Mary Eberstadt and Andrew Clavin expose how leftist activists weaponize children—like Greta Thunberg—as "courageous spokespeople" for climate panic, framing exploitation as justified by the cause while dismissing trauma. Eberstadt ties this to the 1970s sexual revolution’s collapse of family structures, creating identity politics as a replacement for lost communal bonds, while Clavin calls climate fearmongering a socialist power grab, citing debunked 1960s–80s environmental prophecies. The episode argues leftist tactics prioritize ideological control over children’s well-being, exploiting vulnerability to undermine capitalism and traditional values. [Automatically generated summary]
It's called selling bad ideas through child abuse.
Left-wing activist Connie Hartless extolled the new strategy to a meeting of beneficiaries of left-wing policies who are living in tents under the Manhattan Bridge.
Ms. Hartless said, quote, I don't know why we didn't think of this before.
All these years, we've been trying to seize people's guns and take over the economy through spreading panic about violence and climate change among adults.
We missed the obvious flaw in that plan.
Adults have fully developed brains and the capacity to reason.
But children can be easily terrorized by our propaganda and then used as spokespeople to spread that terror to others, unquote.
When asked whether terrorizing teenagers into pushing gun and climate panic wasn't a form of child abuse, Ms. Hartless said, quote, what sort of evil right-winger would pick on these poor children when they're clearly being abused for political purposes?
Instead, we should be celebrating the courage of those children who have overcome the fact that they're being abused by climate change activists in order to become spokespeople for the climate change activists who are abusing them, unquote.
In a speech to the Organization of World Leaders Trying to Seize Economic Power by Spreading Climate Panic, or UN for short, Ms. Hartless said, quote, how dare we pull these children out of school to spread panic about climate change when they could be in school not studying because we've convinced them to be panicked about climate change, unquote.
As Ms. Hartless spoke, she proudly pointed to several climate change spokeschildren who were curled up in a corner, sucking their thumbs and rocking themselves compulsively.
Ms. Hartless also added her praise of traumatized children being used to spread panic about guns, saying, quote, if we don't abandon the Constitution to stop these young people from being abused, then we must go on abusing them, unquote.
Ms. Hartless's speech brought the UN audience to their feet, chanting, give us all the power or we'll continue to abuse your children.
It was a triumphant moment for child abuse.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hurrah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
I'll tell you, one of the things I like least about the current political moment is watching conservatives who disagree with one another attack each other's integrity.
This is a legitimately difficult moment for thinking conservatives.
Conservatism, as we knew it in the post-Reagan era, has collapsed.
It collapsed for good reasons.
It collapsed because it failed to stem the slow growth of the undemocratic administrative state.
It collapsed because it supported the overly ambitious Bush Freedom Agenda, which led us into unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
And it collapsed because it answered the anguish of unemployment and despair in the heartland with pompous bromides about the wonders of the global free markets that had destroyed their communities and lives.
Donald Trump is an effect of that collapse.
It's not its cause.
He's a huge American original with huge American flaws.
He's accomplished a great deal for our country, taken the brakes off our economy, restored integrity to our judiciary, begun a necessary reordering of international relations in a post-Cold War world, and taken on a corrupt anti-American culture led by a corrupt anti-American news media.
He's also a bullying loudmouth of questionable principles who doesn't always think before he speaks, all of which hurts both him and the country.
But I don't pick on every mistake Donald Trump makes.
I don't call balls and strikes from a neutral umpire-like position because I don't believe the two teams are fighting for the same goals.
I believe the Democrat team has become socialistic and anti-American.
They say that out loud themselves.
They tout socialism.
They say America was never great.
They oppose the First Amendment when they seek to ban, intimidate, and deplatform speech they disagree with.
They also oppose the Second Amendment, which is the only real guarantee of the first.
They are, as I've said before, enemies of our founding.
The other party, the Republicans led by Trump, seem to me a bunch of fractious clowns straggling in the generally right direction.
In other words, they seem like a typical American political party.
I don't question the integrity of never-Trumpers and Trump skeptics.
I really don't.
But I do think they're making a moral miscalculation, a mistake, not a sin.
I think their mistake is that they've lifted their own discomfort and uncertainty amidst the collapse of the conservative movement above the true purposes of our politics, which are the preservation of American freedoms and the happiness of the American people.
