Summer of Stupid dissects how media bias turned Trump’s "send her back" tweet into a scandal while ignoring left-wing rhetoric, like Joy Behar’s racist slurs or AOC’s Hitler comparisons. Historian Wilfred McClay counters "comic book" histories with Land of Hope, arguing America’s exceptionalism stems from self-invented institutions—not utopia. The episode warns 2020 will force a choice: preserve traditions or abandon them for radical reinvention, framing Trump’s presidency as a distraction from this existential debate. [Automatically generated summary]
In a fiery congressional hearing yesterday, U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings lambasted Department of Homeland Security Chief Kevin McAlinen for actually enforcing the border laws that Congress has passed.
Working himself up to the sort of extraordinary pitch of righteous indignation usually only seen in Elijah Cummings, Cummings thundered at the DHS chief, quote, How can you sit there in this, the people's house, and defend the fact that you are actually enforcing the laws we passed?
Do you think the people sent us here to make laws that enforcement agencies enforce?
Have you no decency, sir?
Have you at last?
No decency, unquote.
As if to press home his point in the most dramatic way possible, Congressman Cummings then proceeded to sit on his ass doing nothing, demonstrating to a grateful nation exactly how a congressman is supposed to behave.
Congresswoman Alexandria Accasional-Cortex also joined in attacking enforcement agencies by releasing pictures of herself sobbing with grief over the border while wearing a sleek white pantsuit that accentuated her lovely figure and a pair of high heels that made her legs look fabulous.
Speaking to a bevy of male reporters who were standing under her balcony playing Besseme Mucho on guitars while holding roses in their teeth, AOC said, quote, when we look back in history to when so many bad historical things happened that I don't even know what they are, we see that Congress has a sacred duty to speak out against all those who would enforce its laws or else there'll be more bad stuff like Hitler and smallpox, unquote.
Several reporters swooned after her statement and had to be sent home with a souvenir photo.
Reverend Patrick Conroy, the chaplain of the House of Representatives, offered a prayer over the house saying, quote, and this is a real quote, in your most holy name, I now cast out all spirits of darkness from this chamber.
When he was finished, the house was suddenly empty.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Whoopee Cushion Moments00:14:54
Ship-shaped dipsy-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.
All right, the smoke is clearing on another stupid story that took up the stupid oxygen and stupid Washington for an entire stupid week.
Donald Trump tweeted something stupid about four of the most stupid women ever to serve in an increasingly stupid Congress, and then our incredibly stupid media spent the rest of the stupid week saying stupid things while stupid people lined up outside the studios waiting to say even stupider things until everyone became stupid.
Now, I've said many times that politics makes us stupid because it forces us to make binary choices about a complex world and to argue over solutions before we've even finished defining the problems.
And the news media increases the stupid of politics by staffing itself almost entirely with stupid Democrats so that they become so stupid they don't even know they're stupid or that they're only covering every stupid thing in a stupid manner from only one stupid side.
And of course, we all contribute a little to the stupid by the fact we enjoy listening to stupid arguments by stupid people slinging stupid insults instead of intelligent debates between people of goodwill who aren't stupid, which don't bring in the ratings.
But what lies beneath the stupid is something serious.
A debate is taking place about how we regard our country and whether we want it to go on being America as it was founded.
And if we want to rise above the stupid, we have to hear that debate in spite of the stupidity of the stupid people in the news and the stupid people reporting the news and even the stupid news in the news.
All of which we will talk about in just a second.
But first, this Saturday marks the 50th anniversary since we first put a man on the moon.
We have an exciting new podcast by our friends at Esoteric Radio Theaters.
called Apollo 11, What We Saw, immediately rocketed to number three on iTunes Apple podcast and has been in the top 10 all week.
It's getting rave reviews.
Episodes one through three are out now, and episode four, Magnificent Desolation, drops tomorrow.
And speaking of Magnificent Desolation, host Bill Whittle, author, pilot, and space enthusiast, takes you on the journey of what it took to get to the moon and what happened when we got there and how things almost went horribly wrong.
Head to Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe today to Apollo 11, What We Saw.
You know, one of the things I always try to remind people about in the summer, especially, is that it is summer and there's not a lot of news.
And one of the other things about Donald Trump and his presidency is he's doing such a good job that there's not a lot of news.
There's no wars breaking out.
I mean, we've got problems with Iran.
We're always going to have problems.
There are always problems in the world.
We obviously have a crisis at the border, and that is news.
But there's not a lot of news going on because Trump is handling things pretty well.
The economy is going well.
Like I said, we're not in any new wars.
We're not sinking into new morasses overseas.
