Andrew Clavin mocks the 1619 Project’s slavery-centric framing of modern grievances, then pivots to Hollywood’s moral shifts—victim vs. aggressor narratives—and contrasts Trump’s unapologetic patriotism with Democrats’ declining Gallup-measured pride. He defends Trump’s China tariffs as democratic defense, dismissing media distortions like CNN’s G7 spin, while geologist Gregory Wrightstone debunks Amazon fire hysteria and CO₂ alarmism using NASA data. The episode ties these threads to a generational crisis: Gen Z’s shrinking birth rates and fading patriotism, framed as a threat to societal survival, ending with a call for unconditional national loyalty over conditional critique. [Automatically generated summary]
Blitherine Prevarication III, the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, a former newspaper, has traced the origins of a poorly cooked steak he had recently back to the Institution of American Slavery.
Mr. Third's comments were part of the Times 1619 project, which, quote, aims to reframe American history by tracing everything we don't like back to slavery, unquote.
After dining at the elite Midtown Steakhouse American Cut, Mr. Third unleashed tirade against the restaurant, saying, quote, when I pay over $120 for a steak, I distinctly ordered medium-rare.
I do not expect to see it brought to my table medium-rare, shading over toward medium.
I knew the moment I experienced this travesty that its origins must lie in America's history of slavery, unquote.
Mr. Third went on to pen a 25,000-word essay for the Times Sunday magazine entitled, Why Can't I Get My Ribeye Cooked the Way I Want It?
Slavery is to Blame.
The essay reads in part, quote, perhaps you believe this is a great country founded on the highest ideals, but that's because you were not forced to suffer the outlandishly overcooked steak that fell to my lot last Thursday evening, which, as I'm sure you know, is the maid's day off, unquote.
In a speech before the Association of People Who Are Really Virtuous Despite Having Had Every Possible Advantage, Mr. Third said, quote, the fact that the center of my steak was maroon instead of bright pink can only be seen as a result of the sloppy workmanship and low values that arise from a nation conceived on the natty cotton fields we all witnessed in that great movie, Gone with the Wind.
I look forward to the day everyone can have the kind of great steak I'm sure they have in Sweden or someplace like that, unquote.
Mr. Third then headed out for a late dinner at Peter Luger and said he better not see any traces of slavery there or there'd be hell to pay.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hurrah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Okay, I've told this story before, but it's a good one.
It's worth repeating.
After the movie The Ring came out in 2002, I made a good living for a few years writing ghost story scripts.
I realized The Ring was going to start a trend, and I love ghost stories, so it was a good fit for me.
But in Hollywood, everything trends downward toward the lowest common denominator.
It's like water going down a drain.
And after a year or two of selling elegant, subtle ghost stories that were spooky but largely nonviolent, I started getting calls to write gory horror films, which I like a lot less.
Finally, I was called into a production company where they pitched me an idea.
They said, we want to do a story about a girl who gets kidnapped and tortured.
And I said, yeah, then what happens?
And they said, no, that's it.
That's the story.
I laughed out loud and said, listen, guys, I have nothing against stories about women in peril, but when a girl gets chased across the screen by a guy with a butcher knife, I'm rooting for the girl.
That was the end of the meeting.
Now, if I may be permitted to draw a moral from real life, the moral here is it matters who you're rooting for.
If you make a slasher movie and you identify with a heroine, it can be a scary good time.
But if you make the same movie and you identify with the slasher, it's likely to come out torture porn, which is moral and artistic crap.
The same is true in politics.
It Matters Whose Side You're On00:02:47
It matters whose side you're on.
My problem with the modern left is not their policies, though I genuinely hate their policies.
It's who they're rooting for and who they're rooting against.
Whatever you believe, whatever you think works best, if you're not rooting for America, you have no business being in American politics, or for that matter, in the American news business either.
A man who says he wants to fundamentally transform America doesn't love this country as it is.
Imagine how you'd feel if your fiancé said to you on the eve of your wedding, honey, I am one day away from fundamentally transforming you.
You'd be out of there like a shot.
If you, like the New York Times, think everything exceptionable about America, exceptional about America is a product of slavery, you don't love your country as it is.
You're not rooting for it as it is.
If all you see is racism and greed, you should probably leave or shut up.
Say what you will about Donald Trump.
He's a loudmouth.
He plays fast and loose with the truth.
He can be a bully sometimes, but he loves his native land.
You can feel it.
You can practically smell it.
Win or lose, we know he's working not for the America of his imagination, some lofty utopia, but for this America that our forefathers fought and died for, the America where we live right now.
And that matters.
You can't bottle that feeling, though Elizabeth Warren is trying her best.
Watching him at the G7 in France and watching the coverage and commentary of the G7 in France, I can only hope that whatever mistakes Trump makes, whatever stunts he pulls, whatever gaffes, the voters in the end will turn out in 2020 to vote for the guy who wants this country to win the day.
We're going to talk about this.
