Ep. 730’s Left and Lefter pits Andrew Clavin against progressive Democrats, mocking Pelosi’s "four-vote" jab at AOC while defending his sexist humor as rebellion against "woke oppression." Jenna Ellis Reeves argues the 2020 census citizenship question is legally sound, despite Supreme Court skepticism. Glenn Reynolds warns social media rewires cognition like a viral epidemic, citing ADHD-like attention spans and mass psychosis risks, then advocates antitrust action against tech monopolies silencing conservatives. The episode ends with Clavin’s moralizing—condemning leftist "hubris"—and teases Beto O’Rourke’s anti-Americanism, AOC’s alleged racism, and the ethics of exploiting mental health for content. [Automatically generated summary]
A major catfight has broken out between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the four young congresswomen who have been trying to turn the Democrat Party into a bunch of screechy communists instead of just communists.
By catfight, of course, I mean the kind of fight where women claw and hiss at one another and pull each other's hair as they roll around, preferably in a tub of mud on the barroom stage between sets of country music.
And if that's not what's really happening, well, I can dream, can't I?
Anyway, the fight ramped up to a new level when Pelosi hinted to the New York Times, a former newspaper, that congresswomen like Alexandria Occasional Cortex and Rashida Jewhater Tlaib were in no way as powerful as their Twitter following made them think they are.
Referring to the so-called squad, which includes Cortex, Jew hater, the other Jew hater, and some girl I've never heard of, Pelosi told the Times, quote, and this is a real quote, all these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn't have any following.
They're four people, and that's how many votes they got, unquote.
As Republican congressmen ran up and down the Capitol hall shouting, girl fight, and then gathered in the rotunda to try to convince the women to put on wet t-shirts, occasional Cortex struck back by saying, quote, maybe Pelosi thinks she's a big shot because she can get legislation passed, but I can send out a tweet to five million non-voting malcontents, and if that's not real power, I don't know what is, unquote.
Presidential spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway referred to the exchange as a major meow moment, whereupon AOC hissed at her and tried to scratch out her eyes, leading Kellyanne to pull her hair and wrestle with her on the floor while Republicans poured buckets of water on them.
Like I said, I can dream.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and 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, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Wow, that is two despicably sexist openings in a row.
This must be misogyny week at the Andrew Clavin Show.
In fact, maybe I should pause here for a moment and talk about this because these are humorless times.
Our friends on the left have made sure of that.
It's a technique they use in order to silence the voices of patriotism and freedom, wannabe socialist tyrants, pretend to take our jokes seriously, or they take our comments out of context, or they seize on some clumsy misstatement and go on the rampage, trying to ruin our reputations or get us banned from left-sympathizing corporate news and social media outlets.
Because they have no arguments in favor of their dreamed-of oppression, they want to make sure our arguments for freedom can't be heard.
The idea is to make us nervous about what we say, and it works.
Even my friends and those who sign my checks frequently and understandably break into a sweat when I start kidding around because they don't want to lose sponsors and they don't want to get tarred for what I said when the outrage mob comes after me.
So, let me try to explain myself.
I make jokes about things you're not supposed to make jokes about because you're not supposed to make jokes about them.
It's my polite and gentle way of saying, bite me, leftists.
I'll say anything I damn well please because I'm a free American and a man.
Plus, I'm a Christian.
So if you annoy me, I'll put a curse on you and you'll burst into flames.
That's in the Bible.
I will not even go so far as to make the usual lefty-required kow-tows about how much I really respect women or that my best friend is a black homosexual or whatever.
Screw it.
If you listen to the show, you know how my heart is about my fellow humanoids.
It's not people I'm attacking, it's bad ideas.
And here's the thing, my left-wing friends.
Your ideas stink.
Your woke identity politics is racism.
Your feminism is a form of intellectual sexual abuse.
Your economics is a recipe for economic and cultural disaster.
And so when I, your intellectual and moral superior, slap you in the face as you deserve, you will smile and say thanks or go to hell.
Either one is fine by me.
Now, what message could be more inoffensive and unobjectionable than that?
So for the past two days, I've been talking about this grim Epstein case, and it's been very depressing.
So today, I'm going to inject some comic relief into my life and yours by talking about the fact that the Democratic Party is coming apart at the seams, as it should, because it's a cesspit of socialism and tyranny.
And while I'm talking about that, it may be that I start to rant about the toxic feminism that has caused a lot of second-rate, brainless dames to think they're entitled to our respect and attention simply because they have skirts on.
And it's possible some women here or there among the left may find those comments objectionable.
So again, let me explain.
Shut up.
And while you're up, could you bring me a beer?
