Andrew Clavin dissects Marianne Williamson’s 2020 campaign collapse—her $500B reparations fantasy and dismissal of "dark psychic forces"—as proof of leftist detachment from reality, mirroring media narratives like Iran’s 2020 plane protests suppression. Polls show just 32% of Democrats grasp basic facts (e.g., tax burdens), while progressive elites ignore constraints, from AOC’s moral-over-fact stance to Hollywood’s Weinstein cover-ups. Clavin argues unchecked self-fulfillment ideology, not truth, now drives politics, leaving Americans trapped between lies and the hope Trump-era accountability might restore honesty. [Automatically generated summary]
Marianne Williamson has suspended her campaign for president, saying she wants to spend more time with her cats and imaginary friends.
The lovable Hollywood self-help guru said her presidential run foundered when it turned out there were not as many crazy people in America as there seemed to be when she was sitting around watching TV news.
In remarks made to a band of angels coming forward to carry her home, Williamson said, quote, when I watched NBC or CNN, I saw commentators so entirely detached from reality, I thought to myself, wow, if I could bring all those delusional people together, I could really win this thing.
But it turned out once you turn off the television, there actually is such a thing as reality in which I never stood a chance, unquote.
During her campaign, Williamson declared Donald Trump had unleashed a dark psychic force on the nation, which she would cast out with the power of love.
But on further study, she discovered that what had appeared to her to be a dark psychic force was actually a booming economy, and what she had thought was the power of love was just a string of meaningless words coming out of her mouth.
Among Williamson's policy proposals was a plan to distribute between $200 and $500 billion in reparations for slavery.
In the event she could not actually summon the spirit of slaves back from the dead with her Ouija board, Williamson promised to simply bury the money in the ground where it would do more good than just giving it to living people for no discernible reason.
One of the highlights of Williamson's campaign was the time she was caught on a hot mic expressing surprise at the fact that though she was a lefty, conservatives were nice to her, whereas left-wingers were vicious and lied about her all the time and actually seemed as godless as the right says they are.
But after that moment of lucidity, she slipped back into her fantasy world, also known as California.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
You know, I actually like Marianne Williamson.
She actually seems like a really sweet and sincere person.
I couldn't resist teasing her.
And I couldn't help feeling that her insistent detachment from the way the world actually works represents something central to leftist thought, namely a willful commitment to fantasy over reality.
Take the coverage of Iran this last week.
In their efforts to make Trump the bad guy, journalists claimed that government-staged demonstrations over the death of terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani represented an Iranian nation united in grief over their beloved military leader.
Then when Iranians continued their ongoing protests against the government and against Soleimani too, the media claimed the regime had squandered all the love and unity by their accidental downing of a commercial jet, which was somehow Trump's fault.
It's ridiculous.
The Iranians are oppressed by a feckless terrorist regime, and they've been protesting for a long time, even at the cost of their lives.
I mean, the Iranian government will kill them, but they still go out there and protest them, which takes a lot of courage and a lot of commitment to freedom.
But if the press admits any of that, they have to admit that Donald Trump is on the side of the angels on this one, fighting evil oppressors whom we can't transform, and they're just not going to do that.
This is just one example of what really seems to me a left-wing way of life and thought.
They claim that men who think they're women become actual women, and you're a horrible person if you tell them it's just not true.
They claim that socialism works, and only greed would keep you from saying, it's just not true.
They're still yelling at me on Twitter for saying women would be killed in a medieval sword battle.
They're angry at me for refusing to lie to them about it.
But what I'm saying is true, and what they're saying just isn't true.
When I think about this persistent left-wing commitment to non-reality, I see a lot of different lies, but they all have one single theme.
It's the theme of the all-powerful self.
The left wants to believe that we have the power to change Iranian terrorists by treating them differently.
We're the ones in charge.
Instead of acknowledging the bad guys have their own evil philosophy and are beyond our power to influence them.
They want to claim that we can construct our own genders and identities.
It's absurd.
Or that we can control economies better than economies run themselves.
They want to think that we can do whatever we want despite our obvious limitations.
Even their climate change hysteria is based on the weird idea that if we will just dismantle the human project, the weather will forgive us and change its ways.
We're even in control of nature.
All this is actually frighteningly predictable.
Plato's Republic was written in 375 BC.
Now, I worked this out with a calculator.
That turns out to be nearly 2,400 years ago, a long time ago.
But in Plato's Republic, Socrates explains how democracies become tyrannies.
He says, in democracies, freedom becomes a goal in itself.