He's doing a good job of managing the ship of state.
So that, the fact that he is such a loose cannon and has such a big news, big mouth, becomes the news.
The fact that they're reporting on that shows you, the fact that they're reporting on how evil his tweets are shows you how good he is at being president of the United States.
So yesterday we've been, you know, we've had to cover the story all week that A, there's been nothing else going on, but B, it did cause a firestorm and you have to cover the firestorm.
But Trump stepped back from this chant that his people had of send her back when they were talking about Ilan Omar.
And it did, you know, as I said, if we're going to say that support for Israel is all about the Benjamins, partakes of anti-Semitic tropes, which it does, then we have to say that send her back does partake of the anti-xenophobic, we'll call it, or nativist trope of, you know, go back where you came from that's been thrown at immigrants since forever.
They always say that.
So they asked him about it, and he disavowed the chant.
Mr. President Baimi, when your supporters last night were chanting send her back, why didn't you stop them?
Why didn't you ask them to stop saying that?
Well, number one, I think I did.
I started speaking very quickly.
It really was a loud, I disagree with it, by the way, but it was quite a chant.
And I felt a little bit badly about it, but I will say this.
I did, and I started speaking very quickly.
But it started up rather fast, as you probably noticed.
So you'll tell your supporters never to say that.
Well, I would say that I was not happy with it.
I disagree with it.
But again, I didn't say, I didn't say that they did.
But I disagree.
But they were echoing what you said in your first tweet that they didn't go back.
Well, I don't think if you examine it, I don't think you'll find that.
But I disagree with it.
You know, I have to say, just this is off topic for a minute.
But I've been a reporter.
I know you have to sometimes do some scurvy things to get the news.
And that was an important interview.
It was important to get him saying that.
But he was giving medals to the Special Olympics, the U.S. Special Olympics team.
Like, could we not, you know, it just kind of got me when I was looking at that.
Could we not put politics aside for 15 seconds to let the Special Olympics kids get their medals with the president of the United States?
Did that have to be a political moment?
I mean, I'm sure he would have said the same thing outside on the lawn, just saying, you know, when everything becomes politics, nothing becomes civility.
Nothing becomes any good.
Nothing becomes worth anything.
It is a good question to ask.
But of course, it doesn't matter that he dialed it back.
The left is going to hammer this home forever, and they're going to debate, is it really an apology?
But no, he did the right thing.
The other thing, oh, and the other thing they try to do, I think one of the comedians at night, one of the many, many anti-Trump comedians, because they're all anti-Trump comedians, I think was Colbert, made fun of him saying, oh, that he slapped down his own followers.
But that's not what he's doing.
You know, these chants break out.
He hasn't got control of the crowd.
You could see, if you go back and look at the video, you could see he was kind of thinking, is this a good thing or not?
You can't always make these decisions in a flash moment.
The guy's given a speech in front of thousands of people.
So he dialed it back, and that was the right thing to do.
And the press cannot understand this, that the people who love him.
And I'll tell you something else.
One of the things I'm worried about, and I know Ben is worried about, and I think that people who are paying it, who pay attention to politics are worrying about, is he expanding his base?
Because when he's nasty like this, the people who are alienated by him aren't going to sign on.
They're not going to say, oh, he's doing a good job, but he is kind of a jerk.
The more he's a jerk, the more they think like, well, I can't go with him.
But I have to say, this is just a personal anecdote.
I'm meeting a lot of people, Ben and Jeremy and others among them, who didn't vote for Trump last time, who will this time.
And partly it's because the left is so bad, and partly it's because Trump has done a good job.
And so I think that it's very possible that if he hasn't expanded his base, he's expanded the number of people in the base who will turn up.
So that is a possible thing.
And that's not because of the tweets.
It's because of the fact that he's doing a good job and the left is so bad.
And of course, his base is with him.
CNN had some Republican women on and basically tried to talk them into hating him, tried to talk them into calling him racist, and they wouldn't do it.
He was saying that if they hate America so much, because what we're seeing out of them and hearing out of them, they hate America.
If it's so bad, there's a lot of places they can go.
I'm a brown-skinned woman.
I am a legal immigrant.
I agree with him.
I don't think that's racist to say that.
Not at all.
Where you go?
Actually, I think it's a demonstration of how their ideology spills over, even though they're American now, so to speak.
They're not acting American.
I'm glad that the president said what he said because all they're doing is they're inciting hatred and division.
And that's not what our country is about.
It's not about that at all.
Isn't that what the president does with some of his own comments, his own racist comments?
And he didn't say anything about color.
We know the president is not racist.
He loves people from Hispanics to black people all across the board.
