Heather McDonald and the host dismantle the left’s weaponization of bigotry claims, exposing Media Matters’ selective editing of Andrew Clavin’s remarks—like defending gender roles as biologically rooted and opposing open-border immigration—to paint conservatives as hateful. McDonald ties homelessness to drug normalization and ideological exemptions from civil norms, not housing shortages, while The Diversity Delusion framework exposes how the left reduces all disparities to racism, silencing dissent like her near-riot disruption over border critiques. The episode frames conservative values—free speech, meritocracy, and cultural accountability—as the antidote to progressive collapse, closing with Hal Prince’s capitalist-artist ethos as a blueprint for moral markets. [Automatically generated summary]
Left-wing guardians of the purity of our dialogue, Media Matters, has uncovered a, quote, cesspool of bigotry and hatred right here at the Daily Wire.
Now, that quote was not made up, and in fact, all the quotes in what follows are real, and they're shocking.
So you might want to hide the children in the backseat of your car and put your hands over the ears or other body parts of any ladies present so they aren't corrupted by the incredible hatred that Media Matters unearthed here at the Daily Wire.
For instance, Media Matters says, quote, Daily Wire podcaster Andrew Clavin claims the female body is made to attract men and women should sympathize with the powerful sense of attraction that men feel.
If women are asking us to respect them as we should, Clavin went on, shouldn't they have a little bit of understanding of our experience?
I know this is despicable.
To expect men and women to respect and understand one another's feelings for the sweet love of all that's holy, that's not who we are.
The article went on to say, quote, Clavin said there should be acceptable forms of blackface, such as if a child wants to dress up as Black Panther for Halloween.
Are you kidding me?
Are we to allow white children to have black people as heroes?
What kind of racist hell are we living in here?
Does Ben Shapiro know what's going on in this studio, even as I speak?
I can only bear one more horrific example.
Quote, Clavin said the U.S. should not allow immigrants into this country who don't share our Western values.
Katie, bar the door and hold the phone and hold the door and bar the phone.
And who the hell is Katie?
Are we going to keep people from entering this country just because they want to destroy it?
What kind of monsters are we?
The article then went on to say that Michael Knowles also works here.
So, okay, maybe they have a point.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
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.
You know, a lot of us evil conservatives, when we talk about the government, we talk about gun-grabbing, oppressive people.
But I think of the post office.
What about the post office?
I love the post office.
It has been a support for me my entire life.
But nowadays, I want my post office in the computer.
I live in LA.
To drive five minutes to the post office takes three hours.
So I want to know that I can get all the wonderful services of the U.S. Post Office right there in my computer.
So I go to stamps.com.
Whether you're a small office sending invoices and online sellers shipping out products or even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
Simply use your computer to print official U.S. postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send.
Once your mail is ready, hand it to your mail carrier, drop it in a mailbox.
It's that simple.
With stamps.com, you get five cents off every first-class stamp and up to 40% off priority mail.
Right now, my listeners get a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin.
That's stamps.com.
Enter Clavin, send a letter right away saying, how do you spell Clavin?
Attitude Matters00:14:52
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Well, listen, it is one thing.
It is one thing when the press declares that the President of the United States is a bigoted white nationalist who inspires people to slaughter each other.
And it's another thing when the Democrats declare that anyone who doesn't vote for them is a bigoted white nationalist who inspires people to slaughter each other.
And it's yet one more thing when the left in general craps on every value that made this country great, tries to dismantle the principles of our founding, slimes our history, slanders our forefathers, and uses violence and intimidation to shut down free speech and free thought.
But when they attack me, that's going too far.
After all, I'm a wonderful person.
Just look at me.
I'm adorable.
But yesterday, Media Matters, a leftist hate site founded by Bond villain George Soros and created by Bond villain henchman David Brock, unleashed this diatribe against me and the Daily Wire, calling us a cesspool of hate and bigotry.
They said they had reviewed, get this, they'd reviewed seven months of our podcast to find quotes demonstrating how hateful we are.
Now, let me pause here a second to say to Media Matters, thank you for watching.
And you know, you could have gotten a subscription for a lousy 10 bucks a month and for 100 bucks, you could have gotten a full year and this fabulous leftist tears tumbler.
Anyway, they went for seven months and they found the most hateful comments we made.
And guess what?
There was not a hateful word spoken, not one.
Now, that doesn't surprise me.
I've been here since the beginning.
And I will tell you in all seriousness that in a life that has now gone on almost interminably, I have met here at the Daily Wire some of the most decent and generous people of integrity I've ever known, plus Michael Knowles.
