Donald Trump’s border claims face relentless media attacks from CBS, Schiff, and Acosta, who dismiss his policies as false despite Congress’s inaction on asylum loopholes. John Miller of Hillsdale College argues 90% of mainstream journalists lean Democrat, advocating for conservative hires to counter bias—while warning against opinion-driven reporting. The episode ties Trump’s struggle to resist media narratives like the "crying baby" scandal to broader failures in journalism, where fact-based reporting is overshadowed by partisan agendas. [Automatically generated summary]
The wealthy parents who paid a college consultant to help lie and cheat their children into elite colleges have hired a prison consultant to help them deal with life on the inside.
Even I can't believe I'm not making this up, but it was actually reported by CBS News.
Although they may find out later, I really did make it up and they mistook it for reality, whereupon I read it and mistook it for news and rewrote my own satire as a satire.
Which, now I think about it, may account for the entire news cycle for the last 10 years.
The rich parents had their consultant cheat their kids into school by such techniques as photoshopping their daughter's face onto the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger to get her a weightlifting scholarship, then having the daughter show up at Yale claiming she'd had a sex change operation and was now a 110-pound female and was off the team.
Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger was later found in a singles bar trying to pick up men since he finally had the young girl's face he always wanted.
Okay, some of this I may be making up now, but I'm not really sure.
Anyway, several of the parents caught in the scam are now planning to plead guilty, although not Lori Laughlin, the star of the 90s sitcom Full House, who is also accused of being the star of the 90s sitcom Full House, a far more serious charge.
According to CBS, the parents who have pled out have hired Justin Paperni, a former stockbroker who served prison time for fraud and now works with wealthy clients as a prison consultant.
Paperni says he can help his clients by photoshopping their faces onto the muscular tattooed bodies of MS-13 gang members so no one will dare mess with them in the yard and also by raising the marks on their entry exams so they only get into the best institutions.
All of which goes to show that having too much money can drive you insane.
Discussing ExpressVPN00:03:23
Also, reading the news can do that.
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-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
At this point, if Donald Trump said the sky was blue, the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, would declare it was brown.
Adam Schiff would go on Good Morning America and declare he had seen proof positive of a brown sky, though he couldn't reveal what it was.
Jerry Nadler would subpoena the president's eyeballs to demonstrate he wasn't seeing color rightly.
April Ryan and Don Lemon would opine that only a white supremacist could get color so wrong.
And Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, would make a complete and utter fool of himself.
I'm not sure how, but somehow you can count on that.
Trump says there's an emergency at the border, and the Media Democrat complex spend hour after hour saying he's wrong, and if he's not wrong, he's to blame.
And if he's not to blame, then look, there's a crying baby.
They're full of crap.
Trump's right.
The situation at our border is absurd and out of control.
And he's not to blame.
Congress is to blame.
For as long as I can remember, Republicans and Democrats both have brought the yammer, but not the hammer.
They talk, but they do nothing.
It's a gross insult.
We have a right to have our laws respected by the people who passed them in the first place.
It's a cruelty to these poor migrants who are escaping chaos and don't know the rules of the game on which they've staked their lives.
It shows unforgivable indifference to our own citizens who have the right to have their communities and homes respected and to get first, second, and final dibs on whatever jobs and services America provides.
And of course, it's dangerous.
We have enemies who want to destroy us, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Democrats, and the media.
It looks like Trump has had it and is about to get tough, but it's an open question whether he's truly tough enough to stand up against a media that wants desperately to take him down, even if it takes the country down with him.
Let's discuss in just a minute.
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Kirsten Nielsen's Concern00:15:24
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So the Donald, President the Donald, is on the rampage.
And I don't blame him a bit.
We've got people pouring in.
Whatever he was doing, it wasn't working.
You can blame him for the fact that when he had both houses of Congress, he didn't move.
I think that was a mistake.
He made such a big fuss about this during the campaign that he should have stuck it out.
He should have put it right up ahead, but he got what he could get, which was the tax cut instead, because I just don't think he could move the Congress.
I think the Congress has been, is paralyzed on this issue.
It's because they don't all agree on how to do it.
They can't compromise.
They all are serving their base and not serving the country.
It is just, it really, it really is, it's shameful.
So, you know, now he's been throwing out threats.
He's going to shut the border, but he can't do that.
The economy would crash.
So he backs off on that.
He's going to put tariffs on Mexican stuff, but not yet.
Whatever he does, he runs into a wall.
So apparently, he has now turned to Stephen Miller, who is his big hardliner on this policy guy.
And he apparently said to him, Stephen, you are now in charge of this issue, which caused Ilhan Omar to say that Stephen Miller is a white nationalist, another Jewish, white nationalist.
