socialism, I don't get as worried as some people do.
And here's the reason.
I'll show you the reason.
Campus Reform.
We love these guys.
They go on campuses and they interview people and they ask them trick questions, as it were.
And he goes through this campus and he starts to ask people if they're in favor of socialism, and then he applies socialism to their real lives.
Listen.
I also think I favor socialism over capitalism.
Socialism is more geared toward like helping the people in your, you know, the governed.
I'd rather people have that same opportunity.
It's a lot of excess in America.
The main idea of socialism being that people at the top are doing their fair share to help people at the bottom, trying to prevent disparity of income and trying to prevent excess, as you called it.
So on campus, if there's a GPA disparity where there's people at the bottom with the poor GPA, would you support a policy where people at the top spread the wealth and give that GPA to people at the bottom?
Give, like help them get a better GPA?
I'm all for helping.
I wouldn't give like, oh, let me just give you some of my poor GPA.
But it's about being fair, right?
We got to help people at the bottom.
I've lost a lot of sleep.
So I don't know if I will be fair.
It's hard.
I guess it would be kind of like hypocritical for me to say no.
That's completely different.
See, it's not completely different.
It's an actually great analogy.
And I love the girl who said, you know, I've lost a lot of sleep getting this grade port average.
Of course she has.
And a lot of people have lost a lot of sleep earning the money that AOC and Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders want to take away.
And we know it's not fair.
It's not right.
It's so basic.
What they do is they point to these billionaires who, by the way, are never going to get tagged because they can leave.
Unless you build a Berlin Wall, they're leaving, right?
They're not the guys who get tagged.
The guys who get tagged are people who look rich to people who have less but aren't really rich and work very hard for the money they earn.
It's always the kind of upper middle class who gets squeezed and the rich and the poor get a little and the rich get not, nothing happens to them.
So, I mean, it's all a lie anyway, but still, still, people know, they know that these values are bad values.
It's we, the right, who very rarely make the real value argument.
Freedom Is Moral00:15:45
You know, Shelby Steele, one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite political writers, just an absolutely graceful writer, really good thinker.
I don't know why he doesn't write more.
Every now and again, he has an article in the Wall Street Journal, and every now and again, he has a little book he'll bring out, always very short.
But I guess he's not a very, you know, fluent writer, but he's a wonderful writer and a wonderful observer.
And he has a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
And here's what he says.
He says, as many have noted, Donald Trump's presidency is an insurgency.
Mr. Trump himself is the quintessential insurgent doing battle with a disingenuous and entrenched establishment.
This was his appeal over a field of more conventional Republican candidates in 2016.
But last year's midterm elections were disappointing.
And Mr. Trump has gone wanting for political clout in the immigration fight.
His successes, a booming economy, tax reform, low unemployment, increased oil production, the abandonment of terrible treaties, new and better trade deals have brought him little goodwill, even from his own party.
Today's leftist cultural hegemony squeezes President Trump and conservatives generally into an impossibility.
No matter what they achieve, they are always guilty of larger sins.
Make the economy grow if you must, but you are still a racist.
He's talking about a change that came about in the 1960s, a change when we began to see, we went from seeing America as there were always problems.
There's never been a perfect America.
America was never a sitcom where everybody was living in suburbs where father knows best.
There were always problems in America, like every other country on the face of the earth, including Finland.
There were always problems, but we saw it as a great and good country.
We saw it as the point of a moral spear.
It was we who set the people free in World War II.
It was we who set the people free after the Civil War.
We who set the people free all around so much of the world.
In the Cold War, we had contributed to more freedom in the world.
Remember, there were no republics like ours in existence when America was founded.
Our republic has been so successful that even when they created slave states like the Soviet Union, they had to call it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to make it sound like the United States of America.
That's why they did it.
It was propaganda to make it sound like it was going to be as good as America, but socialist, right?
That just doesn't work, all right?
So, what he's talking about is we lost that sense in the Vietnam War with the acknowledgement of racism, absolutely necessary that we acknowledge the problem of racism, fix the problem that the Democrats have created in the South.
Absolutely necessary.
But with that came shame, and with the shame, we sort of lost the sense that America was a good country.
And we have this sense now of moral obligation.