And when you attack people like that, good people, just like when you attack ordinary, decent Americans who voted for Donald Trump, what you do is you strip yourself naked and expose the hateful, twisted, sick, and bigoted person that your lousy leftist philosophy has turned you into.
So let's take a close up look at what the left has turned itself into and how they've revealed it in vicious attacks they've made on the rest of us all this week.
And my hope is that we can start a dialogue, then crush them, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women.
So I, you know, the reason I'm talking about this is because Media Matters has a big profile.
You know, they are a hate site funded by George Soros.
So they've got endless money and David Brock is a smear merchant of the first water.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
And they use this power to go to people's sponsors and intimidate the sponsors.
The sponsors think, oh no, now my beautiful product is going to be promoted by some hateful guy.
But the thing is, just because they're attacking, it don't mean they're right.
It doesn't mean that we are hateful.
It may mean, in fact, that they are hateful.
That is the whole thing that's been going on all this week is the left has been screaming, Donald Trump is hateful, Donald Trump is hateful, and the words coming out of their mouth and the things they're doing and the implications they're making about decent people all throughout this country show that they are in fact the hateful ones.
Donald Trump is rude.
You've heard me say it a million times.
But their true hate in this country is coming from the left and Media Matters proved it.
So first of all, they put out a video, what I thought was a supercut of some of our best moments.
I'm not going to play the whole thing, but let's play a minute of Media Matters' hate-filled jubilee, a jubilee of just the pure hate that's being spewed here at the Daily Wire.
How is it that drag queens have escaped the blackface backlash?
The very fact that women wear leggings tells you something the female body is made to attract.
Planned Parenthood is a rapist's best friend.
Now, isn't there a difference between standing up for integration, standing up for the right of black people to move into a community once they can afford it?
Jew-hating Congresswoman Ilan Omar.
Transgender women aren't women.
Love is love, or if it feels good, do it.
As a result of this, the logical conclusion is we're going to normalize pedophilia.
Obviously, they won the same-sex marriage battle.
Do you think that they're going to win the redefinition of sex battle as well?
If they win that battle, then it really is over.
Western civilization is over at that point.
The West broadly invented every single thing that's ever been invented, but and made virtually every discovery that has ever been discovered.
I agree with Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump that you should not be allowed in the country if you think it stinks.
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.
I love that guy.
He's great.
I'm only going to defend myself because the other guys are big boys.
They can defend themselves.
But I really have to talk about some of this because of what it reveals about them.
I mean, let's go through some of this.
I can't go through all the hateful, terrible things I said, but every single one of them I ascribe to, except for one that they misquoted to make it sound like I'd said the opposite of what I said.
And I'll get to that in a minute.
But I made the point that the female body is made to attract men, that women, you know, that modesty in women is respectful of men's feelings, just like courtliness in men is respectful of women's feelings.
I mean, these are the ways we show respect for one another because men and women are different.
And so we show respect for each other by acting in certain ways that show that we share the world together.
That is something that we do.
And what was the other one?
Oh, I thought people should just in Gamergate that I thought people should be able to play any video games they wanted.
And if they got a little thrill out of big-breasted heroines running around who bounce around, when Lara Croft came out, I pressed the jump button about 15 times just to see.
This technology is amazing.
And my idea that feminism has created a generation has told women that they are interesting or what they think is important just because they're women, which of course is not true.
So when I say we should respect one another and we should have a society in which we behave in ways that respect one another, because the truth is, I mean, how on earth, how on earth can you say that women are not created physically by evolution?
All evolution cares about is that we reproduce.
That's it.
They don't care whether we write Shakespeare.
They don't care if we build the Empire State Building.
All evolution cares about is that we reproduce.
They have made it so that we're attracted to one another.
So women draw men with their beauty.
That is a wonderful thing.
It's part of the joy of life.
What is the problem with saying that?
The problem is reality is not to their liking.
Reality is not to their liking.
So they have to shut it down.
They want a world in which, no, we don't respect one another because then you're ceding power.
If you respect other people's feelings and you back off a little bit and let them have their lives and let their work, then you're ceding power.
And power is what the left is all about.
This is the big one.
And the idea that this identity politics, idea that your ideas, your thoughts, your life matters because of some identity the left chooses to put you in.
And that identity, by the way, is a prison because you're only allowed to have their opinion.
As they've said, we don't want black voices unless they're going to be black voices.
We don't want brown people or women to speak unless they're going to be brown voices and women voices.
They say this.
So they are basically putting you in a prison of identity.
And what they are doing is they are co-opting the bigotry of the people they think we are.
They're taking that bigotry.
They're using it for themselves.
And they have become the bigoted one.
It's essentially really what they've done.
