Ep. 761 – Old Democrats Yell at Clouds skewers the Times for weaponizing headlines to demonize Trump, while Andrew Clavin accuses the left of hyping climate disasters like Dorian to push power grabs—mocking Biden’s "sunshine genocide" claims and Harris’ EPA overreach. Dr. Hoogberg slams "Medicare for all," warning of UK-style rationing, and pushes free-market fixes like shorter drug patents. The show pivots to Mindhunter, critiquing how identity politics warps justice, then ridicules CNN’s marathon climate town hall as ironic fuel for global warming. A scathing takedown of performative outrage and bureaucratic overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has announced a new editorial policy designed to deal with the, quote, special problems and challenges of covering Donald Trump when we hate him so much he makes our scalps break out in hives, unquote.
Times editor-in-chief Blithering Prevarication III said he designed the new policy in response to reader insights and staff suggestions in the hopes that this would convince the readers and staff to return their hostages unharmed.
Mr. Third made the announcement at a hastily called town hall staff meeting when he placed the policy inside a soda bottle full of gasoline, set it on fire, and then hurled it into the midst of swirling tear gas, then ran for his life.
According to Mr. Third, the new policy will address the fact that covering the news in the Trump era presents a dilemma because, quote, on the one hand, we have a journalistic responsibility to try to get at the truth of every story, while on the other hand, there's absolutely no possibility that we're going to do anything like that, unquote.
Under the new policy, Mr. Third says every headline, every story, even some of the former paper's punctuation will be designed to, quote, convey just how very, very much everyone who works here wants to see this president crushed, preferably under a press machine like the metal cyborg skeleton at the end of Terminator, but politically if that's the best we can do, unquote.
For instance, the paper will now run such news headlines as, Hurricane Hits Coast, but it's Trump who blows.
Experts say soaring Trump economy will soon crash, killing thousands.
And Mad Trump-like gunman goes on Trump-like rampage, firing Trump-like gun inspired by Trump.
Editorial writers will be allowed more latitude to use headlines such as Die Monster Die and Oh, How I Hate, Hate, Hate Him, after first clearing those headlines with club-wielding readers.
With the new guidelines, Mr. Third said the ex-newspaper should be able to move beyond out-of-date journalistic practices like integrity.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity-doo.
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!
Hey, you know what word I hate?
I hate the word values.
I hate the way we use and confuse that word in any case.
You hear people talk about American values or Christian values as if these were just things we happen to value because of where we come from or what religion we are.
Or you hear someone say, as someone who opposes abortion, I value the life of unborn children.
Guess what?
You don't have a right not to value the life of unborn children.
You didn't give those lives their value.
Their value is inherent in their lives, just as the value of your life is inherent in yours.
What you're really trying to say is killing the child is immoral because it has value.
Value in the sense we use it is something humans give to things, and it's variable.
A stock's value goes up and down according to what we'll pay for it.
Having a neat desk is something some people value and others don't care about.
We confuse that use with the moral meaning of the word where something has value, has inherent value, like human life or human freedom.
Therefore, we have a moral responsibility to preserve it.
That's a different use of the word.
And here's why I bring this up.
When Donald Trump was elected, the left told us that with Trump, we had entered a post-fact world.
The media almost immediately began using the term lie.
Trump lied to characterize the president's exaggerations, his careless talk, and his Carney Barker self-promotion.
Trump co-opted their phrase fake news, but it was the left that came up with fake news first.
That was their attempt to characterize and demonize and censor the conservative commentary, which the left felt had helped snatch their victory from their grasping, greedy little hands.
Well, the left is right about this.
Facts are thin on the ground right now.
Donald Trump is part of that.
But he's only a small part.
When it comes to lying, our president is a rank amateur next to the Democrats and their media.
They're the ones who have peddled fact-free narratives about the prevalence of racism in America, about the causes of violence involving guns, and about the nature of climate change and what, if anything, we can do about it.
And as I've said repeatedly this week, all that is part of a greater narrative designed to convince us to give up our individual and representative power into their above-mentioned grasping, greedy little hands.
So yes, because the left owns so much of this country's communication real estate, and because they're selling narratives instead of truth, the facts are harder and harder to come by, and the facts do matter.
But the facts only matter within a moral context.
And I believe every fact and every story we tell about that fact must be told in the moral context of freedom.
Preserving freedom is not a value.
It's a moral imperative based on the fact that freedom has value.
God tells us it has value by giving us free will.
By allowing us to choose evil, he's telling us that our freedom is more important even than good for the simple reason that you can't actually be good unless you're free to choose good.
Freedom is God's plan for human life.
