Ep. 755 dissects the left’s hypocrisy over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s illness and David Koch’s death, exposing NYT’s shift from mourning to preemptive smears against a hypothetical Trump SCOTUS pick—while conservative outlets like The Daily Wire pray for Ginsburg despite ideological clashes. The segment contrasts media bias (e.g., CNN’s dossier attacks on journalists) with conservative restraint, then pivots to Labor Day’s origins as an anti-communist holiday, tracing union corruption from Hoffa to California’s pension crisis. Clavin argues unions now stifle innovation with unsustainable demands while avoiding socialism’s worker harm, framing the left’s moral framework as fragmented and economically reckless—culminating in a critique of Me Too’s retroactive justice and the need for holistic discourse over ideological extremes. [Automatically generated summary]
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is having serious health problems, and Democrat leaders have announced that in the unfortunate event she should pass away, whoever Trump appoints to replace her will be guilty of sexual misconduct.
As conservatives quietly issued prayers for the recovery of their longtime political opponent Ginsburg, leftists broke off their raucous celebrations of the death of libertarian billionaire David Koch to issue denunciations of the sexual misconduct committed by whoever Trump appoints as Ginsburg's replacement should Ginsburg die.
At the New York Times, a former newspaper, editor-in-chief Blithering Prevarication III was informed of Ginsburg's illness and immediately called off his Koch death celebration, stopped dancing around a pentagram while dressed as a goat, and assigned his entire op-ed page to women who had been sexually mistreated themselves and were therefore convinced that whoever came forward to accuse whoever was appointed to replace Ginsburg if Ginsburg died would be telling the truth.
Angry Times editorialist Michelle Angry entitled her editorial, Someone I Know Once Got Whistled At on the Street, so I believe Trump's Supreme Court pick will be guilty of rape when we find out who it is.
Angry's angry editorial read in part, quote, it is way past time for us to stop thinking rationally and to instead believe every woman who levels charges against anyone we disagree with.
I myself was once asked out on a date by someone I didn't find attractive, so I know what it's like to be murdered by the sort of deranged serial killer Trump will appoint if Ginsburg should pass, unquote.
Editors at CNN cleared the schedule there to make room for all the women who would come forward after the first accuser to create an atmosphere of credibility that CNN commentators could discuss with sanctimonious looks on their faces.
CNN was immediately besieged by neurotics, floozies, and prostitutes auditioning for the accuser parts.
Several of them will be hosting new talk shows on the cable network this fall.
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-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-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.
So you're watching the stock market.
I know it's going up and down.
It's really everything is raucous.
People are screaming in the streets.
The Wall Street Journal guys are weeping.
It's terrible.
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Again, text Andrew to my name to 47-4747.
So now and then on this show, I like to talk about God because God is the only thing worth talking about.
This is actually true.
But it's always a bit disturbing that nowadays, maybe always, God is depicted more as a political party than as the creator of the universe who can give us tremendous insights into where we fit in his incomprehensibly infinite plan.
What I mean is we talk about God as if he were on someone's side.
Go to virtually any Episcopal church or listen to a speech by Pete Budejej, and you'll soon discover that God is pretty much on board with the whole left-wing agenda.
And if you aren't woke, he'll send you to unwoke hell, which I think is in southern New Jersey.
But to be fair, conservative God is not that much better.
He's an American, of course.
What kind of God would he be if he wasn't?
And he's absolutely certain that largely harmless sexual practices we don't happen to enjoy, but others might, are signs of the apocalypse.
Hell is for gay people, which is going to make it very difficult to find a really good restaurant in heaven.
But there is one important thing I've observed about believers versus unbelievers.
Believers have a holistic approach to human affairs, whereas non-believers are addicted to analysis to the point of absurdity.
Analysis is the practice of taking things apart.
That's what the word means.
It means to break things up or to loosen the bonds that hold them together.
Without God, nothing has an inherent purpose, and so nothing is held together, and everything is always worth taking apart.
Obvious facts of life, like the fact that there are two genders and they're different from one another in ways that make it much more fun to have dinner with the opposite one, are analyzed until they become chin-scratchingly problematical.
And what should be a joy becomes a misery to yourself and everyone else who reads the New York Times.
With God, you tend to discuss how the two obviously different genders should interact, what their essential purposes are, what helps, what hurts, where the exceptions are, and so on.
But you never lose sight of the whole as you try to discern God's plan.