So in attacking what I say, that we should respect one another, that men and women should respect one another as different kinds of people, that we were made by evolution, shaped physically by evolution to be certain things, all they're doing is showing that they can't stand reality and they're not willing to compromise with reality in order to show respect and basically treat people the way people should be treated.
It really is a hateful philosophy.
And because of this, you know, one of the things is, I freely admit, I freely admit that I have opinions about the sexes that are now unfashionable.
I freely admit it.
I think most women, you know, maybe at a guess, 90% of women, would be far happier if they had children young, dedicated their early lives to homemaking and child rearing, and then went on to build a career after that.
That's my opinion.
Okay, that's my opinion.
But here's the thing.
Because the left only believes that things should be forbidden or enforced.
They believe that everything should be either enforced or forbidden.
They don't believe in individuals.
They don't believe in people who say, well, I'm going to go my way, you go yours.
They think that each opinion is somehow oppressive.
I have an opinion.
I don't care if you don't like my opinion.
Do live your life.
I have no control over your life.
I don't want any control over your life.
So if a woman says to me, you know, I don't think I'm going to live that way.
I think I'll be happy living another way.
That's great.
That's fine with me.
It's fine.
So I have an opinion about what most people would be happy about.
Maybe it's wrong.
Maybe it's wrong for some people.
Maybe it's right for some people.
Who cares?
Who cares?
I'm not.
Because they think the government should control every aspect of your life.
They do not understand the idea that we can live and let live, that we can have our opinions and let other people have their opinions and let other people live their lives the way they want to live their lives.
You don't like my opinion?
Either don't listen to me or just go and live another way.
But they don't have that room because they envision a world in which everything is either enforced or it is forbidden.
That's the only place they have.
You either enforce things because they're good, the government forces you to do them because they're good, or it forbids them because they're bad.
There's no room to say, live and let live, you go your way, I'll go mine.
That's why I feel free to express any opinion, even sometimes when my opinions disgruntle someone else.
So what?
I'm not coming to their home.
I'm not trying to pass a law.
I'm just telling them what I have observed in a long and interesting life, all right?
So those are just things that, and then there's a lot of stuff here that they just took out of context.
But here's another one that I really loved, where they're quoting this as hatefulness, as part of our cesspool here of hatred and bigotry.
They said, Clavin said we should thank Christian white men for creating our civilization.
Now, they are absolutely right.
They are absolutely right that my attitude toward this and the left's attitude are absolutely different, right?
They obviously hate Christian white men.
They think they've been oppressive and terrible and somehow owe everybody else reparations for the way they treated them.
Now, that's just an attitude.
I have an attitude of gratitude.
They have an attitude of hatred and vengeance, okay?
That's a difference in attitude.
My attitude comes from this, right?
Racially, I'm a Jew.
I grew up in Western civilization recognizing what a brilliant, beautiful civilization it is, but also recognizing that the Jew, more than any other person, was the other in Western civilization.
For most of Western history, for most of Western history, certainly even today, the Jew was the person that was opposed to Western civilization.
There was Christendom, and there was the Jew who had rejected Christ.
That was the idea.
Came out of the Catholic Church, but permeated society and obviously found its worst expression in the Holocaust.
I understood that many of my heroes, many of the people I admired, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, had expressed things that were offensive to me, that were hateful toward me.
And what I said to myself is, hey, you know, they were in their time, just like I'm in my time.
They partook of the prejudices of their civilization, just like I, all of us, partake of the prejudices of their civilization.
And somehow out of that, they built something beautiful that is now inherited by me because the ideas in that civilization ultimately forced them to confront the fact that anti-Semitism was not acceptable under the rules that they had written.
The rules that Christians wrote made anti-Semitism unacceptable.
The rules that white men wrote made black slavery and black bigotry unacceptable.
Their rules, not ours, not ours.
It was not Jews who seized back, seized Western civilization for tolerance.
It was Christians who understood that they had broken their own rules.
It was not blacks who freed themselves from slavery.
It was white men who understood they had broken their own rules.
So you can take it either way.
You can either say, I'm entitled to something.
You didn't give me everything I wanted.
You were mean to me.
You were mean to my ancestors.
I'm entitled to something.
I don't have to contribute anything.
And that's what you get.
You get Media Matters, a hate site that contributes nothing.
Or you can say, as I say, well, thank God they invented a theory that eventually, a theory of freedom, a theory of tolerance, a theory of love that eventually was going to include me.
And they created such beautiful things, such beautiful music, such beautiful art, such beautiful literature.
Now, what can I create?
What can I create in my flawed state, in my sinful state, with my prejudices?
What beautiful thing can I create to hand down to my children?
I mean, that is a different attitude.