I think that these women see something, and the fact that she's sitting there trying to talk them into calling him racist is part of the problem.
The press is part of the problem.
I know I've hammered this home a million times, but still, still, these things.
Look, it's a stupid moment because it's the summer, there's not a lot of news, and because Trump is doing a good job, there's not a lot of news.
So Trump becomes the news, and that's the way Trump likes it, and that's the way the media likes it.
As Trump says, if he loses the election, a lot of these media outlets are going to go out of business.
But, you know, it's not good for people.
It's not good for people that the press is so dumb.
You know, this is one of the things, in their hatred, in the fact that they surround themselves with people who agree with them, it's not that they have low IQs, it's that they make themselves stupid.
They become stupid by surrounding themselves with people who agree.
That's how you become stupid.
You know, it's like when people debate each other, people of goodwill, when they talk to each other, when they open up their hearts to each other, you become smarter.
I mean, you hear ideas and you think like, oh, yeah, you know, I still want to go in that direction, but yeah, I'm going to move the ship a little bit in another direction because this guy introduced an idea I hadn't thought of.
When people disagree with you, they say things that you hadn't thought of.
When they agree with you, you get people like Joy Behar on the View talking to Whoopee Goldberg.
I love this whoopee and joy.
It's without whoopee, there's no joy.
Without joy, there's no whoopee.
Listen to this conversation about this news.
He doesn't care or doesn't acknowledge the fact that what he's doing is possibly inviting violence towards these women and women who are saying, this is wrong, I don't like this.
No question.
This involves every female in this country.
Well, why can't he be brought up on Trotty as a hate speech?
Sorry.
Why can't he be sued by the ACLU for hate speech?
I don't get it.
How can he get away with this?
Why can't he be sued for hate speech?
I don't get it.
You know, it's not good for America to have people this stupid on television.
It's just not good.
And I mean, it's like, you know, they're there.
It used to be, it used to be that news programs were a loss that networks had to take because the FCC had a rule that a certain amount of time had to be dedicated.
The idea was that we, the people, owned the airwaves, and a certain amount of time had to be dedicated to news.
And so they thought, well, this is not a profit-making thing.
This is a public service that we perform.
And so they had news that was, you know, there were a lot of things going on.
The country had more of a consensus.
There was more of an idea of who we were, kind of a center-right country.
There was a lot less division for a certain period of time.
And so that made it easier.
But still, it was the idea that this was performing a service.
They were still a bunch of liberals, but they still, but they did have some newsmen who were conservatives.
You could go into a newsroom and talk to a conservative without him getting fired.
I mean, that was a different, it was a different world.
Then when cable came along, they basically abandoned that.
They made the news a TV show.
They decided they could make profits off it.
You know, the view is, it's not good to have those women sitting around.
It's not good for the polity to have women of that level of misinformation.
And just, you know, there's not a high level of thought going on on the view.
It's not good for people.
It's not good for the country to have that stuff coming out of the TV all day long and shaping the way people think.
And it's interesting.
Part of what you're seeing with Trump and basically, I hope, with the country, part of what you're seeing is this pushback.
You know, there's a really good story from our friend Lila Rose over at Live Action, the pro-life people.
Netflix threatened to boycott Georgia after they had that heartbeat bill.
And then they came out this quarter and their subscribers disappeared.
They had a drop of like 126,000 supporters disappearing.
And there is reason to believe that a lot of these people were people saying, you know, if you're going to boycott us, we're going to boycott you.
And we want to see more of this.
There's no reason.
There's simply, Hollywood is not so entertaining that they should be able to dictate our politics.
And they do, you know.
You know, because of all this stupid, and I'm going to get back to the stupid in a minute because it's worth talking about.
You almost never hear anybody saying something that's really sensible.
So I don't like to play overly long cuts, but this cut, this cut goes on for about two minutes.
It's Marco Rubio on Twitter.
And I know that you may think that's an unlikely source of wisdom, but here he is talking common sense.
And it's important because the Republican Party should be doing a lot more of this.
I've argued this for many, many years, by the way, that they should be doing a lot more of what Rubio does.
And I'll tell you what he does after a second.
But let's just listen to these two minutes of Marco Rubio.
So here's how this has been working.
The president says something and people cringe because you don't like it.
But then the other side, these left-wing politicians, people on the media, they go crazy with their outrage.
And they demand that you immediately answer what he said and answer it the way they want you to answer it.
And so here's what you're reminded of.
These are the same people that said Reagan was a racist because he was in favor of welfare reform.
George W. Bush was a racist because of the way he responded to Katrina.
And John McCain, they even accused him of being like George Wallace.
They allowed him to be attacked for that.