These Jewish Nazis are all over the place.
I don't think they're thinking long term.
You know, Jewish Nazis are not really, they're not far-sighted enough.
It's like the Japanese joining the white nationalist Nazis for World War II, not thinking ahead.
So Stephen Miller, I don't know what is white nationalist about the guy.
He is trying to protect the border.
You know, it's even so annoying when people say, and this is really what Miller has been talking about, but Stephen Miller has been talking about, is protecting Western civilization.
Really drives me crazy when you say protect Western civilization and everybody says, oh, you're a white nationalist.
You wouldn't know white nationalism was bad if it weren't for Western civilization.
There has never been a civilization, another civilization, that thinks that race is not the main way to categorize people.
Only Western civilization thinks that wrong.
They think it's wrong because St. Paul said so, because there's no Jew or Greek in Christ.
They think it's wrong because the Roman citizens of the Republic fought to get full citizenship, even though they weren't actually Latins.
They weren't actually Romans.
They fought to get citizenship until everybody was included.
That's one of the reasons the Republic fell.
That's why they think white nationalism is bad because of Western civilization.
You have to protect Western civilization.
One of the ways you do that is making sure the people come in subscribe to the values and attitudes of Western civilization.
So this whole thing against about immigration, we should have no borders.
What's the matter?
Why are you so stingy with your beautiful country, which stinks, that's their attitude.
How can our country be so evil that it won't let in all the people who want to get in because the country's so great?
That's basically the left's position.
It's all nonsense.
So Trump has fired Kirsten Nielsen, and I have to say, like, I think she seems to be taking the fall for the fact that things aren't working.
I mean, I don't know what she can do.
They have been hemmed in on every side.
It's Congress who needs to close these loopholes that let people come in.
All you have to do is cross the border and say, I want asylum.
If you have a kid with you, they don't want to put you in, they don't want to confine you because after 20 days, they have to let the kid go.
So, and then everybody says, oh, you're separating the children.
So everybody knows if you come in, walk in with a kid, you can steal a kid, you can borrow a kid, you can rent a kid, walk in with a kid, say, I want asylum, there's nothing they can do.
They release you, you never come back.
We never see you again.
So Nielsen sent her resignation, but obviously she was forced out.
She said, despite our progress in reforming Homeland Security for a new age, I've determined it's the right time for me to step aside.
I hope the next secretary will have the support of Congress.
Good luck with that.
And the courts and fixing the laws which have impeded our abilities to secure America's borders and which have contributed to discord in our nation's discourse.
Our country and the men and women of DHS deserve to have all the tools and resources they need to execute the mission entrusted to them.
Here she is outside her home talking to the gathered press.
I just want to thank the president again for the tremendous opportunity to serve this country.
I'm forever grateful and proud of the men and women of DHS who work so hard every day to execute their missions and to protect the homeland.
I really look forward to continuing to support them from the outside.
I spent the last 24 hours since yesterday talking with government officials, administration officials, members of Congress to ensure a smooth transition.
As you know, DHS has a vast array of missions.
I want to make sure that we continue to execute them all with excellence through the transition.
I share the president's goal of securing the border.
I will continue to support all efforts to address the humanitarian and security crisis on the border.
And other than that, I'm on my way to keep doing what I can for the next few days.
So thank you all for being here.
Okay, so here's what I mean about whether Trump can stand up to the press.
And you know, I know many of you just love Trump and think he's going to roll over his opponents, but let me just make an argument that that may not, you may be a little too optimistic right now.
Let's see.
We'll see.
But remember, the problem they had was that Trump didn't change the rules about separating families.
He changed the rules about who gets detained, okay?
Because if you come in here and you're a criminal, they turn you around very quickly and they send you back even if you have a kid with you.
But if you come in with your kid and you ask for asylum because this is the loophole in the law, they have to give you a hearing.
And it takes a longer time to get that hearing, right?
Because the courts get backed up.
So they put you in a containment cell, and after 20 days, according to the law, they have to get the kid out of the cell.
So he's separating families, right?
Trump did not create that law.
He did not change it.
All he did say was: you no longer get a free pass if you have a kid with you, because people were using kids to bluff their way in.
So he changed that rule.
They keep saying in the paper, even in the Wall Street Journal, which usually gets these things right, they keep saying that he had a child separation policy.
He didn't have a child separation policy.
He had a detaining asylum seeker policy so that they don't slip into the country and vanish, which is what they do.
Now they're coming over in such numbers that they're bussing them into the interior.
You think we're ever going to see them again?
No, of course not.
So that was the rule that he changed, okay?
And Kirsten Nielsen was the face of that policy.
Listen to the press.