So you ask yourself, you ask yourself, if you have an attitude of resentment and entitlement, or you have an attitude of gratitude, and what can I contribute?
Ask yourself, which is going to be the happier life?
Which is going to be the more productive life?
Which is going to be the more beautiful life?
What do you think?
What do you think?
Standing there with your fist shaking at the people who, at the civilization that bore you and raised you, saying, screw you, you know, I'm not going to contribute anything.
You just have to pay me reparations for things that happened before I was born.
Or saying, thank you for the Mozart.
Thank you for the Shakespeare.
Thank you for the freedom.
Thank you for the Constitution.
Now, what can I contribute to that civilization?
You choose.
Take your pick, Media Matters or Daily Wire.
You figure out which is the cesspool of hatred and bigotry.
Now, here is the one that really did bug me.
Because this was taken totally out of context to make it sound like the opposite of what I said.
It says, Clavin warned that gay activists are out there prowling like lions.
For those of you who don't know, it's a reference to the devil.
The devil is out there prowling like a lion waiting for us.
Clavin warned that gay activists are out there prowling like lions to corrupt Christian children with their terrible, terrible culture.
That is not what I said.
That's the opposite of what I said.
I was arguing for tolerance for gays, even in Christian cultures that feel that homosexuality is a sin, and saying that if you cast your gay parishioners out into the world, there are these terrible gay activists with their crappy atheist culture, their anti-family culture, their promiscuous culture, who are waiting to take these gay kids who've been rejected by their churches and their families and ready to take them and corrupt them.
So that even if you feel philosophically, theologically, as I don't feel, even if you feel that this is something that God is displeased with, you should not reject them.
You should not cast them out, but you should keep them close because you want them to get the goodness of God and the love of family.
Those are very, very important things.
So they just misquoted me there.
So I was talking about this and I went on Twitter yesterday and I said, look, you know, this is true.
Beto Rourke's Healing Moment00:07:50
I've always felt like this about gay people.
I remember as a kid when my father explained to me what gay people are.
And in those days, people thought it was a mental illness.
My father was a liberal guy.
He wasn't being hateful.
He was giving me the most liberal interpretation of the time.
And he said it's a mental illness.
And I remember I shrugged and I said, hey, they aren't hurting anybody.
And that's the way I felt my whole life.
And in the arts, you know, gay people have been some of my closest friends and people I've worked with and people I respect.
It's just impossible for me to hate the people that I know.
And also impossible for me to feel that God is somehow against them.
So I started to say this and I said, I've been an arguer for gay tolerance since before you guys were born at Media Matters.
And of course, tolerance, that's not what they said.
We want celebration.
We want acceptance.
You know, I don't celebrate anything.
I don't celebrate heterosexuality either.
I just tolerate everybody.
Toleration for all you people is as far as I'm willing to go.
So now my son, my beautiful son, who is one of my pride and joy, my son and my daughter are no question about it.
They are my pride and joy.
He comes on Twitter and he's had it.
He's tired of listening to people beat up his old man.
And he comes on and he says, hey, here I am, Andrew Clavin's gay son, and I've got nothing but love and acceptance from this guy.
And screw you guys.
He had some wonderful phrase.
I can't remember what it was.
He called them clowns.
It was really terrific.
So anyway, now suddenly people go like, oh, you know, well, why didn't, if you're his gay son, why didn't Claven talk about this?
Well, let me explain why I don't talk about it.
I don't talk about it for two reasons.
One, three reasons.
One, I don't want anyone to think that that's why I develop my principles.
My principles are developed out of what I see in life.
I did not change when my son came out as gay, that none of that happened.
Two, I don't want people ever to feel that they can't. say anything to me.
You know, the people who I know who feel that homosexuality is a sin, but who are loving people, so many of them who have been so kind to my boy, you know, that they've accepted him as a friend, even with their theology.
I don't want any of them to feel that they have to hold back.
I hate that.
I hate when people don't say things to me that are philosophical, but not hateful because of some personal thing.
And most importantly, I just don't want to use my family as a prop.
I don't need my family.
I'm not a politician.
I don't bring up my smiling wife to gaze at me admiringly.
I just force her to do that at home.
But I don't bring her in to gaze at me admiringly to make you think that I'm a good person.
So I don't do that.
And I will be honest about this.
I'll be perfectly honest about this.
If I thought that God condemned my son, there is enough of Abraham left in me that I would stand before the throne of God and risk my salvation to talk him out of it.
But I don't believe for a single second that the Lord of love condemns my boy.
I know this kid that known him since he was a tyke.
I do not believe that at all.
He is my pride and joy with his sister, my daughter, Faith.
They are both my pride and joy.
And so it was just wonderful.