And Mitt Romney, they said he was a country club racist because in a speech somewhere he said that if you want free stuff, vote for Obama.
And so these are the same people, by the way, that one of their members of Congress from their party says that support for Israel is all about the Benjamins, and they couldn't even pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism by itself.
But it took them less than 72 hours to pass a resolution condemning the President of the United States tweet as racist.
And even in the media, Obama says we can't let people across the border, and nobody says anything.
A Republican says it, and it's white nationalism.
So the hypocrisy, the self-righteousness outrages people too.
And on top of it, you have these four members who are Americans.
No one should question that they are fully as American as me or anybody else.
But they're also political bullies.
They go around attacking people, calling other Democrats just like Southern segregationists.
But when you hit them back, it's because they're women of color.
And so they hold a press conference saying we shouldn't be talking and dividing people on the basis of race or ethnicity.
But then they go on to say, by the way, if you disagree with us, you're a white nationalist and you're a racist.
So it's absurd.
People are tired of this game.
You have to immediately respond, pick a side between these two.
It's a game I'm not going to play.
It's distracting us from the important things that this country needs to be focused on.
And I'm not playing this game anymore.
See, if Marco Ruby had talked like that during the debates, he might have won.
Rhetoric Endangering People00:14:08
Because what he's doing, see, what Trump has done, this is the machine, Rubio is right.
He is perfectly describing the machine that has been created to suppress and destroy the Republican Party.
That's why it was created.
That's what its job is.
Every time you see somebody on CBS News, you see the new woman, Nora O'Donnell, I think her name is, every time you see somebody on NBC News, every time you see the anchor people go on the news, their job is to hurt the Republican Party in favor of the Democrats.
That's what they're there for.
That's who they are.
If you go through those news agencies, I dare them, I dare them to produce a person in power who voted for Donald Trump, a person with editorial power who voted, one, who voted for Donald Trump.
I dare them.
And that's why it makes sense to them that when you beat up a kid because he's wearing a MAGA hat, because they don't know anybody who wears a MAGA hat except when they interview them, except when they see them through the lens of their own prejudice.
So there he is deconstructing the machine.
What Donald Trump has done is he has broken the machine.
He breaks the machine.
He stomps on it.
And everybody cheers and it's great and they should.
But the machine is going to be there.
Some machine is going to be there.
And what you want is people who've got the spine to constantly be deconstructing the question itself.
That's what you've got to do with this leftist machine of the media.
You don't say, when somebody says to you, are you in favor of abortion in the case of rape or incest?
You don't answer that question.
You say, well, wait a minute, why didn't you ask this guy if he's in favor of aborting a child because it's a girl?
You know, why didn't you ask that question?
When you ask him that question, you can come back to me and ask me about incest.
Because incest, you know, those abortions are what?
0.something percent of abortions.
People are getting abortions because they're not careful and because they're not paying attention and because they don't think it matters anymore because that's the narrative our left-wing media has sold them.
That's the way you argue.
And the thing is, once you start to argue like that, there are people even on the left who will hear you.
It's not true that there's nobody of good will.
You know, National NPR, National Public Radio, has a show called Code Switch.
And there is a guy on, this is an audio show, right?
And there's a guy named Keith Woods.
And Keith Woods is the guy you would think would be the worst person about this because he is the vice president for newsroom training and diversity.
He's like a job that I don't actually think should exist.
Okay, there's a job that I don't think should actually exist.
But he said something actually radical on Code Switch.
He said, you know what?
It's not our job to describe something as racist.
It's the public's job to hear what it is and decide if they think it's racist.
If that were the way the news was played, if that were the way the news was played, it wouldn't be this kind of news.
Let's listen to a little bit of what he says.
I think that the problem here is that words like racist come with human judgment.
They're not just descriptive.
There's a moral judgment that sits behind them.
And we do not, as a society or as a medium, apply them evenly or with any logic at all.
And I'm not arguing this because we're inconsistent.
I'm arguing this because we sit on a very fragile credibility as a profession different from every other profession out there.
And that credibility rests in part on the view of the public that we are maintaining some distance, our judgments, our morals, some distance from the things that we're covering.
Now, you notice he says it's not that we're being inconsistent.
The fact is they're being consistent in calling any idea from the right racist and not calling ideas from the left racist.
And so they are consistent, but they're wrong.
I mean, they're wrong.
And it's just a way of thinking that only occurs when you're surrounded by people who agree with you.
And that is part of the reason we get into this stupid stuff.
Part of it is that we have a 24-7 news cycle, so they've got to fill it up even when there's no news.
