Andrew Clavin dissects how a media dominated by Democrats—exemplified by the New York Times’ third-hand sourcing on Mueller frustrations—distorts narratives, from shielding figures like Ilhan Omar and AOC to excusing Biden’s "affectionate" behavior while demonizing Kavanaugh. Tim Carney argues civil society’s collapse—driven by secularization and institutional failure—fuels rural decline, rejecting federal fixes in favor of grassroots revival. The episode exposes a press that enables Democratic hypocrisy, leaving voters disillusioned and communities hollowed out. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has published a bombshell report that may be the smoking gun that finally gets to the bottom of the tipping point.
The front page story claims, and as God is my witness, I'm not making this up, that unnamed sources with unknown relationships to unnamed investigators on the Mueller team made unsubstantiated claims that the unnamed investigators made unspecified complaints about the Attorney General's description of the Mueller report, but they won't say what those complaints are.
Again, not making this up.
The Times ran the story under the headline, some on Mueller's team say report was more damaging than Barr revealed, and claims the unnamed government officials are familiar with the, quote, simmering frustrations of the unnamed investigators they heard say these things, which they won't tell us what they were.
Three reporters have bylines on this story, and two other reporters are credited with additional reporting.
By my count, that means it took five reporters to gather the information that unnamed people heard unnamed people make unspecified claims.
Sounds like another Times Pulitzer may be already in the mail.
Times editor Blithering Prevarication III had high praise for his crack team of five reporters who ran down these anonymous sources, who overheard other anonymous sources say something they won't tell us.
In a statement released to a really outraged woman in a Brooklyn artisanal coffee shop, Mr. Third said, quote, this bombshell could be the smoking gun that marks the beginning of the end when the walls started closing in and the news started tightening, and we finally found out.
But at this point, Mr. Third burst into uncontrollable sobs and cried, I hate him, I hate him.
I would betray every professional practice and principle if I could just destroy him, unquote.
It was unclear to whom Mr. Third was referring, but anonymous sources familiar with unnamed reporters claim those reporters say it was a certain president of the United States, but they won't say which one.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
Ship-shaped, ipsy-topsy, the world is zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hooray, hooray, it makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So after eight years of scandal-free reporting of an Obama administration that used the IRS to silence dissent, lied to the public about the Iran deal, lied to the public about the Benghazi disaster, lied to the public about Obamacare, covered up the fast and furious fiasco, and then stonewalled Congress about it until they held the Attorney General in contempt and shut down an investigation into a Democrat presidential candidate while spying on an opposing presidential campaign on the basis of the Democrat candidate's oppo research.
Spring Cleaning Special00:02:04
I think we can safely say that a press 90% populated by Democrats is in the business of covering up for Democrats.
As I've said before, the media acts like a ring of invisibility that allows Democrats to get away with high crimes and misdemeanors under cover of Democracy Dies in Darkness.
And I can understand why Democrats love that freedom in the short term, but doesn't it hurt them in the long term?
After all, look what happened to Gollum when he put on the invisibility ring.
He turned all shriveled and evil and blue.
Maybe that's what they mean when they talk about a blue state.
Let's discuss.
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I mean, there's another one like it in the Washington Post.
The Hill is running it.
So clearly, this is a story that certain people wanted out at this point in time, right?
Here's some of the Times, the Times leads.
Some of Robert S. Mueller III's investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.
So the investigators told associates, according to government officials, that this was going on.
I mean, and Washington Post has a story.
They added some details saying that they felt that there were summaries in the report that could have been released and that there was more evidence of obstruction.
Just moments ago, by the way, almost like a minute before I came on, the DOJ came out and denied the whole story.
They said every page of the Mueller report was stamped with a watermark that said this page could contain classified information, so it couldn't be released until it was vetted.
So none of the summaries that were in it could be released until it was vetted.
And I don't know if they actually came out and denied the idea that there was obstruction, but it was quoted in the report that Mueller, that was a direct quote from the report that Mueller said he had not exonerated Trump but had not come to any conclusions on obstruction.
So as you know, I'm here at Hillsdale College.
And first of all, you know, I really have to send a shout out to Scott Bertram.
Boy, every day this week we have had a technical crisis.
Scott Bertram runs the radio station at Hillsdale.
And every day he has patched this thing together like Apollo 13.
It has been amazing.
We would not be talking to you without him.