I felt like Spencer and I were in one of those, on Twitter, we're in one of those bar fights where you and your son just beat the crab out of everybody.
This media matters just exposed themselves for the hateful, small-minded, bigoted, oppressive people that they are.
And our sponsors, who I love, you know I love you guys.
I test out your products.
I love the products that we sell here.
They're great.
And if they come to you and they say these people are hateful, just ask yourself for a minute, where is the hate coming from?
Where is the real hate coming from?
Because really, all week long, it has come from the left.
You know, let me just move this over to talk to apply this thinking to what's been happening in our culture this week, because the left has truly disgraced itself.
There's no question about it.
Let me just give you two headlines, right?
The New York Times, yesterday, Donald Trump went to visit the first responders and the victims in Dayton and in El Paso.
And, you know, he's good at this.
I mean, people love to see the president of the United States.
Even people who disagree understand when the president of the United States comes, that's a healing moment.
That's, you know, he represents all of us.
The president is the president of all of us.
I used to say this when Obama was president and people said he's not my president.
I would say, yes, he is.
He is my president.
If he called me up, if Obama called me up and asked me to come to the Oval Office, I would say, yes, sir, and I would be there right away.
You know, the same thing is true of Trump.
The president represents all of us.
And so when he goes and congratulates the first responders, when he goes and comforts the victims, that's all of us talking.
And so the people who said that he shouldn't go, the people who attacked him, the beta who disgraced themselves, stood on their head in manure to try and get some kind of credibility for themselves by attacking Trump.
They were attacking all of us.
They were telling all these people that we don't care about them, and we do.
So here are two headlines.
The New York Times, and there were protests outside, but there were also people holding up signs saying we love Donald Trump.
So the New York Times says Trump uses a day of healing to deepen the nation's divisions.
He uses a day of healing, which is him visiting people, to deepen the nation's divisions.
What they're talking about is the fact that he fought back against the people attacking them.
And Trump is a guy.
If Trump is walking down the street and a dog half a mile back barks at him, he will go back half a mile and kick the dog.
That is part of his pugilistic mentality.
It comes in very handy when dealing with the press and the left, but sometimes it does get in his way.
But here's the Wall Street Journal.
They say Trump visits grieving cities as gun control debate boils.
It's the difference between hate, which will not let the New York Times do its job, which is reporting the news.
They're so embroiled in hate, they cannot just speak a straight sentence.
And listen to the unfairness of the networks.
Listen to the way the networks.
They use the term when Trump says something, he's lashing out.
When Trump says something, he's lashing out.
But when Beto O'Rourke says he's a murderer, essentially, he's a bigot.
That's just Beto O'Rourke opining.
Listen to this.
President Trump lashes out overnight, targeting Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke before heading to Betto's hometown, El Paso, this morning.
Hours ahead of his trip to the border town of El Paso, Texas, President Trump lashing out at former Congressman Beto O'Rourke, a staunch critic of the president and one of the most high-profile members of this grieving community.
The president tweeting, O'Rourke has a phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage, telling the 2020 Democratic candidate to be quiet.
O'Rourke firing back in a tweet of his own saying, 22 people in my hometown are dead after an act of terror inspired by your racism.
El Paso will not be quiet, and neither will I. New overnight, President Trump, just hours before he's expected to honor the victims in El Paso, took to Twitter to mock Betto O'Rourke.
President Trump calling Betto a phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage.
O'Rourke hitting back at the president, writing, 22 people in my hometown are dead after an act of terror inspired by your racism.
So Beto O'Rourke is fighting back, but Donald Trump is lashing out.
And Beto O'Rourke, who has 0%, I think, in the polls right now, maybe it's one or two, I don't know, is Beto O'Rourke has just disgraced himself this week, calling Trump a bigot, saying Trump is essentially blaming Trump for these shootings.
And let me just point out one other thing.
It's not so much the fact that the guy in Dayton was a left-winger and Donald Trump has gone out of his way to say he doesn't blame Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders for that shooting, the way people are blaming him.
Trump has really spoken the words of healing this week.
He really has.
He is pugilistic.
He does get in fights.
He does go back and kick the dog.
But he's the one who has spoken most of the words of healing this week, almost all of them, as opposed to the media, as opposed to the left.
But there was also, you know, in Chicago, and congratulations to CBS News for reporting this.
Dozens of people were shot over the weekend.
Seven people were killed.
46 people were wounded in shootings in Chicago.
Whose city is that?
Diversity Delusion Debates00:15:38
Who created that atmosphere?
Who told those people that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?
Who told those people that they didn't need fathers because the government would take care of them?
Who told the people in Chicago, whose city is that?
So, you know, we can all point blame at one another.