Part of it is that we, the people, the audience, would rather watch two people screaming at each other than two people having an intelligent debate over something.
And people tend to get overheated when they debate.
They're not listening to what the other person is saying, you know, so many times.
I mean, one of the things I try to do here is not get to the solution before I define the problem, because first, I'm not a policy guy.
I don't always know what the solution is, but I can see the problem in front of my eyes.
And I think it's important that we recognize reality and we describe reality as best we can and then start talking about why we don't like the other guy's solution and why we think we might have a better one or maybe we can fumble forward together.
But when it's all one side, we get stupider, just like the news media.
The news media is now a clown show.
I mean, it's a clown show.
There is no, outside of Brett Baer's special report, there is no place where you can go on and turn on and listen to the news without feeling that you are being made stupider than you were when you turned it on.
It really is, as if you turn on the news and little men come out of the TV set, climb into your ears and start pulling IQ points out.
And you can hear them and they're going, guys, here's another IQ.
He's getting dumber.
We're almost there.
We've almost got him down to our level.
That's what it's like when you watch the network news.
Whereas when you watch a special report and at the end, they have a panel discussion where people are obviously instructed to remain civil and they talk things out and they're on the right and the left.
It makes a difference.
It makes you a little smarter at the end of the show, whereas most of these news shows are there to make you stupid.
And so then that's how you get, that's how you get people like Alexandria Casional-Cortex, who is just does not know anything.
She just doesn't know anything, but she's a good politician.
She's got talent, but she's got no information.
And so she's the one, and we're going back to this idea that we just saw in Whoopi Goldberg, this idea that somehow the rhetoric on the right is dangerous.
Somehow, the rhetoric on the right is endangering people, but what she's doing is not.
Here's AOC.
The president put millions of Americans in danger last night.
Its rhetoric is endangering lots of people.
This is not just about threats to individual members of Congress, but it is about creating a volatile environment in this country through violent rhetoric that puts anyone like Ilhan, anyone who believes in the rights of all people in danger.
What crap, okay?
Who's been threatening the president?
Who has been making theater out of assassinating the president?
Who's Johnny Depp talking about when was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
Shakespeare in the Park where they did Julius Caesar and Julius Caesar, who was obviously assassinated, is dressed up like Donald Trump.
Kathy Griffin, obviously, with the head of Donald Trump, and then she's the terrible victim because it ruined her career.
Snoop Dogg shooting Donald Trump.
And then, you know, all the level of rhetoric.
Talk about the level of rhetoric, not from a couple of people in a crowd, but from the mainstream of the Democrat commentariat, Trump committed treason.
Trump is working with the Russians.
John Brennan, everyone on CNN.
Trump is Hitler.
How many times have you heard Donald Trump compared to Hitler?
I mean, you know who never gets called a fascist dictator?
A fascist dictator.
You know who never got called the fascist dictator, Hitler?
You know why?
Because those people would disappear if you said it.
The very fact that you can call Donald Trump those names and nothing happens to you, if anything, your ratings go up and you're called on to be on MSNBC, you know, the fact that you can do that proves that the words coming out of your mouth aren't true.
And who does all that?
Why is that not endangering the president?
Why is that not causing violence?
Well, it does cause violence.
We know it.
I mean, why was there so little coverage of the anti-FA terrorist attack on the Immigration Detention Center in Washington state?
You know, that guy was inspired by the squad, things the squad said, but that's nothing but when that clown sent out fake bombs to all the left-wing news people, that, of course, was big news.
And, you know, listen, it's all big news.
We don't want violent people.
We don't want terrorists on any side.
But when you only report one side, again, we know it.
We know it.
And it's all so much theater.
You know, the other day, Al Green put this resolution forward.
Here he is.
Sorry, it was the untalented Al Green from Texas.
He's been talking impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.
And all the people on TV, impeachment, impeachment, every Democrat, all the squad is big on impeachment.
Al Green actually put forward an impeachment resolution.
It died, and it died with Democrats voting 137 to 95 against.
So they're all talk.
It's all a show.
And the show is covered by the people who are in show business, namely the news media, and it spreads the stupid.
So what's beneath the stupid?
This is the thing I just want to get to, because the funny thing is they keep saying that this is all a distraction.
You keep hearing Democrats say it's all a distraction.
But Donald Trump has actually gotten closer to the nub of the issue, to what is actually happening in this country.
The left keeps saying he's distracting us, but as always, they accuse us of doing what they're doing.
Donald Trump keeps saying these people hate America.
These people hate America.
And then everybody says, well, hasn't Donald Trump said bad things about America?
And no, he hasn't.
Donald Trump has said bad things are going on in America.
He hasn't said America is running concentration camps.