I would have a little bust of him made to go next to my Aristotle bust, but that sounds expensive.
But anyway, he's done a great job.
But here I am at Hillsdale College, and I am the Pulliam Distinguished Fellow in Journalism.
All right.
So from that lofty position, from that lofty position, I'm going to ask the following question.
Part of a news story is where the information comes from.
And you say that's not a question, and you're right.
That's not a question.
Part of every news story is where the information comes from.
That's one of the most essential parts of a piece of journalism.
Where did you get the information?
What's their purpose in giving you the information?
Why did they do it?
Where do they stand politically?
What's their motivation?
How do we know it's reliable?
We know nothing.
This is third-hand anonymous sources.
Investigators told associates, according to government officials.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
If I were at the New York Times right now, I would be in the bathroom, curled up in the corner, sobbing for the disgrace I've made of myself in my hatred of Donald Trump.
This paper used to be a great paper.
It really did.
I mean, I'm talking way back in the day, like the 80s, but still, still, it was a good paper.
It was more or less fair.
It had liberal leanings, but it was still pretty fair.
Anonymous investigators have told anonymous associates according to government officials, and we can't tell you what they said.
They won't tell us what they said.
I mean, that's their story.
And of course, and of course, the liberals love it.
The liberals think this is a big, big story.
If you just want to get a hit of what the liberals are doing, here's MSNBC, Chris Matthews, reacting to this.
This is amazing.
Now it comes out that what a lot of us suspected, I'm sure you did too, Mueller had more to say than Barr wanted us to hear.
Really?
Maybe it took all these weeks to get the truth, but it's coming out.
Maybe we're going to find some amazing information out here that has nothing to do with whether they caught the president with a capital crime or not.
This story keeps breaking on us.
We think we got to the bottom.
The New York Times has been incredible getting it.
No matter, no wonder Trump hates them.
They keep breaking this stuff out.
And I think Mnuchin's going to be of no help in getting the tax returns because he's part of that army of toadies now in the executive branch.
This is an embarrassing executive branch now.
You go on Twitter and the liberals are, oh, what a wonderful country that all this information is coming out.
At least the Times is honest about one thing.
They're honest about their motivations.
They say, at stake in the dispute, right?
This kind of passive voice where nobody's saying this, just the New York Times is declaring this to be the truth.
At least they didn't have three anonymous sources not saying things.
But at stake in the dispute, the first evidence of tension, this is the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel's office, which, by the way, it's not evidence of anything, but at stake in the dispute is who shapes the public's initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history.
Some members of Mr. Mueller's team are concerned that because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel's findings, Americans' views will have hardened before the investigation's conclusions become public.
That is an amazing paragraph.
That is a paragraph that should be put into some kind of hall of shame of journalism.
At stake in this dispute is who shapes the public's initial understanding.
So in other words, the New York Times wants to get in on the narrative.
They've got government officials talking to associates who talk to investigators who won't tell them what they said, but it's worth putting on the front page because then Chris Matthews can go on and people can go on Twitter and it'll help shape the narrative of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history.
Who says?
What's consequential about it?
Nothing's happened.
There's been no indictments.
There's been nothing.
If anything's consequential about it, it has been a massive, massive scandal for the FBI, led by James Comey, for Barack Obama's DOJ.
That's the scandal, but they're not covering that scandal.
So it's a battle for the narrative.
Now, let's, I hate to do this to the New York Times because I feel sorry for them, but let's use a little logic here, okay?
The Attorney General is going to release this report.
This report is going to come out.
Now, maybe there'll be some stuff redacted for classified, you know, for reasons of classified national security and all this stuff.
But basically, we're all going to see what's in the report.
He wants to show what's in the report.
Trump wants the report to show up, although recently, because he knows the Democrats are making themselves hysterical, he's been trolling them.
But he wants them to come out.
He doesn't care if it comes out, too.
Barr put out a letter, his letter quoted the report, and he's now trying to get the report out as quickly as he can.
He's going to be called before Congress to testify, right?
He's going to be called before Congress to testify.
He's not lying.
It's ridiculous.
This conspiracy does not exist.
There is no cover-up.
There's nothing going on.
There's no news.
It's not a news story.
It's not, if it were a news story, they would have some kind of source who would go online and say, this is what happened.
Anytime Mueller wants, anytime Mueller wants, he can come out and say, Barr is lying about me.
That's not what the report says.
And Barr knows it.