Here is a montage of the press.
I think this is from Newsbusters.
Yeah.
This is cut number two of the press reacting to her resignation.
You almost have to feel sorry for Nielsen.
I don't feel sorry for her, but almost because, you know, she is willing to violate the dictates of humanity, morality, and ethics.
For the rest of her life, people will look at her and think, oh, that's the woman who put children in cages.
That's the woman who broke up families across the border.
And you know what?
They'll be right.
I really don't have much sympathy for Nielsen.
Just to be clear, I don't have sympathy for Kirsten Nielsen.
For those of us who spend a career in Homeland Security, there's not a lot of sympathy here for her.
So I don't have sympathy for her.
Some are saying, good riddance.
She may be leaving government, but Kirsten Nielsen will forever own the child separation policy.
Well, let's not forget, it was on her watch, too, that tear gas was fired across the border.
Kirsten Nielsen is, was, will always be the face of Donald Trump's family separation policy.
Her legacy will be that many courts did find several of the major policies that Kirsten Nielsen put in place to be unlawful.
The face of the president's anti-immigration push.
She never let the facts or the underlying data get in the way of an extreme Trump administration policy.
People say, we're glad Kirsten Nielsen is gone.
These policies have been so horrible.
She's going to get what she deserves.
At last, guys, Jeffrey Toobin.
That's the guy.
I seem to remember Jeffrey Toobin got his longtime mistress, he was married.
He was sleeping with somebody else.
He got her pregnant.
He refused to support the baby until the baby got a DNA test and they proved it was his.
And then finally, he was forced, you know, so he's pronouncing, making moral pronouncements on Kirsten Nielsen.
This, I mean, this is just appalling hypocrisy.
It's pure hypocrisy.
It means nothing.
But let's not forget, right, when they pulled that baby crying routine, which they did when the babies were being separated.
And by the way, I don't want to see babies separated.
I don't want to see these children.
I mean, I feel for these migrants.
I think the law needs to be changed.
It would take Congress 10 minutes to change the law to close the loophole.
It's not Trump's fault that this is happening.
And you cannot have a country without borders.
And you can't protect your civilization and your people, our people, who matter more to us than their people because they are ours.
You can't protect their jobs.
You can't protect their services.
You can't protect their communities without protecting the border.
So all these people who are crying their crocodile tears for these children at the borders, and I'm not saying, you know, this is not a sad situation.
It is, but they are just doing it to get at Trump.
And when it happened last time, and when they showed the babies crying, and it breaks everybody's heart, right, when they show the babies crying, Trump backed down.
He did, and he just could not stand the bad press.
Well, now he's furious.
It's his watch.
People are pouring in.
He made such a big deal about this during his campaign.
He needs to do something.
And apparently he wants to put the other guy he wants to put in charge is this Kevin, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Kevin McAlinen, I think.
He wants to now put him in DHS, and they are going to have to fire people because the law says the undersecretary has to take over for Kirsten Nielsen, so they're going to have to do this big thing.
Plus, it looks like he's written to Homeland Security saying expect big changes.
So he's going to make, you know, he's actually going to go through and kick some butt and throw some people out, do his Donald Trump your fire routine that he's, you know, he's practiced for many years on television.
And that makes perfect sense.
If you've got people pouring over the border, if nothing's being done, if the policies aren't working, it makes perfect sense to have a shake-up, to get things changed, to make things different.
Let me just show you, just to show you where the press is going.
And this is MSNBC, and I hate to use MSNBC because they are not dishonest.
They are an openly leftist station.
But there is a place where you've gone so far, it becomes absolutely ridiculous.
So they bring in this former FBI investigator, Frank Figluzzi, his name is, right?
Here he is talking about what it means for Donald Trump to be firing people to have a shake-up in his department.
What we talked about was a possible analogy between what we're seeing in the president and studies of violence and acting out, particularly workplace violence.
And we talked about the path, the journey and pathway to violence when we see people using language of despondency, lashing out, blaming others, obsessive, compulsive attachment to one issue and the inability to get off of it.
In that case, it would be the border and security on the border and immigration.
And so are we, the question we have to ask ourselves from a behavioral sense is, are we watching a president essentially on his way to what we call a flashpoint?
And are we now beginning to see him act out in the form of purging and mass firing and completely not listening to any logic?
You know, when people say to him, the law or policy is such and such and we would be violating the Constitution or the law, and he simply dismisses it and fires people and keeps doing it.
Are we essentially watching a workplace violence incident play out at the highest level of our government?
And is he acting out now?
And where does this go, if I'm right about that?
Wow, thank you, Dr. Figluzzi.
I mean, that is amazing.
It's workplace violence.