To allow the occasional unforced errors of our blowhard president to endanger those purposes is, in my humble opinion, to be played for a fool by our opponents.
After two and a half years of false accusations against this president, after what looks very much to me like a failed coup attempt by the Obama intelligence community, after a cover-up committed by the very news media whose job it is to expose cover-ups, I think that now every single charge against Trump and each consecutive impeachment hysteria should be laughed out of court until A, it's proven real, and B, it's shown to be worth handing our country over to the internal enemies of its first principles.
If Trump himself ever becomes a danger to those principles, and I mean an actual danger, not a rhetorical danger, I will turn and rip into him like a tiger.
But so far, it's not even close.
He hasn't endangered our principles, not even a little.
NetSuite: Growth and Control00:02:23
And until he does, my response to leftist charges against him is prove it, you un-American lowlives, or sit down, wallow in your own disgrace, and shut the hell up.
All right, that is my pleasant message to our leftist friends.
But a more pleasant message is about NetSuite.
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And the problem you have if you're growing your business, a problem that keeps you from knowing your numbers, is there's so many different business systems, and that's where you need NetSuite.
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That's netsuite.com slash clavin to download your free guide, 7 key strategies to grow your profits, netsuite.com slash clavin.
The first strategy you need is how to spell clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Will I ever get tired of that joke?
The mailbag is tomorrow.
Yay!
It's actually me screaming.
Why?
So how do you do the mailbag, you ask?
Because you've never been here before.
You have to subscribe.
So go to dailywire.com, subscribe.
It allows you $10 a month.
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Also, you get to be in the mailbag.
You get to the mailbag by going to pressing the podcast button, press the Andrew Clavin podcast, then there's a little mailbag symbol, and you press that.
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Will they change your life for the better?
Screams And Secrets00:10:53
You'll have to find out.
And you get that scream.
You will be screaming like that.
You'll say, all my problems are solved.
Whoa, yeah.
All right.
So I'm not going to spend maybe any time at all on this Ukraine garbage.
It's unfolding with the hysteria.
You know, we've seen all this before.
We've now seen it for two and a half years.
It's a smokestream for what's coming down the pike, the IG's investigation into how Obama, how or whether the Obama intelligence community tried to stop this presidency, tried to overthrow this presidency.
Everything they do from now on is a distraction, has to be assumed to be a distraction until we have pictures of Donald Trump chasing a naked little boy around the room.
I don't give a damn.
I swear, I swear, you know, I think this is just, I can't believe, I cannot believe that guys like Bill Kristol and Mitt Romney are just like, oh, well, they lied for two and a half years, but now this is important.
You know, it's like watching Goofy, you know?
I mean, it's, and again, I'm not attacking, I mean, Bill Kristol, I have serious questions about, but I'm not attacking the Never Trumpers.
I'm not attacking their integrity.
I know they're people of conscience.
I know we're all working through the kind of mess that comes in the collapse of the conservative movement.
And Donald Trump is a tough character to deal with because he's got all these flaws.
But come on.
You know, come on.
How many times are they going to do this?
And you're going to, oh, well, it was a lie before, Mickey, but this time I think it's really true.
Never mind.
Let's talk about this crazy climate crap instead, all right?
Because the UN, this has been going on now since Friday, right?
There were all these strikes.
They left the cities where these climate change people struck.
Just like with the old 1% movement, remember the, what was it called?
I can't remember.
Oh, the, ah, I can't remember.
It was during the Bush years when the left was going out and they were protesting Wall Street, Occupy, the Occupy movement.
They leave this litter behind.
They leave these tons of trash behind.
And these are the guys we're supposed to think care about the environment.
You know, this is a generation.
They replace their iPhone every 20 minutes because they've got to have those three cameras.
If you don't have those three cameras, you can only take one picture at a time.
You know, they change their clothes every 20 minutes.
Everything they buy is wrapped in a million pieces of plastic.
Everything they do is disposable.
And then they come out and say, oh, it's your fault.
It's your generation's fault.
In a pig's eye, in a pig's eye.
And they've now got this thing where they've got this poor girl, this Greta Thunberg, who, you know, I mean, she is, she's obviously, as her mother has said, she's suffering from Asperger's.
They are using her as a commentator.