We can all point fingers at one another.
But, you know, the problem is here, you know, here's the thing.
We deal with, this is a natural human tendency, but it's just wrong, especially in politics.
We deal with the symptoms.
We deal with the guns.
We look at the video games.
We talk about the internet.
Today, Daniel Henninger, a really good columnist, he's the deputy opinion page editor at the Wall Street Journal.
He talked about the internet, how much the internet has caused us stress.
But think about that for a minute.
Think about that.
For me, the internet is the only way for a long time I could see my children.
You know, I could see my children on the internet.
I would see my grandchild on the internet.
It was a beautiful thing.
It's the way I do research that used to take me days and weeks.
Now research takes me five minutes, literally from going from weeks to five minutes.
It has been a blessing to me because I use it for the things that you're supposed to use it for, the good things.
It's not the internet.
It's us.
You put tools on our, we're sinful, we're broken, we have all these problems.
It comes from their inability to accept their failure.
And that really is where all this hate is coming from.
The hate they throw at us exposes them.
The hate they throw at us exposes them.
Hey, listen, let me stop here.
Usually I break here, but I want everybody to be able to hear this interview.
This is one of my favorite guests and one of the best reporters in the country by far.
And she has a lot to say, especially on this issue of racism and the way this racism has developed.
Heather McDonald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor to City Journal.
She's the recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize and the author, they didn't put this on my sheet, but it's the author of The Diversity Delusion.
Did I get that right, Heather?
The diversity delusion.
Heather, I hate to say this to your face and embarrass you, but I always say it.
You are one of the very, very best reporters in this country.
There's no question about it in my mind.
There's no barely any competition.
And it's always great to talk to you.
You have been a fearless reporter on these.
Let me start with, first of all, I know you're here studying homelessness.
And it is absolutely true that a week before you got here, I didn't know you were coming, but I was saying to friends, homelessness needs a reporter of the level of Heather McDonald to get to the bottom of it.
And you have been saying some things about this that kind of speak into the collapse of our society as a cause of homelessness.
Is that fair to say?
Absolutely.
What I saw in San Francisco, Drew, was above all the scourge of drugs and the failure of a society to believe in its own norms of civil behavior any longer.
When you carve out an entire group of people to exempt them from the expectations of civil street behavior and say because we deem them victims, they don't have to comply with defecation laws, with drinking in public.
You get the squalor that we're seeing now in American cities.
But what worries me the most, frankly, is our ongoing push to normalize drug use because that is so much of a profound factor in what's going on in the streets.
The drug use is ubiquitous, the drug dealing is ubiquitous, and we are enabling behavior.
San Francisco enables behavior.
Every city that has a problem has an inevitable massive homeless industry that is simply encouraging this kind of lifestyle out of their need for fundraising, number one.
But also, I think they have an ideological need to have the homeless on the streets as their proof of the heartlessness of American capitalism.
So in other words, they have systems that put the homelessness on the street and then point at them as proof of the heartlessness of our systems, essentially.
Exactly.
It just shows that, you know, as even the head of San Francisco's homelessness agency said, his ultimate belief of what's going on here is the failure of a capitalist system to supply needed housing.
Well, that's ridiculous.
What causes shortages in any field is a socialist system.
It's price controls.
But in any case, I reject the argument that this is all a housing problem.
It's just not.
These people are offered housing numerous times and they turn it down.
It is something else.
So you're talking about the fact that by calling people victims, you essentially absent them from the norms of society and essentially turn them into victims, actual victims of their own behavior.
You wrote this book, The Diversity Delusion.
I have to read this.
Shelby Steele is another one of my favorite writers.
I mean, the guy, I wish he wrote more.
He writes very little, but everything he writes is absolutely gem-like.
He wrote, read your book, and he said, not since Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind has a book so thoroughly exposed the damage done to American institutions, particularly universities, by modern liberalism's glib commitment to diversity.
So what is the diversity delusion?
Well, I define it by three principles, Drew.
First is the belief that the most important thing about any individual is his race and gender.
Second, that discrimination based on those characteristics is the defining feature of American civilization.
And third, that any disparity in representation in any institution, any lack of, say, for, let's look at gender, if Google does not have 50-50 male to female ratios, that lack of proportional representation is by definition the result of bigotry, discrimination, homophobia, Islamophobia, you name it.
What is not allowed to be noticed is that there are significant behavioral disparities between different groups, significant cultural disparities, preferences, skills that are far more powerful as explanations.
But what we are seeing today is this obsession, which has come out, sadly, following these horrific shootings.
We see the world at large having completely embraced the academic conceits that racism is the defining feature of American society.