It should not be sacrificed to any make-believe emergency, any narrative, any high-sounding, sweeping solution to the world's problems.
Freedom comes first because it is the most valuable thing we have, whether we value it or not.
I'll talk about this crazy CNN, I don't know what do they call it, a town hall.
It was just a bloviating disaster of incredible proportions, but very, very revealing.
The Democrats can't talk without revealing themselves, and they did reveal themselves, and I'll talk about that.
Climate Change and Hurricanes00:15:14
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So you remember that Simpsons headline?
I always love this headline.
Old man yells at cloud, and it just has a picture of the old man and the services yelling at the cloud, shaking his fist.
That to me is the Democrats.
That's the Democrats.
They are yelling at the clouds.
And, you know, obviously there's this terrible storm, Dorian.
And Dorian is now, I think it's moving over the Carolinas.
It's been degraded to a category two as I'm speaking, went up to a category three.
But when it hit the Bahamas, it eliminated whole parts of the Bahamas.
That was a genuine catastrophe.
Last I heard, the death toll was around seven, I think, but it's obviously unfortunately going to go up.
So we talk about this fact that it's a fact-free world.
And what are they, it's always Donald Trump's fault.
So Donald Trump at some point said that he thought the storm was going to hit Alabama.
And all the weather people said, no, no, no, this is not.
The National Weather Service said Alabama is not going to see any impact from Dorian.
And it's important because when the president says something, people pack up and leave.
They evacuate and all this stuff.
So it matters.
And if he was wrong, he shouldn't have said it.
If he's wrong, he should have admitted it.
Then he was talking in front of a weather map and somebody had drawn on the weather map movement that made it look like the storm was going to hit Alabama.
And Trump is still saying he was right about this, that there was a point when they said it was going to hit Alabama.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Who cares?
Who cares?
And this is what I mean.
When they talk about a fact-free world, they're always going after Trump's gaffes and his, you know, he talks carelessly, and he does.
He talks carelessly.
And, you know, the way I hear him lie, he lies in this kind of harmless, exaggerating way and in this negotiating way.
But we've kind of factored in the way Trump talks.
Most of us, those of us who are paying attention, those of us who are not trying to destroy him in order to give power back to the Democrats, which is a small number of people in the media.
But let's compare that.
Let's compare that to the news media and to the Democrats when we're talking about the storm, right?
Does it hit Alabama?
Does it not hit Alabama?
Was it ever going to?
I don't know.
A lot of times Trump turns out to have been right about this.
I don't know what he saw, but let's talk about this.
The science on weather, rising temperatures, and temperatures, I think, have been rising somewhat.
The story on the question of whether that increases hurricanes is completely unknown.
Nobody knows.
There have not been any more hurricanes recently.
The question is, does it make them more powerful?
Does it make those hurricanes more powerful?
We don't know.
Even the UN, which has been pushing climate change like crazy, doesn't know whether hurricanes get more powerful, just in the same way that they don't know whether it makes fires worse.
What really happens, it seems like there are fewer forest fires, but they burn worse because of poor forest management.
That's what it seems like.
But there's a lot of science that's unsettled, this whole thing.
However, is that unsettled on CNN?
No, no, no, my friends.
On CNN, the science is done completely in the laboratories of their imagination, and they've got it all figured out.
This is what CNN is selling about Dorian.
This cut five.
We're seeing firsthand the effects of climate change as a powerful Atlantic hurricane is sitting right now off the coast of Florida.
It could make landfall tomorrow in South Carolina.
More extreme weather events like Hurricane Dorian that's churning toward the Carolinas right now.
Think bigger fires in the West or deadlier heat waves, supercharged storms like the one we've seen now, Hurricane Dorian, which is hovering off the coast of the Carolinas as I speak.
When you look at the severe weather, certainly we're seeing it with a hurricane now.
The top Democratic presidential candidates are all with us tonight on the heels of the deadly Hurricane Dorian, which is leaving neighborhoods underwater in the Bahamas, utter devastation.
It now heads north along the United States coast.
You know, the storm comes as we are facing a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.
You know, Hurricane Dorian is just one, right, one thing, right?
One sign of that dangerous world that scientists say we are entering if humans do not cut carbon pollution.
Flooded coastal cities, island nations underwater.
We're coming to you, of course, tonight, just as Hurricane Dorian, the strongest storm anywhere on the planet this year, has decimated parks of the Bahamas and is threatening the East Coast.
Talking about superstorms and mass extinction, worsening drought.
They got it all figured out on CNN.
They don't actually need scientists.
They just have little scientists in their brains who run around doing experiments in their imagination, getting the results that they want to get.