They've got her, the stuff that's coming out of her mouth, it just shows you that this is a form of child abuse.
It's a form of child abuse because of the authority they are conferring on a little girl.
The little girl has every right to have her opinions and have her talks.
Why is a 16-year-old addressing the UN on a scientific subject, all right?
But it's not just her.
When I talk about child abuse, it goes way beyond just this girl because it's all the kids who are being taught this.
I remember when my kids were in school, I used to say to the school, you take them out on nature trips and all you tell them is about how, you know, oh, look, there's a sheep.
Sheep soon will be extinct.
You know, I mean, we used to go out and find colored leaves and say, look, it's autumn.
That's beautiful.
You know, you've got to teach kids to love nature before you teach them that it's going to be destroyed, which it's not.
So let's just start with her speech at the Climate Action Summit.
I think this is cut eight.
This is all wrong.
I shouldn't be up here.
I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
Yet, you all come to us young people for hope.
How dare you?
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.
And yet, I'm one of the lucky ones.
People are suffering.
People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.
And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you?
You know, I don't blame this child one bit, right?
I'm not going to pick on her at all because obviously, you know, this is the human shield strategy which they're using.
Just like the terrorists who put their children in front or put their missile launchers in a hospital so that when you hit them, you hit the hospital.
They put up a child and they, you know, she's obviously upset.
They've got her so panicked and so upset about this stuff.
They put her up.
And then if you attack her, it's like, how could you possibly attack this child?
Well, how'd you put her up in front of you, the guy selling this garbage in the first place?
And it's not just her.
If it were just her, that would be one thing.
It would still be wrong.
It would still be cruel.
But it's not just her.
It's all the children that they have now gotten terrorized.
I mean, here's a, let's put out the montage of all these kids talking about climate.
It starts with an older clip of Greta, but then it goes into all these other children speaking about climate.
But I don't want your hope.
I don't want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
We have been polluting the earth for years and we might actually die in a few years.
Our world is already in flames.
It's getting hotter.
We can't breathe.
We are here because our parents trashed the planet and it's up to our generation to save it.
Unlike so many people my age, I feel really visceral anxiety about climate change.
Call it Generation D, the last letter of the alphabet, because we are going to be the last generation to survive.
My conscience couldn't handle the idea of bringing someone into a dying world.
I'm angry because this planet is dying and the president of the biggest country in the world refuses to acknowledge that.
And I'm sick of the people that they want us.
I am here for the people who are suffering and dying because of our country's decision.
You know, children are self-dramatizing.
They're dramatic.
They believe the stuff they're told by their elders.
They believe what they hear in the news.
They haven't developed the critical faculty required.
And this is what they're teaching them.
It's not, again, not the children's fault.
It's the people behind them.
It's the people funding them.
It's the people allowing them to stand up with platforms of authority.
It's the news people.
Shame on them.
It's the news people taking them seriously and calling them the voice of the planet and the wave of the future and all this.
This is a truly, truly shameful moment for the left.
You know, Trump tweeted when he saw Greta Thunberg.
He tweets, he starts trolling her.
He says, she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.
So nice to see.
And she adopted that as her Twitter handle, a happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.
But who can look at her and think that that's true?
Who can look at her and think that that's true?
So now the left goes after Trump.
Oh my goodness, what an evil, evil man for making fun of this girl.
But that's the strategy.
That's the whole strategy.
And of course, on the right, people are saying, well, it's like the Covington high school kids.
You weren't kind to them.
You said we were going to punch them in the face.
You talked about how smug they looked.
You know, the news media didn't protect them in the least.
In fact, it launched after them.
And that does, that speaks to the hypocrisy of the news media, which is the left, and the left, which shelters in the news media.
It speaks to their hypocrisy, but it's an entirely different situation.
No right-winger took the Covington high school kids and made them authorities, you know?
In fact, in fact, when they took that kid, David Hogg, out of the school shooting and made him this authority, another kid who looks like he's been troubled by the way the left has treated him and by the brainwashing of the left.
I know the kid from the other side, Kyle Kashov.
I know him, and I wouldn't bring him on the show.
I mean, eventually when he's getting to the point where he's in his majority, I'll have him on the show.
But I wouldn't bring him on because I thought I'm not going to do what they're doing and fight back that way.
It's just, it's obscene.