Okay, so while I still have sponsors, let's talk about them.
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The Citizenship Question Controversy00:05:27
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So I'm going to get into this Democrat war that's going on, the civil war that's going on.
But first, I wanted to invite our good friend Jenna Ellis Reeves on because I want to talk to her about this census thing that's been heating up all week.
And she just knows so much more about it and can explain it so much better than I can.
She's a constitutional law attorney.
You all know her.
She's a Daily Wire contributor, Trump 2020 Advisory Board member, one of my favorite guests.
Jenna, are you there?
I am.
Thanks so much for having me today, Drew.
It's always great to talk to you.
Can you, so much has happened in the census thing.
Can you first just bring us up to date?
They want to put a question on the census that says, are you a citizen?
And the Supreme Court has an objection to this.
Can you just explain that quickly?
Yeah, well, so what the Supreme Court said is that the question doesn't actually violate the Constitution, the enumeration clause in Article I, or the implementing legislation from Congress in any way.
And so all of that, Justice Roberts, who's speaking out of both sides of his mouth, and he joined the liberal contingent as a never-Trumper, basically, just said that the Trump administration has to provide better rationale for it, which is actually venturing into the realm of political policymaking.
So this is absolutely an overreach for the Supreme Court to require that.
Let's be clear, not only has the citizenship question been used since 1820 in some form on prior censuses, it's been used on the long form since 1950.
And so this is just a reinstatement, but also the Constitution doesn't specify the process by which the census has to occur.
And so as long as the executive branch, which would be the Trump administration, is not violating the implementing legislation from Congress, they can ask the question.
And it is not at all for the Supreme Court to second guess the political process.
It is amazing.
And then Trump wanted to change his legal team and some courts said he couldn't do that.
What was the objection?
That's just ridiculous.
And, you know, that's, again, another venturing into political question.
I mean, Trump has every right to have whatever lawyers or anyone that he wants to advise him on the matter.
I mean, people do that all the time in terms of legal context.
And so, you know, really, the Attorney General here has been very clear as far as finding a pathway to get this citizenship question on the census.
And let's also recognize that this is just used for statistical purposes.
This is not about finding who is here legally or illegally.
There are people who are here legally that have even permanent residency that can't actually vote because they're not citizens.
This is about finding correct apportionment in the U.S. Congress and the House of Representatives, which is what Article I requires.
This should not be political.
This is really a routine, mundane question, but the left has continued to politicize it and make it, again, about just hating Trump rather than fulfilling the constitutional mandate.
If you have people in your district who are not citizens, do you get more representation for them?
Well, and so that's why we need a fair and accurate count, because if we're counting people who really shouldn't be counted in terms of apportionment, then that's really the outcome, right?
It would be that we're counting more people in the district than are actually legally represented.
I see, okay.
And that's why we need the apportionment.
So now today, I think it was, Trump has put out an executive order.
What does that say?
Yeah, so this is that Attorney General Barr has been very clear.
And then the executive order just says that they are going to add an addendum to the census, which is a very smart move, add an addendum with a citizenship question.
And so that allows for printing to continue.
And the Supreme Court will have to take up whether or not the addendum is sufficient in terms of the rehearing of it in the Supreme Court once they get back in term in October.
But this is basically the Trump administration saying, we're not just going to roll over on the 2020 census.
We're going to make sure we do everything to get this citizenship question on because there's a great argument.
And actually, our own Daily Wire, Josh Hammer, wrote a great piece about why the 14th Amendment actually requires a citizenship question to be used.
And so this is an executive order that's basically just saying, hey, Supreme Court, we've done our job.
Step out of the way.
This gets to be on the census.
Jenna, I know you got to go.
I thank you so much.
It was really clarifying.
I appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Jerry.
Always great to join you.
All right.
Talk to you soon.
I'm beginning to feel with this stuff that the courts, I can see why Cocaine Mitch is making sure that we get some judges in there because the courts are kind of out of control.
They're like a new branch of regulatory government stepping on our rights, just kind of making up the law as they go along.
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There's just no way an auto parts store can stock everything.
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You know why people do this?
They do it because they're insecure.
They think that the person behind the counter at the parts store knows more than they do.
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Committee Clash at the Border00:15:24
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Write Claven in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know we sent you.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking auto parts and engine modules.
I can understand, but how do you spell Klavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So I love this.
The GOP has put out an ad about this civil, it's called Civil War, Socialism Rising.
It sounds like a video game, but it's about the war that's broken out between Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, and what the people they call the squad, which is AOC, Rashida Tlib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Presley, who's kind of like the Ringo star.
Nobody actually knows who she is.
So let's play this ad, Cut One.