You could even hear the way Anderson Cooper was talking when he said the worst storm anywhere on the planet this year.
So it's a bad storm.
We've had bad storms before.
If my anecdotal memory is any use at all, when I was a kid, storms were much, much worse.
You know, we had these hurricanes.
I remember my backyard.
I lived out on Long Island.
I remember these storms that absolutely flooded our neighborhoods, flooded, and we were not that far.
We were fairly far inland, but we would just get absolutely flooded.
Guys and hip waiters coming down the street to make sure everybody was all right.
Boats being overturned.
Then they stopped for a while.
They seemed to get better, and now we're seeming to see some of these storms again.
But of course, it's the reporting.
You just heard, I mean, you heard that.
You heard that.
That is completely fact-free reporting.
That is fact-free reporting.
They do not have proof that Dorian has anything to do with climate change.
And they haven't proved that climate change is a result of human activity.
Look, the climate is changing.
The climate always changes.
Human activity does create heat.
I'm sure it does have an effect on the climate.
We just don't know if it's catastrophic.
When they call you a denier, I mean, when I talk about fact-free, when I talk about things that are fact-free, they call you a denier because that is a way of comparing people who disagree with the Democrat panic on this, the CNN panic, that complete dishonest, this completely dishonest reporting on CNN.
They're comparing you to Holocaust deniers.
The Holocaust, the most completely documented atrocity in human history.
Okay, I mean, the Nazis, say what you will about them, they kept good records.
They kept good records, and we have their testimony, and we have the testimony of people who were there, and we have movies, we have all this.
If you're denying the Holocaust, it's because you are an anti-Semite.
That's why people deny.
That's why people deny the Holocaust, or you're a nutty conspiracy theorist.
If you are denying that a computer model can predict the climate long into the future, you're simply being sensible and sane, right?
The climate is a vastly, vastly complex system that computers have not predicted very soundly in the past.
So we simply don't know what's going on.
Look, and the other thing is, even in the worst, even in the worst climate predictions, the cost is not that bad.
You know, the cost of climate change is not that bad.
But it is if you're listening to CNN.
So let's take a look.
Let us listen and take a look to some of the stuff that was said yesterday.
I should probably stop first and do my second ad.
Let's do that because then we can just talk about the rest.
But you do want to hear about Wesley Financial because I know a lot of people, I hear this again and again, that people bought a timeshare and it sounded great.
Not so great.
They were told it's a great investment.
They were told it's a legacy for the kids.
They were told, you know, you can stay there wherever you want in your timeshare and you can come whenever you want.
And none of that, it turns out, is true for a lot of people.
The ugly truth is with a timeshare, you can never tell how much it's really going to cost or when it's going to end.
And many owners find that they try to sell their timeshares online and they find out the hard way that it's not an investment that they can get a dollar for.
And if you can't get somebody to pay for it, it ain't an investment.
With those rising annual maintenance and assessment fees, buying a timeshare is like giving the timeshare company a blank check for life.
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You know, this is before the CNN town hall, but we should hear from Pete Buttigej.
I mean, Pete Budajej is telling you exactly exactly what the Democrats want to say.
There were floods and fires and storms before, but the severity and the frequency of these weather events is unquestionably accelerating.
And it is simply unacceptable that we're having a debate over whether to deal with climate change.
The only acceptable debate is how to deal with it.
That's the first thing I'm taking away.
So no debate, folks.
And everything he just said is untrue.
First of all, they weren't even able to measure hurricanes the same way we can measure them now.
So they don't have a lot of data.
Temperature, too.
They have not been able to measure temperature.
Global temperature.
A lot of these global temperature statistics are kind of meaningless.
They don't really have a good way of measuring global temperature.
And it's not the same as their way of measuring it now, which has gotten better.
So when he says there shouldn't be a debate, that's the point.
That is the point.
I keep telling you this, you know, it's about not stopping the debate.
It's always about making you, listen to the way they talk.
You're a denier.
You're a denier.
Denier.
Who was it?
Chuck Todd on NBC.
So we're not going to have deniers on the air anymore.
You're banned.
You're banned from expressing your opinion.
A lot of good scientists, a lot of important scientists say the whole thing is a hoax.
A lot of important scientists say that it's not as bad as they say it is.
And just the facts on the ground, the things that they're saying, the way they report climate change, brings the panic.
They want to bring the panic.
Again, the narrative is always about power.
The narrative is always about transferring representative power and electoral power from you to unelected administrative agencies like the EPA.
That's the point.
That is the point what all these narratives are about, whether it's race, guns, it's always about taking power away from the individual and putting it not in a government that represents the individual, the government of your state, the government of the Congress that we elected, but into these administrative agencies over which you have no power and which can make law and also enforce the law and also try you for breaking the law.