Now, here's the distinction that Shelby Steele is making, this distinction between principle and morality.
The distinction between having a set of principles that keep you free and that keep you, that let you know which way you're going and whether or not you are good or bad, right?
And Steele writes, admitting evil obligated America to seek redemption by actually earning an innocence of past sins.
Proving your innocence in this way earned you moral authority and ultimately political power.
So out of nowhere in the mid-60s came the Great Society, the war on poverty, forced busing, public housing, affirmative action, and so on.
A proliferation of redemptive actions meant to reify innocence as a currency of power.
Liberalism became essentially a moral movement, more informed by ideas of the good than by constitutional principles, more enthralled to innocence than to freedom.
And that's why so many issues are turned into largely stupid moral fights that nobody can win.
We're going to talk about this more, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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One of the ways that politics makes us stupid in America now is because every fight, instead of being a principled fight, instead of saying to Bernie Sanders, by what right?
By what constitutional authority do you take somebody's, do you set a drug price, saying to AOC, by what constitutional authority do you take 70% of a person's income?
At what point is he working for you, working for the government, instead of for himself?
And how is that in keeping with the American founding?
Instead of having arguments like that, we're always having these pseudo-moral arguments.
And I call them pseudo because none of us is righteous.
No, not one.
That's why they're pseudo-arguments.
The person accusing you is taking the moral high ground by accusing you, but does he really have the right?
You know, Joe Biden, I kind of feel for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is, I mean, I think the guy's a dope.
I think he is AOC, disguised as an old man.
You know, maybe this, you never see them together.
That's why.
They're probably the same person.
But I think that he's being hit now for being creepy Joe.
You know, he puts his hands on people.
puts his hands on people's shoulder.
So there are all these pictures of him putting his hands on people.
And now a, I think she's a Las Vegas Assemblywoman.
Is that what she is?
Lucy Flores.
She's Nevada, Nevada legislator, Lucy Flores.
And she has now said that Joe Biden me-tooed her.
Here she is describing what he did.
Well, it happened also suddenly.
Anyone who's ever been at a rally recognizes that there is just chaos.
There's a lot of energy.
Everyone's running back and forth.
Eva Longoria was there.
We were all lined up next to the stage.
Eva was in front of me.
Joe Biden was behind me.
I'm kind of preparing myself to give these remarks.
It's the very last days before the election.
And very unexpectedly and out of nowhere, I feel Joe Biden put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair, and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head.
Okay, so it's yet another one of these MeToo stories.
You know what's interesting?
What's interesting about this?
Biden put out a statement, and he said, my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I've offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort.
And not once, never, did I believe I acted inappropriately.
If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully, but it was never my intention.
Interestingly, one of the most famous pictures used to make Joe Biden look like this creepy guy was with Stephanie Carter, who was the wife of, I can't remember, he was a top Obama official.
And at his appointment to his post, there's a famous picture of Joe Biden coming up behind her, whispering in her ear, holding her by the shoulders and keeping his hands on his shoulders.
And this is Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense.
There it is.
Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense.
And this is one of the famous pictures of him.
And she writes a piece saying, no, he was not doing that at all.
He was not being creepy.
I was absolutely wiped out.
I was exhausted.
It was a high-pressure day.
And he was comforting me.
And he said, thank you for letting us use your husband.
Thank you for loaning us your husband.
And it was the right thing to do.
And I appreciate it.
Now, here's the thing.
Flores, this woman who's making this accusation, is a far leftist.
Biden has a reputation.
Recently, he's been sounding like one of these identity politics buffoons, but like, you know, he has a reputation for being an old-fashioned Democrat, a kind of more moderate Democrat.
And by the way, a white man who might actually have some advantages with Trump.
I think Trump would kick him down the street.
I bounce him down the street like a basketball.
I don't think he would have a problem with him.
But there is a strain of thought that he is Lunchbucket Joe.
He's the working class guy.
All those people who turned out for Trump in the Midwest are suddenly going to turn over to Biden, even though they have jobs now, even though the economy is better now.
Somehow that illusion is going to take them over.
But Flores is a political operative.
She's a political operative.
And I really wonder.
I really have to wonder.
I mean, Elizabeth Warren, here's just a quick clip.