It really gets elevated to the main goal, and any restraint on personal desire begins to seem unfair and oppressive.
Each individual must be able to do exactly what he wants, and that leads to chaos, and ultimately, only the state can control that chaos.
So a tyrant arises and says, I'm going to make everything better, and democracies collapse into tyranny.
The fantasy of absolute freedom and the all-powerful self leads to the death of freedom and selves who have no power at all.
The reason the founders knew our constitution was made only for religious people is not because religious people get told what to do and people wag their finger and say you're going to go to hell.
It has nothing to do with that.
It's because understanding that you are a creature, which means a created being, entails understanding that you were created with a purpose outside your own desires.
And that requires you to curtail your own desires in favor of virtue.
In fact, that's what virtue is.
It's curtailing your desires.
Only virtuous people can be free.
Only people who know the truth can be virtuous.
Shapely Knucklehead, Alexandria Casio-Cortez, once said, there's a lot, that's her profession, actually, Shapely Knucklehead.
She said, there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
And I hope that's true.
She's never said anything true before, but I hope that that, at least, is true.
We will talk about all this more in just a few moments.
You know, yesterday, I'll talk about this later.
Yesterday I went to the Critics Choice Awards, and it was kind of funny because I'm surrounded by big-time celebrities, really beautiful.
Understanding Virtue00:16:33
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The men are good-looking.
Everybody looks great.
And some guy came up to me and wanted to take a selfie with me.
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But he turned out to be a conservative.
He wanted to take a selfie with me, which happens kind of often, which is strange for me because I'm a writer used to being alone in a room.
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Another Kingdom.
Coming up on the final episodes.
It's the new one released today for everyone.
If you were a subscriber, as you should be, you could have gotten it on Friday.
But you can get it now for everyone.
This is really good stuff.
We are just so proud of what we've done and you'll want to hear it, I know.
So take a listen.
T.S. Eliot, poet, he says, humankind cannot bear very much reality.
And this is what I'm thinking about, at least the left.
I think sometimes it's true of the right too.
And I'm going to talk more about the way we hide from reality.
But there are protests going on in Iran.
Yes, in the wake, it was inspired by, it was inspired by the fact that they admitted after three days that they had accidentally shot down this Ukrainian plane, killing many Iranians.
But they're shouting death to the leaders.
They're shouting Solmeni was a killer.
They're shouting it's not the United States who is the devil.
You know, Trump sent out a tweet in Farsi.
This is what he said.
He said, to the brave and suffering Iranian people, I have stood with you since the beginning of my presidency and my government will continue to stand with you.
We are following your protests closely.
Your courage is inspiring.
After just one hour, the tweet had received over 100,000 likes.
It has since more than doubled that number.
It is the most popular tweet, I think, in Farsi, at least by an American.
They are desperate to have our support.
Remember that Obama withheld support when they tried to rebel last time because he wanted to make that deal with the Mulahs to let them get nuclear power while we gave them money.
Strange deal, but that was apparently what he wanted to do.
He thought that he was going to transform them.
He thought he was going to bring them into the community of nations.
He doesn't understand, A, there is no community of nations.
And B, people have their own motivations.
They have their own philosophies.
They have their own way of looking at life.
You want multiculturalism?
That's multiculturalism.
Their way of looking at life, the people who run Iran, have an evil way of looking at life.
And so they're going to do evil things.
And all we can do is try and stop them and help the Iranian people overturn them if we can.
So what I want to look at, that's the truth of what's happening in Iran.
And now I want to look at the lies the media is telling about it.
Just let me start with this little clip between Robert O'Brien, the National Security Advisor, and Chuck Todd, who is, you know, this is on NBC where they, you know, covered up the Harvey Weinstein story, killed the Harvey Weinstein story, because they were so busy protecting Matt Lauer, who was doing all the same things that Harvey Weinstein was doing at their media session.
So they have no moral standing whatsoever.
But Chuck Todd, who is a stone Democrat, just a Democrat spokesman, that's all he does, and cannot understand, cannot believe that people don't trust the news media.
He doesn't understand it.
And he's sitting, and he's a fierce defender of this dishonest news media where they covered up for Harvey Weinstein because they were covering up for Matt Lauer and where they just had this Democrat, stone Democrat, his wife has run for Democrat office on Meet the Press, which is one of our key news shows, selling anti-Trump Democrat propaganda instead of the truth.
And he's baffled.
So here's Robert O'Brien explaining the situation that there are these protests going on at newsbusters.
They say ABC spend more time on the Royals and Oscars than on the anti-regime protests in Iran.