So that's the thing that they're trying to move toward because they've got this.
They know what's supposed to be done.
So now let's take a look at some of the nuttiness they're talking about.
And if you want nuttiness, the guy to turn to, always Joe Biden.
I mean, Joe Biden was talking on this CNN thing was unbelievable.
It causes everything.
It's cut six.
And so where are we?
Look what happened in Darfur.
What's Darfur all about?
Darfur is all about the fact that the sub-Saharan desert, because of the change in climate, no longer had enough ariable land.
Look what's happened in Indonesia.
They're talking about moving their capital because it's going to sink.
What happens if you get 10, 12, 13, 15, 100 million people on the move?
That causes wars.
And so it's well beyond whether or not it affects me personally, which it does, and it did my family and still does, just like your families.
This is personal.
Every one of you probably have a story that can talk about what's happened to something you care greatly about, whether it's a species or your son or daughter coming down with cancer because of it.
What?
I'm sorry.
I mean, Darfur was a terrible, terrible tragedy.
It was a racial, it was a genocide.
It was a genocidal war.
And, you know, that was to blame on sunshine.
It was just too much sunshine.
It caused people to commit genocide.
We never had genocide before.
Oh, genocide is new.
Cancer, cancer is now climate change related.
And then his eye exploded, by the way, which really kind of stole the whole show.
In the middle of this thing, I guess a blood vessel in his eye broke and it was like his eyes filled up with blood.
I'm telling you, Joe Biden is not going anywhere.
It's like at some point people are just going to pull the plug on this campaign.
Recently, he started saying, you know, his campaign started saying, we don't have to win Iowa.
If he doesn't win Iowa, that's the end of his campaign.
The reason is his whole campaign is he's electable.
He's the electable guy.
And he keeps pushing himself to the left and becoming less electable.
So it doesn't really matter.
Right now, I'm guessing Elizabeth Warren, but if he loses Iowa, that pulls out the electable narrative.
And I believe he'll plummet after that.
I do not believe his poll numbers will survive a loss in Iowa.
These guys always think they're going to come back later, but I don't know.
Obviously, just guessing, but that's the way it looks to me.
The most revealing thing anybody said came from Bernie Sanders.
And the reason that Bernie Sanders says the most revealing things is because Bernie Sanders is a true believer.
I mean, Bernie Sanders is the one guy who's saying something that he has believed all his life, which was the Soviet Union would have worked if we had just turned, flicked the right switch.
I mean, the guy is a communist.
He is not a socialist.
This whole thing about Democrat socialists, you know, who was it, Erdogan, I think, in Turkey, who said that democracy is like a streetcar.
You get off when you reach your destination.
That's the kind of Democrat socialists are.
Once they get what they want, believe me, democracy will be over.
Electoral college will stack the Supreme Court.
They don't want democracy now.
They don't believe in your power now.
How are they going to believe it once they get their hands on the levers of creativity, on the levers of commerce, on the levers of finance?
How do you think they're going to give it back?
They won't even let England have its government back.
What makes you think they're going to give you your power back once they get it?
His comment on climate change to me, he was asked a question about overpopulation.
And to me, this is the entire Democrat, the entire Democrat philosophy laid bare.
Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years.
The planet cannot sustain this growth.
I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it's crucial to face.
Green New Deal Nonsense00:15:41
Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact.
Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?
Well, I think the answer is yes.
And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions.
And the Mexico City Agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control, to me is totally absurd.
So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, something I very, very strongly support.
So basically, kill your children because the world is coming to an end.
These are the progressives.
These are the progressives.
The progressives are telling you that human business, human modernity, human progress is destroying the world.
That's the catastrophe.
And they talk about this Green New Deal.
Well, I'll get to the Green New Deal in a minute.
And we have too many humans.
You know, the only thing that matters about the Earth is humans.
The only thing that matters about the Earth is humans.
You know, people always, I had a guy once say to me in a gym, he said, I think the beauty of a leopard is more important than a human being.
And I said, only a human being knows that a leopard is beautiful.
Only a human being knows that that's a word that only human beings and God understand.
There is no beauty of a leopard without human beings.
The only interesting thing about this planet is that we are here.
Our minds, our imaginations, our perceptions, that's it.
That's it.
So if you have a philosophy in which human beings are the problem, you have no problem.
That's not a problem.
Human beings are the answer.
Human beings are the purpose of everything you do.
And human freedom is the purpose of everything you do.
And that's why anything these guys say, any words that come out of their mouth, should always be about freedom.
We should always answer it with freedom.