It's workplace violence for him to fire his staff.
I mean, just like they're saying it's obstruction of justice for him to fire James Comey.
Talking about Trump having a flashpoint, who at this point would not have a flashpoint?
It's not just the press.
It's the Democrats who won't do anything.
It's the Republicans who can't get together to do anything.
And it's the judges, the Obama judges who are holding him up, changing the rules, overturning law, making law essentially, saying, oh, no, there used to be a rule that if somebody came in asking for asylum, he had to meet a certain level of obvious fear that it was reasonable for him to be afraid.
And the courts are just saying, now we throw that out because anything that will wrongfoot Trump, we are willing to do.
Just watching the press, just keeping your eye on the press, it's like watching, you know, you talk about his psychological analysis of Donald Trump.
How about a psychological analysis of the press?
Because it is like watching a madhouse.
I hate to put on the view, but the view has gotten to be kind of representative of what is happening on the press.
Here is Megan McCain and Joy Behar going after each other on the question of immigration.
This is a hardline issue for people who live in border states.
Many friends of mine, this is the number one and only issue.
And if we sit here and act like there isn't a crisis, that it's just, it's crazy people living in border states that think that there's a crisis, activity, like I just said, this guy who's coming in wants to help those countries.
That's the way to solve the problem.
Keep them there happy or whatever.
Solvent.
Give them a house.
Give them food.
Help them.
Help their children.
Give them to Rock.
Stop the crime rates.
Well, we've had a lot of people.
I'm talking about Galfa.
They do not want to lend an aid.
I listen to you.
Let me just finish.
Yeah, part of your job is to listen to me.
Okay, so here's the deal.
Here's what's not going to happen today.
We're not going to do this.
When Whoopi Goldberg is the peacemaker, you know you're in trouble.
I just want to see, I'm like cat fight, catfight.
I think they should come on in kind of wet t-shirts and just wrestle around in the back.
That would be a view I would watch.
That would be something I could actually look at.
I'll probably hear about that comment, but do I care?
Journalists and Bias00:15:40
No, I don't.
But just here she is, Joy Behar.
And all right, she's not anybody's idea of like the brilliant commentator, but she's talking about us paying for people to have houses in Nicaragua.
I mean, come on.
You know, what is it about, what is it about these people that they do not think about us?
They do not think about Americans.
You know, they keep, some of the guys on CNN are saying, well, we don't like the browning of America.
As if America were a white country.
When did that happen?
You know, did somebody shuffle off all the different colored people in America while I was asleep or something?
I mean, this is an incredibly mixed up country, incredibly racially mixed, because we let everybody in because we welcome everybody.
That's not going to change.
Nobody cares about the, you know, you know, the only person speaking sense about this on the left, you'll kill me for this.
I know people will get it.
Barack Obama.
Barack Obama, you know, he gave that I, speech in Germany the other day, but he did have this remark.
It's almost as if, like, now that he doesn't have to make excuses for his failed policies, now that he doesn't have to, like, you know, solve the cognitive dissonance of the fact that everything he thought he knew was actually wrong.
It's like he actually, a little bit of common sense that comes out of his mouth.
Now, this is a kind of long cut because the guy can't speak without a teleprompter, but it's worth listening to.
It's worth just seeing Barack Obama, you know, talk sense.
It's like watching a dog walk on its hind legs.
You know, it's just not that he does it well, it's the fact that he does it at all.
Listen to this.
If you're going to have a coherent, cohesive society, then everybody has to have some agreed upon rules.
And there are going to have to be some accommodations that everybody makes.
And that includes the people who are newcomers.
The question is, are those fair?
Do they, you know, should we want to encourage newcomers to learn the language of the country they're moving to?
Of course.
Does that mean that they can never use their own language?
No.
Of course it doesn't mean that, but it's not racist to say, ah, if you're going to be here, then you should learn the language of the country that you just arrived at, because we need to have some sort of common language in which all of us can work and learn and understand each other.
It gets more sensitive, obviously, around religious issues.
That becomes more challenging.
And I don't have simple solutions to all of that.
But I guess what I think we have to do in order to push back against just what are clearly racist motives of some, we can't label everybody who is disturbed by immigration as racist.
Obama's a white supremacist.
Who knew?
Who knew Barack Obama is a white supremacist?
Did anybody else play this clip?
He says people should learn English, and he says the people who oppose mass immigration aren't necessarily racist.
There are some in there, but they aren't necessarily racist.
And he brought up, when he was talking about religion, the subtext of that is maybe it's not such a good idea to let people come into the country whose idea is they want to slaughter us all on behalf of Allah.
I mean, that's basically what he's talking about.
And he says he doesn't have the answer.