Now, of course, a certain amount of analysis is a good thing.
You take things apart in order to fix them and put them back together better.
But in order to know how to fix them and put them back together better, you have to know what they're for in the first place.
You need a holistic vision in order to get it right.
If you don't know what a car is for, there's no point taking it to pieces.
If you don't know what the genders are for, your analysis is just a misery-making waste of time.
Today, I'm going to be talking about leftists whining about the fact that right-wingers have turned their own nasty techniques against them.
Sad panda.
But while we laugh at their dismay, drive them before us, and listen delightedly to the lamentations of their women, I do want to remember that if we are people of God, we do what we do with a purpose, not just to destroy our opponents, although that's a lot of fun, but also to bring them back into a holistic structure of freedom and responsibility so we can analyze and debate together and make sense of what we're saying.
You might say that attacking the left is our little way of making America great again, because God is an American, obviously.
Leftists Under Attack00:14:25
Tomorrow, you want to tune in 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, for our latest episode of The Conversation with Michael Knowles.
He'll be answering your questions live on air.
Are his answers guaranteed to change your life?
No.
Are they guaranteed to be true?
No.
Are they useful?
No, but you'll love it.
He's great.
He's always entertaining.
The episode is free to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
So subscribe to Daily Wire.
Get your questions answered by Mr. Michael Knowles tomorrow, Tuesday, August 27th at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
Come on in, join the conversation.
Why do you let me pick on Knowles so much?
I mean, you know, he'll be on this show.
He will be here together later on in this show.
Once upon a time, long time ago, you know, 10 years ago, say, John Nolte from Breitbart was over my house.
We were having dinner and Nolte said, you know what we should do?
We should form a group of people who every time leftist journalists attack us personally, we go after the journalists themselves and attack them.
And I said, that would be a terrible thing to do.
You know, I don't want to stoop to that level.
Well, then came Media Matters, right?
So Media Matters comes after us, right, and they say they listen to me and Knowles and Matt Walsh, and they put out an article saying this Daily Wire is a cesspit.
It's a cesspit of, you know, what did they call it?
A cesspit of hatred, a cesspool of hatred and bigotry, right?
And then they play the stuff that they found, and it's nothing.
It doesn't make any, you know, it's not, there's no hatred and bigotry on it at all.
But a lot of people pass this stuff around on Twitter and they don't read the article.
So they don't know that.
They think, oh, Media Matters says Daily Wire is hateful and bigotry, and they just spread that around.
And that's the way that works.
And if they can find, you know, some poor guy will get picked for the draft in a football game or win the Heisman Trophy or he'll get picked for a baseball team.
And suddenly they go back into his old Twitters and find something he said when he was 13 that wasn't quite woke.
And they destroy young people's careers.
They've been doing this for a long time.
Well, now the New York Times, a former newspaper, is shocked to discover that some conservatives are doing this right back at them.
And they are very, very unhappy.
Jeremy Peters writes, Trump allies.
See, they always have to, anything they think is bad, they always have to get Trump into it.
It has nothing to do with whether Trump is doing this or is aware of it or anything like that.
But they always have to get Trump into it.
It's like in their 1619 project where they say everything about America is due to slavery.
It's like, you know, Trump's America traced back to slavery.
Trump allies target journalists over coverage deemed hostile to the White House.
And then the story goes, a loose network of conservative operatives, in other words, a bunch of people allied with the White House, they're conservatives, is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.
It's the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump, whom they haven't proved has anything to do with this whatsoever, but it is in the New York Times, a former newspaper, the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.
You get this.
What's being done is illegitimate, but the reporting is so, it is so legitimate.
It is so news.
Four people familiar with the operation, not one, not two, not three, four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country's most prominent news organizations.
They have been doing this to us at the New York Times.
The New York Times has been doing it, but let alone the New York Times, certainly at Media Matters, for years, for years and years.
Now it's been turned against them and they are happy.
Here is the author of the piece on Morning Joe, Jeremy Peters.
And please play the first one of his clips.
This is just the latest escalation under a president who has called the media the enemy of the people.
And what that has effectively done is embolden the president's allies, this group of people who are connected to Donald Trump Jr., to start looking at the online histories going back, in some cases more than a decade, of journalists who, in some cases, don't even cover this administration.
And what they've done is they've tried to pull embarrassing things, find unflattering things in the social media histories of these journalists.