I used to kid around when I would see my kids.
They had a game they would play when they would look at fortune cookies.
They would add in bed to any fortune that they got.
It was supposed to be, you know, kids.
They were supposed to be clever.
It would say, you know, you're going to be very lucky.
And they would say in bed, and then everybody would giggle.
I feel we should play that same game with their solutions and keep our freedom.
How do we preserve the environment and keep our freedom?
How do we make race relations better and keep our freedom?
How do we cause less violence to happen and keep our freedom?
Because all of those things would get rid of every Democrat plan, every Democrat plan.
We have to have guns to defend our freedom.
We don't need to turn against one another and turn to the government to protect us from one another because of race.
We just don't have to.
That's not what the facts tell us.
And with this, most importantly, really, we cannot solve climate change in any of the ways they're talking about.
And the proof of it, Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris was asked by a clearly concerned guy, I know because he was wearing a green t-shirt.
He was asked, he said, a lot of the people who work in the energy sector voted for Donald Trump.
How are you going to convince them that you're not going to destroy their jobs?
Remember Hillary Clinton went into coal country and said, I'm going to destroy the coal industry?
So this guy asked, how are you going to make sure that you can work across the aisle to ensure that these people still have jobs?
Listen really carefully to Kamala Harris's answer.
How will you work across the aisle to support all workers and build trust with Republican constituents dependent on a fossil fuel economy?
Yeah, I mean, here's the thing, Michael.
I think that, first of all, let me just tell you, I think about this issue through the lens of my baby nieces who are one and a half and three years old.
And when I look at those babies and I think about what the world will be like in 20 years if we don't act, I'm really afraid.
And as it relates to those Republicans in Congress, where I've now been for two and a half years, every one of those members needs to look at the babies, the grandbabies in their life, and then look in the mirror and ask themselves, why have they failed to act?
Because on the issue of this climate crisis, I'm going to tell you, I strongly believe this is a fight against powerful interests.
And leaders need to lead.
So lead, follow, or get out the way.
If they fail to act as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal.
So you're listening carefully.
And if you work in the oil industry or in the energy industry, did you hear where she preserved your job?
Did she hear where she even reached across the aisle?
She's going to get rid of the filibuster, which I think they should do now because it no longer does what they're supposed to do, but she'll get rid of the filibuster to make sure that they have enough votes to put the Green New Deal in.
Now, the Green New Deal is a perfect example of what I've been talking about all week, okay?
When you look at the Green New Deal, it's nonsense, right?
It's babbling nonsense.
It's cows passing gas and ending plane travel and all this stuff.
It's kind of like this dreamy thing.
And they all say the same thing.
They all say, well, it's an ideal.
It's an idea.
It's a dream.
It's supposed to be a law.
In the old days, not that long ago, legislators had to be policy experts.
They had to know, or their interns and their researchers had to teach them about policy.
They had to understand what could be done, what it would cost, how it would affect the people constitutionally, how it would affect their freedom.
Okay, they had to know that because the law had to be specific enough to tell people what they were going to do.
It had to say, now you're going to have to do this, this, and this, so that you could go to court and say, hey, that violates my constitutional rights.
They don't have to do that anymore.
Why?
Because all they do is they say to some agency, clean the air, go, go forth and clean the air.
And then the EPA comes in and says, you can't flush your toilet anymore.
And people go nuts and they say, well, it's the EPA's fault.
We didn't.
That's not what we, you know, that's not us.
That's not us.
Don't throw us out of office.
That's the EPA.
Ooh, the Republicans will say, ooh, that EPA, it's going way too far, way too far.
But look at the laws they pass or don't pass, right?
They don't pass laws that tell people what to do.
And they say to the court, and the courts have said, well, the EPA, no, they are the ones.
They're the experts.
We defer to the EPA.
Well, nonsense.
Nonsense.
At what point in that process do you have any power?
None.
That's what the Green New Deal is about.
The Green New Deal is an absolute blithering nonsense that is meant to give absolute power to administrative agencies.
And I know this is a little wonky, but it's where your freedom goes.
The system is simple.
The original system is simple.
You elect somebody to represent you in Congress.
He represents you by passing laws that represent what you want, that do what you want.
That system has been completely disappeared.
It has been disappeared by shifting and delegating the power that we delegated to them to these agencies.
That's what we're trying to do.
That is what Donald Trump, in his inarticulate and sometimes bloviating way, is an expression of.
It's an expression of the fact that we don't feel like we are governing ourselves anymore.
That's why he's there.
And believe me, for all his flaws, for all Donald Trump's flaws, the danger is not from him.
He is cutting back on regulation, but he's not cutting back on the administrative state.