You know, it's ridiculous.
It's an absolutely ridiculous, illogical story with no sourcing.
You know, and on the front page, I mean, these guys have sacrificed their reputation, the reputation of a great institution, their reputation as journalists.
If it weren't for the fact that all of journalists is run by Democrats, these guys would be toast.
This is an absolutely shameful moment in the history of the New York Times.
It is just absolutely shameful that they would do this.
You know, I've said this, I haven't said this in a long time, but I remember noticing when Trump was running his incredible talent, not for destroying other people, but for getting other people to destroy themselves.
It's just a knack he has.
And it really is amazing.
And this is what is happening to the Times.
Trump's not destroying the Times, although, of course, he put out a tweet saying that they're a terrible fake newspaper and it's all fake news, as he should.
I mean, he's absolutely in the right.
But it's the Times destroying themselves.
It's just like when Marco Rubio came out and made those kind of terrible Trumpian jokes about Trump's hands, and it just made Rubio look bad.
Somehow, Trump is able to do this stuff and get away with it because it's him.
We all know it's him.
It's kind of what we expect from him.
You know, it's just like it's a way of talking.
It's kind of funny.
We're used to it from The Apprentice.
And people like it because he doesn't change when he goes and talks to other people.
He doesn't go to some meeting of black Americans and say, I'm in no ways tired, you know, like Hillary Clinton does.
Like she's suddenly singing his spiritual out in the moonlight.
You know, he doesn't do any of that.
He's the same Trump no matter where he goes.
And people like it about him.
He's just very out there as he is.
But when other people try to imitate them, they sink to this level that they can't sustain.
Their reputation can't sustain it.
Their nature doesn't really fit with it.
The New York Times is now in the mud with Donald Trump at his worst.
They're not even in the mud with Donald Trump when he's on a roll.
They're in the mud with Donald Trump when he's doing stuff that even I disapprove of.
It really is shameful.
And so what does it do?
Obviously, the New York Times is acting as a pure Democrat instrument of the Democrats.
That's all it's doing.
That's all the press is doing.
So why does that hurt the Democrats?
Isn't that great for the Democrats?
Well, no, it's not, because now you've got all these people who are voters who are, once again, getting their hopes ginned up, once again thinking, oh boy, this is a scandal.
You can see them on Twitter.
You can see them like just, oh, I knew it.
They said this was the end, but it's just the beginning.
And it's all going to fall through.
It's all going to fall through because Barr's reputation, Barr is a straight guy.
He's not there.
You know, he didn't like this investigation because it's a hoax, because the whole thing is a shame to begin with.
But he's not going to risk his reputation saying the report said one thing.
And then when he has to release it, it says something else.
That's going to be ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
It's just a ridiculous storyline.
And they're putting it out their way.
And it just means that the expectations of the people who are supposed to be supporting the Democrats are going to be constantly dashed.
Plus, it makes them stupid.
It means when they get in an argument at a dinner party with me, and this happened recently, they don't know what they're talking about, and I do.
You know, they're reading the New York Times.
The New York Times is lying to them with their sources reporting sources, reporting sources, and they don't know anything.
And when they say, well, what about this?
And I say, oh, yeah, but look, here's the story.
And this is what it says.
I win that argument.
And they know I win that argument.
You can't fool all the people all the time.
And at some point, even people who aren't paying attention will get it.
They will understand.
Oh, I get it.
This is the press.
They work for the Democrats.
Everything they're saying is a lie.
Once you do that, the Democrats are lost.
So that is one important way that having a press that's all Democrats hurts the Democrats.
A second way that it hurts the Democrats is that they disguise, they do this thing we've been talking about all week.
We got it from Shelby Steele, but it's a really great observation.
Not, but it's a great observation because it comes from Shelby Steele.
It's a great observation.
That the Democrats, the left, have managed to transform political debates into moral debates.
And that is a very dangerous thing to do because none of us is righteous.
No, not one, right?
So anybody who starts pointing moral fingers is going to get those fingers pointed back, right?
This is why Jesus told you, you know, he was just trying to be good, a friend.
He was just trying to be a pal to you.
This is why he said, let he who is without sin, let him who is without sin, throw the first stone, right?
Because if you don't, you're going to get that stone coming right back at you.
And that is what happens when the press promotes all the stories that the Democrats want promoted, right?
So let's take a look, for instance, at our old pal, Creepy Joe Biden, right?