I mean, it really is an interesting, it's fascinating the way your perspective just changes everything.
But let's talk first about NetSuite.
As I've told you many times, I am a business.
I run a business.
The business is me.
It's the business of me.
And I need my business to go well.
So I need to know where everything is, where the numbers are.
That's where NetSuite Suite comes in handy, because the problem with growing businesses today is that there's a hodgepodge of business systems.
You don't know where anything is.
But with NetSuite by Oracle, you have a business management software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy-to-use cloud platform, giving you the visibility and control you need to grow.
With NetSuite, you save time, money, and unneeded headaches by managing sales, finance, accounting orders, and HR instantly right from your desktop or phone.
That's why NetSuite is the world's number one cloud business system.
Right now, NetSuite is offering you valuable insights with a free guide, seven key strategies to grow your profits at netsuite.com slash clavin.
That's netsuite.com slash clavin to download your free guide, seven key strategies to grow your profits, netsuite.com slash clavin.
And you're probably wondering, how can I even begin if I don't know how to spell Clavin?
Why We Root For Some00:05:46
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease in Clavin.
Just looks easy when I do it.
Mailbag is tomorrow.
I knew you were all thinking it, so I just said it for you.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
Go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit that little picture of a mailbag, and ask me anything you want.
You can ask about religion.
You can ask about politics.
You can ask about your personal lives.
All my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
For the better, you'll have to be there to find out.
But you have to be a subscriber to ask a question.
So send us your $10 for the month, $100 for the year.
It's cheap at the price.
You'll be solving all your problems.
Where else do you get that deal?
So, you know, I laugh.
A lot of people these days, I hear them saying, oh, America has never been so divided.
And I always crack up when I hear this because forget about the Civil War when we were actually at war with ourselves.
I mean, forget about that.
But in my lifetime, which I admit has gone on now for hundreds and hundreds of years, but still in my lifetime, I remember the president getting shot and then the president's brother getting shot and then shot and killed, assassinated, and then the top civil rights guy in the country, Martin Luther King, getting shot.
And then the second civil rights guy in the country, Malcolm X, getting shot.
I mean, people were getting killed.
Important people were getting assassinated left and right.
Universities were on fire.
There were riots all over.
We were much more divided then.
But it is the one thing that is different now is who the elite establishment was rooting for.
The elite establishment was rooting for America.
It was the rebels.
It was the guys out in the street who were saying America stinks.
It was Jane Fonda who was waving communist flags and going over to Hanoi and supporting the communists in Vietnam.
Those were the rebels.
Those were the outsiders.
Now they have become the establishment and they are still rooting against this country.
And this thing about this movie, about the idea of a movie where you're rooting, you're identifying with the girl who's being chased around or you're identifying with the killer who's chasing her, it changes everything.
It changes the exact same story.
It's the same story, but everything has changed.
It matters who you're rooting for.
Sometimes, you know, sometimes I think that this is what it means when they say that the Jews are God's chosen people.
Seriously, you know, obviously it's not everything is going to go well for them.
That can't be what it means.
What it means is when we read the Bible, we read it from their point of view, and it makes a difference, right?
If you hear the Battle of Jericho and how the Jews come in with this small force and play horns and the walls come tumbling down, and you read that from the Jews' point of view, you think like, wow, it's a miracle.
You can accomplish anything if God is with you.
If you just have faith, you are more than a conqueror.
You can do anything you want.
That's what you learn when you read it from the Jews' point of view.
But if you happen to be sitting around in Jericho, minding your own business, and these illegal immigrants come into your country and start blowing horns and blow down your walls and come and sack your city, it's a different story.
It's a different story.
And that's what it means.
That's why we read the Bible from one particular point of view.
You have to read it from someone's point of view.
We're not God.
We don't see the world from just above the ground where everybody is equal.
We see it from a point of view, and that changes everything.
And, you know, I mean, I talk about this with abortion all the time.
You know, this is why I pay so much attention to the press and to Hollywood, because the press in Hollywood teach us how a story is told, what perspective it's told from.
And this is one of my problems with abortion.
Abortion is always told in our left-wing press.
It's always told from the point of view of the mother.
It's never told from the point of view of the baby, of what that baby's life would be like, what the baby is losing, the fact that the baby has no voice.
The mother has a voice.
The mother has a choice, but the baby has no voice, no choice, no vote, no way of telling his or her story.
That's the problem.
You know, that crazy actress, celebrities, I think, are the worst.
They're not the worst people.
I just think they're the craziest people on earth.
Why they should ever talk about anything other than what they do for a living, I don't know.
But that crazy actress, Alyssa Milano, sent out a tweet saying, oh, she could never have had the many joys of her life if she hadn't had her two abortions.
And I thought, all right, I buy that.
That's probably true.
But what's the baby story?
What are those two baby stories?
They never had the joys of their lives.
I mean, that's the whole point.
And you could say it about anybody.