There are 62 freshmen Democrats, not three.
The first thing you will do is impeach President Trump.
Is that true?
No.
We're going to impeach the mother.
An emerging, more progressive cohort of elected Democrats is coming into conflict with an older generation of centrists and traditional liberals.
Talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.
Jews have dual loyalty and can't be patriotic members of the country in which they live?
Words matter.
Some new Democratic drama on display today.
A speaker, Nancy Pelosi, slammed some of the loudest left-wing voices in her party.
All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn't have any following.
They're four people, and that's how many votes they got.
Now the congresswomen are firing back at their leader, the speaker.
That public whatever is called public sentiment.
Omar adding, you know they're just salty about who is wielding the power to shift public sentiment.
Does the Green New Deal go too far?
No.
You cannot go too far on the issue of climate change.
New Green Deal, the Green New Deal, whatever they call it.
I sound like Nancy Pelosi now.
How will you vote on that?
I've read it, and I've reread it, and I asked Ed Markey, what in the heck is this?
You sound like Nancy.
You tried.
You do it.
Because you're not.
Because you're not.
So until you do it, I'm the boss.
How about it?
AOC and her group on one side.
That's like five people.
Five people.
So it's a great ad.
But I mean, the thing about it is, is that it really is people, the left, arguing with the lefters, like dumb and dumber, except left and lefter.
You know, it's not like Nancy Pelosi is some moderate liberal.
She's a San Francisco left-winger whose city is falling apart, who really ought to be in San Francisco shoveling up the sidewalk instead of in Washington.
But she is a practiced and expert politician, and she understands how things get done.
And that is not true of Akasio-Cortez.
You know, it's really funny about Occasional Cortex.
Like, I don't actually think she's stupid.
I've been listening to her.
At first, I thought she was just an idiot, but she's just an ignoramus.
She just doesn't know anything.
And that is what Pelosi has.
She has experience and cunning, and she knows what she's doing.
So they had this $4.6 billion border aid package.
And the squad didn't want this to go forward because they want to keep grips.
Basically, they don't want Trump having more border security.
They want people pouring into the country.
They think this is the future of the Democrat Party.
And they think this is virtue signaling that we should just tear down the border walls and let everybody in.
But Pelosi understands that you've got to get some help down to these people, that this is a crisis.
It's not Trump's fault.
It's Congress's fault.
Congress hasn't done anything, and I blame both the right and the left.
I think both have been absolutely absurd and have clung to their base instead of doing what the country needs.
You know, this is a Trump is 100 percent right about this.
It's a 15-minute fix to fix our asylum laws so people are not drawn to come in and buying children and coming in.
And nobody wants children abused at the border.
That's not the point.
But to blame this on the Republicans when you ignored it under Obama is simple corruption flat out.
Okay.
So anyway, Pelosi made sure this $4.6 billion border aid package passed.
But all of this stuff, of course, was already looming because the squad and on the left want this impeachment thing to go through.
And that, too, just makes the left look like, it makes Congress look like it's doing absolutely nothing.
So, you know, and AOC said, oh, I think we've become the party of hemming and hawing and trying to be all things to everybody.
And it's not to say that we need to exclude people, but it's to say that we don't have to be afraid of having a clear message.
And then Pelosi said this famous thing, all these people, she said this to the Times, all these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn't have any following.
They're four people, and that's how many votes they got.
And AOC said that public whatever is called public sentiment.
Now, this is actually true because look at the people running for presidential candidate.
They're going out with this Green New Deal, which is absolutely devastating to the economy.
It's absolute nonsense that the crisis that they're talking about isn't even as big a crisis as they say it is.
And if it were, nothing that they do is going to change it.
It's going to change it as new technology.
So it's all nonsense.
So they have this back and forth.
My favorite part of this is Kelly Ann Conway, who actually can be great when she's on her game.
And she went on Fox and she made this remark.
The people suffered.
Our brave men and women at the Border Protection, the kids who these Democrats pretend they care so much about, they blocked those four female Democrats that Nancy Pelosi is brushing back.
I think they're all freshman members.
A major meow moment, a brushing back in a huge cat fight, really ridiculing them.
And they voted against the Democratic aid package.
They preen around going to these detention centers, going to these places, and saying, oh, my God, look what's happening.
And then they vote against $4.6 billion worth of aid, including the Democratic package.
So I love the major meow moment.
And AOC answered, a cat fight is the sexist term Republicans use when two adult women happen to disagree with each other.
The reason they find it so novel and exciting is because the GOP haven't elected enough women themselves to see that it can, in fact, be a normal occurrence in a functioning democracy.
That's actually a good response.
That's a good zing.