It's a complicated question.
It is a complicated question.
I couldn't believe those words.
If I had known he was a white supremacist, I'm ashamed of my country.
I mean, that we had for eight years, we had this Ku Kux Klansman in office.
When Spike Lee was talking about the black Klansman, obviously it was a coded reference to Barack Obama.
It's amazing.
Let me finish this way.
When I talk about can Trump stand up to the press, I'm just talking about the fact that they are going to go after him with all guns blazing.
And last time, when they went into their crying baby routine, last time Trump folded.
We have to remember that because it's going to be really interesting to see if he does it this time.
I want to end just with the, just so you can see the press in a nutshell, the media, what the media has become in a nutshell.
Earlier, I'm not sure if it was yesterday or last week, I played this clip of Christian Amnipur journalist talking to James Comey.
I'm just going to play a little bit of it before.
Let's play this.
Of course, Lock Her Up was a feature of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Do you, in retrospect, wish that people like yourself, the head of the FBI, I mean, the people in charge of law and order had shut down that language, that it was dangerous potentially, that it could have created violence, that it's kind of hate speech.
Should that have been allowed?
That's not a role for government to play.
Even Comey is shocked.
All right, so Christian Amapore journalist is representing all journalists here as far as I'm concerned.
She's a perfect example of leftist journalism in action.
She doesn't support the First Amendment.
It's free speech for she, but not for the, okay?
So that's who she is.
Okay, now here she is parading herself as the journalist's friend.
She loves it, doesn't like the First Amendment too much, not for you, but for journalists, any criticism of journalism is a terrible thing.
It's cut seven.
We are watching an era in which life for journalists becomes tougher and tougher, more and more dangerous.
We are truth tellers, we're truth seekers, we go for the evidence and the facts.
So we need the committee to protect journalists to protect and to have our backs while we do that job.
This whole notion of fake news, I don't know why it bothers me so much.
It potentially can have a corrosive and destructive influence and effect on one of the most important pillars of our democracy and our freedom.
So what do we do?
Well, we keep doing our jobs.
We rise to the challenge and we redouble our efforts to be as diligent as we possibly can.
Okay, so no First Amendment for the people, but journalists cannot be criticized.
We must not criticize journalists because they are the pillar.
She said it.
They are the pillar of our, one of the pillars of our democracy.
They're one of the pillars of our democracy.
Any attempt to criticize them for the job they're doing is completely off basis.
Here, courtesy of newsbusters once again, here is Christian Amanpour interviewing Jonathan Mahler of the New York Times, a former newspaper, after Mahler wrote a hit piece on Rupert Murdoch saying what a horrible, horrible man he is.
And Mahler is describing what the fact that Fox News doesn't think unbridled immigration, illegal immigration, is a good thing.
And of course, you'll always notice they leave out the illegal.
It's just immigration that Fox News is supposed to be against, which is completely untrue.
So here is Christian Amanpour interviewing this guy.
What's happening now on Fox News, which is this very sort of strongly kind of nationalist, kind of ethno-nationalist agenda, which you can also see at their outlet in Australia, Sky News Australia, where they've effectively recreated Fox News during prime time and are pushing the same sort of anti-immigrant sentiments that we see here in the United States.
Well, I mean, look, I have to point out right now the danger of this kind of activity because this Sky After Dark program that you're talking about, I mean, one could say, well, look what happened.
It was an Australian who went to New Zealand and massacred 50 people in two mosques.
I mean, do you see the actual tangible fallout of this policy and this politics?
It's unbelievable.
So Fox News or their Fox or their equivalent in Australia is responsible for this clown, this knucklehead in New Zealand, who walks into a mosque and kills people.
So let's get at this straight, okay?
No First Amendment for you, but First Amendment, very important for the press.
No criticizing the press unless it's Fox News, then they're responsible for mass murder in New Zealand.
That is the press in a nutshell.
That is the way they think, and that's the way they're going to come after Donald Trump.
And I'm telling you, it is an open question whether he's going to stand up to them.
This is something that really is under his skin now.
We're going to see Trump at his trumpiest.
He is going to be ticked off.
He's going to clean up Dodge at the DHS.
He's going to put Stephen Miller and this other fellow in charge, these hardliners in charge.
Let's see if he can take the heat because he is walking into the kitchen.
We've got a great guest coming up, John Miller, who heads the journalism school here at Hillsdale College.
But first, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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All right.
John Miller is director of the Herbert H. Dow, the second program in American Journalism at Hillsdale College.
Sounds much more impressive than he actually is.
No, it's an amazing program.
I've been here holding a seminar in that program all week long, and it has been just amazing.
He is also a national correspondent for National Review.