You know, it's an obscene thing to do.
These kids suffered something.
They went through a traumatic experience.
You know, you don't use them for political purposes.
Just a little bit of decency, just a little bit of decency.
You know, I want to go back.
We played that montage of the kids.
I want to play one more that actually, she was in there for just a moment.
But here's one of the activists, the young people activists, who was out in Washington in front of the Capitol over the weekend.
I guess it was Friday at this protest, this strike.
And we are not here to talk about our sacrifices and their doom and gloom and non-existing.
We are here, two, three.
Is that what Anna?
I'm sorry.
You know, again, I'm not blaming her, but I mean, this is what she's been taught is heroic.
This is what she's been taught is dramatic.
This is what she's been taught is real and authentic and important.
And it's all nonsense, as we will look at in a minute.
You know, that this is what we have done to these children.
It's a crime.
It's a sin.
It's a sin.
And it is indicative of a movement on the left that deserves to be attacked every single day and undermined every single day because they have so much communicative power through Hollywood, through the news media, through the academy.
I'm not turning my attention for two minutes to their latest scandal about Trump because of this, because of the stuff they're doing.
Let's talk about Ring.
I love Ring because Ring helps put a ring of security around your home.
And we all need this.
We all want it.
If you know, even if you don't live in a city, in a major city, even if there's not a lot of crime, it just gives you peace of mind to be able to stay in touch with your house at all.
times.
Ring has devices, doorbells that help have cameras.
You can see who is at the door anywhere you are.
You can look at your phone.
You can talk to them.
You can find out what they want.
And it just gives you a sense of security.
They also have the motion-activated floodlight cam, which I kind of like.
I mean, that's when at night people come onto your property.
It sees them.
It turns on the floodlight so they get caught out and nobody wants to be exposed.
These people who are doing bad things like to operate in secret.
So the floodlight cam is a good thing.
And as a listener, you have a special offer on a Ring starter kit available right now, which has both a Ring video, the doorbell two, the second one, a motion-activated floodlight cam.
12 Years To Uninhabitable?00:15:32
The starter kit has everything you need to start building a ring of security around your home.
Just go to ring.com slash clavin.
That's ring.com slash clavin.
Additional terms may apply, like you might have to be able to spell clavin.
That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No E's.
And Clavin, I just make it look like this.
It's just easy when I do it.
Let me read you some headlines.
These were collected from real climate science Tony Heller.
These go back to the 1960s, right?
These are headlines going back as far as here's one from 1967.
Dire famine forecast by 1975.
All right, this is from the Los Angeles Times.
It's already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine, a Stanford University biologist said Thursday.
Sound familiar?
1969.
The trouble with almost all environmental problems, says Paul Ehrlich, the population biologist, is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you're dead.
From 1970, air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century.
That's from the Boston Globe.
Here is from, what am I looking at?
The Washington Post in 1971.
Dr. S. I. Rezul of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, and Columbia University says in the next 50 years, so let's see, that's right now, in the next 50 years, the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees.
It's going to get much, much, much colder.
Scrolling forward in time, okay, those are the 70s.
Let's go into the 80s, 1980.
Acid rain kills life in lakes.
Acid rain, which has already wiped out the fish in 197 of New York's Adirondack Mountain Lakes, is rapidly killing other lakes in nearby eastern Canada.
Ten years later, the U.S. government declared that acid rain was not a threat.
1978, no end in sight to 30-year cooling trend.
1988, a gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian ocean nation, the Maldives, of 1196 small islands within the next 30 years, according to authorities.
From 1989, oh, New York City's Westside Highway to be underwater by 2019.
Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress, looked out at Broadway in New York City and said, if what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there?
He said, yes, the Westside Highway will be underwater.
More.
I'm just going through these.
The Guardian in 2004, the Pentagon tells Bush climate change will destroy us.
So this has been going on for a long time.
It is clearly some kind of religious guilt reaction to progress, to comfort.
It has been sold from different points of view.
It's going to get colder.
It's going to get hotter.
It's going to get flooding.
Let's take a look at some of the things that have happened.
First, let's play a Prager U video with Bjorn Lumborg, who is one of the best of these guys, because Bjorn Lumberg says, he says, look, I'm going to accept on faith that what the scientists say is true about some of the problems that are facing us.