I'm sure she didn't write it, but it is a good comeback.
But she did give this, it was really interesting because I'm always interested in what's actually happening in politics, not the stuff that's going on TV.
And AOC did give this interview to The New Yorker, which I thought was really pretty interesting, where they asked her about her actual relationship with Pelosi.
And this is cut number two.
What's your relationship like with Nancy Pelosi?
Tell me how that works.
What are the dynamics of it?
You know, I think sometimes people think that we have this, like, we have a relationship.
Are you saying you don't?
Not particularly, not one that's, I think, distinguished from anyone else.
Like, if there's a legislative need, you know, the last time I kind of spoke to her one-on-one was when she asked me to join the Select Committee on Climate Change.
What did she say?
I said no.
So she goes on to say that she didn't join the Committee on Climate Change because they wouldn't agree to her terms.
I mean, this is a girl from an absolutely blue district.
As Pelosi said, a glass of water with a D on it could win in that district, okay?
So she, and that's true of Pelosi's district too, by the way.
But Pelosi has parlayed that into real power because she knows what she's doing.
So AOC says she wouldn't serve on this committee because she demanded that within two years they put forward legislation which would look like the Green New Deal, or if not, if they had another idea, they could put that there for her.
And basically, they weren't going to kowtow to her.
So she took her ball and went home.
And here she talks about what has happened since then.
Are you better on the outside looking in or the inside looking out?
I think I'm better on the outside looking in on this issue.
Why is that?
Because given that none of those standards were met, sitting on that committee, I would have to own anything.
I would take responsibility for anything that comes out of that committee.
And when the actual, in my opinion, the structure of it is compromised in very deep ways.
You know, it's not, I don't think it was like, I'm going to take my ball and go and go home.
It's we have a select committee whose mission I was uncertain on, whose members take fossil fuel money.
You know, it's that it's beyond just a mere disagreement.
I think there's a structural problem with it.
And so, and there's plenty of other caucuses as well that work on climate issues.
So I think that ultimately I'm fine with the decision, especially given the committee assignments that I was ultimately given, which were very intense and very rigorous.
I was assigned to two of some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees.
So my hands are full.
And sometimes I wonder if they're trying to keep me busy.
You know, it's interesting because maybe they're also trying to teach her something.
Like maybe they're trying to get her experience.
I really do think that feminism, which is a branch of identity politics, it's a particularly, I feel it's a particularly toxic branch of identity politics for the simple reason that identity politics is wrong because it's racist.
What's important about you is not the color of your skin.
It's the content of your character and your ideas and the way you behave and whether you live according to those ideas and whether you have integrity.
And you cannot, if you do not have those things, if your ideas are bad, if you have no integrity, and this is the thing Rashida Talib is saying, oh, they're picking on us because we're women of color.
Yeah, my ass.
Like, no, they're not.
They're picking on you because you're really bad at what you do and you're really ignorant about what you're doing.
And I think that the thing about identity politics is racist, but in many ways, that's not so bad because in truth, in reality, the races are just not that different.
A black man and a white man are basically the same kind of person, right?
A black woman and a white woman are basically the same kind of person.
But that's what makes sex feminism so toxic because men and women are different.
They see things differently.
They think differently.
They want different things.
They excel in different spheres.
And of course, this doesn't, it's a generalization.
It doesn't apply.
Any individual could be anything.
We all know that.
That has nothing to do with it.
I'm speaking generally.
But then to say that somehow one of these points of view has to be erased, which is essentially what feminism says.
You can't have the Boy Scouts.
It has to be the scouts, right?
Because God forbid, boys should gather off and be boys together as girls are girls together.
You know, you can't have boy, what was it called?
The Boys Club.
I can't remember now.
The Boys Club.
It had to be the Boys and Girls Club of America, which is really just an attempt to eliminate this essential difference in human beings, which is not just essential, it's also one of the joys of life.
This is what's so incredible about it, is that the left poisons all the joy of life.
Anything that we love, 99% of human beings are glad there are men and women.
It makes life so much more interesting, so much more exciting, so much more beautiful, all of those things, except this small cadre of bitter, angry, sexually confused people who dump on women for being women, who say, oh, if you're not in the workplace, you're not good enough.
As if, you know, being a mother were not the central job of humankind, if that were not the center of humanity, which it is.
And I think it has messed people's heads up.
Because once you start to see, once you break away, if you're a black person and you break away and say, you know what, I'm not going to let you define me by my color.
I am going to walk, you know, you can be a racist, whether you're on the left or the right.
You can be a racist.
I am going to walk that line.
Like the guy, Harry Stewart from the Tuskegee Airmen, said to me, I kept my eyes on the prize.