His books include The First Assassin, a novel set during the Civil War, and The Big Scrum, How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football.
He's also, and I did not know this until this trip, he is the founder and chairman of the Student Free Press Association, which supports collegiate journalism and is best known for its terrific news website, The College Fix.
If you haven't looked at it, it is absolutely terrific.
John, thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me on, Drew.
It is great to see you, and I thank you so much for having me here as the Pullium Distinguished Fellow.
The idea that I'm a distinguished anything is just kind of lowers your department.
Yeah, we're all surprised by the acceptance of this pick.
And I just wanted to be here to tell you we're all looking forward to your talk tonight here on campus.
And then you have your last class tomorrow, and then you have to leave, Drew.
I do.
I know.
They're going to have to drag me out of here.
But I just wanted to make sure my speech was up to the was up to the standard.
So I'm actually delivering Lincoln's inaugural address.
I think that that will be.
Just wear pants tonight.
That's my one request.
It's a little different than the way I've been walking around campus up till now.
So journalism.
You are teaching these wonderful kids.
I mean, just unbelievable kids.
You're teaching them journalism.
Is journalism as bad as Trump says it is, or is he out of line?
So journalism is at its best and at its worst right now.
We see the worst all the time.
I've been listening to you for the last few minutes.
This has been like a seminar in the worst of journalism.
Tune in every day.
We'll hear more and more about it.
A lot of bad journalism out in America.
There's a lot of great journalism, too, and that's because it's never been easier for us to get our hands on information and be able to report it.
I remember when I was a young reporter in Washington, D.C., I lived out there for 20 years.
You know, if you wanted to get the senator's statement, you didn't just log on to a website and have it, you know, 30 seconds later.
You had to call over there, hope to get the right person, ask, would you please, please, please fax it to me, and then walk over to the machine, which, by the way, was really high tech, and we were all delayed at fax machines, you know, and then comes off on this bad paper that rolls up on you and all that kind of stuff.
It was hard to do this stuff.
I mean, I shouldn't say it was hard.
It's tedious to get this information.
But now we have so much at our fingertips.
And a lot of it's good.
Another problem, though, is a lot of it's bad.
And one of the things we have to teach young people, especially, is how to discern the good from the bad and how to go through it and know what's a good source and what's not and what's a true fact and what's a lie.
You know, it can't be right.
It's got to be something like 90% of mainstream journalists are now Democrats.
And when I say mainstream, I'm talking about the networks.
I'm talking about the Times and the Washington Post and major sources, certainly CNN.
Am I wrong in thinking that there should be a hiring policy at some of these places to bring in high-level conservatives to serve at an editorial level, or is that just too much of a quote-unquote?
Well, it's definitely a problem.
We hear so much about diversity and, you know, on campuses, all over the place.
And every kind of diversity except ideological diversity, or diversity of thought is a better way of putting it.
And one of the best things newsrooms can do right now is think about hiring people who think a little bit differently from the herd mentalities you see there right now.
And it's not about bringing bias into the newsroom.
It's about bringing people with different kinds of perspectives so that when some politician wants to raise the minimum wage and every Democrat starts jumping up and saying, yay, living wage and so on and so forth, there might be someone in the room who says, what about jobs?
And what about jobs for young people?
And what's this going to mean for some poor kid who needs a starter job to learn that you need to show up on time and dress appropriately and how to make change and that sort of thing.
Will that job be available for that person if we increase the minimum wage?
Just those kinds of questions coming up would help coverage so much.
So yeah, I think they ought to think about bringing in people like that.
When students come here and some of these students actually want to go on to be journalists and they actually do go on to be journalists, when they come here, what are you thinking?
What are you thinking you have to teach them first?
What are the ABCs that you want to teach them?
Well, first and foremost, when you come to Hillsdale College, what you're getting is a traditional liberal arts education.
And a lot of people, if they want to go into the media, if this is a career aspiration they have, they'll go to another school and they'll major in journalism.
And that's a really bad idea.
You should major in an actual academic subject, something like biology or economics or history or what have you.
I have a young woman who's on campus right now and she has a bright future in journalism ahead of her.
One of the first times I met her, I said, what do you want to do when you grow up?
And she said, I want to be an economics reporter.
Well, what do you think she should major in?
Right?
And so she is actually an economics major.
And so we have journalism as a minor here, which puts it in its proper place.
And so we will teach journalism in the classroom.
There are some things we'll do about how to write, how to tell a story, how to check a fact, how to do an interview, how to lay out a newspaper page.
All this kind of stuff will come up.
But first and foremost, if you want to learn this, you need to do it.
The way you learn journalism is by doing journalism.
So we have a campus paper, you work on that.