Creepy Joe is now, somebody is out to get this guy.
We don't know whether it's a conservative mark or it's the leftist mark.
I suspect it's more from the left side of the Democrat Party.
Biden is a frontrunner.
He looks like he hasn't even entered the race yet, and he's way ahead in the polls.
And this is a classic slow leak, right, of people coming out.
First of all, Biden put out a statement yesterday.
And let's take it in two parts.
The first part of the statement, he says, all this touching I do, all this sniffing of hair, all this grabbing of shoulders, that's just the kind of hairpin I am.
Here's the first part of Biden's statement.
The coming month, I expect to be talking to you about a whole lot of issues, and I'll always be direct with you.
But today I want to talk about gestures of support and encouragement that I've made to women and some men that have made them uncomfortable.
And I always tried to be, in my career, I've always tried to make a human connection.
That's my responsibility, I think.
I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, you can do this.
And whether they're women, men, young, old, it's the way I've always been.
It's the way I've tried to show I care about them and I'm listening.
And over the years, knowing what I've been through, the things that I've faced, I've found that scores, if not hundreds of people have come up to me and reached out for solace and comfort, something, something, anything that may help them get through the tragedy they're going through.
And so it's just who I am.
And then he makes the classic mistake of actually agreeing to the terms that the left has set, right?
This is the Stalinist Democrat Party, so he's got to put up the I'm sorry sign and hang his head as an enemy of the state.
And he admits, well, you know, times have changed, and I'm going to have to change.
Old Uncle Joe is going to have to change with me.
Here's the second part.
I've never thought of politics as cold and antiseptic.
I've always thought it about connecting with people.
As I said, shaking hands, hands on the shoulder, a hug, encouragement.
Now it's all about taking selfies together.
You know, social norms have begun to change.
They've shifted.
And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset.
And I get it.
I get it.
I hear what they're saying.
I understand it.
And I'll be much more mindful.
That's my responsibility.
My responsibility, and I'll meet it.
But I always believe governing, quite frankly, life for that matter, is about connecting, about connecting with people.
That won't change, but I will be more mindful and respectful of people's personal space.
And that's a good thing.
That's a good thing.
I've worked my whole life to empower women.
I've worked my whole life to prevent abuse.
I've written, and so the idea that I can adjust to the fact that personal space is important, more important than it's ever been, is just not thinkable.
I will.
I will.
Okay, so that's Joe Biden fighting back, trying to get back in his position, get steady on his feet.
And then right afterwards, right, three additional women come forward to say Joe Biden touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable.
Right after the speech, right, they come out.
These three women come out.
They say, oh, he put his hand on the back of my head and pressed his forehead to my forehead while he talked to me.
I was so shocked that it was hard to focus on what he was saying.
I remember he told me I was a pretty girl.
Joe, So that's choreographed, right?
I've been watching these things a long time.
We all have.
We saw it with Kavanaugh.
I told you when it was happening with Kavanaugh the way it was going to happen.
Another woman would come forward.
Oh, another woman would come forward, keep those headlines going.
That is a choreographed attack.
This is the way it's done.
As Pulliam Distinguished Fellow of the Journalism School at Hillsdale College, once again, let me say from that perch of authority, that part of a journalist's story is where the information comes from.
So that's the story here.
Where is this coming from?
Where is Joe Biden coming from?
But here's my point about this.
My point about this is this is what they did to Kavanaugh.
The press supported it 110%, right?
This is what they did.
Now listen to the way the press is covering Joe Biden.
Here's this montage.
Joe Biden's Affection Controversy00:08:07
There's a lot of things I know about Joe Biden.
I've known him for a long time.
He is extremely affectionate.
He's very affectionate.
I find oddly affectionate.
He kisses people on the mouth.
He shouldn't.
He's always touching people's shoulders.
I've seen him rub the shoulders of women and men.
Joe Biden calls them expressions of affection.
He is an affectionate old school politician.
Uncle Joe, as we affectionately call him, he's a very affectionate, very likable person.
So it's not surprising that he behaves in this way, that he's quite affectionate.
You know, he's just an affectionate guy.
I've known Joe Biden a long time, as have many others, and have always found him a very emotional man who is very, very affectionate.
You know, everyone in Washington knows that he is a guy who is very affectionate.
He's touchy-feely.
He's been doing it his entire life in an affectionate way.