He didn't let other people define him.
He defined himself.
Once you do that, all that stuff falls away.
But with women and men, there's still the vast complexity of the difference between women and men.
And feminism has created this generation of women who think they matter because they're women, who think their ideas matter because they're women, who think their ideas are protected because they're women.
They're not.
AOC is an ignoramus.
Rashida Talib is an anti-Semite.
Ilan Omar, also anti-Semite.
They deserve all the attacks.
They deserve all the trouble they're getting.
And if I were a Democrat, if I were a leftist, and I were Nancy Pelosi, I would feel that they were actually screwing the party.
Because as Pelosi knows, the way the House, the way the Democrats won a majority in the House was by putting blue dogs up there.
And she had a meeting.
She went in and ripped them because AOC has suggested that the blue dogs are somehow segregationists, which is nonsense.
The only segregation going on is on the left.
And Pelosi went in and said, you got to stop this because we're going to lose the House if you guys keep pushing us to the left and they could lose the presidency as well.
Tucker Carlson has been going after Ilan Omar to his great credit because she's an awful human being.
She's an awful human being and a terrible congresswoman.
And he made this wonderful point.
I think I made the same point the other day when I was saying, these people, all they say is America was never great.
America's a terrible country.
America hasn't lived up to its ideas.
America's racist.
America's sexist.
America's this.
Why, if you hate us so much, why should you be allowed to govern us?
And Tucker went off on Ilan Omar this way.
Omar isn't disappointed in America.
She's enraged by it.
Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism.
This is an immoral country, she says.
She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people.
Think about that for a minute.
Our country rescued Ilhan Omar from the single worst place on earth.
We didn't do it to get rich.
In fact, it cost us money.
We did it because we are kind people.
How did Omar respond to the remarkable gift we gave her?
She scolded us and called us names.
She showered us with contempt.
It's infuriating.
But more than that, it's also ominous.
The United States admits more immigrants than any country on earth, more than a million every year.
Democratic Party demands that we increase that number and admit far more.
America's Servant Problem00:02:56
Okay, Americans like immigrants.
But immigrants have got to like us back.
That's the key.
It's essential.
Otherwise, the country falls apart.
Very clear here that Tucker's talking about ideas, right?
He's talking about the way she thinks about America.
And he's absolutely right about this.
There is absolutely no reason voters should put people in the government who do not like the country.
You cannot, I say this about the arts all the time.
When I talk to conservatives about the arts, I say the arts cannot be saved except by people who love them.
You cannot save the arts by wagging your fingers artists and saying, oh, you curse too much or there's too much nudity.
You have to love the art and create the arts that matter.
Same thing with governance, right?
You can't govern this country thinking it stinks.
You should not be allowed to govern this country thinking it stinks.
And personally, I agree with Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump that you should not be allowed in the country if you think it stinks.
We should not have immigrants coming into this country whose philosophy is antithetical to Western values.
And so what did Ilan Omar do?
She immediately went on and called for Tucker's sponsors to boycott him.
They boycott Tucker's sponsors, so the sponsors will get turned tail and run away.
So far, Fox has back Tucker to the max, and good for them.
It's really important that we do that.
But here's the thing about this.
Again, it's this idea that somehow, because your skin is brown, because you're in a skirt, somehow we have to pay attention to you.
And the point of this is if you have power in America, you are a servant.
If you are in government in America, you are a servant.
And this is the thing.
That is the Christian ethos.
Remember, Jesus said the Gentiles wield power over people, but we will serve.
And he washed the feet of his disciples.
And that has entered into the idea of power in America.
These people have lost the plot of that.
AOC is a servant.
She should serve at the pleasure of the people, and she should learn how to serve the people, not just go off at the mouth.
She's not here to dictate to us.
She is here to serve us and to serve her constituency.
And I would like to know if her constituency feels by tweeting all the time to 5 million people who can't vote for her, whether she is actually getting anything done at all.
I would like to see one thing that she has accomplished as she calls herself the boss.
And this is what I think.
I think their identity politics and their feminism has created a young contingent on the left who think that they have something to say simply because of who they are.
And none of us, not one of us, has something to say simply because of who we are.
And all of us, any one of us who has any kind of power, whether it's media power or government power, each and every one of us is a servant and needs humility.
And that's the thing that they've been deprived of.
They have been taught pride.
They've been taught hubris, and it's tearing the Democrat Party apart.
Spreading Ideas Like Germs00:15:29
And long may it wave.
I hope they keep doing it.
I hope they keep tearing the Democrat Party apart.
We're going to stay on.
I'm not going to go away, but that's no reason.
Actually, it's more reason.