And I'm talking about journalists at the nation's top news organizations like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, entities which have already been targeted by these conservative allies of the president's.
And what they do is they publicize unflattering things that they found in these social media histories when they want to retaliate against an outlet for publishing a story that is unflattering to the president.
So what you have here really is something very different from what basic journalism is.
Okay, okay, Jare.
Let's find out what basic journalism is.
He says these people are targeting some of not they're not targeting crappy little places like us like the Daily Wire where evil cesspool guys like me are.
These guys are targeting serious big-time news organizations like CNN.
So let's go over to CNN where Brian Stelter is interviewing psychiatrist Dr. Alan Francis about Donald Trump.
And notice just how Brian Stelter pushes back against Dr. Alan Francis' assertions.
Listen to this.
Lumping the mentally ill with Trump is a terrible insult to the mentally ill and they have enough problems and stigma as it is.
The second issue is that calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we're crazy for having elected him and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist.
Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century.
He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.
He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.
It's crazy for us to be destroying the climate our children will live in.
It's crazy to be giving tax cuts to the rich that will add trillions of dollars to the debt our children will have to pay.
It's crazy to be destroying our democracy by claiming that the press and the courts are the enemy of the people.
We have to face these policies, not Trump's person.
So it's an insult to the mentally ill to call Trump mentally ill, but we have to attack his policies, not him personally.
And then he goes on to say that he's as bad as Stalin and Hitler because he's killed as many millions as they did.
I wish he had a list of names to find out who he's killed, but never mind that.
As I was watching this guy, I kept thinking that they were going to discover the real psychiatrist tied up in the asylum from which this guy had escaped.
It was like, what?
I'm a psychiatrist.
It was like a scene from a bad horror movie.
But this is, so Jeremy Peters feels that CNN, I mean, and this is a serious show.
Brian Stelter is one of their big guys, right?
This is their journalism show.
Jeremy Peters feels that this is untoward.
It is unbelievable that people should be attacking really respectable news outlets like CNN, where that clown is talking absolute nonsense with exactly zero pushback from Brian Stelter.
Mr. Potato had said absolutely nothing to shut this guy down, who, by the way, was violating the ethical standards of the American Psychiatry Association ever since the psychiatrist did this to Goldwater back in the day when Goldwater was running for president and they were so horrified that a conservative Republican was running, psychiatrists came out and said he was crazy and they put out a paper and the American Psychiatry Association said, no, it's not ethical to discuss the mental health of someone you have never talked to, that you've never treated him.
So how do you know what his problems are?
So the guy is acting unethically to begin with, but he's also talking absolute crap.
I mean, nobody, anybody who came on this show or any responsible show who started to say, oh, Nancy Pelosi, you know, has killed millions of people.
The first thing I'd say is name one.
How has she killed anybody?
What are you talking about?
I mean, a guy like that would never get past me probably to get on here in the first place.
But that is the kind of person.
That's the kind of news that's coming out.
The front page in the New York Times looks like that every single day.
And so if there are people going out and going after those journalists, they are not going after respectable people.
They're going after the hate.
We already know Dean Begett had met a meeting with his staff and his staff was saying, how are we going to get Trump now?
Our Russia hoax blew up in our faces.
What now?
And Bequet or Baquette, whatever his name is, said, well, don't worry, now we're going to call him racist right up until 2020.
And we're going to hit him with that racist thing forever until we get him, as one of the journalists said.
We want to get Trump.
So what is he talking about?
Why shouldn't they be attacked when they are attacking the right in the same way?
They are not respectable journalistic outlets.
They just think they are because they're surrounded by people who agree with them.
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Let's play the next cut from Jeremy Peters.
Why I want to, yeah, what is so bad about what they're doing?
Let's hear it.
And a lot of allies of the presidents will say, well, this is no different from what news outlets do every day when they investigate the president, when they investigate members of his cabinet, members of his administration.
But the fundamental difference here is that what news organizations like us do is not to cast an indiscriminate net and scrape up everything that we can about people and then deploy it in a retaliatory fashion.
What we do is we look at individual targets who are relevant and publish those stories when they are ready to be published.
What this is doing is publishing this embarrassing information about journalists in response as an attack for some story that the administration does not like.
Okay, okay, so you got that right.
What we do, we do is we find the targets who deserve to be targeted, but they're indiscriminate.
These evil conservatives are indiscriminate in their targets.