He's a very affectionate person.
He suffers from being overtly affectionate.
See, I guess he's affectionate.
So what I was, what I'm getting from this is I'm getting that he's affectionate, right?
That he's affectionate.
What happened to Believe All Women?
What happened to the minute a woman accuses you, you're done, right?
See, this is the problem they have.
The press set the standard with Clarence Thomas and with Kavanaugh.
We know Anita Hill is a living saint.
No word comes out of her mouth that can possibly be doubted.
No, absolutely no taint of being a political operative set out to bring down a conservative justice, a black conservative Supreme Court justice.
No taint of that may ever touch her holy body.
Same thing with Christine Blasey Ford.
This is the standard, right?
This is the standard that's been set.
There was no, oh, you know, Kavanaugh, he's just affectionate.
He just will come up to you and like kind of give you a big old smooch in the middle of a party.
No, We learned this.
They told us.
They told us this.
The left told us this.
And now, because they've turned this into a moral battleground and none of us is righteous, suddenly when it bounces back on them, they got to scramble.
They make themselves look like idiots.
They make themselves look like hypocrites.
And what they're depending on, they're depending on the fact that we have a conscience.
The people on the right have a conscience.
And my feeling is, oh yeah, too bad, pal.
You know, what they're depending on is that the right will say, well, you know, when we were talking about Kavanaugh, we were saying that, you know, we were saying that it was overblown and that we shouldn't, there should be proof and this and that.
We'll have to apply that same standard.
Eh, you know, this is politics.
This is the gladiator fight.
You can't count on that.
So a press that takes every accusation against the right seriously, and especially on a moral plane, is going to, by nature, by absolute inevitability, is going to find itself exposing Democrats to the same charges when they come back at them, right?
So one pro-Trump PAC put out this ad called Creepy Joe, right?
Creepy, yeah, Creepy Uncle Joe, it's called.
And it's hilarious.
It's a little visual, so if you can't see it, it's basically children watching all these various pictures of Joe grabbing hold of people while the lady who first, Lucy Flores, who first accused him, is talking.
So it's kids watching TV where Uncle Joe is grabbing people and Lucy Flores talking.
It happened also suddenly, very unexpectedly, 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.
To have the vice president of the United States do that to me so unexpectedly and just kind of out of nowhere.
It was just shocking.
It was shocking because you don't expect that kind of intimate behavior.
You don't expect that kind of intimacy from someone so powerful and someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever to touch you and to feel you and to be so close to you in that way.
And all that creepy music, it says the children are watching.
You know, we have to show them.
Anyway, I have to tell you one thing, if you weren't watching, if you're just listening, that I'm all for this affectionate Uncle Joe, and he's just doing all this.
Some of those kids he's touching looked really uncomfortable.
I mean, I got to say, if you're even a little bit aware of the people around you and how they're reacting to you, I would have jumped about a foot away from those kids just because of the looks on their faces.
So I'm not so sure that the press isn't defending something that may actually not be as defensible as they'd like to think.
But anyway, it just, when you accept the premise that we are all to be held to these pristine moral standards because you're using that to attack right-wingers, it's going to bounce back because nobody can live up to those standards.
And if you think the right is going to sit there and say, oh, well, you know, yes, you tried to do it to us, but we're not going to try to do it to you, them days are over.
It's Trump time.
Forget about it.
That's not going to happen.
The third way, the third way is the most important as far as I'm concerned, is that invisibility, the invisibility that the press gives the Democrats encourages corruption.
It encourages corruption.
When you're invisible, it's the Gollum rule.
When you're invisible, you're Gollum.
And you're going to just eventually get worse and worse and worse.
You've got Ilhan Omar now, who is being investigated for spending $6,000 in campaign funds on her divorce.
I know there are a lot of rumors that she was actually married to her brother.
I tried to substantiate those, but they don't look like they're, they don't look like they're well-grounded.
You know, I'm not sure.
I don't know whether they're true or not.
But $6,000 is not a lot.
But still, it's this kind of easygoing corruption that you do when nobody's watching you, when nobody can see you, when you know you're not going to be called out.
Our old friend Alexandria Casional Cortex, there's been another second, I believe, complaint to the Federal Election Commission saying that she and her campaign manager operated a subsidy scheme that ran afoul of campaign finance laws.
They had a company that was basically undercharging them to do favors for them.
And she's denying all this.