Oh, I could never have had this wonderful second marriage if I hadn't killed and buried my first wife in the backyard.
You know, anybody can tell the story from his point of view, but we have to decide.
We have to decide whose point of view we want to see things from.
And, you know, this country, there's a natural love of country.
There's a natural, straightforward love of country, right?
It's just like your love for your mom.
Nobody goes out.
You know, remember Obama said that thing about, oh, yes, there's American exceptionalism, but I'm sure the Brits think about Brits exceptionalism and the Greeks think about Greek exceptionalism.
Anybody ever say that about his mom?
Yeah, my mom is the best, but I'm sure Tom thinks his mom is the best and Bill thinks his mom is the best.
So it's not that they're really the best.
We just think that way.
Of course not.
Of course not.
That would be inhuman.
It would be unnatural.
It would be a little bit neurotic, okay?
It would be just a little bit crazy not to feel that.
America deserves that from us, but it also deserves more because of the values on which it's founded.
Now, I'll talk about that in a minute, but it really does.
America deserves not just the typical mother love that we all give to that anyone gives to our country.
You know, breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself has said, This is my own, my native land, that old great poem.
You know, that is a natural feeling, but America deserves more than that from us because of the values on which it's founded, because of the way it changed the world.
Calm Amid Recession Talk00:15:39
Hey, let me talk to you about Vistaprint.
I don't know.
I'm like this, I know, but when I meet people and the guy says, Oh, yes, I'm a billionaire interested in funding the arts.
Have you got a card?
I'm always like, No.
Can I send you an email?
Yeah, sure.
You know, I'll be waiting for that email.
You know, for just 10 bucks, Vistaprint gives you 500 personalized cards with exactly the look you want so you can own that moment.
Just 10 bucks and you can own the now because that's where you're going to find yourself in the now.
And you can feel good knowing that Vistaprint uses only carefully selected inks and responsibly sourced paper stocks.
Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed, or your money back.
They will make your card the way you want it.
Vistaprint wants you to be able to own the now in any situation, which is why our listeners will get 500 high-quality custom business cards starting at $9.99.
Just go to Vistaprint.com/slash Claven.
Go to Vistaprint.com/slash Claven to get 500 custom business cards and own the now for 999 Vistaprint.com/slash Claven.
And of course, you'll want my name on there too, so you'll need to spell it.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
What is a card if it doesn't have my name on it?
Who cares, right?
You know, the other day, a typical example of how the press controls which side we're on, Donald Trump says the press is trying to organize a recession so they can get rid of him.
They're saying they're kind of exacerbating the panics on Wall Street and the bad feelings among consumers that could help to bring about a recession.
So this is cut number three.
We're doing very well.
Our country is doing fantastically well.
I mean, you people want a recession because you think maybe that's the way to get Trump out.
And maybe that's the way we get him out.
But I don't even think that would work because, look, if there's anything, it's, you know, we've got to go into trade negotiations to get it right, but ultimately it'll be many times what it was before.
Our country is doing really well.
We have horrible trade deals, and I'm straightening them out.
The biggest one by far is China.
So this is Trump at the G7 in France.
And The Hill runs a headline: Trump again lashes out at the media, accusing it of trying to force a recession.
Now, why is he lashing out?
So I tweeted, media again lashes out at Trump by saying he lashes out when he's just stating a fact.
I mean, it's a fact.
The media has been trying, has been rooting for an American recession.
There's no question about it.
Here's cut number six.
Pushing back.
President Trump downplays spares the economy is on the slide.
President Trump is attempting to downplay growing concerns that the U.S. economy could be headed for a recession.
Even in the face of some economic warning signs, the president and his top aides are now brushing off fears of a recession down the road.
Recession and re-election.
President Trump insisting he has no concerns about the economy after that 800-point plunge as his 2020 opponents fire back, saying the president is terrible for business.
President Trump and his economic team are trying to tamp down talk of a possible recession after a volatile week on Wall Street.
Presidents get the credit when the economy's good.
They get the blame when the economy's bad.
And right now, with some signs of economic weakness and the market's growing anxious, President Trump is playing defense.
Last week, the Dow plunged 800 points in one day, the biggest single day drop of the year as investors forecast concerns with the global economy.
The White House is now working to project calm.
I love the fact that he says that one story is my favorite where he says, presidents get the credit when the economy is good, which it's been for two and a half years while the press has virtually left it unmentioned, right?
But they get to blame when it's bad.
And right now, there are some signs of weakness that we're blowing up to try and make it look bad, so you'll blame Trump.
Because it's not bad.
It's not bad.
There are fears.
There are legitimate fears.
In August, every August, the stock market gets a little crazy because all the smart investors go on vacation.
But still, if they want to build up those fears into a recession, there's a reason for it.
There's a reason for it.
That's just the story they're telling.
And America deserves better than that.
It certainly deserves better than wishing.
You know, there was a poll recently that basically said, that basically said that Democrats, here is Gallup.