And Robert O'Brien makes that point and listen to Chuck Todd's reaction.
Right now, we've got a maximum pressure campaign that is strangling the regime.
Their economy is contracting dramatically.
The people of Iran are upset.
They're protesting.
They have been protesting for some time.
They've been brutally put down.
And Tiananmen Square-style massacres that the press has not been covering.
And we think the regime is in real trouble.
Not to consider it.
Press does everything it can to cover.
It is a very difficult country to cover.
It is because this is not a press trying to omit things here.
I'd like not that to be a shot at us.
You are fake news.
You are fake news.
Let's do a little fact check on this.
Here's a Grabian montage.
They do the best montages, I think.
And they have a montage.
And you're going to have to use your imagination if you're listening to this, because some of this is visual.
The visuals are the protests in Iran.
They're people tearing down the pictures of the Ayatollah, people driving cars over pictures of Soleimani, people protesting the government at the top, at the top of their lungs, screaming and yelling.
Remember, the government is fighting back, too.
They killed 1,500 of them over the last several months, but they're now apparently, it is hard to cover the place, but they're now apparently sending out tear gas, and there's been gunfire heard.
So they're suppressing these protests.
Here is the way, at the same time, they're showing these visuals, here is the way the news media covered Soleimani's death and the staged, the government-backed and stage demonstrations of mourning that were put on there.
Qasim Soleimani was no ordinary general.
In Iran, he was a national hero.
He was a war hero, the commander of Iran's feared Qudsforce, a revered figure in Iran.
It's difficult to convey how revered he is in Iran.
I was trying to think of somebody and I was thinking of de Gaulle.
Princess Diana died, for example.
There was a huge emotional outpouring.
These kinds of Elvis Presley in our culture.
It turns out that this general he killed was a beloved hero.
He's regarded as personally, incredibly brave.
The troops love him.
I have been in the midst of anti-American protests in Iran before, but nothing like this.
Thousands of mullahs on the streets in Iran, weeping.
The crowds are massive and emotional.
There are many tears here.
He is the, think of the French Foreign Legion, you know, if you will.
Smart, charismatic, ruthless, strategic, and bold.
His power made Iranians proud.
Come on.
Come on, man.
While these people are saying this, they're playing in the background, just as a counterpoint, people tearing down Soleimani's pictures, the real people, the protesting people.
And yeah, are they coming out en masse like they did when the government ordered them to?
Of course not.
They're getting shot at and tear gassed.
They're afraid.
They should be afraid.
But the fact that people are coming out at all and saying this stuff just shows you how committed they are to being free, to getting rid of these people who have no care for them.
They have a care for their revolution that they're trying to spread throughout the Middle East.
They have a care for their own power.
They have a care for their sick version of Islam, their radical Islam that they want to impose on people and which only spreads death and oppression wherever it goes.
And this is what the people are fighting against.
And Chuck Todd, later in this interview, he says, you know, there's no difference.
There's no difference between the Iranian government and what's called the Revolutionary Guard, which is their terrorist arm, which is what Solmani was running.
It is a government agency.
It's the same thing.
The government is running the Revolutionary Guard.
So Chuck Todd said, well, if it's just the government, then they're not terrorists.
They're a government.
He can't understand that a government could be a terrorist entity.
They've been declared terrorists.
Anyway, here is O'Brien explaining things to Chuck Todd.
Well, in this case, the Kudz Force, the RGC Kudz Force, which operates outside of Iran and foments revolution and terrorism in Yemen, in Syria, where 500,000 people have been killed, in Lebanon with Hezbollah, in Iraq.
That organization has been designated legally as a terrorist organization.
Soleimani was the head of it, but he's not just been designated by us.
He's under a travel ban from the UN.
He shouldn't even have been outside of Iran.
I mean, this was someone who was a leader of an organization that was engaged in terror.
He was involved in plotting imminent attacks against the United States.
The president made a very difficult decision, but a bold decision to lead not to the marriage.
You know, it is the thing.
The thing about Chuck Todd that you have to understand is Chuck Todd is not a liar.
He's a bubble boy.
You know, those children that they have to put inside bubbles, poor kids, they haven't got any immunity, so they have to put them inside bubbles to protect them from getting diseases.
They basically have to put Chuck Todd in a bubble to keep him, protect him from the truth.
And all of these people are in a bubble.
All of them know.
None of them know what we're talking about.
They're not listening to this show.
They don't know what I'm talking about.
They don't listen to Rush Limbaugh.
They hear little things that are pulled out of Rush Limbaugh and sent to them to make them hate Rush Limbaugh.