He hasn't accused, I mean, the show that went on that I was joking about in the open when Elijah Cummings was yelling at the DHS chief, the things that we've seen them say to Department of Homeland Security, guys ICE people trying to enforce the border laws.
That's shameful.
It is shameful for Congress, who is responsible for passing the laws, to come down on the people who enforce the laws.
I've said this before.
I'm saying it again.
The debate we are in the midst of is will the founding stand?
Are we friends of the founding or are we not?
Is it unpatriotic to wave the flag?
Is it racist to wave the flag or is it supporting the freest country ever made?
Is our history about racism, the racism that has existed everywhere in the past?
Or is it about the fact that we, in a unique way, have climbed out of racism and been a beacon to the world?
All these people around the world who are saying we're a multicultural country when they're not are saying it because they want to be like us.
So shouldn't we be thanking the people who brought us here, the white people who brought us here, the white males who brought us here?
Can't we be thankful to them while including new people into the mix because of the ideas that they put forward?
Are we going to be grateful for this country or are we going to hate it and break it and make some utopia that no one has ever seen?
Is speech going to be free or are we going to make a better world by shutting people down?
Is the government going to start to be dialed back?
Listen, there's no debate between no government and too much government.
There's a debate between too much government and limited government, defined powers.
I'm increasingly beginning to think people said last election was the biggest election of your lifetime.
They always say that every time.
I think only one party may survive this next election or at least survive as it stands.
You know, I'm watching this coverage of the moon, right?
We've got the 50-year anniversary of the landing on the moon and the New York Times, the Washington Post, story after story about, oh, the Soviets had female astronauts, but for us it was, that's garbage.
We've had much, far, far more female astronauts in the years since.
The Soviets did believe, as the left believes now, in erasing gender differences.
Women were supposed to be just the same as men in the Soviet Union.
That made everyone a lot happier.
But the New York Times is selling this idea that somehow the Soviet Union, this slave state, this miserable, miserable, unworkable dysfunctional slave state, was somehow better than us.
But instead, instead of saying, hey, you know, NASA is not to blame that the world was a little more racist then.
If our culture in the 50s, our successful culture that went to the moon, right, 50 years ago, if that was a white male culture, then is the dysfunctional culture we find in Africa, is that a black culture?
Because I don't believe either one of those things.
I believe these are cultures created by ideas.
And sure, ideas come down through history and maybe one group of people gets them and they're lucky, but the world is about ideas.
And what we had is a successful idea.
And to abandon that idea because the people's faces were white is racism, is racism.
That's the debate we're having.
And all this stupid is meant to draw your eyes away from that debate for one simple reason.
Most of the people, I think, are on the side of the founding.
Donald Trump's personality, a distraction.
This crisis, that crisis, this thing going on, all of it, a distraction from what is coming down the pike in 2020 is a decision between are we going to be proud of this country and move forward into a new age with the guidance of our traditions and our ideas, or are we going to abandon this and build out of our own virtue a utopia that has never existed on earth and just spoiler alert, never will?
All right.
Backstage Live, Ben, the Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, that guy Knowles, and I will be taking our backstage show on the road live, August 21st, to the beautiful Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.
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And we'll be dazzling you with answers to your burning questions from the audience while we're having drinks.
Tickets are available at dailywire.com slash backstage, daily wire, one word, dailywire.com, backstage.
Thomas Jefferson's Vision00:07:09
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And then we have a higher premium where you don't have to meet any of us.
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So head to dailywire.com slash backstage and get your tickets today.
All right, we're going to stay on with you here, but that's no reason not to go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
And we're going to stay on so you can hear our guest, Wilfred McClay.
We have been trying to have Wilfred McClay on for months at this point.
And last time we had a technical glitch.
Hopefully, we won't this time.
He's the GT and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma and the director of the Center for the History of Liberty.
His new book, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, offers what existing texts about our country's past do not, an inspiring narrative account of our own country, which is what we need.
Wilfred, I'm so glad to see you.
I hope we can keep you on.
How are you?
It's great to be here.
I'm delighted.
And I'm a big fan.
My son introduced me to you.
And he, like your son, is a classicist, a student of the classical world.
So, yeah.
No, I just wanted to tell you that.
Yeah, no, it's nice.
It's nice to hear that I get some love from a classicist.
It's good.
So, tell us about this book.
First of all, obviously, a book like this is coming up against what's the famous one that runs down the people's history of the United States that runs down the country.
So, what is this?
How do you tell the story of America differently?
Well, Zen, Zen's, and I here can quote from left-wing historians, which is, I repeat myself, but the majority of historians understand that Zen's book is a kind of comic book version of history.