This was a 4th of July poll that said American pride in the U.S. has hit its lowest since Gallup's first measurement in 2001.
The latest overall declines in patriotism are largely driven by Democrats whose self-reported pride in their country has historically been lower and has fluctuated more than Republicans.
Democrats' latest 22% extreme pride reading is the group's lowest in Gallup's 19 years of measurement and is half of what it was several months before Donald Trump's 2016 election victory.
Most Republicans have remained extremely proud of their country, and the latest 76% reading is just 10 points below the high recorded in 2003, even when Barack Obama was in office.
Republicans' extreme pride never fell below 68%.
So we know that basically Democrats are proud when they're winning, but they're not proud of their country per se, and the country deserves that pride.
It really does.
America deserves to have our history looked at from our point of view, not from the Howard-Zinn point of view of the victims all the time.
It deserves to have, we look at this country and we want it to succeed because of the values on which it's founded.
You know, even the idea, I've talked about this a lot, but it's worth saying again, even the idea of racism that has now become the left's tin drum that it bangs and bangs and bangs trying to make enough noise to get us to subscribe to their stupid policies.
But even that comes out of this idea, you know, in the Declaration, it begins when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature has got entitled them.
Our definition of a people there and the definition of the people we're breaking away from are two different definitions of the word people.
The British people are British.
They are a people.
They are, maybe you can say they're a group of people because there's the Welsh and the English and the Scottish, but they are a people in racial terms where Americans were not even then a people in racial terms.
They came from all over.
They were defining themselves in a new way as what people were.
And that's why America deserves more patriotism than just the love of native country.
So this trade war with China, I mean, this is important.
And I know, like, I don't cover it a lot because it goes up and down.
And it's hilarious to watch the Wall Street Journal.
You know, I mean, nobody likes this.
Nobody wants this to be going on.
It is bad for the economy to put tariffs on Chinese goods.
It is bad for there to be a trade war going on.
It does affect the stock market.
Nobody wants it to be happening.
But Trump, you know, when Trump said, oh, I'm the chosen one.
I'm the one who has to do this.
He was joking around.
He was clowning around.
But basically what he was saying is, look, this is not good for my presidency.
This is not good politics.
This is what has to be done.
This is what I have to do.
So he goes to the G7.
And at G7, if you're following the reporting, I know it's not the most exciting story in the world.
This is the seven richest countries.
But the reporting has been utterly garbage, right?
All we've heard is like, oh, Trump wants to nuke hurricanes, which he says is a complete lie.
I was disappointed.
I was hoping he would actually nuke a hurricane, especially if it was a hurricane that was over like, you know, I don't know, the Ukraine or Siberia or something like this.
But Trump says this is completely ridiculous.
I knew it was ridiculous when they were reporting it.
Some guy leaks this stuff and the press just is absolutely credulous about anything, anything that you say that is negative to Trump.
Melania gave Trudeau from Canada a kiss and they captured this picture of her looking, kind of looking fondly up at him and they start basically saying, oh, they're having an affair.
I mean, the reporting from this thing has just been garbage.
Anything that Trump says, Trump says, well, you know, it might not be a bad thing.
Remember, the G7 used to be the G8 when Putin was in it before he started taking back territories, Soviet territories.
So Trump says, you know, maybe we should invite him back.
It might be a better thing to have somebody as powerful as Putin in the room with us rather than outside the room.
Oh, my God, what a terrible, terrible thing that would be.
He says the next summit, the next, we're hosting the next G7.
He says maybe it'll be at one of my resorts.
Oh my God, the emoluments clause.
You know, Trump is probably losing money.
It would be hilarious to me, just absolutely hilarious.
You know how they've been trying to get all his tax returns just to find something they can embarrass him with.
It would be hilarious to me if they got their grubby little hands, their grummy little Democrat hands on his tax returns, and it turned out that he was losing money being president, which I suspect is the case.
He's turning back the, what is it, 400 grand, the salary?
He's not even taking the salary.
He probably is losing money on this deal.
So, I mean, it would be just hilarious if what it proved was he was a generous, patriotic guy.
Anyway, we know how Trump negotiates, right?
So he says different things.
One moment he's talking about China as our enemy, G is our enemy.
And then the next day he says China wants to make a deal.
This is what he said.
This is cut number one.
Suddenly he changed his tune and said China had put forward a statement from one of their, you know, one of their top guys saying that we want to negotiate a deal.
And we know, we know the Chinese economy is suffering.
So here's what Trump said.
This is cut one.
The vice chairman of China came out that he wants to see a deal made.
He wants it to be made under calm conditions, using the word calm.
I agree with him on that.
And China has taken a very hard hit over the last number of months.
They've lost 3 million jobs.
It'll soon be much more than 3 million jobs.
Their chain is breaking.
The chain is breaking up like nobody's seen before.
And once that happens, it's very hard to put it back together.
You understand?
I think they very much want to make a deal.
And the longer they wait, the harder it is to put it back, if it can be put back at all.