We go after the people who need going after, and we know this because we consult with other people who agree with us, and we all agree together because we all have the same leftist point of view, and then we go after the people who need to be gotten after.
You got that?
All right, so he's talking about big outlets.
We're not talking about small fry.
We're not talking about the little guys.
We're talking about the big outlets.
Let's talk about, say, the Washington Post and how discriminating they are on who they attack.
Here is Washington Post columnist, Jennifer Rubin, talking on MSNBC about how we need to respond to the fact that she disagrees with Donald Trump.
What we should be doing is shunning these people.
Shunning, shaming these people is a statement of moral indignation that these people are not fit for polite society.
I think any institution, and University of Virginia, for example, for a bit had a relationship with Mark Short, who is now back with the administration.
I think it's absolutely abhorrent that any institution of higher learning, any news organization or any entertainment organization that has a news outlet would hire these people.
I also want to echo something that my friend EJ said.
It's not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to lose.
We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party.
We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weathered this storm, they will do it again.
They will take this as confirmation that, hey, it just pays to ride the waves.
Look at me.
I've made it through.
And so up and down the ticket, federal, state, local offices, the country has to repudiate this.
That wasn't discriminating, right?
It's everywhere.
Who do we destroy?
Everybody.
How do we destroy them?
Don't let them have jobs.
They can't work at colleges.
They can't go on TV.
I mean, it's one thing for Andrew McCabe, who lied to Congress to get a job on CNN as a commentator, but the fact that Sean Spicer should be on Dancing on the Stars, that is absolutely unforgivable.
So this discriminating mainstream media we have, as Jeremy Peters was explaining, this discriminating mainstream media is way, way different than these evil conservatives who are targeting just anybody.
It's almost as if we were saying you have to burn the Democrat Party to the ground and shun them and not give them jobs if they had anything to do with anything involving Donald Trump.
I mean, this self-blindness is wonderful, and this is the best cut of all because Joe Scarborough now tees him up to answer the objection that they all know is coming.
How is this different from Media Matters?
How is this different from, say, what Media Matters has been doing for quite some time or what Newsbusters has been doing in the defense of Donald Trump?
It's a good point, Joe.
Bill Maher On David Koch00:09:21
It's not really all that much different.
In fact, the people we spoke to as we interviewed them for this story, kind of uncovering the depth of this here, told us that their template was Media Matters.
And their template was, you know, this exhaustive, basically what's called opposition research that people do all the time.
The difference, though, is that it's being deployed against very low-level people in a lot of cases.
I mean, if you look at what these guys have uncovered here and who it's hurt, it's low-level journalists at places like CNN, a photo editor who had nothing to do with CNN's coverage of Donald Trump, for example.
And that's what's different.
This guy's basically, his basic answer is, how is it different than doing it to us?
It's happening to us.
It's not fun when it happens to us.
It reminds me of Dave Chappelle, who says mean things can be funny, and everything is funny until it happens to you.
This is what his problem is.
But okay, he says we're going after low-level guys.
Let's not do that.
Media Matters, one of their main targets, if not their main target, is our own Ben Shapiro, right?
They're always going after Ben.
All Ben has to say is the truth, but if he says it in a way that can be just interpreted and twisted, they go after him and they call him names and they spread it around.
And, you know, Ben is such a celebrity that he trends on Twitter when they attack him.
And nobody reads the attack.
Nobody thinks, well, what was Ben talking about?
So they do that all the time.
So let's go after somebody like that.
Let's go after Bill Maher.
He's a celebrity.
Let's go after Bill Maher.
Now, you know, this is something, I mentioned this in my opening, but it really is true.
You know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a tumor, malignant tumor, removed from her pancreas.
That's very dangerous.
She's a very old lady.
And all I saw on Twitter was right-wingers praying for Ruth Bader-Ginsburg.
And to be absolutely honest with you, I who oppose everything Ruth Bader Ginsburg stands for, who does not think she was a good Supreme Court judge, who actually will think if we get a conservative in that position after she dies, I think that will be a better Supreme Court.
But I do not wish her ill.
I do not wish her dead.
It is absolutely true.
I'm not being a hypocrite about it.
I simply do not.
I actually wish for her.
Why?
You know, it's not because God makes you a better person.
It's because God gives you a holistic vision.
You understand that we're in a battle.
It's a battle of ideas.
We're in a battle for freedom.
Freedom is good for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just like it's good for everybody else.