It is more reason for you to go to dailywire.com and subscribe so you can get my show and Ben's show and Knowles' show and all the great and Walsh, all the great content we have.
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There are very few sites that I go on every day, but one of them is Glenn Reynolds Instapundit.
It has been forever.
We call him the blog father because it has been forever one of the greatest sites on the internet.
But Glenn Reynolds is not just a pretty face, though God knows he haunts my dreams.
But he's also the Beacham Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law.
And he is an author of this new, very short book that you should read called The Social Media Upheaval, the Social Media Upheaval.
It actually, when I say when they call things thought-provoking, it actually provoked thoughts and changed my mind or started to change my mind about a lot of stuff.
Glenn, are you there?
I am.
It's good to see you, man.
I haven't seen you in a long time.
I know.
It's great to see you, too.
You're looking good.
Oh, you lie.
But you lie convincingly.
That's the important.
So this book, it really got me.
I mean, it's short.
I think it's 65 pages or something like that.
Yeah, 65 pages.
It really got to me because it actually kind of changed the way I was looking at things.
You talk about the fact that we really haven't got it in our brains what the internet has done to us.
Can you explain it a little bit?
Yeah, well, what brought me to the book, sort of something you'd think would be unrelated.
I was reading a book about the very earliest civilizations, the very earliest cities, a book by James Scott at Yale, who's a really smart guy, called Against the Grain.
And one of the interesting things about the earliest cities was they'd spring up, you'd have actually sometimes a pretty decent population, you know, thousands of people, and they would flourish for a little while and then boom, they'd be depopulated by some epidemic, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.
And the reason nobody had ever seen him before was nobody ever crammed a whole bunch of people and their animals together in a small space with no knowledge of sanitation before.
And as I was reading that, it was pretty interesting in itself.
I just happened to see a tweet by Richard Fernandez.
And he said, you know, we're rewiring the human brain and the ways of thinking with the internet.
Who knows what changes it's bringing about?
So on the one hand, you have James Scott saying the earliest cities were introducing disease vectors they had no concept of and couldn't have any concept of.
On the other hand, you've got Richard Fernandez saying, we're really doing in the world of thoughts and ideas, sort of the intellectual equivalent of sharing each other's toothbrush as we allow for ideas and interactions to spread so much more rapidly and with so much less thought or mediation than ever before.
And so what's the consequence?
And that leads to sort of the quote that's on the back cover of the book where I say, you know, society seems to be getting crazier lately.
Maybe it really is getting crazier.
So in other words, we're spreading ideas like germs, basically, like we're crowded together.
Give me some examples.
I mean, how do you feel that that's actually rewiring the brain?
Well, first, well, I actually talk of the book, literally rewiring the brain.
And one of the things that happened, if you look at pre-literate people, hunter-gatherer types, by modern standards, they basically have ADHD.
You're always looking up to make sure a saber-toothed tiger isn't sneaking up behind you.
You know, you're sort of looking around, going from task to task.
When people started to read and write, especially when printing came in and people started to read and write books, people's brains literally changed.
And the parts of the brain that process ideas and think analytically got bigger as a result.
If you look at how people interact with social media on the internet today, we're back to the ADHD thing again.
And the book reading, I mean, books are no magic tool.
They're not necessarily great.
Mein Kampf was a book.
So was Das Capital.
But the kind of thinking that books encourage is deep and at length and involved, as opposed to sort of superficial and flitting across the surface of things, which is what social media encourages.
So that's one thing.
And then you talked actually about diseases.
There is a branch of information science invented originally by Richard Dawkins called memetics.
And it talks about memes.
And these are not cat pictures with captions.
They are ideas that self-reproduce in people's brains.
They're basically viruses of the mind and looks at how they spread.
And I think that what we're seeing is really the intellectual equivalent, as I say, sharing each other's toothbrush.
Ideas spread so much more rapidly now and with so much less resistance.
And making it worse is the social media algorithms are designed to promote engagement.
And engagement means an emotional response.
And as Jerry Lanier, who's a big Silicon Valley guy, wrote recently, the easiest emotions to amplify are the negative emotion.
So by design, the social media tend to make you sadder and more angry the more you're on them.
And I can tell you, I got off Twitter last year and I'm so much happier.
Is that true?
Because I'm being assaulted on Twitter right now.
And I have to say, I just look at these guys and I think, have you nothing else to do?
I mean, so, well, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I mean, for me, one of the problems with Twitter is you get sucked into it.
And I was a late adopter of Twitter.
I didn't actually like it when it came out.
But when you get sucked into it, suddenly the problems of the world seem to belong to you.
You have some kind of ownership as if you're somehow responsible for what's going on out there, which is not at all true.