Elizabeth Warren chimes right in.
She goes right for it.
I read the op-in last night, I believe.
Lucy Florence.
And Joe Biden needs to give an answer.
Should he not run as a result?
That's for Joe Biden to decide.
So Biden is polling much better.
Elizabeth Warren is a second-tier candidate.
She really blew herself up with the, I guess she shot herself in the foot with an arrow over the Vocabus fraud.
But she, you know, this is a hit job.
It's all about the politics.
It's all about the power, just like it was with Kavanaugh, just like it was with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas.
It's not about morality because none of us is righteous.
That's the problem I have.
Of course, there are actions that people take that are immoral.
But what the left does is it tries, Shelby Still is right about this.
They try to make every action about their moral high ground.
What we keep saying and should be saying is that freedom is moral.
Freedom is moral.
You don't have the moral right.
I saw a comedian say this.
Bill Burr, I think it was, said this the other day.
Where do you get the right to take 70% of my income?
He put it in moral terms.
You know, this guy, Pete Boudigi, I believe it's pronounced, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
He's a gay guy, but he is getting some traction basically as a kind of all-American gay guy.
He's an Episcopalian.
He's a believing Christian.
He's a, you know, kind of a, he puts himself forward as being kind of in the middle ground.
And when he talks, he starts to talk about freedom.
Watch this.
This is kind of a magic trick he pulls.
He starts talking about freedom and then not.
Play the first cut first, obviously.
I don't think we need different values.
I believe in the values of this party.
That's why I'm doing this.
But I do believe we could adjust the way we talk about it just a little bit.
And it's one of the reasons why you always hear the word freedom on my lips.
We've allowed our conservative friends to get a monopoly on the idea of freedom.
Now they care about freedom, but they care about a very specific kind of freedom.
Freedom from.
Freedom from regulation.
As though government were the only thing that can make us unfree.
All right.
But that's not true, is it?
See, he knows.
He knows that the values, that there's a value difference.
He is trying to take our value.
He knows that our values have appeal.
And he says, well, they only have one kind of freedom, freedom from.
And to some degree, that's true.
It's not just freedom from government, although laws are there to restrain the government, and the government is one of the most powerful actors.
In fact, the government is the most powerful actor.
But I've said before, the government sometimes has to act to restrain powerful corporations from taking your freedom away.
But it is true that we believe in freedom from.
We believe in the freedom to be left alone.
Now, he redefines that.
Here it is.
We know that your neighbor can make you unfree.
Your cable company can make you unfree.
If they're telling you who you ought to marry, your county clerk can make you unfree.
You're not free if you're afraid to start a small business because leaving your job would mean losing your health care.
You're not free if there is a veil of mistrust between you as a person of color and the officers who are sworn to keep you safe.
You're not free if your reproductive choices are being dictated by male politicians at all.
So don't let anybody tell you that the other side is the side that's got a handle on freedom.
We are the party of freedom and we shouldn't be afraid to go out there and say it.
Well, you can go out there and say it, but it's just not true.
It's just not true because every type of freedom he describes is really the freedom to overpower someone else, to demand that the labor of a doctor somehow belongs to you, to say that the life of a child, an unborn child, is yours to take away.
I mean, that is a kind of freedom.
I mean, it's like it's freedom if I don't like my wife anymore and I want to throw her out of the car.
That's freedom.
But that's not the kind of freedom we talk about.
What we talk about is the freedom to be left alone and to have responsibility for one another.
Your freedom ends at the other guy's nose.
It's always been true.
You can throw a punch, but the minute it connects with somebody else, that's where your freedom ends.
And so he's redefining it, but at least he hears, he knows he's attuned to the fact that we have a values problem and that the values that the right is defending, if it would defend them, if it would come out and defend them, those values still exist.
Is this country going to be socialist?
Is Donald Trump wrong?
You know, I think Trump is not a guy who's on either side of this.
He's not a guy who plays the moral card, and he's not a guy who plays the principle card.
He's a guy who plays the reality card.
He says, look, I made the economy better.
You have a job now.
Vote for me.
You know, that's what he says.
He says, this will work.
I'll do this.
He doesn't really consult a set of principles.
He consults his gut.
And so far, he's doing a good job.
You know, he is.