It's, you know, the good guys and the bad guys, and the good guys are always the outs, the underprivileged, the minorities, and so on.
And the bad guys are always rich white males who sit atop a giant pile of lucre and load it all over everybody else while smoking big fat cigars.
And it's very entertaining in a way that textbooks that most of the mainstream textbooks are not.
They're dull, they're poorly written, they're uninspiring, and they're uninspired.
They're assembled by committees of people who are accountable to interest groups and stakeholders of various sorts who insist that their group be represented and this phrase not be used and that sort of thing.
It's a kind of political correctness with the marketplace very much involved, too.
So it's very hard to find a textbook that has any kind of verb to it, that has the mark of an individual author.
And I fortunately in Counterbooks actually approached me to do this.
And at first I said no.
And then I thought about it.
Why did you say no?
Because it's a big job and you don't get a lot of credit for it in my profession.
You know, you get credit for making obscure discoveries in new areas that are considered pioneering, but that are of no interest to the general reader.
And, you know, I see my country kind of falling apart around me, partly because people don't remember what we are, what we have been.
They don't have a knowledge of our founding principles, as you've just been talking about.
But they also don't have that kind of memory that's the source of gratitude simply for the fact of your being.
None of us invents himself or herself.
We come into the world equipped with the things that were given by others, often through much struggle and sacrifice.
And that's a part of the story that needs to be told, that needs to be inculcated to generation after generation of Americans.
So that's a large part of what I've tried to do.
So I mean, I don't think anybody wants to, you know, history is full of evil and corruption.
I mean, people are full of evil and corruption.
So how do you tell the story of America in a positive light without leave, you know, and not leave that stuff out?
How do you do that?
I don't leave it out.
I don't leave it in that.
And one of the things that I really require of the reader, and I want young people, of course I want people to have heroes, but I want them to understand that we are fallen creatures.
There's definitely a not so subtle sort of theological or anthropological perspective I bring in that we, you know, there is nobody.
Thomas Jefferson was a great man.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.
Thomas Jefferson was very ambivalent about slavery.
You can be, you can accuse him of all kinds of things, but his greatness endures.
And so how are we going to be mature enough people to take the balance of that?
As we do with individuals in our lives, you know, we don't, my father wasn't perfect, but I love him to death, always will, partly just because he was my father, but he also had many great virtues.
And, you know, this kind of generosity is something we ought to extend to our own country.
Is there something, you know, we talk a lot about American exceptionalism, and it was one of the kind of big moments of the Obama presidency when he kind of shrugged that off and said, well, the English think they're exceptional and the Greeks think we're exceptional.
Are we exceptional?
Absolutely.
What is exceptional about it?
Well, we're a country that invented its own institutions in the clear light of day.
You know, we don't have Romulus and Remus as our heroes.
We have people that we know about.
George Washington, preeminently.
He definitely comes off very well in my book.
And they invented a regime based on the study of history, based on the light of reason, based on customs that they had inherited from the English, British provenance, from the legal structures and political structures that came over with the British settlers.
And all of that was very consciously wrought into an institution that, into a way of life, a country that didn't have kings, where equality was, fundamental equality was enshrined as an aspirational principle, and where we rule ourselves.
Ideally, we rule ourselves.
We're a nation ruled by laws and not men.
That's what we are to be.
That's what we are still to a considerable extent, but it's always a fight because the natural tendency of human regimes is downward.
And the founders knew this.
They were very well aware of this.
Innovation And Community Change00:07:21
And they actually, some of them are rather gloomy about the prospect that we're all holding together.
I think they'd be astonished that we're about to celebrate our 250th anniversary.
I think so too.
I think that they were, I mean, their pessimism is what gave them wisdom, really.
When you read the Federalist Papers, you really think like, yeah, this isn't going to work.
It is amazing.
You know, I want to ask you about something else.
We're talking about the book Land of Hope, an invitation to the great American story.
But you've written another book that actually has come up here recently.
Ben Shapiro and I have been in a long, long debate.
We actually went live the other day about the need to keep communities alive in a world in which technological change is coming so fast.
And a lot of people are trying to deal with this in ways that I disagree with.
Tucker Carlson wants to stop innovation or slow down innovation, which I don't agree with.
Andrew Yang wants to give everybody federal funds that I also don't agree with.
But I think the problem is real.
And you wrote a book about place called Why Place Matters.
Is there something?
Is there something that can be done to keep communities from disappearing without stopping technological advance?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I just think we have to be thoughtful and careful about the way we adopt technologies.
I think stopping technologies is, first of all, it's not going to happen.