White supremacy, toxic masculinity, that these are the only allowable explanations for what is going on here.
We see as well the academic conceit of labeling anything that the left disagrees with as hate speech.
So Donald Trump's good faith disagreements with how the left has been operating our border policy for the last three decades.
And I would, of course, throw in the Republican establishment.
But a belief that borders are worth defending, that the American public has a moral right to defend borders, that is immediately converted by the left into an example on Trump's part of white supremacist hate speech, because the left cannot engage on the level of ideas.
You know, this is because they have defined everything they disagree with as hate speech, they've made it virtually impossible for things like what you're saying to reach the ears of young people.
You were nearly killed at one of your speeches you were going to give.
The police had to shut down the speech.
There was a virtual riot that chased you into a room.
I mean, it's a kind of insanity.
How then do you break through to tell people these things?
You know, there's one of the things that concerns me is that diversity has become an industry.
So that what you are saying doesn't just threaten the ideas of the left.
It also threatens the livelihood of many people who have entered that industry.
Is there some way to break through to the ears of the young to let them know that this is in fact a delusion?
Well, what I've concluded, Drew, is that as long as the dominant narrative about our country is that racial bias explains all disparities, all socioeconomic differences, all economic inequality, the left wins.
Because right now, the charge of racism is so powerful, although we'll see.
I mean, I have to say, I think this, in some respects, and leaving aside just the, let's grieve and leave the shootings aside, but Trump's recent refusal to back down under these spurious charges of racism is his finest hour.
And let's hope that he inspires more people to just be uncowed by this charge.
But as long as in the mainstream society, as long as every corporation folds when it is accused of running a white supremacist symbol with Betsy Ross' flag, and banks fold, corporations fold if they're charged with racial bias because they don't have proportional representation or gender bias because they don't have proportional representation, the left wins.
What the people who want to argue for sanity have to do is advance alternative explanations and say, no, it's not racial bias, which explains the fact we do not have perfect equality in our society.
It is behavioral and cultural differences.
And that now is taboo.
If you talk about those differences, if I talk about out-of-wedlock child rearing in the black community, high rates of crime, high rates of gang involvement, failure to pay attention in school, beating up your teacher, you are accused of being a racist because those explanations challenge the left.
But I think more of us have to strap on some courage here and actually confront the fact that there are massive cultural and behavioral impediments to achieving a greater equality in our society.
You know, Thomas Sowell writes about this too.
He wrote a really good little book.
It's called something like discriminations and disparities.
But his point is that many on the left or many young people especially are afraid that if they say this is not the lagging achievement of blacks, for instance, is not about bigotry, that the only other choice is that it is about some kind of racial inferiority, that those are the only two choices there are.
And of course, what you're saying is absolutely true.
The way people behave and the ideas in their head are really what govern their lives.
I mean, if you have good ideas in your head and you behave according to those ideas, you're going to have a better life, luck permitting, than you are if you have bad ideas and behave badly.
So let me ask this, because when you talk about the culture, it just seems like this incredible mountain too high to climb.
Are there policy things that you immediately recommend?
Are there policy solutions?
If you could pick a policy, if you could press the red button from the meme and have a policy appear, what would those policies be?
Well, that's interesting, Drew, because you're talking to a policy skeptic.
I sort of think there's something policy porn where it creates the illusion of power, you know, that you can fiddle with the tax credits for child rearing, you know, the family tax credit, and mirabledu, you have a massive effect on On the culture.
Unfortunately, I do think the culture has to be fought with cultural terms.
I just, I don't know.
You know, we did welfare reform.
We really hope, and that was a successful policy.
And we really hoped that that would result in an increase in married child rearing among the inner city poor.
It didn't.
It got some welfare mothers in the workforce, but I'm not certain that it really had much of an impact on the driving, the overwhelmingly, overwhelming driving factor of ongoing dysfunction in inner city black communities, which is the failure of boys to take responsibility for the children that they sire.
And I think what needs to be done there is a massive revalorization of fathers, of males, and that's fighting hard because what's coming out of the universities is an incessant drumbeat about toxic masculinity.
All of us are in the dark here about what's driving these shootings, but for me, my instinctive explanation is that you've got white males now that are being the target of so much anti-male propaganda.
It cannot be overstated how thoroughly universities are committed to rubbing students' nose in this toxic victimhood where the only allowable source of problems, complaints is white males, heterosexual white males.
And if you've got a white male son who's neither gay nor trans, woe unto him, because he's going to have to be twice as good as anybody else in our culture today to get hired or promoted.
And identity politics dominates the left.
And so there are some lost, alienated white males out there living in a culture that is somehow not providing meaning that are taking the logical next step and saying, well, we deserve our own identity politics.