They never listen to the right.
They do not know the right exists.
They think that the right is basically just on a spectrum with guys like Richard Spencer who are hating black people and hating Jews and all that.
They do not know what we are saying.
They really have no idea.
And so they think like, well, anything we're doing, anything we're doing is justified by Donald Trump.
The New York Times, the New York Times had a wonderful headline this morning.
I just love this.
They had this, I mean, this thing has been a major win for Trump.
It has been a major win for Trump.
And they're trying to say, well, he had different reasons for saying why he launched the attack.
And there's different reasons where they were going to attack one embassy or they were going to attack four embassies or that he was just a terrorist.
I mean, they're all the same reason, really.
But they had a wonderful headline that said, Trump ran on ending war.
What happens if there's a new war?
So on their front page now, they're just creating problems that don't exist.
It's really wonderful.
And the thing is, they are convinced because they only listen to themselves, because they talk to themselves, because Democrats talk to them and they talk to the Democrats, and it is a literal, not a literal, it is the metaphor of an echo chamber is very exact.
They are in an echo chamber.
They don't know that.
See, the thing is, it's not that conservatives are in the majority, but I do believe that the majority of people want to hear something like the truth.
The majority of people don't want to make decisions based on non-reality.
And that's the difference.
They can tell.
Even people, there are liberals, I know liberals like this.
Every time I'm reading the New York Times and I think, who believes this crap?
I can always think of one or two people who are going like, y'all, it was right there in the New York Times.
I know people who just buy everything they're selling, swallow everything they're fed.
But most people, I really do believe, want to get it something like the facts because without the facts, you can't know what they're doing.
So Nancy Pelosi is, here's a perfect example.
She is on with George Stephanopoulos, who used to silence the women who were complaining about being harassed by Trump, who now works for ABC, where they silenced, they killed the Jeffrey Epstein story about women being abused.
He's interviewing Nancy Pelosi, and she basically says, who cares why these people are out on the street?
Sometimes they're out for one reason, sometimes they're out for another.
We're seeing now demonstrations in the streets of Iran against the regime.
Do you support those protesters?
And would it be a good thing if they brought the regime down?
Well, the protesters are protesting, as I understand it, this brand of protesters, about the fact that that plane went down and many students were on that plane.
and these are largely students in the street, I think the Iranians should have not had commercial flights going off when there was...
They're calling at the regime for lying?
They're saying death to Khomeini as well.
No, well, whatever it is.
But the fact is this.
There were protesters in the streets before against the regime.
After the taking out of Solemani, there were protesters in the street joined together, as you know, against us.
That wasn't good.
Taking down this plane is a terrible, terrible tragedy.
And they should be held accountable for letting commercial flights go at a time that was so dangerous.
But there are different reasons why people are in the street.
Same woman who is selling this delusion about Iran is selling the impeachment.
You know, it's interesting.
The Media Research Center, which is the overseeing body that runs newsbusters, which I love so much, they have a new survey and they have this wonderful building outside of Washington where they just have reams and reams of video where they collect this incredible amount of information about what the media is selling.
And they go through it, and they really have a lot of ways to do research in this.
They are now saying they're in their new survey, in the first hundred days since House Democrats began their impeachment push on September 24th, ABC, CBS, and NBC have aggressively aided the impeachment effort.
A media research center analysis finds the big three evening newscasts have battered the president with 93% negative coverage.
That sounds fair.
And promoted impeachment at the expense of nearly all other Trump news.
At the same time, the broadcast networks donated at least 124 hours of wall-to-wall live coverage as they preempted regular programming in favor of House Democrat-led impeachment activities.
And you know what, of course, the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, you know what they would say.
They would say, well, this is historic.
They always say this historic.
It's a wonderful word because they use the word historic as praise, but they can always say, well, it's not really praise.
It's just historic.
But they say it's historic.
But is it really historic?
I know that only a few presidents have been impeached, but in the last few years, both Clinton and Trump have been impeached.
So it's actually become used now as a tool, as a political tool.
So it's really not as historic as it looks.
They go on to say, on the other hand, the network's frenzy over impeachment has meant the Democratic presidential candidates have been barely visible on the evening newscast.
And you think that that is unintentional, but of course it's not unintentional.
Their candidates stink and they want to cover them up as much as possible.
During the impeachment, the networks kept up the same relentless negativity toward President Trump that they first displayed during the 2016 presidential campaign.
But polls collected by Real Clear Politics indicate all of this coverage might have actually hurt the Democrats' efforts.