She says this is a right-wing hit job.
But listen to the way she talks.
She goes on, I guess this is that Facebook, instant Facebook thing, and she's just throwing, Instagram, thank you.
She's just throwing out these incredible charges against our law enforcement guys on the border.
Listen to this.
At least I'm not trying to cage children in the border and inject them with drugs.
That's not a mistake.
That is a deliberate policy to attack people based on their national origin.
That's not a mistake.
That's just hatred.
That's just cruelty.
That's just wrong.
That's just crazy.
I mean, that's just crazy.
She thinks that our border patrol are injecting people, kidnapping people and injecting them with drugs because they don't like their race.
That's what she thinks.
And she can say that because nobody, she's not going to get hit.
That's not going to be on the front page of the New York Times, the paper that's supposed to be covering the city where she is a representative.
That's just not going to happen to her.
So she can say those awful, awful things and get away with it, whereas anybody on the right said that, of course, they'd be crucified.
So it encourages corruption.
So a Democrat press, it hurts the Democrats by making them stupid on the issues while constantly disappointing them with fake news that doesn't have a climax.
It creates trivial moral categories for scandal for the right and then leaves Democrats open to the same tactics under charges of hypocrisy.
And it encourages corruption, which always comes back to bite them all, as the New York Times has told us, in defense of the narrative.
Pardon me, he's written a fascinating book called Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.
But you got to come over to dailywire.com.
I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
You could watch the whole show right there.
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We'll be right back.
All right.
Tim Carney is the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
He's the author of Alienated America, Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, which is out now.
Tim, thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
So what's the answer?
Why do some communities thrive and others collapse?
The short answer is it has to do with the little platoons, as Edmund Burke would put it.
It's got to do with institutions of civil society, strong communities.
We sometimes hear a purely economic explanation of the suffering of the working class in the middle of the country, but that skips a very important step.
People do well in places that have churches, that have swim clubs, that have strong public schools with very involved parents.
And so when you look at the suffering of the working class, when you look at opioid deaths, when you look at teenage pregnancies, when you look at the retreat from marriage and all of these problems, the root cause of them is that is a loss of connection because it's a loss of strong institutions of civil society.
So it's not the economy destroying the families.
It's actually the families destroying the economy.
No, it's the economy.
When a factory closes, that's often the first domino to fall.
But the next step is the diner that served the factory closed down and people aren't as able to meet and get together with their neighbors.
And then the active involved parents get up and leave.
And so the public school becomes less of sort of a great hub of civil society bringing people together.
And then next thing, the church closes.
And so then people are left alienated.
Families, individuals are left without the connection that these things provide.
In some places, though, they can weather an economic downturn.
I was just in western Michigan in Grand Rapids.
They got hit by the auto collapse in 2008 a lot.
But they weathered that downturn because the churches, the schools, the community institutions, the museums, all of those things sort of kept together families, kept up human capital, kept up education quality.
And so then lots of other businesses, as quickly as possible, resettled in a place like that.
That doesn't happen in a lot of rural America because there isn't that thick, dense web of strong institutions of civil society.
All right.
I want to get back to that in just a second.
But a lot of people, especially on the right, I've heard these kind of tough guy remarks about people like this.
Kevin Williamson is the famous one.
Let these societies die.
They behave badly.
This is the kind of dysfunction that we see in urban black communities.
We don't like it there and we shouldn't like it here, to be fair.
What's wrong with that assessment?
So it's consigning a lot of people to sort of the despair.
I mean, you can't, well, there are some places that are dead.
And so the Kevin Williamson argument is you should get up and leave them.
And there's probably a good argument to be made about that.
But I would say that the places that are on the decline, they can be stopped before they hit rock bottom.
But what it will take is something of a great awakening, something of a revitalization of the strong institutions.
These are things that are being killed by secularization.
Technology has lots of great things and some harms.
Being crowded out by big government.
Big government saying, oh, we'll take care of feeding all the poor.
And then the local government, the churches, those things don't have as much of a role.
If we can stop that sort of eradication, erasing of these institutions, a lot of these places can be turned around.
Okay, but these things don't come out of nowhere.
I mean, it's not that long ago.
It's within my memory, which only goes back a couple of hundred years.
But I mean, it's not that long ago when you thought of the Midwest and you thought about mom and dad, you thought about churches, you thought about this.
I mean, this was the kind of thing that people in New York would scoff at, that they were so moral, that they were so straightlaced, that they were so boring in their lives.