We have a campus radio station.
If you want to learn to be a good talker, sit in front of a microphone and try it for a little while, right?
You'll make all kinds of mistakes, but you'll get better and better and better and suddenly can do it.
And so we teach them by having them do the actual work.
And then when they're here at Hillsdale College, they're getting a great education in the traditional liberal arts, that small L liberal arts, right?
The kind of small L liberalism that true conservatives want to conserve.
But they're learning all kinds of appropriate things in the classroom.
And then they can take that knowledge and bring it into the workforce and bring it into the newsrooms.
You know, one of the things I feel is I feel there's a tremendous need for people who gather facts, for people who actually go out and cover stories and get the facts.
I mean, it's an actual craft.
It's something you have to learn how to do.
And I was there.
I was in journalism when they came in and gutted a lot of the facility for doing that.
There is now such a demand, an economic demand for opinion journalism, for people to sit and talk and have opinions.
But the problem is when you're, you know, when you're 20 or something, you don't really know enough to have any opinions.
And once you become successful as an opinion giver, you never want to go on and learn that trade.
You get somebody like Michael Knowles, who I don't even think you should be allow to wander free, let alone voice his opinion.
But seriously, how do you keep people from being drawn into that, sucked into that tremendous industry of opinion journalism?
Crazy Smart People00:05:13
So you're right.
And there's a kind of narcissism to it about how everybody, you know, everybody should know my opinion, right?
And there's a sort of egotism that attaches to that.
And I try and destroy it.
And these young people, when they come here and think that way, not all of them do, but there's often a compulsion that, you know, I want to be a media star.
I want to be a pundit on some TV station.
I want to give my opinion.
Have people listen to me and applaud when I speak it, that sort of thing.
What I tell them is a thing I learned as a writer for National Review and being in that industry for so long, which is the best opinion journalism is driven by good reporting.
And the most valuable thing you can do, unless you're a genius like Charles Krauthammer, who knows how to put everything in, or used to, know how to put everything in context and deliver a good opinion that informs us all, no matter what you think about some subject.
Unless you're that, and few of us are, what you need to do is go out and learn how to report, learn how to get new information, learn how to uncover interesting facts, come at topics from unusual angles in ways that will enlighten our understanding.
And so you do the reporting, you ask the right questions, you gather the information, and then as you assemble it, maybe you can give your opinion.
Maybe you can report from a kind of perspective and so on.
But that's where the real value is.
It's from making the phone calls, talking to people, learning what they think, and then putting it all together and presenting it to readers or viewers or listeners or whoever.
Yeah, no, that makes total sense.
Now, I don't want to set you up to do a Hillsdale advertisement.
I really don't.
I'm asking this as a serious question.
I've been here over a week and everybody says this.
That's not just me.
Everybody says there is a magical quality to this place.
As I was describing it to my wife the other day, I said it's like being sane.
When you come from LA, it's like being crazy.
Being in LA is like being crazy.
Everybody's a little crazy.
Here, you have this sense of sanity.
Where is that coming from?
Well, it is a great institution, and I love working here.
And the students are terrific.
They're smart and hardworking, which is nice.
But you could say that about students at a lot of places, right?
That they're smart and hardworking.
The ones who come here are that, but they're also good people.
I like them.
They get up on Sunday morning.
Many of them go to church on their own at a time in life when many fall away from that kind of habit, and they may get back into it later.
But here, at our church in town, you got to show up early if you want a seat on Sunday morning, but that so many students will come.
And that's, well, number one, that's kind of a pain.
But number two, it's nice to see.
That's a good problem.
So it's a different kind of place.
It's made that way by the kind of person who comes here.
There's a lot of self-selection that occurs.
It takes a certain kind of person to come to Hillsdale.
Hillsdale is not for everybody, but it's for an awful lot of people, and it's good for them.
And so you get a certain kind of kid who comes here.
Then the faculty is terrific.
They're dedicated to the liberal arts.
These are teachers who love what they teach.
They are not English professors who either want to remove Shakespeare from the curriculum because he's a dead white male, or when they teach him, teach him in a way that sort of subverts him or undermines him or delivers peculiar messages or whatever.
No, these are teachers who are in love with what they teach and they want to pass it on to these students.
And they recognize what a gift it is to be in that position where you get to talk about American history and what it's really about and what are the great works of literature and what are the great ideas in science.
So the faculty is excellent.
And then finally, I just love living in Michigan.
I mean, we're kind of in the middle of nowhere here.
It's in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, it takes a little while to get here.
But it's a nice place to be.
And I like the people that surround us and the community.
And mix it all together.
You've got a wonderful little liberal arts college that punches way above its weight and stands for something important.