So I believe they want to do a deal.
The tariffs have hit them very hard.
In a fairly short period of time, the United States will have collected over $100 billion in tariffs.
And I say it again, reporters fail to, the media fail to acknowledge it.
But if you look at the goods coming in from China, we're talking about China, not other countries.
If you look at the goods, they have a power that others don't have.
But that power is only good for so long.
So, you know, he's saying, look, he's hoping to come to a deal.
He doesn't want the tariffs on.
He's always said this.
He wants no tariffs, but he uses them as a weapon.
He uses them as a blunt instrument in trade.
What's funny is everybody says this.
I mean, Bernie Sanders says he would use tariffs.
Elizabeth Warren says she would use them.
So it's not like they're yelling and screaming at him, but what they keep saying is, well, we wouldn't do it the way he's doing it.
He's doing it irrationally.
But that's obvious garbage.
I mean, obviously, Trump does know what he's doing.
He is in a negotiation.
And play this.
And what he basically says is that China has to deal.
They've been playing fast and loose, stealing intellectual property, cheating on deals, manipulating their currency.
They've been doing all this stuff.
And all he's trying to do is bring them into the community of nations, which is not easy to do.
And now he says he feels that maybe he's backed them up against the walls.
Cut to.
They've manipulated their currency.
They've devalued their currency and they put a lot of cash into the system.
And because of that, the prices have not gone up.
Or if they've gone up, it's been very little because they want to keep people working.
If the prices go up, they're not going to be able to keep people working.
They're not going to be able to compete.
It's a brilliant market.
It's a brilliant, brilliant market.
The world market.
A lot of markets are brilliant.
And frankly, I think that China cannot, I don't know, maybe they can, maybe they can't.
I don't think they can do that.
And I think they're very smart.
And I think President Xi is a great leader who happens to be a brilliant man.
And he can't lose 3 million jobs in a very short period of time.
And that's going to be magnified many times over.
And it's going to break down the Chinese system of trade.
And he can't do that.
So when you say, do you think they want to?
Maybe they want to and maybe they don't, but I think they want to make a deal.
I'm not sure they have a choice.
And I don't say that as a threat.
I don't think they have a choice.
Okay, now let me, I'm going to explain why this is so important that we be on Trump's side, no matter who we are, Democrat, Republican, we should be on Trump's side in this.
But let me just show you that the press is not.
And this is what I'm talking about.
This is the difference in the tone of our country today than, say, in the 60s, when there was a lot more division, a lot more trouble in the country, a lot more violence, a lot more chaos.
But still, the elites, the establishment were on America's side for the most part until that turn came.
And that's the difference that we're seeing now.
It's not Trump.
The thing about Trump is that he is a patriot.
He's kind of a throwback to the days before this.
But let me just play this cut from CNN.
You know, Trump said that basically the Chinese had called looking to make a deal.
And here is CNN's Jim Scudo comes on and he says, oh, Trump, it's just one lie after another from Donald Trump.
President claiming today that China called and wants a trade deal.
China called last night, our top trade people, and said, let's get back to the table.
So we'll be getting back to the table.
In fact, the president later said there were, quote, many calls, numerous calls, high-level calls.
The only problem China's foreign minister's office says it is not aware of any calls.
And no one else from the Chinese government has come forward to say that they participated.
So how did the president explain that discrepancy?
So the Chinese are saying that there weren't any particulars.
The Chinese are not saying that.
Excuse me, let me explain something.
The vice chairman of China, do you get higher than that other than President Xi?
The vice president, the vice chairman, it's like the vice president, the vice chairman, made the statement that he wants to make a deal, that he wants to see a calm atmosphere.
He wants it all to happen.
So it was a foreign ministry statement, not a phone call directly to the president or his aides.
It was actually a statement of China's long-standing position on the issue.
So why is the president framing it as something new today in a call that wasn't a call, but just a general public statement?
Wow, you really got him that time, buddy.
You really got him.
Now, first of all, it was not their standing position.
It was a different tone in the statement.
But then Trump pointed to Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, and Mnuchin said, yeah, we've been in contact now, whether they were on the phone or whatever they were doing.
He said, we have been going back and forth on this.
So Trump was essentially telling the truth.
He was speaking fast and loose the way he always does, but he was essentially telling the truth.
And the thing is, are you rooting for him or not?
I'm not saying, look, you don't have to back lies.
You don't have to back things that we do wrong.
As much as I feel you should be on the side of America, you should be on God's side first.
When America does something wrong, you're allowed to say so.
That's not the point.
The point is not a blind patriotism.
That's not what I'm talking about at all.
I'm talking about an overall sense that you support this country and it's good.
And here's why it's so important.
And I should give some credit to Joseph Sullivan, who wrote about this in the Atlantic.
He was one of Trump's economic advisors.
He wrote about this in the Atlantic, saying we should all be rooting for Trump to win this exchange.