You're not fighting to destroy her.
You're not fighting to destroy her.
You're fighting to overcome her ideas.
I truly do not wish her ill.
I didn't see anybody wishing her ill.
David Koch dies.
David Koku was a philanthropist and was not a conservative.
I mean, he was not, he was in favor of abortion.
He was in favor of gay marriage.
He was a libertarian.
He was also a guy who understood, he was an oil man.
He understood that we need energy.
He wanted less regulation.
He wanted less interference in business so that we would thrive.
I mean, all the things that happen when capitalism is allowed to go forward and we all thrive and things get better.
Here's Bill Maher's reaction to David Koch's death.
And now some funeral news to report.
Yesterday, David Koch of the Zillionaire Koch brothers died place of prostate cancer.
I guess I'm going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.
He was 79, but his family says they wish it could be longer, but at least he lived long enough to see the Amazon catch fire.
Condolences poured in from all the politicians he owned.
And mourners are being asked in lieu of flowers to just leave their car engine running.
As for his remains, he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes blown into a child's lungs.
Now, I know these seem like harsh words and harsh jokes, and I'm sure I will be condemned for them on Fox News, which will portray Mr. Koch as a principled libertarian who believed in the free market.
He and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers for decades, so f ⁇ him.
The Amazon is burning up.
I'm glad he's dead, and I hope the end will come.
All right, what a great job.
He's not condemned on Fox News.
He should be condemned everywhere.
He should be condemned everywhere.
You can disagree.
Even Bernie Sanders, just to show you, though, that this was actually universal on the left, Bernie Sanders had to tell the crowd to stop cheering for someone's death.
Yesterday, oligarch David Koch passed away, and we're going to be dealing with his pollution and the radicalization of his politics.
He's made a killing off of the misery of other people.
And I want to talk about retroactive justice.
How would you follow up for the victims of folks who are coming down in the future generations?
Your question went into several different directions.
I don't applaud the death of somebody.
We needn't do that.
I think what we can say is that the Koch brothers and other billionaires, because of this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, have been able to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful and the fossil fuel industry, which is where the Koch brothers made a lot of their money.
You know, so he does tell the crowd not to cheer his death and then goes on to attack the Koch brothers.
And it's fine to attack the Koch brothers for their ideas, and there's nothing wrong with that.
You know, it is maybe a little moment to let the family mourn before you go back onto the attack.
But he was asked a question, and I'm not blaming Bernie for that.
But the crowd, the crowd was right there with Bill Maher.
You know, people say that leftism is a religion.
And Bernie, we should mention, has put out his new version of the green, his version of the Green New Deal, which is priced, the Wall Street Journal says, at $16.3 trillion, 10 times Joe Biden's climate plan and about two-thirds of America's annual economy.
He would spend basically all our money on this Green New Deal.
It's supposed to get rid of fossil fuels.
It's a complete government.
He's a communist.
It's a complete government takeover of basically our entire economy, basically our entire economy.
It's absolutely nuts.
It basically says we're going to dismantle the army.
We don't need an army because we won't be using oil anymore.
So everything's going to be great.
It's lunacy.
And people, when they hear that, they say, oh, leftism is a religion.
It's not.
It's the opposite of a religion.
Which brings me back to what I was saying before.
When you have a view of God, when you try to understand God, when you try to understand God through the book of nature and the book of scripture, all the information that we have, you are looking for a holistic moral vision, a moral vision.
You can't have a moral vision without God because why should there be any moral vision without God?
What the leftism is, it may be a theology in a sense, or it may be a philosophy, but it's not a theology.
It has no God.
And so it doesn't really know what the purpose of things is.
You know, they talk about climate change as being their version of Christianity's apocalypse, but it's just any crisis, any crisis that they can put together to get people to stop thinking, to get people to stop thinking about what the whole picture is, what the bigger picture is.
Listen, I believe we're going to have cleaner energy in the future.
I believe that fossil fuels are something we need today.
But to ban fracking, which is what Bernie is talking about, franking, which has been absolutely restorative and brings us cleaner energy than before, to ban nuclear energy, which he says is a false solution.
I don't know what's false about it, except that maybe when you watch like old movies, things blow up at nuclear plants.
They don't have to blow up if the plant is taken care of, as we've proved here in America.
It's that they have lost a vision.
It really is important.
It is important, whether you believe in God or not, not because it makes you right, not because it makes you right, but it makes the conversation make sense.