On November 12th, the day before the impeachment hearings began, a slight plurality favored impeaching and removing the president, 49% to 47% against.
By December 19th, the day after the House voted to impeach, those figures had reversed 48% opposed to removal versus 47% in favor.
And by the way, I don't believe these polls.
I mean, some polls I do believe.
These are polls that I do not believe.
And the reason I don't believe it is it's very easy to say, yeah, the president should be impeached and removed from office.
It's a big, big deal.
And you have to really hate Trump beyond the point of reason to want him removed when the economy...
You know, when...
I mean, I talk to liberals.
I have friends and relatives who are liberals.
And I say, well, what is bothering you?
And it's always personal.
It's always the fact that they don't like Trump.
And I understand not liking Trump.
I think there's a lot of reasons not to like Trump.
I think that if you talk about him personally, it's one thing.
He's doing a good job.
He's doing a good job.
I mean, personally, I think he's doing a great job.
I think if the presidency ended right now, he'd be one of the great presidents.
He would at least he'd be, you could say that he could have projected and you could have projected his presidency and said he would have been one of the great presidents.
Why Liberals Really Hate Trump00:09:18
He's doing a great job.
You don't have to like him at all.
So now Pelosi, Pelosi says she's praying for this president.
I have to tell you that when the Media Research Center says that the press is covering this impeachment trial is just blanket covering this trial.
That's what the Democrats want.
They want to stain this presidency.
And if you don't believe me, Nancy Pelosi, who said she prays for the president, here she is praying for him on ABC out loud.
This is cut two.
But again, it's Sunday morning.
Let's be optimistic about the future, a future that will not have Donald Trump in the White House.
One way or another, 10 months from now, we will have an election if we don't have him removed sooner.
But again, he will be impeached forever.
Forever, forever, forever, forever.
That is what they're trying to do.
They're trying to destroy his legacy, his reputation.
They're trying to say, oh, we're one of the very few presidents to be impeached.
Trump doesn't look to me.
They keep saying, oh, Trump is really, really disturbed by this.
Trump doesn't look so disturbed to me.
He looks like a guy who's riding high.
He looks like a guy who's successful.
He loves a fight.
He loves the pugilism of it.
He's not running away from Nancy Pelosi.
And Pelosi has caved in.
Pelosi, remember, last week we were talking about the fact that the Democrats, including Dianne Feinstein, the senator who covers Pelosi's district, were saying, hey, it's time to turn the impeachment articles over to the Senate for trial.
And Nancy Pelosi thinks that she, she says she thinks she has some leverage over the Senate that she can force them to commit to calling witnesses, force them to commit to doing the kind of impeachment trial that they want.
She knows, I mean, she has read the Constitution.
She may not think much of it, but she has read the Constitution.
She knows they have absolutely no power to control the Senate.
So I think she's just, it's just delay of game.
I think what she's doing is just drawing out the period during which Trump is impeached, keeps phasing off, staving off the period during which Trump is acquitted.
That's what she's doing.
She wants this thing to last as long as possible because she thinks it stains Trump.
She thinks maybe she can get under Trump's skin.
And here she is now.
She's going to accuse.
Remember, these guys, they did not call, they did not fight to get the witnesses that Trump said shouldn't come.
Trump said these people are protected by executive privilege, don't go and testify.
They could have gone to court.
They could have given Trump due process.
They didn't.
It was all about we've got to hurry, hurry, hurry, because we want this to happen before the election.
Why?
Because they want it to affect the election, right?
So now she is saying that this is a cover-up.
And if they refuse to call the witnesses that they didn't call in the House, if the Senate refuses to call them in the Senate, that's a cover-up.
Very unusually, the leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has signed on to a resolution to dismiss the case.
To dismiss the case.
That, in his view, may be.
But he's committed to having the presentations first now.
I'm telling you that he signed on on Thursday to a resolution to dismiss the case.
The dismissing is a cover-up.
Dismissing is a cover-up.
If they want to go that route again, the senators who are thinking now about voting for witnesses or not, they will have to be accountable for not having a fair trial.
So here is Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate telling basically Nancy to get stuffed.
Article 1, Section 3, says the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments, period.
The House can begin the process, and Speaker Pelosi's majority has certainly done that.
But the Senate alone can resolve it.
And yet for weeks now, the House majority has blocked the Senate from fulfilling our constitutional duty in a precedent-breaking display of partisanship.
The Speaker has refused to let her own allegations proceed normally to trial unless she gets to hand design various elements of our Senate process.