Now, I am by no means, the problem with explanations is you end up risking the charge of justifying.
I am not justifying in any means, by any possible way, violence, homicidal violence that strikes to our basis of civilization.
Nevertheless, if the mainstream culture continues to tell these young white males that they are worthless, the only positive messages coming out are to females today, to young girls, all the damn you-go girls, the women in tech, you know, Latinas in tech.
Nobody is encouraging boys to succeed.
It's a miracle that anybody does, and it's to testament to the male drive to accomplish and succeed and overcome and yes, conquer.
Hal Prince's Risky Success00:03:07
More and more white males are going to withdraw and to develop their own alternative universes.
And that's a very scary thing.
Heather, from beginning to end, from the time I asked that question to right now, that was one of the smartest things anybody's ever said on this show.
I hope the people at Media Matters are watching.
I hope their heads explode.
It destroys them.
Heather McDonald, it's always great to see you and to listen to you and to read you the Diversity Delusion, a terrific book, like all you're writing.
And also, you can find you at City Journal.
It's great to see you.
Wonderful to be with you, Andrew.
Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot.
All right, let me end with a final reflection.
not had a chance to talk about Hal Prince, the death of Hal Prince, who died at 91.
He was a giant, a giant of Broadway, a producer, just nobody like him.
And the reason I want to talk about him, Harold Prince, the reason I want to talk about him is that this is kind of what we need on the right.
When we talk about the arts, obviously the arts are a big subject.
There's so much to say about them.
But the thing about Harold Prince is he is an absolute model of capitalism and the limits of capitalism, okay, of capitalism with values.
And I don't know anything about his politics.
He was in the theater.
I assume he's a liberal.
I don't know.
But the thing is, he wanted to make money.
He wanted to be a success.
He wanted to put out things that the people liked so that he could make money and continue doing what he was doing.
He did Cabaret.
That was his first big success.
Cabaret, one of the great shows of Broadway.
Probably his biggest hit is Phantom of the Opera.
He also did Evida.
I mean, Phantom of the Opera is something that has been running for a gazillion years.
But he also collaborated with Stephen Sondheim, who is probably one of the, not probably, he's one of the great artists of the American 20th century, one of the true originals, somebody who really carried the great American songbook into a new era in a new way.
A lot of people don't like him because of his experimentation, but he was incredibly creative, incredibly brilliant.
And some of his stuff didn't make money, right?
It didn't make money until later.
So for instance, Sweeney Todd, I've only given two standing ovations in my life in a theater.
I love the theater.
I go to the theater all the time.
I've only gotten to my feet to applaud twice.
One was Sweeney Todd, and the other was Arcadia by Tom Stoppard.
And Sweeney Todd was an act of genius, but it didn't make money the first time it opened.
He did it because it was an act of genius.
And then, of course, over time, it became a staple in opera companies.
It became a staple all around the country.
There are all kinds of, there's a movie of it.
There's all kinds of reproductions of it.
In the arts, in the arts, you have to take the risks to do the great stuff.
You have to use the stuff that succeeds, the crowd-pleasing stuff like Phantom of the Opera.
Nothing wrong with Phantom of the Opera, but it is just a crowd pleaser and nothing wrong with that, but you've got to use that money and pour it into things that might not make it.
Use Money Wisely00:02:16
Take those risks.
We have to do that.
And we have to remember also the larger point, which is that capitalism doesn't solve all our problems if it's empty of values.
Capitalism does not solve all our problems.
Free markets, I should call it, do not solve all our problems if they are empty of values.
If we don't reach out to people, if we don't spend our money in charity, if we don't make a little less money to do a little more quality work, a little less money to spend a little more time with our families, then free markets are worth nothing.
They are worth nothing.
All that wealth, all that success, all that progress, worth nothing if we don't have the values to go with it.
Harold Prince, one of the giants of the American arts, if only, if only we had someone like that who was dedicated to the concepts of our founding, who was willing to go in and take the risks on artists that need to be taken, but also willing to have the savvy to put together the capitalist successes that are needed to fund the arts as they go forward, we would be in great shape.
He was a giant.
He will be missed.
I will be missed because now the Clavenless weekend is upon us.
And boy, oh boy, Media Matters, if you thought it was bad while I was here, wait till you see the chaos and darkness that ensues when I'm gone.
Survivors gather here Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Ngulo.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about another mass.
killing that happened last night, but the media, though, curiously is less interested in covering this one.
Why is that?
We will discuss.
Also, Media Matters compiled a video highlighting all of the supposed bigotry at the Daily Wire.
It's really more like a greatest hits compilation.
So I'll play some of that video for you today on the show and we'll talk about it.