It makes the conversation make sense.
You can't have a conversation about what is good for human life if you won't admit that there are men and women.
Once you're not talking about reality, once you're not talking about the whole picture, the true picture, the obvious picture, you're not talking about anything.
So it's not the fact that they're right and that they're wrong and we're right, and that's why God loves us and doesn't love them.
That's not it at all.
It's that they're not talking about the world.
They're not talking about reality.
And we are.
And we are.
And that's why we're not cheering Ruth Bader Ginsburg being ill and they are cheering the Koch brothers.
That's why the New York Times can't see that what is happening to them is exactly what they're doing to us.
They do not have a holistic picture of the world.
Hey, the Daily Wire has turned four years old.
It is an amazing, it's been an amazing journey from really nowhere to being a tremendous operation filled with people who have no idea what they're doing, running around banging into each other.
But as a thank you to our fans who have made it all possible, we're giving away one month of our premium monthly subscription to anyone who uses the code Birthday.
Labor Day Origins00:14:04
This is all of August, so it's coming to an end.
So get on the horn.
We celebrate this milestone.
We're giving away a free first month for new premium monthly subscribers.
Again, just use the code BIRTHDAY.
Time is quickly running out.
So come on over and join the fun.
And to show you that we're not all nice people here, Michael Knowles will be coming on right after the break, and he's got his conversation.
His conversation is tomorrow, right?
Yeah, tomorrow.
So his conversation is tomorrow, 7 p.m. Eastern.
You want to be there for that?
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Michael Knowles coming up.
All right.
The control room just got in touch with me to tell me that they really do know what they're doing.
So they're also delusional.
Knowles, how you doing?
You know, I probably shouldn't make fun of those guys.
One day they'll just shut us all down.
That is the issue.
Yeah.
Even before big tech finally shuts us down, it's just going to be our own guys because they can't take it anymore.
What's this red button here?
Forget the Labor Day holiday.
It's going to be like a May Day hay market.
You know, they're going to finally turn on us.
What is this?
All our holidays are coming.
You know, May Day is communist.
It starts out as a pagan holiday, and then it gets taken over by the left.
But Labor Day is a very good thing.
That's so weird.
The left would take over something that's absolutely debauched and pagan and then make it their own.
Some kind of strange connection there.
Labor Day.
Why would we take a day off to celebrate labor?
It seems like we should work harder.
We should work harder in honor of labor.
They should work harder for us.
That's right.
I'm actually going to defend Labor Day.
All right.
Let's hear it.
I'm going to defend Labor Day precisely because I hate May Day.
And Labor Day is just the better alternative to May Day, which is the radical communist, leftist labor holiday.
Labor Day, the idea of Labor Day, began in the early 1880s.
So it actually began even before this massive labor event, this huge radical uprising, the Haymarket Affair.
It began before that.
It began as a response to industrialization, which conservatives do understand.
Conservatives in many ways opposed industrialization.
And that did have effects on labor that were pretty rough.
Yeah, you needed some regulation.
It became a state holiday by 1887.
It became a national holiday in 1894.
So it wasn't a union thing.
Well, it was trade union groups or groups that resembled what we would call a modern trade union, but not the same as the unions we see today.
Got it, okay.
Or at least as many of the unions we see today.
This is the big shift, and this is the big shift in perception from Republicans and conservatives.
So the May Day holiday is actually called the International Workers' Day.
And this was organized by the Second International.
This was by communists.
This was to commemorate the Haymarket Affair when in 1886, labor activists threw a bomb at police.
This was a day after police fired on some labor activists.
This was pretty radical stuff, and the Second International and communists wanted to just make this into a worldwide workers' event.
U.S. said, no, thank you.
This was actually, Bernie Sanders was actually there.
He was there at the time.
I think he threw the bomb, actually.
So the U.S. obviously doesn't want to associate with that.
So they create a different holiday at the end of summer, which is Labor Day.
So that's what we're going to have next year.
This was literally a response to May Day?
Yes, this is a response.
Yeah, there were earlier intimations of it, but the reason that this was created in the late 1880s and the early 1890s is as a response to these very real tensions and these very real movements from the Second International, from May Day, from the communists.
The thing that's confusing now is we think, or at least in the mainstream media, we see that the GOP is the anti-labor party.
But the GOP was actually founded as the party of labor.
The GOP in the beginning was the party of economic protection.