In other words, the House Democrats already spent 12 weeks undermining the institution of the presidency with a historically unfair and subjective impeachment.
And now for a sequel, they've come after the institution of the Senate as well.
So that's, you know, Mitch and Nancy are basically the same person.
They're basically these politicians who will say anything.
But the thing is that Mitch McConnell, in this case, has the truth on his side.
And you have to, in order to believe Nancy Pelosi, you have to be willing to believe anything.
Here's just a voice of a non-politician, Donald Trump.
Here's how he reacted to Pelosi.
She is obsessed with impeachment.
She has done nothing.
She's going to go down as one of the worst speakers in the history of our country.
Now, in all fairness, she's hurting our country.
She's very bad for our country.
And she's become a crazed lunatic.
But she will go down as, I think, maybe the worst speaker in the history of our country.
And she'll be overthrown pretty soon because she's doing very little and the people are tired of it.
And she's controlled by the radical left.
She's controlled by AOC.
She's controlled by this Taib.
It's another great one.
And she's controlled by Omar.
So that's Trump on Fox Who's talking to the lovely and talented Laura Ingram.
But, you know, the thing is, he's wrong about one thing.
She's not a deranged lunatic.
She's living in a deranged situation.
When he says she's controlled by AOC and Taib, what he means is that she is in danger of losing her caucus to the left.
And the left is surging because they have the press behind them.
That is why.
They're not surging.
It's not true that they're surging in the Democrat Party.
Voting rank-and-file Democrats are moving to the right.
Voting ranking-file Democrats were getting very leftist under Obama.
They are now moving back to a more liberal slash conservative point of view.
Nancy Pelosi is not fighting with her voters.
She's fighting.
She wants to serve her voters, but she has to serve the left because the left is the echo chamber of the press.
It is this world of lies.
And that's why they live in that world of lies because it emphasizes absolute freedom.
Absolute freedom means we need stronger government.
They want that stronger government in there.
And so they love the lies.
We've got to take a break from Facebook and YouTube.
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You want that leftist tears tumbler.
I make these myself in my workshop in the basement of this building.
Actually, you know, you who are not in California don't know that there are no basements in California buildings.
I always, I'm writing fiction that takes place in California.
I have to remember not to put basements in them.
And I don't make this cop online.
But you will get it if you subscribe and a lot of other things besides.
So come on over to dailywire.com.
So here's my question.
And it really is the big question.
Do Americans in general want to live in reality?
Do we want to know the truth?
This thing about the self, when I talk about the all-powerful self, that I can be whoever I want to be.
I can be a woman if I want to be a woman.
If I'm a woman, I can punch a man in the face and he's going to go flying just like he does in the movies.
If we just change our ways, the Iranians will change their ways.
This all-powerful self, this idea that anything, that anything that restrains your desires, to be the all-powerful self, your desires have to generate meaning, right?
You have to, the meaning of your life has to be generated by your desires.
Not your high desires, not your desires to say, oh, fulfill the reason you were created to fulfill your meaning in God's mind, but your basis, basic desires.
If you can just get enough money and enough food, enough sex, boy, oh boy, your life is going to be happy.
And then you're going to kill yourself because it's all meaningless.
But that's the idea.
The idea is this all-powerful self.
I say this as somebody who has benefited in a way from that point of view because I'm somebody who broke away from his tradition.
I grew up as a secular Jew and I became a Christian.
I had to break away from my parents to establish myself because my parents were not constructive people.
Let's put it that way.
They were not conducive to having a full and happy life.
So I had to do that.
So I benefited from that situation.
And it is true.
It is true that the rare person who can be self-shaping and find a way to serve God through himself, that person can break away from all the traditions that are left behind.
But there's a reason.
There's a reason that one of the Ten Commandments is honor your father and your mother.
It is to honor the traditions that make you who you are and make you what you are.
And only by forgetting those traditions, only by ignoring the facts, can you live as a completely free person and ultimately if everybody does it, you lead the country into chaos.
So there is a place called that's called Just Facts.
Voter Knowledge Gap00:03:49
And they do these surveys to find out if people know the quantifiable facts of politics, not the vague things like what your opinion is, but what are the actual facts.
And they went out and asked these questions.
They do a wide-ranging survey.
They're not a partisan group, just facts.
And on average, they found that voters gave the correct answer 39% of the time, gave an incorrect answer 54% of the time, and said they were unsure 6% of the time.
So 39% of the time was when they were right.
And a majority of voters gave the correct answer to only five of the 24 questions.