Backing Trump Means Backing Democracy00:02:25
Why?
Because Trump, because Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, is essentially an autocrat, right?
He's not going to have to be re-elected.
They can't take him out of power.
His presidency is supposed to be a kind of a figurehead position, but it's not.
He is in control of that country and he's in full control of that country.
Trump is dependent on being re-elected from us by the voters.
What Xi is depending on is that we will drop out from behind Trump, that we won't support Trump.
That's why he's putting tariffs on farmers because he knows farmers are Trump's, among Trump's big supporters.
He's trying to eat away at Trump's support so Trump loses his bargaining power, his bargaining position.
Trump knows this too.
Trump is dealing with us.
Trump has us.
If we back him, he can win.
And if he wins, we win.
But if we get nervous, if the Wall Street Journal throws its apron over its face and goes running around saying, oh, the stocks, the stocks, you know, Trump loses the power of his negotiation.
We should back his play.
We should back his play.
It's simple because his play, if he wins, democracy wins.
If he wins, he proves that a democracy can beat out an autocracy at the bargaining table for the good of everybody.
It is good for China to play fair.
It is good for us if China plays fair.
It is good to have a market in which people play fair.
And only the democracies are going to fight for that.
And if the autocracies realize, oh, we don't have to do that because the people will fall away.
You know, this is what autocracies have been saying since Greece and Persia.
They said, oh, Persia said, oh, we can beat them because they're a democracy and democracies don't like to fight.
The people won't fight.
And the people in Greece showed up and they said, no, we will fight for our freedom.
We're fighting for our freedom now in a different way in a trade war.
It's not obviously not a shooting war, thank God, but it is a trade war.
We have to back the play.
We back the play and I think Trump can actually win and he should win.
Of course he should win because the Chinese aren't playing fair.
Backing him is backing democracy.
Backing America is backing the principle of individual freedom and democracy.
We should be doing that.
We should be doing it all the time.
And the elites are not doing it because they benefit from a global economy that kills America's workers.
All right.
Today, later today, 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, the conversation is back, and Michael Knowles will be answering your questions live on air.
Will his answers change your life?
Amazon Fires Decline?00:14:50
Of course not.
But they could be useful and 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 night.
Michael Knowles today at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, and join the conversation and then get the true answers from me tomorrow out of the mailbag.
All right, we got to take a break from Facebook and YouTube.
on over to dailywire.com.
All right, the Amazon is on fire.
So we wanted to talk to Gregory Wrightstone, who's a geologist.
He's got more than 35 years experience studying the Earth's process.
And he's got a book called, his latest book is called Inconvenient Facts, which was, and the book was the result of a quest to find the truth about climate change.
And he ended up debunking Al Gore's climate crisis.
Gregory Wrightstone, are you there?
I'm here.
Thank you very much for having me on.
It's a pleasure.
It's a pleasure.
Actually, forest fires is what really got me into this, this climate skepticism part, because whenever I got to forest fires and researching that, it wasn't the Amazon forest fires, but fires across the world.
I saw that the science, the facts, and the data just disputed flatly what we're being told.
And it was at that point I said, oh my God, they're lying to us.
And they're lying to us again about the Amazon being on fire.
Well, now, what is going on with the Amazon?
They're telling us it's burning at a rate that's never been seen before.
And the Amazon is called the lungs of the world.
And so we're all going to suffocate, I guess.
Is that anything like the truth?
The data came from an ostensibly good, reliable source, which is the Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.
But the satellites and the data set that they're using wasn't designed to count fires.
It was designed as an early warning system, if you will, for the Brazilian government so they could get out ahead of any fires that started.
And so they're important.
The focus for this was we don't want to miss any fires.
And because of that, some of these fires get counted multiple times.
NASA data and the NASA satellites are actually much more accurate.
Plus, the Brazilian data only started in 2013, so we have less than six years of data to work with.
So to make any broad statement about record fires when you really only have five plus years of data is a little bit of a reach.
The NASA data goes back to 2003, much more accurate.
And I've got a commentary that just was published today, as a matter of fact, and it's up on my website.
You can see these charts I'm referencing.
The NASA data shows that the number of fires this year in 2019, man, it's dead set right in the middle of the average of what it's been for the last 16 years.
Nothing unusual.
And what's that's sad?
I was going to say it's funny, but it's sad actually, is that the most shared image of the Brazilian fires came from a NASA satellite photograph.
It's been shared more than 2 million times.
But what doesn't get shared is the caption that NASA used.
In the caption, they stated that this year the fires are, are you ready?
Average.
So it's mid-range.
But then it does get odd.
I looked at that same photograph and captioned last week.
And in the caption last week read, slightly below average.
So I think somebody got to the NASA people and said, you know, we can't generate, we need to generate alarm.
And if you call it slightly below average, can you please get at least get it up to average?
Yes.
So they made that change.
It is funny.
The G7 got together, all the countries got together, and they donated what was like $20 million, which is chump change for all these countries.