He should be shutting some of these agencies down.
And he should be working when he had the majority in both houses.
He should have been working on laws.
He said, no, you have to pass laws.
But the thing is, the legislators don't want these laws in the same way that Parliament doesn't want its power back from the EU.
Parliament is stopping Boris Johnson from leaving the EU because they don't want to be responsible for those laws because then they're responsible to you.
If they can just say, oh, it's the EU.
You know, we didn't want it like that, but the EU passed this regulation, then they can stay in office forever.
This is what it's all about.
This is where the power all is.
It's not about whether Donald Trump says stupid stuff.
It's not about the fact that he's rude and belligerent.
It's not about any of that.
It's about where power is located.
It's supposed to be located with you and with your family and with your town and with your area and with your state.
Okay?
And then, yes, there is supposed to be some powers that link us all together in the federal government.
But those powers have been growing and growing and growing until finally we have a president from Chicago who goes to Washington and tells people in Arkansas who should use the bathrooms in their elementary schools.
That's not the way it's supposed to be.
That's not the way the government was shaped.
And so they constantly have to have you in a panic about the clouds.
There's too many clouds up there, folks.
There's too many clouds.
And you are, look, look in the mirror.
Those are your children.
Oh my gosh, those are your children.
Look, my eyes are filling up with tears.
Look at the clouds, children, eyes, tears.
Give away your power.
That's all it's about.
And that's what Donald Trump, that's the meaning of Donald Trump.
That's why I don't like pick on him all the time.
That's why I don't pick on every little thing he says, even though he sometimes annoys me, because I believe the power should be with you as deplorable as you are.
And believe me, if you're listening to the show, you're deplorable.
All right.
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Dr. David Hoagberg is a former senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
He's author of Medicare's Victims, How the U.S. Government's Largest Healthcare Program Programs Harms Patients and Impairs Physicians.
Dr. Hoagberg, are you there?
I am, and feel free to call me David.
All right, David, thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
You're welcome.
So all I've been hearing in this campaign season is that we need Medicare for all.
And I'm guessing.
I'm just guessing off the top of my head that you don't think that's such a great idea.
It's a terrible idea.
You got to understand that anytime, any sort of national healthcare system that is basically controlled by politicians is going to serve the interests of politicians.
And ultimately, what that means is that people without political power, those that, for example, don't amount to much on Election Day or can't protest, organize, and so forth, all the things that can affect change in a democracy, they lose out.
And you see this very seriously in systems like Britain or Canada that have single-payer systems.
The people that suffer the most often tend to be the sickest people.
People that need heart surgery, cancer treatment, hip and knee replacement, they often wait months, sometimes years for surgery.
Why do politicians allow that?
Well, because they feel no pressure from those folks to change the system.
Any system has to allocate its resources, and that is a way of allocating resources in a healthcare system that does not blow back on politicians.
Why is that?
Well, the number of people who get sick in any given year is relatively small, not enough to amount to much at the ballot box.
And, you know, they're seriously sick.
They've got a hundred things on their mind that they're dealing with.
Getting involved in politics, organizing, protesting is not going to be on that list.
And so, if here in the U.S., we switch over to a system of Medicare for all, you will over time eventually see that kind of resource allocation, that kind of, I'm sorry, what is the word I'm looking for here?
You're going to see those kinds of waiting lists and so forth, that kind of rationing word I'm looking for.
You'll see that kind of rationing develop here in the U.S.
So, you know, when it comes to health care, you want the two main people who should have power are the patient and the healthcare provider, you know, usually the doctor.
You don't want to hand your health power over your health care to politicians because they have their own interests, and oftentimes their interests are not going to coincide with what your interests are.
So, what do you say then to the people?
Obviously, the argument is without the government, healthcare is simply too expensive.
And the people who are, let's say, lower middle class can't afford the kinds of treatment that they need.
What do you say to that?
I would say nonsense.
I mean, a free market finds ways to bring expensive things and lower the cost to people.
I mean, at one point, automobiles were beyond the means of everybody except the very rich.
Now, even the very poor can afford an automobile.
Our health care system would work the same way if we started removing all the enormous amount of government regulations and laws and so forth that govern the healthcare system.
And in fact, lead to how expensive it often is.
If we were to let the market work properly, if we were to have a free market in healthcare, you would see more and more of the expensive treatments, you know, their costs would go down.
It would be easier for people to afford them, even if they were to pay for them out of pocket.
And it would ultimately make insurance more affordable as well.
So, this notion that government needs to get involved to make the cost lower, I'm hard-pressed to find any to think of any example in which the government getting involved has ever made the cost lower.