And now we suddenly find out, and it took everybody by surprise on the coast.
We suddenly find out that these people are in despair, that they're not getting married.
They're not going to church.
They're not going to church.
What happened?
So there's a lot of causes of this.
One, we should mention, a failure on behalf of the institutions, the churches.
I'm a Catholic.
My church has failed spectacularly in not taking care of its people and not dealing with abuse cases right.
And other churches, I think, have failed by either welcoming the crowding out by the government or becoming overly politicized.
And other lots of tons of other institutions have failed too, including public schools, et cetera.
But there are lots of outside forces that are killing it.
And one of the huge ones is big government.
When big government comes in, it crowds out the welfare spending by churches and nonprofit organizations.
And there's a push of secularization on the left saying that churches should not be in the public square.
You're not allowed to bring your religion into the marketplace.
That's what the Hobby Lobby case was about, was the Obama administration arguing, no, you do not get free exercise of religion once you step out into the marketplace.
ACLU suing Catholic hospitals out of business because they don't perform abortions.
There's an effort to say religious institutions shouldn't be out in the public.
And that's killer because when we're talking about civil society, for the middle class, the core institution has been, always has been church.
The cover of Alienated America is a broken down church because Tocqueville noted it 200 years ago.
He said that the church doesn't run government there, but it is the most important political institution and social institution in America is the church.
You know, one of the strange things is, though, that the church retained a lot of power even into, say, the 1920s and 1930s, even though it was breaking down in communities.
Communities were not as religious as the church was.
But I'm thinking because I work in Hollywood.
I'm thinking of the establishment of the Hayes office.
That was a minority of people who wanted that movie code to be put into place, but they forced it because they had moral authority in the society.
How did they lose that?
I mean, why is it that why is it this push for secularization was so successful?
I mean, many, many books have been written about this.
Mary Eberstadt, who's the wife of a colleague of mine at AEI, she wrote that the collapse of family helped contribute to the collapse of church.
I think that's true.
But I also try to argue that it goes the other way around, that churches, the most important thing that these institutions do was never preaching, this is how you ought to live your life.
That only carried weight when they were doing the other work of building an infrastructure, building an ecosystem in which you can raise families.
Raising kids is really hard.
My wife and I, we have six kids.
We would not be able to do that without, you know, without strong communities around it.
I tell lots of stories like that in the book.
But one of the things is when the churches stopped, either because of government crowding out or just a change in emphasis, whenever institutions aren't sort of doing what they can to serve families and individuals, help them live out their fullest lives, then they lose an authority, a sort of moral authority to preach.
Preaching only carried weight when it was backed up by deeds.
And churches today do not do as much of that building of the infrastructure as they used to.
One of the things I've noticed, I've written this article that's going to be in the next City Journal about a phenomenon I've noticed where several intellectuals, especially in Europe where they feel that the society is basically being overrun and destroyed, they say, you know, we have to retain our Christianity, but I myself cannot believe.
So I mean, I hear this a lot.
You know, there's a philosopher named Marcello Perra who talks about he had a book called Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, but not why we should be Christians.
Douglas Murray has written this book, The Strange Death of Europe, where he says, without religion, we're not going to get back.
And I just asked him flat out, do you believe?
No.
I just can't.
I just can't.
Is there something that maybe science has done, maybe the modern world has done that just has actually undermined Christianity, old-fashioned religion in ways that we simply can't heal?
Well, I mean, first of all, what you're pointing out, it's a broader phenomenon, but a sociologist realizing that religion is important and specifically attendance.
So that's one of the arguments that it's belonging to something where you are engaged in a joint higher purpose, and it's very important.
There is something about the modern world, though, with lots of other sort of, I used to describe it as we've got so many other creature comforts.
And one of the explanations of people falling away from church is, well, people don't want to sign on to like the idea of waiting until you're married to have sex and that sort of thing.
And so now that there's more access to video games and sex and delicious food, we have other pleasures that drag us away.
But then I look at the secular, most secularized parts of America, the places where it's happened the quickest.
It's not the wealthy elites who are these decadents.
No, it's the struggling middle class who, what they're doing, I mean, A, they are having less sex in and out of marriage.
B, these are the parts of the country that are suffering the most.
So it's not that great, fun, good times has dragged us away from church.
That's sort of like an analogy to college, right?