The way that the left writes this off is they say that we just wanted to protect the oligarchs and the monopolists.
The evidence says otherwise.
The evidence says that early Republican activists were genuinely concerned about wage earners and what would happen to wage earners through unfettered free trade.
Unsurprising, the GOP was also founded as the party against slavery.
So they were also looking out for the little guy and the little laborer there as well.
That's right.
And it is true that free trade has been a problem for the working man.
It has.
Free international trade has created problems for the working man.
Abraham Lincoln said, quote, give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth.
He said that in 1840.
Lincoln said that?
No less than Lincoln.
He was the one with that tall red hat that says, make America all the way down.
Yeah, it's really just as eloquent as our modern presidents, actually.
So I think what, because there is Republican opposition to unions, it's not just that we're all imagining this.
But the Republican opposition to unions really takes form during the bastardization of the labor movement and the union movement.
This is a really important point.
This happens in the 1960s and 70s, and it comes with the advent of public sector unions, also known as government unions.
Which FDR opposed.
FDR opposed it.
Samuel Gomper is a post-public sector union.
Samuel Gomper is the founder of the American Federation of Labor.
FDR said, he made no uncertainty about this.
Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the government.
All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.
The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible. for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.
Can't do it.
It's wrong in every way.
They're not only negotiating against the people that the government is representing.
The government is representing the people in that.
But there's no, just technically, there's no reason for a mayor or a governor not to cave in to a public sector union on questions of like retirement funds.
That's why we're all, that's why California is in such bad retirement debt, because by the time that kicks in, and by the time your bad deal becomes obvious, you'll be gone.
That's right.
You don't have to answer for it.
That's right, yeah.
And there's no competition.
There's no competition at all.
It makes no sense.
And there had been some early public union attempts in the late 19th century.
It just did not exist in anything but the rarity until the 60s and 70s.
A lot of that is Kennedy's fault, actually.
Kennedy issued an executive order in 1962 that made it easier for government workers to organize.
And then you see this corruption that we've had the last 50, 60, 70 years.
Not just the government unions, though, because you also had corruption of the private unions.
So especially during this time, you saw ties between labor and the mob.
Just ask Jimmy Hoff about this time.
As soon as we find it.
As soon as we find it, we'll ask him.
And you also see corruption of the labor leadership.
So the GOP and conservative opposition to labor, I don't think has ever been about rank and file labor.
It's been about crony, corrupt labor leadership and union leadership.
This was part of the pitch of Make America Great Again, not in 2016, but in 1980 when Ronald Reagan used that expression for the first time.
Reagan got a huge amount of support from labor unions and labor union households.
The next time we saw that kind of support for a Republican was in 2016 with President Trump.
You know, we're hearing now that the union leaders and the union people are not standing up and cheering when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders sell socialism.
They know it's not a good thing for them.
You know, the funny thing about unions, I once got into a fight during a doorman strike in New York.
The doorman in New York bringing your packages to keep bad people from coming upstairs theoretically.
And they went on strike.
And I got in a fight in an elevator with this guy who said, why are these people going on strike?
And, you know, what have they produced?
What have they created?
The people who own these buildings are the creators.
And I said, you know, unions are a necessary evil when people are abused.
I don't think they're a good thing, but they are a necessary evil.
And the doormen overheard me, and all through the strike, they would send my packages up.
That's right.
No, but I mean, the thing is, the thing about the unions is like everything else, they exist in time.
And in a lot of ways, they've made themselves obsolete.
And they've made themselves obsolete because the people who run the businesses, just like Henry Ford, started to realize, you know, if we treat our workers well, we get better workers and they become our customers because they have money to spend and they become consumers.
So there's a lot to be said for optimizing profits, for treating your workers well.
And a lot of the unions have become obsolete.
And once they've become obsolete and they have no reason for being, do they look at each other and say, well, that was a good job.
Yeah, no.
No, they don't.
They start asking for stuff that destroys the very business, like the car companies.
They start asking for retirement packages that the companies can't afford.
They start asking for pay.
And unions ultimately, this is how you can tell when they've crossed the line, when they've jumped the shark, is when they start making it harder and harder.
They start making the people who are in the union are doing better, but nobody can get into the union.
We see this in Hollywood.
A lot of our units.
In Hollywood.
They block you out, and so it's very hard to get a job, but the guy who's in there gets paid more.
So, you know, thank heavens, you know, Tom Cruise is making an extra million dollars, but you can't get a job.