And he knows some of these scientists, and he says, look, they're not lying.
A lot of them are saying things that get distorted by the press.
They'll put forward a best case and worst case scenario.
Of course, the worst case scenario is the more dramatic one.
So that's the one the press runs with.
And then that becomes distorted until we all have 12 years to live.
I mean, this is the funny thing that happens is they start out saying, well, you know, the worst case scenario is that in 12 years, it may be more difficult.
It may cost a lot of money to turn back some of this thing.
And that becomes, we all have 12 years to live.
So let's look at Bjorn Lumberg.
This is an older Prager U video from, I don't know, 2014, 2015, of him talking about what the data is telling us.
Carbon emissions are rising and faster than most scientists predict it.
But many climate change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected.
This ignores that much of the data is actually more encouraging than expected.
Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than models expected.
But models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease.
Yet Antarctic sea ice is increasing.
Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating.
If anything, two recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in January 2014 and the other by US scientists published in May 2013, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea level increase.
We're often being told that we're seeing more and more droughts, but a study published in March 2014 in the journal Nature actually shows a decrease in the world's surface that has been afflicted by droughts since 1982.
Facts like these are important because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound policies.
Okay, there is the rational, what he calls himself, I think, the rational environmentalist.
Now, let's compare this to college kids.
These are college students.
This is from the great website, the colleague College Fix.
They went out and interviewed them and said, do we have, in fact, 12 years to live?
I think it's a super serious statistic and that people should recognize that that can be truthful, that we need to enact change as soon as possible to prevent that from happening.
Yeah.
I'm baffled the fact that we're talking about so many other issues when this is the most pressing it affects everyone equally.
We're not going to have a life if we don't do something about it right now, so we need to start acting immediately.
One thing I'm kind of wondering about is the statistic I've been hearing that in 12 years the Earth will be uninhabitable.
Do you guys buy into that?
Yes, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's very serious.
What do you plan to do to fix it?
I mean, coming to strikes like these and really fighting for it.
Come on.
All right.
So you think that capitalism and climate justice are incompatible?
I do think so, yes.
I think the overconsumption and I think our lifestyle, the lifestyle that people live here, the life of comfort, is definitely what causes that.
So what steps could we take to reduce this life of comfort and become more sustainable?
I think there needs to be a shift in our lifestyle.
I think we need to make our lives a bit more uncomfortable, the way they should be.
I think we should be learning of the consequences of all the actions that we take.
I mean, this is, you know, they always say that something's a religion, meaning it's irrational.
But my religion is very rational.
You know, it's based on faith, but the faith is of a rational faith.
It's a leap of faith, but it's a small leap from where I got by using my reason, right?
But this is totally irrational.
If you watch NBC, NBC has just decided they're not going to give any, there's not going to be any debate anymore.
You know, I don't get to watch the NBC morning shows that much, but while I was in New York the other week, it's just last week, I was on the elliptical in the gym and I was watching NBC, and now they've got this long series every day.
They're going to tell you about some new danger, some new terrible thing.
They've got a website you can go to and confess your climate sins.
No kidding.
You know, you confess your things you could be doing better.
You could be doing better.
And then, you know, and Chuck Todd comes on and he gives you, say, three Hail Marys and throw out your plastic straws and you'll go to heaven, whatever they do.
Meanwhile, when you look at the actual statistics, when you look at the things that might actually happen, for instance, the United Nations, which has been at the forefront of climate panic because they want the power, because all this socialist power goes to the elites, it goes to this small number of people who are in power.
The United Nations has estimated that the economic impact of climate change will reduce our economy by 10% over 80 years.
And this is in the Wall Street Journal.
They write about this all the time, is that the economy in 80 years will be maybe five times bigger than it is now.
So 10% of what it is now from five times bigger economy is not really that much.
I mean, that's something that we can deal with.
It's not going to be the most terrible thing in the world.
And as Bjorn Lumberg himself has pointed out, the seas don't rise instantly.
They may continue to rise.
They're rising less than they were.
But if they do rise, we're not going to look down at our ankles and just sit there for 100 years while the water rises.
We'll move.
You know, we'll do things.
We've already got machines that can take CO2 out of the air.
We've got systems in place for spreading particles if we need to block out some of the sunlight.