In total, the rates at which voters gave the correct answers varied from a high of 46% for who do you think? Trump voters, to a low of 32% for, you guessed it, Democrat voters.
Trump voters got 46% of the questions right.
Males, 43% of the questions right.
36% for females and 32% for Democrat voters at the bottom.
Females and Democrat voters at the bottom.
Now, you might want to gloat because I'm a man and a Trump voter, so I might want to say, whoa, we won, but we're still under 50%.
So that's not such a good thing.
Let me give you some of the questions and see how well you do on them.
On average, who would you say pays a greater portion of their income in federal taxes?
The middle class or the upper 1% of income earners?
Who pays more, a greater portion of their income in federal taxes?
The correct answer is the upper 1%.
The Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Treasury, and the Tax Policy Center have all documented that households in the top 1% of income pay an average effective federal tax rate of about 33%, while middle-income households pay about 13%.
So it's a big difference.
So whenever you hear Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders going out there and saying the rich aren't paying their fair share, they're paying more than their fair share.
The correct answer was given by 18% of all voters.
6% of Democrat voters got that right.
6%, they do not know anything.
30% of Trump voters got it right.
That's still not, that's not good numbers.
You know, 21% of males got it right and 15% of females.
Still, nobody is covering themselves in glory.
Here's another one.
Do you think the federal government spends more money on social programs such as Medicare, education, and food stamps?
Or does the federal government spend more money on national defense, such as the Army, Navy, and missile defense?
I'm sure many of you know the answer to this.
I hope many of you know that it's social programs.
In 2018, 62% of federal spending was for social programs and 18% was for national defense.
That is a big, big difference.
And you wonder, you know, because I know sometimes you see these pie charts where it seems like we're spending more on the military, but that is because the money that goes to social programs is sometimes entitlement funds.
They can't change it without a major vote, without changing the law.
And so they don't count it as federal spending, but the money goes to social programs.
Correct answer was given by 36% of all voters.
14% of Democrat voters got this right.
That means the vast majority of Democrat voters think we spend more money on the military.
59% of Trump voters got it right and 40% of males.
So that's a little bit better than the other numbers.
Let me do one more.
What about federal government debt?
The average U.S. household owes about $122,000 in consumer debt, such as mortgages and credit cards.
Thinking about all federal government debt broken down to a per-household basis, do you think the average federal debt per U.S. household amounts to more or less than the average consumer debt?
In other words, do you owe more through the government or do you owe more through your own shopping?
The correct answer is that government debt is more than your U.S. household debt.
The correct answer was given by 77% of all voters.
76% of Democrat voters got it right.
81% of Trump voters, that was one they got.
You know, the one that Republicans got wrong was the one about global warming.
Why We Thank Gervais00:07:35
They didn't think it was actually getting warmer, but it actually has gotten warmer, although nothing like the charts that the scientists have used to predict it.
It's been nothing like that, but it has gotten warmer.
Here's the thing, though.
My question is, do people want to know?
Now, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal today called Cancel Culture Comes to Science.
It was by Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars.
And they're holding, the National Association of Scholars is holding a conference to talk about the fact that so much of the, so many of the experiments being done in the sciences, especially the social sciences, but other sciences as well, can't be reproduced.
So these tests come out and they publish the results and the big headlines come out about them.
And when they do the experiment again, they can't reproduce the results.
And reproducibility, of course, is what indicates that the results were right in the first place.
So they're going to have a conference to talk about this.
One scientist, armed with a keyboard and contempt for contrary opinions, has set out to cancel our conference.
Leonid Teitelman has busied himself writing to the speakers at the event to warn them away.
And he has found fellow censors who agree the conference is, quote, problematic.
Our critics call us clever and dangerous.
They do not want them to talk about this because if you can publish and publicize your results that can't be reproduced, you can lie.
They want the lies to go out there.
And, you know, when it comes to subjects that are controversial, it's even worse when it comes to subjects, for instance, the genetic components of race, right?
This is a real problem that people who study genetics are beginning to discover, as you would expect, that groups that have been separated for tens of thousands of years have different genetic components in their lives.
And some of those genetic components may have to do with IQ and they may have to do with cognitive abilities.
They don't know.
They're looking at it and they also don't know yet.
I mean, a lot of this stuff is unknown.
They don't know how much of this is permanent, how long it would take to change, how much of it is cultural, but they are finding these differences and they are being hampered in their work.
Northwestern University, this is from the Claremont Review of Books.
Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens, who has called on the federal government's National Institutes of Health to, in her words, issue a regulation prohibiting its staff or grantees from publishing in any form, including internal documents or citations to other studies, claims about genetics associated with variables of race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other category of population, which would include women and men.