It really does.
And I just like the fact that all the kids call you Miller.
No, Professor Miller, no Miss Miller.
It's just Miller, Miller.
Even your daughter, who's in my seminar, she's Miller.
Yeah, she does that.
She does that all the time.
You know, one of the great things about Hillsdale, too, and I suppose many of our listeners know this, is we take no federal money.
Yeah.
Right.
Almost uniquely among colleges and universities in the land is Hillsdale College accepts no federal funds.
And so it relies on tuition dollars for one thing, and it's reasonably priced, but also friends of the college to support what we do here.
And they're critically important, and we deliver a good education.
But you know what's funny is you would think a federal government that is $20 trillion in the hole, you think they would maybe send a thank you note to Hillsdale College.
Thank you for raising.
They want you in debt.
But they really, you know, they try every way they can to regulate this place.
And the college has to defend itself constantly.
And not taking federal aid allows us to have a tremendous amount of freedom and educate students the way they ought to be educated and the way the college has been doing it since 1844, which, by the way, is a lot older than the Department of Education.
John Miller, he heads the journalism department here at Hillsdale College.
Me Too Movement Reflection00:04:39
Also, one of the terrific cultural writers, one of the very few writers on the culture, on pop culture, that I'm always excited to see his byline, which I'm not that excited to see him personally, but I'm excited to see his byline.
Thanks a lot, John.
Thanks, Drew.
A final reflection, our friend Christian Toto over at Hollywood in Toto writes a really good piece about how Hollywood, where the Me Too movement has sort of got started with Harvey Weinstein, is now kind of letting it die because it's called out too many of its own people.
He's saying people who are under clouds of suspicion, including Morgan Friedman, Chris Hardwick, Casey Affleck, are going back to work.
We saw that guy who did the Bohemian Rhapsody being praised for that.
And just, you know, he's saying they're letting the Me Too movement die.
And I have to tell you, the more I've thought about the Me Too movement, the more I feel my opinions have changed.
And the more I feel it is actually pulling up a tragic thing.
Here's the first thing, that a man, an older man, especially, who is in a position of moral mentoring over a young woman, I'm talking about a woman as young as, say, oh, say Monica Lewinsky, who uses that power and that position to get sex out of her, has really committed a sin.
I mean, that's a bad act.
That is a very, very bad act.
But at the same time, human sexuality is set up so that exact situation is one of the most explosive, right?
The guy is powerful and girls like that.
The girl is young and admiring and guys like that.
And sometimes in that situation, people actually fall in love for life.
And everybody likes that.
So the point is to take a very explosive situation like that.
You need rules.
You need rules for the way that people treat each other.
And the problem we have, and the thing that makes Me Too so tragic, is that those rules went away.
Those rules went away.
And I personally blame the feminist logic, which is not logic at all.
You want to say that women need men to take care of them, but they don't want to say women need men to take care of them.
You want to say women need to be treated as full and free adults.
But then if they give their consent to what, like Monica Lewinsky did, to what is essentially an abusive act, then how is the guy to blame if she gave her consent?
I mean, many of these cases that come up, these Me Too cases, are not rape cases.
They're cases where an actress wanted a job or where she thought, you know, where a secretary thought, well, it's the boss.
I better give in.
You know, that's a choice that everybody makes.
I think that feminists has taught us that it's virtuous to lie about the sexes.
It's virtuous not to tell the truth about the differences between men and women.
And therefore, we cannot make sensible rules about the way we should treat each other.
I think the Me Too movement, as I've said from the very beginning, has a point.
It has now been twisted and corrupted to use it for politics, to get out of Brett Kavanaugh, but to let, you know, the guy in Virginia, the assistant mayor, the vice mayor and vice governor, I'm sorry, in Virginia go free.
Nobody's going after him at some very substantial charges for some very substantial charges.
And I think that feminists and the left have so destroyed the sexual, the rules of sexual engagement that what always happens is it's the weak who suffer.
It's the person who is second on the totem pole who gets really put in a bad position.
And I think it's a shame.
I think really it is because the Me Too movement has a lot to say and a lot that should be, and maybe we should change, stop listening to the feminists and change the rules.
Mailbag tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I will see you then.
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Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, Mayor Pete is the trendy Democrat presidential candidate of the week.
And he's been out there saying a lot, including accusing evangelical Christians of hypocrisy.
But then he claims to be a Christian while supporting late-term abortion.
Is that hypocritical?
Yes, of course it is.
We'll talk about that.
Also, Corey Booker has introduced a slavery reparations bill.
So we will discuss the left's constant efforts to cure injustice with more injustice.
And finally, a very important question.
Is it okay for parents to use leashes on their children?