We can sit around and thumbs up and imagine a world without technological innovation.
I'd like a world without John Lennon, frankly.
Imagine, yeah.
But no, I think we can do it in thoughtful ways.
Look, the very fact the technology you and I are using to communicate is an amazing way of bringing things together, not separating them, of creating a community of shared understanding, shared love.
You know, we love the same things.
Classics.
And America.
So I don't think there's a kind of deterministic effect of technologies.
I think actually the telecommuting, just to give one example, telecommuting is something that can hold communities together.
People don't have to move away from the place they grew up.
They don't have to move to LA or to New York or Chicago or Houston or whatever.
They can stay where they are or in various other ways they can work without having to leave the small towns or regional centers that they grew up in.
So there's not a deterministic quality to this.
The question is, do we stay in places long enough to have a commitment to them, to have a commitment to the well-being of the community, the quality of schools to the quality of life for our children and places where memories can be built and where it's not just everything being leveled from one day to the next.
And there's not as much of that in America as the critics fear, but there's more than there should be.
We move around a lot.
We don't establish roots.
And that's not good for our flourishing as human beings.
So I think it's a balance issue.
I definitely wouldn't go with the technophobes.
Right, right.
No, it is a balance issue.
Wilfred McClay, thank you so much.
I'm glad we finally got you on.
Your book is Land of Hope, An Invitation to the Great American Story.
It's very well written.
And I think it's a book that's very much needed.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
Thank you.
Coming from you, the well-written part means a lot.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
Let me get to a final reflection about my trip to New St. Andrews in Idaho.
It was just such a delightful trip.
And they tried to gin up some controversy in the Christian press about the fact that I have a lot of support for gay people and basically believe that they can be part of our Christian community.
Obviously, gay people can be bad, straight people can be bad, but obviously, but that homosexuality per se is a sin.
And they wanted to build that into a big debate.
I just want to say this.
The people that I met at this place at New St. Andrews were so open-minded, so tolerant of debate, so eager for debate and so eager to challenge my ideas in intelligent scriptural ways and intelligent rational ways that you really walk into this place, especially when you are so used to being surrounded by small-minded leftists, so used to going to universities where people are afraid to open their mouths and here nobody is afraid to say anything.
Everybody is willing to discuss things.
Same was true at Hillsdale.
And what that makes me think about is here's a structure that works.
And when you are coming to somebody and saying, you know, I think there could be a change here.
I think there could be more tolerance.
You have to make sure that you don't remove any load-bearing walls.
You do not want this structure to collapse.
And so that's the debate that we're having.
Because if I had to choose, if I had to choose between these 95% of people who thrive in this Christian setting and the 5% of gay people who are cast out, who ultimately find themselves rejected for who they are, I would obviously choose the 95% over the 5%.
But I do believe, I do believe that these gay activists are out there prowling like lions, waiting for these kids to come and tell them your religion rejects you, there is no God.
Your family rejects you, families stink, the patriarchy stinks.
They're prowling out there waiting for these kids.
And if we don't bring them into God and keep them in the fold, we lose them to that terrible, terrible culture that the gay activists, and basically it's not gay activists, it's all the left-wing activists are trying to create this terrible anti-God, anti-family, anti-freedom culture that they work so hard to create.
And so my argument is for tolerance.
But again, I'm very, very aware that their system works.
These kids are so bright.
The people that I talked to were so knowledgeable.
I had a debate with Pastor Douglas Wilson, a very, very sophisticated thinker, a very well-educated person.
In fact, I thought our debate was going to be more fiery, but we agreed on so many things that it was a lot more friendly than I thought it was going to be.
I was on the show Cross Politics.
If you haven't checked it out, check it out on iTunes with Gabriel Wrench, Toby Sumter.
He calls himself Chocolate Knox and is a very funny guy, three guys.
We just had a wonderful, wonderful time.
You can go in line, find that.
You can find it on my Twitter feed.
I retweeted it.
But the point is, this system works.
The system of Christianity works.
And obviously, you want it to change as we move toward the kingdom, hopefully, and get to look more like the kingdom.
But I do not suggest change lightly.
And I understand that a debate has to be had and discussion has to be had.
But I think their open-mindedness is really amazing.
It was an amazing day.
I had a wonderful time.
And I look forward to seeing them all again.
I got to stop.
The Clavin List Weekend is upon us.
You can listen to me on Shapiro's show.
I'm filling in for him on the last two hours of Shapiro's show.
After that, chaos has come.
But survivors can gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Andrew Klavan Show00:00:37
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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Animations are by Cynthia Ngulo.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, President Trump disavows the send-her-back crowd chant and the media prove their hypocrisy.