All those things are too expensive to use now, but they are on hand and they will get less expensive as technology develops.
It is technology.
Even Obama admitted this, that within 30 years we'll have the technology to handle this.
He just thinks we should suffer in the meantime.
This panic is just a panic.
It is a power grab.
That's all it is.
It is a means to get at socialism, which is a way to keep elites in power.
Once you have socialism, that means that the people in power are spending your money.
The people in power are in charge of the economy.
The money you earn goes to them to spend as they see fit.
That's what it is.
It is essentially slavery.
It's essentially a form of slavery.
Even if it worked, it would be wrong.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work because it takes away the impetus that makes people thrive.
It takes away the profit motive that makes people do the things that invent the new technology and invent the new systems and the new services that we all love.
You don't get Uber under socialism.
You get Uber because some guy thinks, hey, you know what?
I could make a lot of money doing this.
You don't get the iPhone under socialism because the iPhone is invented when somebody says, hey, I can make a lot of money doing this.
This is a power grab.
So while they're talking about this Ukraine thing, and while, you know, it's kind of like a mob scene, when the press gets into it, when everybody's talking about it, even the people on the right get carried away and say, oh, this could be really serious.
This could be really serious.
When it gets really serious, let's talk about it.
Because meanwhile, we have two and a half years of evidence that they are throwing mud at this guy.
Why should we get upset over the latest thing?
This Ukraine thing that got the whistleblower wasn't even in the call in question.
Every other thing that has come out of it has come from sources.
Trump himself has said, Yeah, I brought up Biden's corruption, but it was not, there was nothing guilty about it.
And he says he didn't use any coercion.
Now they're trying to link withholding some aid to this request to investigate Biden.
We have no idea whether that's true.
We already have two and a half years of proof that they'll lie about him.
We already have that.
So why would we get upset?
Why would Mitt Romney immediately walk the plank on this?
Why would Bill Kristol immediately fall into the you know, David French, who I love the guy, I think he's a terrific guy, and again, I'm not questioning his integrity at all, but he said this is not a story about the press.
The hell it's not.
The hell it's not.
It's all about the press.
It's all about the press turning these children into human shields for climate change activism.
It is all about the press going after Trump with every little single thing.
You know, impeachment is not something the only time I've ever seen a president, including I was alive during Nixon, the only time I ever saw a president do anything I thought was impeachable was when Obama used the IRS to silence opposition.
I thought that was a genuine threat to American freedoms.
I would have taken him out of office for that, or at least tried to bring him out of office.
I thought the impeachment of Clinton was ridiculous.
I thought the Watergate scandal, we now look back on it and we see it was a political hit.
John F. Kennedy did far, far more serious things that they never went after because they were pals with him.
They hated Nixon and they went after him for Watergate.
I'm just, I'm absolutely done.
I'm absolutely done highlighting this stuff in any way that gives it any credence whatsoever.
If you show me that Donald Trump has acted in a way that is so bad that it actually endangers American principles, then I'll say, oh, let's give it over to these people who are openly against American principles.
Until that happens, it ain't going to come from me.
All right, we've got to take a break, but remember, tomorrow is the mailbag.
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All right, we're going to talk to Mary Eberstadt.
She was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
She has written it for just about everybody, but she has a new book out called Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.
It's available now, and it is a really complex and interesting theory about the source of identity politics.
Mary, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me, Drew.
So this is a really interesting theory that I've never heard.
I've never quite heard anything like this before.
Let's start with where you think, why you think identity politics and the sexual revolution are linked.
Well, if we look around us, it's no secret that we see people trying desperately to join these collective communities of identity, whether they're gender communities or ethnic communities.
And you can't open the paper without seeing reference to identity politics.
What people need to understand is this way of doing politics is actually quite new.
It begins in 1977 with a declaration from a radical feminist group, essentially saying, we give up on the idea that anyone has our back but us.
We give up on our families.
We give up on politics as usual.
So my argument, Drew, is that this is not a coincidence, that the first statement of identity politics comes out of the first generation to come of age after the sexual revolution.
The argument is that these two things are linked and that the way we are living now in smaller and more broken families, in many cases without religious faith, that these forces have combined to prevent people from constructing their identities the way they used to be able to do.
And the result is this increasingly rancorous identity politics.
Well, talk about the way people used to construct their identities.