He's doing a really good job.
I'm impressed.
I didn't think he was going to be this good.
I think he is.
But I do think that there are people, the people who write, the people who think, the people who talk, who have to remind people of what our principles are, who have to remind us of what our values are, that we value freedom, that we don't value, you know, we value the freedom of the other guy, the guy we disagree with.
We can value the freedom of a gay person and also value the freedom of the cake baker who does not, who does not want to attend his wedding and celebrate that wedding for religious reasons.
We have to celebrate his freedom because if we don't celebrate the freedom of the people we disagree with, we're only celebrating power.
If we don't celebrate the freedom of the people we disagree with, we're only celebrating power.
Because when he's in power, when he's got the gun, when he's got the government, what argument have you got left that's going to keep him from taking your freedom away?
These principles defend us all.
They defend us left and right.
The principles defend us all.
Valuing Freedom Despite Disagreements00:03:28
And that's what makes them more moral than the moral faux pas of the moment.
That is what makes the argument so much deeper than the events of the moment and then the issues of the moment.
And that's why we shouldn't let politics make us stupid.
You know, just as a perfect example of the way this morality stuff blows up on people, take a look at what's happening in Hollywood, my hometown.
Take a look at this new boycott.
This is, what's her name?
Alyssa Milano and 49 other celebrities threatening to boycott Georgia.
Why are they threatening to boycott Georgia?
Because Georgia is trying to pass a heartbeat bill that will keep, outlaw abortion the minute a heartbeat can be detected.
And this includes guys like Sean Penn, you know, and what a moral man is he, right?
This is the guy who still hasn't apologized to Venezuela.
You know, he still hasn't apologized for Hugo Chavez.
You know, and that, and by the way, if you're holding your breath waiting for the Sean Penn apology tour, you can forget it.
I mean, this is the Hollywood that Harvey Weinstein once said.
Remember this?
Harvey Weinstein said, Hollywood has the best moral compass because it has compassion.
We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9-11.
We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.
Now, think about this.
This is Harvey Weinstein talking.
He was talking at the time that Roman Polanski, remember old Roman Polanski, had been detained in Switzerland.
Why?
Because he was a fugitive from justice.
Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl.
He drugged her.
He sodomized her.
And then when he knew he was going to have to pay the price for it, he left.
He fled the country.
So there's no statute of limitations on that.
There's no statute of limitations for fugitives, right?
Because you never paid the price.
So when he got picked up in Switzerland, it was Harvey Weinstein, it was Meryl Streep, it was Woody Allen.
They all showed up with their petitions now.
By what right do these people come after Georgia?
By what right do they use the incredible power of the economy to crush these people's right to self-governance?
Where is the morality in that?
But nobody's even arguing about that principle.
We're arguing about abortion, but this isn't about abortion.
It's not.
I mean, you know how strongly I oppose abortion, but that's not what it's about.
It's about the right to Georgia to self-governance.
It's about the right to Georgia to self-governance.
The only reason, the only reason Hollywood comes to Georgia to make its movies is because this town is so lefty.
Hollywood, where I no longer am, but where I usually live, Hollywood is so lefty, so unionized, that they can't afford to make the movies there.
So they go to Georgia so they don't have to pay the unions when they're making their movie about how great unions are.
I mean, that's really true.
They go to Budapest to film things, so they don't have to pay the Teamsters while they're making a movie about Norma Ray and how wonderful it is that you unionize the shop.
That's the problem with these moral arguments is the people who making them are no better than anybody else.
It's only the fact that their finger is pointed that distracts you from them and puts the onus on the other guy.
If we make the argument for our values, if we make the argument for our principles, if we make the argument that through our principles we will reach a higher stage of progress and morality, I think we can win this fight.
But the outcome is by no means certain.
I'm going to be here for two weeks here in Hillsdale.
It is absolutely beautiful.
I hope you will join me and I'll tell you all about it as things unfold.
Be here tomorrow for more.
Making Moral Arguments Count00:00:55
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Clavin Show.
Hooray, hurrah!
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show.
Joe Biden is facing intense scrutiny for behavior that he has been exhibiting in public, including on the largest stage in the world, for 40 years.
If I didn't know any better, I'd say this was just a cynical attack.