And everyone was attacking Trump for not being there.
But it's not really a crisis.
Is the Amazon a crisis?
Are we losing the Amazon?
I know for a while people were really concerned about that.
It is and was really a problem.
It really began in the late 80s.
In the 90s, early 2000s, there was quite a bit of rainforest that was, well, it wasn't really cut down.
They used these fires to clear it.
And we've lost about 15% of the total original rainforest to this clear-cutting and burning.
And it's really slowed down and nearly stopped now.
And the fires that go every, these are yearly annual fires, nothing unusual.
It happens this time every year during this is their fire season.
It goes from late July to early November.
It's going to peak here in the next couple of weeks.
It's their dry season.
These are intentionally set fires.
They clear the farmland and the ranch land.
It's a regenerative process before they plant the next crop.
And that's what they do.
Some of these.
So what we're seeing is that that NASA photograph shows smoke everywhere.
But if you look at where it was coming from, it's mostly the grasslands and the crop area.
Again, it's a regenerative burning process.
Nothing unusual.
It happens every year.
I'm looking at another, on my other screen over here, I've got another chart that I'm going to add to my commentary that I just found, just showing that this year's actually a little bit below normal because it came from the fire report, the Global Forest Watch fire report.
Very powerful and just showing that we've actually been in a slight decline in the Amazon fires.
And that's a good thing.
I'm not going to make light of the dangers and the need to stop the burning of the rainforest.
It's an important environmental niche.
But when we get these false reports and hoaxes, it serves just to exemplify just how much we're being lied to about this.
Well, let's get into that a little bit.
Your book is called Inconvenient Facts, the Science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know.
Let's take the biggest idea.
Is climate change catastrophic?
Are we facing some kind of catastrophic climate change?
Oh, absolutely not.
If you would look at the back of my SUV, I've got a big bumper sticker that says iHeart CO2.
Whenever I travel, I've got a button that says iHeart CO2.
And I give out people love my stickers.
I'm out of my bumper stickers now.
I'll send you one.
It's what we see as an earth that's prospering, thriving, and greening, and humanity is prospering because of it.
If we look in historical rearview mirror, just about everything we look at is just getting better and better and better and better every year.
Cleaner air, cleaner water, longer lifespans, more food.
And it's what they're, I look behind me in history, and we're just prospering and thriving.
They look in the future and see nothing but doom, despair, and demise.
Well, we're seeing a lot of times I talk, I talk about rising temperatures, how rising temperatures and increasing CO2 are benefiting the earth and humanity.
The big thing, again, that they point to are forest fires.
And I've exposed recently some other really big lies.
Probably the one I'm not going to say proud of because it's a scientific malfeasance that I exposed, but it was recently the UN issued a report on mass extinctions.
They said that there would be 1 million species going extinct in the next several decades.
Well, for that to occur, we would need to have 25,000 to 30,000 species going extinct each year.
I went back and looked at the exact same data set that the UN used.
It's called the Red List.
It's the closest thing we have to extinction database.
And I looked at it on a decade-by-decade process where they looked at it on a century date.
And I found that rather than extinctions increasing, extinctions have been in a severe and significant decline since the early 20th century.
And get this.
So recall I said we need 25,000 to 30,000 extinctions per year to get to that 1 million.
Well, the average, I'm not going to make you guess.
The average over the last 40 years was two, not 2,000, not 200, two extinctions of species per year.
And they're telling us, well, yeah, but we're going to get 30,000 pretty soon.
No, we're not.
We're seeing fewer and fewer.
And that's just one example.
Why is this happening?
I mean, a guy like Al Gore may have an interest in this.
And I'm sure there are people.
Michael Mann just had his lawsuit thrown out.
He's the guy who did the hockey stick, which he can't defend.
But some of these guys have got to be honest scientists, right?
I mean, why is this such a universal idea that we're in such desperate trouble?
Yeah, that's a darn good question.
I think once you're invested in this, Michael Mann's got his acolytes that have come after him.
He's used and abused the scientific process.
Mark Stein's got a great book that he wrote.
He's also being sued by Michael Mann.
He showed us exactly what you do when Michael Mann sues you.
He wrote a new book and he called it a disgrace to the profession.
You've probably seen it.
And he didn't say anything.
He just quoted 100 scientists saying really bad things about Dr. Michael Mann and his processes.
And my next book will be diving deeply into the malfeasance that we've seen, starting with Dr. Michael Mann.
But what about these other guys?
I mean, Bjorn Lumberg, who's a skeptical environmentalist and doesn't panic and anything, but he says a lot of these guys are honest people and he trusts them that if they say there is a problem, there's a problem, but you don't seem to feel that way at all.
No, no.
Yeah, there are some that there's good science being done, but they take this and they take the climate models that over predict warming and they take the most extreme of the climate models to predict these.
Frankly, we need to separate rank speculation that's based on failed climate models from what's actually happening in the world.