I mean, one of the things that's really interesting to me about this is, you know, I'm kind of an individualist, but in latter years, it has come to me that individualism is a broken philosophy, that there is, in fact, a community identity that we all have, that we're all part of a single organism.
And so talk about the ways that people actually create their identities.
Sure.
Individualism is limited because we are social animals.
We learn from those around us.
We learn in community.
And if you were to ask most human beings who came before us, who are you, the answer would be, I'm a mother, I'm a cousin, I'm an aunt, I'm a sister.
People tend to answer these things in familial ways.
And we see this even now, Drew, with the popularity of 23andMe and related technologies.
What those tell us is that when people want to know who they are, they go first to their relations.
Now, there's another way of answering that question, who am I?
It is traditional, and that's the religious answer.
I am a child of God.
That's the most important thing about me.
It's not my skin color.
The Great Scattering Questioned00:10:32
It's not my sex.
It's not my erotic feeling.
I'm a child of God.
Well, we've had secularization for several decades in this country and across Western civilization.
So the religious answer is off limits for a lot of people.
And increasingly, the familial answer is just more complicated because of divorce, fatherlessness, abortion, and all of the other post-sexual revolutionary trends.
So traditional ways of answering this question, who am I? are more problematic than before for many people.
And again, that's why we see this passionate flight for collective identities that provide that fundamental answer.
So this is a way of replacing the familial ties that are destroyed by sexual liberation.
Is that a fair?
Absolutely.
I think these collective identities operate as surrogate families.
They provide you with a community of like-minded people who claim to have your back.
And of course, the problem is that now what we have are people seeking deep metaphysical answers politics.
They're taking these cardial passions about family and clan into national politics.
And that, again, Drew, I think that's why the tone of conversation out there is so divisive and angry and increasingly, I would argue, desperate.
So is this just so I'm clear about this?
Is this what you mean when you talk about the great scattering?
Is the great scattering the destruction of the family and the community?
Is that what you mean by that?
Yes, if you look at what the sexual revolution did, and this was not well foreseen at the time, but what it did was cause a skyrocketing of several behaviors.
All of these have the net impact of subtracting people from other people's lives.
There are simply arithmetically fewer people who have your back these days, fewer people to whom one is related.
And that's what I mean by the great scattering.
We have to understand that something profound happened after the 60s.
This isn't just the usual talk of changing family pattern or that a family is whatever I say it is.
No, something cosmic, I think, happened after the 1960s, given the kind of social creatures that we are.
And many of us are not living in the kind of robust communities we need, small C communities, religious communities, and above all, the community of the family.
Can you explain what this has to do with the hostility toward gender and really the hostility toward masculinity?
I mean, it seems to me that a kind of androgyny is being elevated as a political good.
What is that?
How is that connected to what you're talking about?
Well, if you look at contemporary feminism, which I think is a very misunderstood phenomenon, you know, it's very angry.
It's increasingly bellicose.
If you look at the kind of demonstrations that we've seen on the steps of the Supreme Court or the so-called resistance, this is an increasingly, again, angry, bellicose kind of feminism.
And I think that anger is coming from the fact that in the world after the sexual revolution, getting married and having a family and having stable men in one's lives became very difficult for a lot of women.
And I think this emphasis on androgyny is coming from the same place.
If you consider the fact, Drew, that almost half of kids in this country now are going to be raised without their biological father in the home, that is a lot of boys who don't have a male role model.
And this, again, is how we learn as social creatures.
And, you know, there's research in the book about the animal kingdom because it's quite opposite.
When you want to stop young elephants from marauding, it turns out Park Rangers have learned you import an older bull elephant because he keeps them in line.
You know, this is very, this is really primordial stuff.
And again, we're living in a very unnatural way given the kinds of creatures that we are.
That's what I'm trying to draw attention to.
So these are big things.
I mean, the secularization of Western society, which is now in Europe almost complete.
The breakdown of the family.
Is there any way of addressing this besides brute force?
I mean, is there any way of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again?
Sure.
A couple of thoughts.
I mean, people renorm all the time.
There have been things like drug epidemics in our past that are well over.
And of course, nothing is hopeless.
There's also the hope that we are rational creatures and that holding a mirror up to some of what's going on, which is what I'm trying to do in this book, will make some people have that little shock of recognition and think, you know, maybe my problem isn't some abstraction like the gender binary or the patriarchy.