That's when a lot of college kids don't go to church because they're having too much fun on the weekends.
That's not happening on the large scale.
It's depressing and dank in most of the places where the secularization is accelerating at the highest rate.
It's almost as if the elites sold this idea of secularization to the poor, then went back to church while the poor just went down the drain.
Yeah, no, it's religion, Mark said, was the opiate of the masses.
I'm saying, no, this is a high-end drug.
The top 20% are more likely to be in church on a given or synagogue or mosque or whatever on a given Sunday than the bottom 20%.
That's really interesting.
So do you have any solutions?
What's the way back?
We need a large federal program.
No, I'm joking.
There is no big solution.
There are some.
So the first, the most important thing Donald Trump is doing is stopping the sort of anti-the effort to push the church out of the public square.
And so that's got to keep going.
Most of my solutions, like the Ten Commandments, are thou shalt not.
But really, it's going to take, there are a bunch of little solutions.
We have to, when you build a place, you have to build it around people, not around cars that would help.
People who have money, a lot of them put it into building up institutions that bring people together and give them a sense of purpose.
Churches are going to have to reform in a lot of ways.
A lot of southern evangelical churches are overly politicized.
The Catholic Church is not taking head-on.
It's an abuse crisis.
And I think when it does, that'll be the first step towards building up more priests, finding new roles for the laity.
But really, it takes a million, as a wise woman said, it takes a village to raise a child.
It takes a million people in their town.
It's like being more involved and realizing that while it may seem like you're going to get your happiness and that you can, you know, be a good neighbor just electronically or in your own home, you really do have to build up institutions that reach out to neighbors and give people a sense of purpose, give people their private mini safety net, all those things.
So there is no big solution because a big federal program would undermine itself.
Church Reform Efforts00:03:51
Yeah, no, that sounds frighteningly realistic.
Tim Carney, the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, really good paper, by the way, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.
Thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Let me just end with a final reflection, which I have to just talk about our old pal, Jesse Smollett.
Thank heavens for comedians who are not intimidated by the leftist mob.
They're going to be few and far between when you see a guy knocked off his post hosting the Oscars because he said something in some tweet 15 years ago.
It's dangerous out there for these guys, and they can lose their posts and lose their job.
But a couple of them are stepping forward.
Chris Rock was at the NNACP Image Awards where Smollett, in some kind of massive act of irony, I guess, was nominated for an image award.
And he was apparently told Chris Rock not to make any jokes about Smollett, and he didn't listen.
Here he is.
I guess I got to present an award that said no Jesse Smollett jokes.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
What a waste of light skin, you know?
You know what I could do with that light skin?
That curly hair, my career would be out of here.
running hollywood um yes no no no just did what the hell was he thinking From now on, I never want to know just you Jesse from now on.
You don't even get the you no more.
That you was respect.
You ain't getting no respect from me.
That's great.
That's great.
And Tracy Morgan did it on Jimmy Fallon, too.
I heard you got a new gig, though.
Yeah, they gave me a role on Empire.
They did.
What are you going to do on that?
Well, contractually, they gave me millions of dollars.
Contractually, all I got to do is not fake a hate crime.
That's it.
Jesse.
That's all you have to do.
That's all I have to do.
Yeah, perfect.
Yeah, you don't buy that story?
What?
What happened?
Nah, man.
Come on.
First of all, racist people don't be jumping nobody in the polar vortex.
That is great.
It's great stuff.
And, you know, it reminds me a little bit.
Obviously, there's no comparison between what Jussie Smollett did and what O.J. Simpson did.
It's not even in the same ballpark.
But it is true that O.J. Simpson got off in the courts of law, but he didn't get off.
He didn't escape justice.
I mean, people made sure that his life was not the same after that.
His reputation was not the same.
And it really did hurt him.
You can see.
You only have to look at him to see what it did.
And I think maybe a little bit of that is going to come down on Jussie Smollett as well.
You can escape the law, but you can't escape justice.
It's always going to find you somewhere.
I hate to tell you this.
I know some of you are already living in fear and trembling, but the Clavinless weekend is upon us.
Your odds of surviving are very, very small.
But if you do, I will be back here at Hillsdale College on Monday broadcasting live to you.
And I hope you will be here too if you live.
Doubtful, but try your best.
Clavinless Weekend Ahead00:00:46
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Joe Biden comes forward and apologizes for all of his touchy feely ways.