I live in the real world and what I do in my presentations in my book, I look at, okay, they say these bad things are going to happen.
Let's take a look and see what's actually happening.
So I go, you go and you look at droughts.
They're in decline.
You look at fires.
They're in significant decline.
These things that they're predicted just aren't happening.
Yes, sea level's rising about the same rate as it has for the last 150 years.
There's nothing alarming about that.
And it's these, they get themselves into trouble when they shoot themselves in the foot and expose themselves when they do things like this.
Amazon and the fires.
The national climate assessment that was published in November featured forest fires as their main climate catastrophe of the year with fires on the front, fires on the rear, and stated flatly that fires are increasing.
If you look at fires, there have been in significant decline globally in North America and even in California, get this.
People watching this are going to go, what?
But fires in California, according to Cal Fire, have declined nearly 50% in the last 30 years.
They've declined the number.
Now, the area burned has increased.
The area burned, which means, but that's a forest management problem.
That's not a global warming-related issue.
The Sierra Nevada Conservancy tells us there are five to six times too many trees per acre in the Sierra Nevadas.
Well, that's just when you do have a fire, that means there's more fuel.
And think about it, too.
The second largest decrease of soil moisture is the water that's pulled out by each plant.
So now you've got five or six times too many trees all competing for that same scarce soil moisture.
So it's exacerbating the aridity.
We've stopped logging in the U.S. Forest Service area.
So it used to be if a fire started, man, they could get right to it.
They could take the logging trails, logging roads, and get there.
There's no way in.
They're all grown up now.
I have to stop you here.
I'm out of time.
There's a lot I want to ask you.
So I hope you'll come back and talk again.
Gregory Wrightstone, the author of Inconvenient Facts, the Science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know.
Thank you very much.
I hope you'll come back and talk again.
Thank you.
Thanks.
All right, I got a wind-up final reflection.
I'm sure you've heard about this poll now, the Morning Consult's poll about understanding Gen Z, and it has all this kind of disturbing ideas that spirituality and religion is less important to Generation Z. Gen Z is, I guess, the mid-1990s.
So these are people who are like up to about 25, I guess.
They want to be famous.
They're less likely to care about country, to be patriotic, to have religion.
They're less likely to want family, to have children.
And, you know, I read these things, and I really don't get upset about them.
They just, most of them, what they are telling you is that young people are foolish.
That is, being a young person and being foolish are almost the same thing.
There's only one way that I worry about the fact that young people are foolish, and that is that young women should have babies.
Women should have babies young and stay home and take care of the babies.
Then later, when the babies are grown, they should start to get into their profession and have that second part of life.
They should do it differently than men do it because young women should have babies.
That's because that is built into the system.
That's the only thing.
I was reading The Federalist, which I really enjoy.
And one of their assistant editors, Kylie Zembel, Z-E-M-P-L, wrote a story called Why Idolizing Marriage and Motherhood Isn't Godly.
And she talks about a project she was doing where she was researching transgenderism.
And she gave a speech about this.
And at the end, she got a note from someone who said, may you know the Lord's blessing, who liked her presentation.
May you know the Lord's blessing.
Maybe the Lord would have you serve in your city council or school board or as a representative of our state, or maybe even the higher calling of godly wife and mother.
And she felt a little bit annoyed by this.
She said his insinuation or rather outright declaration that public service is an inferior vocation to that of mom.
It wasn't personal.
He didn't offend me, but it troubled me that a person could make a definitive value judgment that a life of singleness or childlessness were necessarily less noble than one of married and parental bliss.
She says, I'm tired of hearing this.
Guess what?
He's right.
He's not right for every single person.
There are always exceptions.
You may be an exception.
Have babies.
I'm Telling You00:02:14
I'm telling you.
I am telling you what the world needs.
You know, being a mother is the only job that someone else can't do.
It's the only job that someone else can't do.
Being a child's mother is the only time where you are unique.
A CEO of a company could be a good CEO.
There are other good CEOs.
There's only one mom.
There's only one person who can be mom.
That's you.
It is the most important thing you can do.
It is what the world needs.
It needs babies.
It needs good babies, well-cared for babies.
That's the only reason I worried about that Gen Z poll, that people put family less.
They'll find that there's a God because there is a God.
They'll find that the country matters because they'll see what other countries are like.
They will grow older.
They will get wiser.
They will not be foolish 20-year-olds forever.
But the one thing that it'll be too late for is babies.
Have them young and take care of them.
All right, that's it.
We've got the mailbag tomorrow.
Get your letters in.
Now, you have to subscribe to be there, but it's worth it.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
And if you want to help spread the word, give us a five-star review and also tell your friends to subscribe too.
We're available on Apple podcasts on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Kormina.
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.
Journalists have come out against journalism and the reporters at the New York Times are furious that someone is reporting on the New York Times.
We will examine why the left can give it, but they can't take it.
Then, young Americans are abandoning their values, and Dave Chappelle infuriates the PC left in his new Netflix special.