And yet, you know, you kind of feel that way.
So it's great to be away from that.
And yeah, there are a lot of idiots on there, too.
Yuval Harari in his book, Sapiens, talks about the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.
And he says it really wasn't that good for people, but what happens is that people evolve step by step, and each step is good, but basically they're walking into a mousetrap.
And once it closes, they can't get out of it.
You're basically describing something like that.
What's the worst case scenario of where this gets us?
Some kind of mass psychosis, basically.
I mean, you know, other cultures, even pre-literate cultures get that.
You know, if you look at the American Indians with the ghost dance or various other things where people do crazy stuff in groups, and we saw that in Europe before the Renaissance.
And I mean, it happens to any civilization.
I think it's just a lot more likely when ideas can spread super fast without very much thought and when everybody's sort of plugged into the matrix.
It's a situation in which if you could just get the right toxic idea, sort of the equivalent, the intellectual equivalent, one of those earworm songs you can't get out of your head, you could spread it to everybody on the planet and drive them crazy overnight.
There's a science fiction story there somewhere.
Is there something that like as individuals, well, let's start as individuals.
Is there something as individuals you recommend to combat that in your own life?
Well, I got off Twitter.
Yeah, that's other exactly.
Minimizing your exposure, I think, does help.
Now, there's a price to be paid.
As David French wrote, he said, the trouble is, yeah, you get off Twitter, you feel saner, but now you're not part of the national conversation.
And it just means, you know, the people on Twitter, and the blue check mark people on Twitter, think what you will of them are influential people who are kind of setting the agenda.
So when you opt out of that, you have less influence.
And that's probably true.
You can also not take it as seriously.
And one piece of advice I give in my book to organizations is when you're being assaulted on Twitter by some rage mob, the best thing to do is probably just nothing.
Those things have very short attention spans.
The people in them mostly discharge all their emotional energy online.
So it doesn't generally lead to any real consequences in the real world anyway.
And if you just wait a few days, it blows over.
Now, the interesting thing is that every organization has people in it now who deal with social media.
And those people are the last people who are going to give that advice to their bosses.
Right, because then they don't matter.
Yeah.
But the fact is, the best thing you can do is to just sort of yawn, move on, and let them be attracted by the next shiny object.
Now, as we speak, I think our president is meeting with people he considers influential right-wing, mostly right-wing internet people.
I noticed you weren't invited.
I don't think you're insane enough.
Yeah, I was not invited.
Is that a plus or a minus?
I don't really know.
I mean, Washington in July is not one of my destinations of choice anyway.
But everybody seemed to expect me to be there.
I've gotten a lot of messages from people, and I'm like, nope, nope, nobody wanted me.
I mean, is he doing something important?
He's talking about what I think is a genuinely real thing, this move to try and silence conservative voices, especially before the 2020 election.
I think they're doing it on Facebook.
I think they're doing it on Twitter.
Is there some government fix for that?
Well, first, he's totally right to do it, both from a political standpoint, which is that the mainstream media is 99.9% against him and willing to jettison basically all standards and ethics of journalism.
So this is what he has.
He has social media.
He has the alternative media.
And he's smart to recognize that meme makers with names like Carpe Donctum are actually important, which they are.
Second of all, is there stuff you can do besides sort of jawbone?
Yes.
I've suggested in the book, antitrust regulation to basically break up a lot of these behemoths.
We have very little competition and they tend to collude.
I mean, for example, when Gab tried to be a competitor to Twitter, suddenly all their payments were cut off.
And the same thing happened to BitChute, which is a YouTube competitor.
They lost their access to PayPal.
Same way.
And it's very hard to believe there's not collusion going on here.
And you may notice when James O'Keefe had his video out about Google, the only place you could see it was on BitChute.
YouTube took it off.
Then YouTube's alleged competitor, Vimeo, took it down.
So, you know, there's definitely an effort to control.
There's plenty of room for antitrust regulation, both on the breakup side and on the policing collusion side.
I think that's absolutely fair.
And the thing that should worry the tech companies is.
About a month ago, I was at a conference at Stanford on free speech and social media, very diverse group, left and right.
Everybody was saying that.
I thought I was going to really have to defend this position.
I expected to get a lot of flack from it.
And instead, everybody agreed with me to the point where I was on the plane on the way home saying, if everybody agrees with me, that never happened.
Don't be wrong.
No, that's not.
Politically, at least it means something.
I think that's encouraging because I agree.
I think there is room for antitrust action here.
And I think it would be a good thing.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the website, which you should go to every day is Instapundit.
The book is The Social Media Upheaval.
It's great to see you.
I hope you come to LA and let me buy a drink.