It's almost, I mean, I'm sure there's got to be one out there.
I mean, the law of average is being what it is, but it's rare, and it's not going to, and it's certainly not going to work in a system that is as immensely complex as our healthcare system.
So, people say, you know, if you get if you get sick in this country, you can always go to the ER and the ER will not turn you away.
And we're all paying for that anyway.
So, why shouldn't we all pay for the same for the whole system?
Yeah.
Well, have you ever gone to an ER on like a busy weekday or weekend?
I mean, is that really what we want our health care system to look like?
I mean, usually the ERs are incredibly crowded.
It takes you often, you know, unless you're absolutely dying, it takes you forever to get treated.
It's sort of a microcosm of what you see with major medical treatment in places like the UK and Canada.
Long, long waits for treatment.
And that is sort of a microcosm of what you will get when sort of everybody has to pay for the health care system via our taxes and the government politicians have inordinate control over it.
Can you explain why drugs in this country are so expensive compared to other countries and whether or not that has to do with too much government or too little?
Oh, well, number one, I mean, drugs are cheaper in other countries because they have most other countries impose price controls on drugs, but that has a big impact in that most other countries don't have, don't do a lot of research and design into drugs.
Ways to Shorten Drug Costs00:04:49
Most new drugs are developed here in the U.S. where you pay the cost not just for the drug, but for the distribution, but for research and design as well.
Other countries, they tend to set the price just to cover the distribution and the production.
But there is other reasons.
I mean, we have a very long process with regard to the FDA.
We also have a patent system that allows drug companies to keep a drug away from generics and decreases competition.
Now, don't get me wrong, drug companies need to have some patent protection.
I mean, you create a product, you should be able to benefit from the creation of that for a while before people are able to copy it with generics.
That said, what you should do is look at the FDA approval process, find ways to shorten that, and then find ways to shorten and then maybe perhaps shorten the patent length for a commensurate amount.
That would go a long way to driving down drug costs in the U.S. As healthcare gets better, as they develop new techniques and new machines and all this, is it possible that the best cures are going to be so increasingly expensive that they'll only be available to the very rich?
I mean, I suppose that's the kind of nightmare scenario that people who want government health care are always proposing to us.
I mean, take any treatment that we have today that you consider commonplace, that at one point was, again, primarily the purview of the wealthy.
I mean, markets drive down the price of things over time.
And, you know, there isn't a single, I mean, the computers that you and I are using now.
I mean, you and I, no disrespect, but I assume that you're old enough, I know I'm old enough to remember when, you know, buying a personal computer was $2,000 and it did maybe one one-hundredth of what these computers do today.
You know, the price has gone down, the quality has gone up.
Why?
Because computers are a relatively unregulated market.
They're relatively unfettered by government.
Our healthcare system would look a lot more like that if we were to make it more unfettered.
Okay, so President Trump gets re-elected, your phone rings, and it's the Donald and he says, and he says, what do I do?
What would I present to Congress?
What would you say?
I would say start with something that's free market, but is relatively modest in scope.
Because that's what the left has done with the healthcare system over time.
The big ticket items like the passage of Medicare in 65 or the more recent passage of Obamacare, those are rare.
And those are hard to pass because they're so big.
They affect so many segments of society.
And they're an easy political target because of that.
What the left has mostly done over time is past maybe small, medium-sized things.
And over time, has just, you know, over decades really expanded government scope over healthcare.
What I would do is something more modest and something that's very hard to, you know, which would make it harder for opponents to attack.
What I would do is start with something like targeting small businesses, which are having a harder and harder time affording health insurance.
Allow them to fund large health savings accounts, like $7,000, $8,000 per individual, for their employees, because small businesses may not be able to afford health insurance, but they could certainly afford, many of them afford to put a couple thousand dollars in those large health savings accounts.
Let individuals top them off if they want.
You can use a large health savings account to purchase insurance, buy health care directly, and then let individuals take that, if they work for a small business, get that large health savings account, and then they move to any other business, a large business or on their own, private individual contractor or whatever.
Let them keep that and let a big business fund it once they have it.
What that would do is, first of all, you're saying, you know, I'm helping small businesses help their employees with health care costs.
So it's targeted.
Second, you're kind of slipping the nose of the free market camel there under the tent.
Big businesses are going to start looking at that and go and say, you know, that's a good system.
Why can't we have that as well?
And individual contractors or individuals saying, well, small business, why have that?
Why can't I have that as well?
Something more modest, but something that starts moving us along the road to greater healthcare freedom.
Wow, those are really good specific suggestions.
I hope they do call you next administration.
Dr. David Hoogberg, author of Medicare's Victims.