Maybe my problem is actually that I'm not connected to enough people around me who care about it.
So I think a renorming might come from that.
I think it's already started.
We can see this in the mostly progressive upper echelon on the socioeconomic ladder.
Many of those people have progressive political opinions, but they are still more likely to get married and stay married than other people.
So they might be talking left, but they're living right in a way that we might see more of in the future.
So I don't think it's hopeless at all.
I do think we have to recognize how deep the problem is.
Yeah, Charles Murray says they refuse to preach what they, they refuse to preach what they practice, basically.
Yeah, and I, you know, it is true that a very similar thing happened in the early 19th century, this kind of dissolution of society after the French Revolution, and it led to the Victorian era, which was actually quite an interesting and progressive in a good way era.
So maybe that will happen again.
Mary, thank you so much for coming on.
The book is Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.
It's a really interesting and complete idea, and I appreciate your coming on to talk about.
Thanks for having me, Drew.
Thanks a lot.
A final reflection.
I have to talk about this.
You know, I've talked many times about how you can't love freedom if you don't love ordinary people.
And one of the things that happened to me, you know, I've talked about before how when I went to live in England and I fell in love with England and I lived there for seven years.
I lived there through most of the 90s.
And one of the things that happened to me when I went to England is that I left kind of a left-winger, a dissatisfied left-winger, a left-winger with a lot of doubts, but still kind of a liberal.
And I came back a ferocious patriot, having seen our country from afar, having seen so many other countries, having had an intimate view of possibly the second best country on earth, England, a place that I loved, a place that is renowned for not only being free, but being the source of many of our own freedoms and the source of many of our ideas of freedoms.
And yet always from the first day I landed in England, I found the thing I missed was not America at first, but Americans, normal, everyday people.
They are different from other people.
They're friendlier.
They're more open.
They're more honest.
They're more blunt.
All of the things that the left has been using all of its force to destroy.
Been trying to teach us to be afraid, to speak, been trying to teach us, oh, if we say this, we're evil, we're racist, we're bad.
This is really the least, the least racist country on earth.
And I say that advisedly because it's not like I think there's no racism here.
If there are people here, there's going to be racism and all the other sins that people bring with them.
But you have no idea.
You have no idea what it's like in almost every other country, in every other country, where they don't even think about the kinds of things we think about and we struggle over.
Anyway, I was reminded of all this by a piece of video that has been going around Twitter that just cracks me up.
In order to get this, you have to know that the Philadelphia Eagles football team has a wide receiver named Nelson Aguilore.
And Nelson Aguilor, talented guy, but has been having a little bit of problems with his game.
He missed a couple of passes on Sunday and they lost to Detroit.
But the week before that, he dropped a big 60-yard pass that would have been the go-ahead touchdown.
All right, so that is Nathan Aguilar.
And Nelson Aguilor, sorry.
And so here is Hacking Laws.
Hacking Laws came upon a fire and rushed to help.
And he tells the story of what happened to him.
I seen a guy hanging out the window, you know, screaming at his kids was in there and things like that.
So I ran to the back door, see if it was open, and it was.
I ran upstairs, and then I was greeted with smoke.
I ran back downstairs.
By that time, the ladder truck was pulling up.
And ironically, being one of my old co-workers took the ladder off the off the truck, raised it up, and was assisting people down.
My man just started throwing babies out the window.
We was catching them, unlike Aguilar.
The guy sees a fire, runs in to help.
He's overcome by smoke.
He can't do it.
He goes out.
He helps the fireman, put up the ladder.
They start throwing children out the window and he starts catching them.
Not like Aguilar, who kept dropping the pass.
I love Americans, man.
I love this country.
And Aguilar, to his absolute credit, tweeted, thank you for being a hero in the community.
I would like to invite you and your family to the next home game.
What a great country.
It's the only place on earth where you go in, you're a hero, you catch babies, but you use it for the most important thing, which is to nail your wide receiver for dropping passes.
Love it.
I love this place.
Anyway, I just had to bring that up because just one of the things I just love about this country.
Tomorrow, mail back.
Be there.
All your questions answered.
All your problems solved.
Come on.
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Audio Production Highlights00:01:11
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