You know, this, back in my prior life, when I was an actor, it was very difficult to get into the Screen Actors Guild.
Eventually, I managed to do it, but I always hated the union.
I hated the union when I wasn't in it.
I hated the union when I was working union contracts.
It wasn't serving its members, and that's not just my view as a conservative.
You can ask any actor on the street in LA.
And it's true, and that's why people are torn, because I had to join the Writers' Guild to become a writer in Hollywood.
And the Writers' Guild has treated me very, very well.
I'm really happy with it.
When I call them up, they give me help.
They've done great things for me all along.
But I know that every time they go on strike, it gets harder and harder for the guy who just got to town with his cardboard suitcase and thinking like I have a dream.
So it's like, it's not that we're against labor, it's that things become corrupt and obsolete, and that's the way it goes.
Of course, this is this.
Why would Labor cheer for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?
Labor doesn't want to vote against their own interests.
They don't want to vote against meals on their table.
But there is a sense, as President Trump talks about it, he's giving the context, which is: look, we want a strong American worker.
We want a strong country.
We want you to buy American because you love your fellow Americans and you love your country, and hopefully they put out a good product.
That's a much more nuanced view than what the left would tell us, which is that the right hates labor, the right hates the working class.
If anything, it's the left that looks with some disdain or contempt on those proles.
Always.
We always do.
So, all right, I'm taking Labor Day off.
What are you talking about?
We're talking about Trump's big challenge.
You know, Joe Walsh is going to be running against President Trump.
And listen, don't discount Joe Walsh.
Life's been good to him so far.
That's great.
I will be there and be there for the conversation on Tuesday.
Final reflection: I just have the Wall Street Journal has a piece out today on the fact that many of the filmmakers who got nailed, as it were, in the Me Too scandals are now can't open their films in America, and so they're opening them in Europe.
So, Woody Allen's new film is, I don't, it's called A Rainy Day in New York.
It's screened in Poland and Lithuania, but it may never come to the U.S.
He hasn't got distribution in the U.S. Roman Polanski's film, An Officer and a Spy, which I think is kind of interesting.
It's about the Dreyfus affair, which I would kind of be interested in seeing.
He is, of course, a fugitive from justice, and so it's not opening here as well.
It hasn't found a distributor here.
It's interesting to me because it's an unintended consequence of the Me Too movement, and in some ways, unjust.
I mean, I feel Woody Allen's never been convicted of anything, and he has his side of this story, and it's a very ugly divorce situation, and he's had an ugly marital life and an ugly love life, and that's on him, and it's a shame.
But I don't see why his films shouldn't open here.
I don't see why, what's the guy's name from House of Cards, Kevin Spacey.
I don't see why Kevin Spacey should be chased out of the business because he's a bad actor.
He was allowed, not a bad actor, actor, he acted badly.
You know, he was allowed to do the things that he did.
If he's guilty, everyone on set was guilty.
Now, it's different for Roman Polanski because Roman Polanski is a rapist who was convicted and didn't pay for his crime.
He's a fugitive from justice.
That's a very different thing.
But again, a holistic view of this says, you know, women are responsible.
They are responsible for taking care of themselves if they want to be in business.
That doesn't mean that men aren't responsible for acting morally.
Men are also responsible for acting morally.
But I don't think that people should be allowed to do the kinds of things that they do and then punished retroactively for something everybody is guilty of.
I think that Harvey Weinstein is going to go on trial, I believe.
I think he should go on trial.
I think he has done by rumor, he seems to have done terrible things that are against the law.
That's very different than a guy who's a slob or a guy who's a bore or in Woody Allen's case, a guy who is in a he said, she says situation who didn't break any laws, who didn't do anything that he can be prosecuted for.
I don't see why his film shouldn't open here.
I don't see why he should be punished because something he did in the past violates some new standard that wasn't there in the first place.
I think this Me Too movement is really unfortunate because, of course, I think women should be treated well everywhere and men should be treated well everywhere.
But it's really unfortunate that it has had these unintended consequences, mostly because it's been used as a political weapon instead of as a moral one and has not been used in a holistic, intelligent way.
I got to stop there.
You know, be here tomorrow because there's going to be a long, there's a long Clavenless weekend coming up because I'll be celebrating, now that I've heard about it, I'll be celebrating Labor Day.
The Andrew Klavan Show Production00:01:16
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