Brave Lesbian Relationships00:04:47
Thank you very much for coming on.
That was really interesting.
Thanks a lot.
Well, thank you, and feel free to have me back.
I would have you back.
I will.
Thanks.
All right.
Take care.
All right.
A final reflection before the Clavenless weekend comes upon us.
I just want to talk about Mindhunter, the second season of Mindhunter, which I finished.
Full disclosure that it's based on a book by my cousin, my close cousin, Mark Allshaker, which he wrote with John Douglas, who was an actual FBI profiler.
But basically, I am related to all content creators everywhere.
All content somehow is filters back to me in some way.
So it's Mark.
This way it's through Mark.
But anyway, this is a terrific series.
It's a really good series about the development of profiling, but also about what it does to you to try to understand the minds of serial killers.
And Douglas is the guy, I believe, that they based one of the characters in the Hannibal Lecter series on, the guy who first goes up against Hannibal Lecter in, I think it was called Manhunter or Red Dragon was the name of the book.
But anyway, I think those are based on this.
And that's the whole idea.
What does it do to you to try to identify with these guys and try to get into their heads?
And it's really interesting.
But this one was about the killings in Atlanta in the 80s.
By the way, there's one scene where they're sitting in a doctor's office and they're reading a Saturday review that happened to have a book review by me in it.
So I thought like, gee, I'm actually a star of this show because it goes all the way back to the 80s.
So this is in the 80s, and it's Atlanta, the child killings, over 20 little boys, little boys who were black were killed.
And of course, it became a big racial question.
Why weren't they doing this?
Why wasn't anybody doing about it?
What I thought the show captured really well was the way identity politics, and it was not political.
It was just observing things.
It was the way identity politics distorts everybody's ideas and the way race and racial separation distorts everybody as ideas.
The black people of Atlanta in the story are angry, and they deserve to, and they're rightfully angry.
And they feel like this is the Klan, that's white people who come after black people.
And the profiler is saying, you know, the profile says that this guy is going to be a black guy.
And they're saying, well, that's because you're just looking for a black guy to put away.
And it really captures the way that this kind of identity politics, the separating us into identity politics, makes us fools.
It makes us fools.
It makes us stop turning to one another.
It's not that the racism isn't there.
It's not that there aren't people who care less about black children than they do about white children.
It's that when you get so angry, when you start to identify with your race instead of with your humanity, on both sides, on all sides, how the truth starts to slip away and how reality starts to slip away.
And some of that is also, and again, this is not a statement being made.
This is me reading this into it.
This is all me talking, something that I was thinking about as I watched the show because the show is very involving.
There's a lesbian relationship in it, and it's taking place in a time when this is less acceptable than it is today, when people are sort of offhandedly using what we would now consider slurs against lesbians and basically assuming that that's not going on or they would know about it.
And what's interesting is there's a woman in it who has left her husband and son in order to go live a lesbian life.
And they keep talking about how brave she is and how honest she is.
And I know people like that.
I know people who have broken up marriages in the name of their homosexuality.
I know people who have left their marriages in the name of the homosexuality and say it's brave and authentic.
And that to me also expresses the way that identity, when it's reduced to your sexuality or your color, as opposed to your moral standing, as opposed to your belief systems, really is degrading.
It's not brave to leave your child in order to live the sexual life you want.
It's no more brave when a lesbian or a gay person does it than it is when a man does it because he wants to sleep with younger women.
That's not brave.
That's not brave.
That's selfish.
That is selfish.
Once you create a life, you are responsible for that life.
You are responsible for that life.
And the fact that you have to suffer somewhat or give something up for that life, including other sexual partners or sexual partners who are in the gender that you want, that's not brave.
That's just pure selfishness.
And elevating identity to that degree over morality is self-destructive.
And the thing I thought the show was very honest about its depiction of it, it wasn't passing judgment, but just as a work of art.
I thought it was really honest in showing who this woman was in the end.
You know, I'm not talking about their values.
I'm simply talking about what the story told.
Anyway, I highly recommend it if you can take some of the, they don't show a lot of gore, which I really appreciate, but they talk about a lot of gore, and it is upsetting and it is difficult.
Daily Wire Insights00:01:48
But really good performances by the leads.
Everybody is really good in it.
And I just think it's a really entertaining show on Netflix, Mindhunter, and the second season, Mindhunter 2.
I got to end there.
Clavenless weekend.
Sorry.
I know it was a short week and it was hardly enough, hardly enough of me here for you to get all the clavy-y goodness you needed to survive the weekend ahead.
But let's face it, you were never going to survive it anyway.
But those of you who do, I'll be here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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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.
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