Awesome.
That's good.
I'll talk to you again.
Thanks a lot, Gron.
A final reflection.
You know, earlier in the week, I think it was Monday, I was talking about this thing I'm going to do on Tuesday, I believe.
I am going to talk to what is called the CALLD conference, which is like a summer gathering of teenagers, of high school students at New St. Andrews College run by Pastor Doug Wilson, a conservative guy.
And it became a controversy when a place called, I think it was Pennin Pulpit, wrote this kind of blazing article making me sound like a gay activist because I do support the rights of gay people and I do not think that homosexuality is necessarily a sin per se in Christian theology.
And I'm not a theologian, but this is the way I read the scriptures and this is the way I read the experts and I have read about it and all this stuff.
And they wanted to make a controversy out of it.
So the people at New St. Andrews at the CALLD conference got in touch with me and said, look, we don't like, we don't agree with you, but we don't like this virtue signaling stuff where people cancel speakers.
So we're just going to invite you to come and put you on a panel where you can discuss this and debate it and argue with it.
And I thought, gee, that's really great.
Then after that, I got called by something called, I can't remember offhand what it was, the Christian News Network, something like that.
And the guy grilled me for 45 minutes about everything about not just how I felt about gays, about the fact that people curse in my fiction.
They were upset that somebody cursed in a Gosnell movie about it.
And it was very, although they were very pleasant and very fair in listening to me and in recording it, it was clearly like a prosecutorial interview.
And afterwards, I came off and I started to think, you know, hey, maybe I'm putting these folks at New St. Andrews College at the CALLD conference.
Maybe I'm putting them on the dime, you know, because these are teenagers.
What if I show up and I say what I'm going to say?
And I'm not any kind of an activist at all, but I will express my opinions.
And the parents of these kids say, no, this is awful.
We're going to pull out.
So last night I wrote to them and I said to them, listen, if you don't want, I'm happy to come, but if you don't want me there, I will pull out and I will take full responsibility for it.
And they wrote me right back and said, no, we're not afraid of controversy.
We talk to the parents about who's going to be there.
We tell them who you are.
And we deal with this.
And we're not afraid to discuss these issues.
And it was like, I thought, wow, that's what life should be like, right?
Because, you know, I believe when you're a Christian, if you really are a believing Christian, your fears fall away.
They're not afraid of me.
I'm not afraid of them.
I know that we can walk together in God and discuss these things.
And that, to me, is what Christian courage looks like.
And that to me is what American tolerance looks like.
It is not so hard to disagree with respect.
It really is not.
It is not so hard to disagree with love.
It is not so hard if what you're talking about is whether to be tolerant or not, to be tolerant of one another's opinions.
I mean, this is the thing that drives me so crazy.
You know, it's like, again, I'm not a pastor.
I'm not running a church.
I only have one responsibility.
My responsibility is to get my sinful backside into the light of God.
That is my responsibility.
I do that.
One of the ways I do that is by letting go of judgment, by not passing judgment lest I be judged.
That, if I had only followed that advice, and I try to follow a lot of the dictums of the gospels, if I had only followed that, my life would have become so much happier.
My life is so much more relaxed.
I don't have to fix things.
I don't have to condemn anybody.
I don't have to judge anybody.
I can let my friends have flaws.
Sometimes, there are some days when even I have occasional flaws.
I know, hard to believe, but it actually happens.
I can live so much more easily this way.
These are the reasons I attack the philosophies of the left because they're so intolerant, so unforgiving, so graceless.
And I just want to sing the praises of the called conference at New St. Andrews College for their courage, for their Christian love, and for their tolerance of conflicting opinions.
This is the way the world should look.
And it will look like this when a lot more people come back to Jesus and stop trying to get things right on their own.
I just wanted to say that.
Letting Friends Have Flaws00:01:40
I look forward to seeing them all on Tuesday.
I guess I'll meet them.
And I hope people will be there and I will try not to set the place on fire.
It's the Clavinless weekend.
I'm sorry.
It has come at last.
You're doomed.
It's kind of like that show Bird Box.
You know, you got to put on a blindfold and hope you don't see anything that drives you crazy until Monday when we will be back.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Walsh show today, Beto O'Rourke went and met with some refugees and immigrants and he proceeded to trash America.
America's racist, horrible country, so on and so forth.
What a great guy Beto O'Rourke is.
We'll talk about that today.
Also, AOC, speaking of great people, AOC basically implies that Nancy Pelosi is racist, which is kind of hilarious, but also disgusting.
And we'll talk about that.
Finally, I want to discuss the very common modern practice of filming troubled people in the midst of mental breakdowns so that we can laugh at them online.