Noam Chomsky said the same thing.
He says that while people differ in their biologically determined qualities, discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance except to racists, sexists, and the like.
So even asking the question makes you a racist.
Even Sam Harris, who is not a stone liberal, but he's the big atheist guy, very intellectual guy, he said he was talking to Dave Rubin, I think, and he said if they found an acquisitive gene for Jews, this is what he said, if he found that there was a greed gene for Jews, he doesn't think that that would be useful.
He thinks it would be bad for people to know this.
I completely disagree.
I believe, as I say again and again, because Jesus said it, it's the truth that sets you free.
It's the truth that sets you free.
And see, if you have an idea of God and you have an idea that people are made in the image of God, it ain't going to matter too much about what they find out about genetics.
You are going to still have to treat people as if they were your brothers, made in the image of God, as if they were made by God for a purpose, as if that purpose were important to God.
You're going to have to treat them that way.
They are immortal beings.
That guy who's sitting next to you, who's annoying you on the bus, an immortal being.
That guy that you don't like because he looks different than you, an immortal being.
You're going to have to treat people that way.
It's only when you want to be utterly free.
It's only when you want yourself to be the guide and the standard of all morality that it becomes a problem, that the truth becomes a problem.
And that means that bad guys get to release the truth and put forward their bigoted, nasty ideas with the truth backing them up.
It's a bad system.
The truth is worth knowing all the time.
All right, a final reflection.
You know, I was at last night, Christian Toto, the critic, he has his website, excellent website.
You should check it out, Hollywood and Toto.
And he's over in Colorado, and he doesn't come to LA that often.
But he's one of the few people who reports from a right-wing perspective on the culture.
He's one of the few people who does movie reviews and pays attention to what's happening in the culture, pays attention to what's going on.
He invited me to the Critics' Choice Awards.
This is out in Santa Monica at a big glamorous event, and I had to wear a tuxedo and all this stuff.
And I've gone to a couple of these things, but I don't go very often.
I'm not really into it that much.
First of all, I have to tell you that to show, this is in the wake of the Ricky Gervais blast, right, of the Golden Globes.
This thing went off like an explosion.
And Ricky Gervais, the thing I said that was so important about him was he reminded these people that they are corporate hirelings.
They are hired by corporations.
The corporations who hire them do bad things.
They have no business preaching to the public.
Okay.
And let me just take a moment.
I think this is another, I don't know who put out this montage, but when you wonder how Harvey Weinstein got away with raping and doing all the things he's alleged to have done, here is a montage of people talking about Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood.
I'd like to thank Harvey Weinstein.
The Punisher.
That's his nickname.
The Punisher, yes.
Harvey, if I keep thanking you in public, people think we're having an affair.
But nonetheless, if you're choosing sides in the playground before a scrap, I would like to have Harvey Weinstein and Graham King on my side.
Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, God bless them.
My friends at MirrorMax for making this film, especially Harvey.
And Harvey, thank you for killing whoever you had to kill to get me up here today.
And to Harvey Weinstein, the tough guy on the playground, with the biggest heart.
Thank you for saying you do anything for your friends and you always do.
Thank you.
And then Harvey Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein, Harvey and Bob Weinstein every thank you, Harvey Weinstein.
I want to thank Harvey and Bob Weinstein, my agent, Kevin Yvain, and god, Harvey Weinstein.
So I I want to report I didn't stay for the whole uh, I didn't stay for the whole ceremony yesterday.
I got bored, so I dumped poor Christian.
It was like being a bad date where you know, you say you're going to the ladies room and then you just go home.
It was a bad date.
I dumped Christian.
I want to say that the food was so bad that they, to sustain the planet, they served vegetarian food.
And not only did they serve vegetarian food, they didn't even serve it to most of us.
They just gave you a couple of pieces of celery and, you know uh, vegetables.
So I was starving.
I had to go home and get something to eat.
However however, I do want to say this, the part that I saw and I was there for at least half of it, maybe even more the part that I saw I thought Gervais had had an effect.
There were no political comments, zero political comments and there were a lot of expressions of gratitude, people who were happy to have the glamorous well-paying, celebrity-making jobs that they have, and that was it was a good thing to see.
Talented Performers Grateful for Their Craft00:02:19
These are very talented people.
All they want to do is work their trade.
I mean, most of them get told that they're important because they're celebrities, but they know who they are.
What they want to do is they want to pretend to be other people for a living, and they should be able to do that because they are so talented and so beautiful.
I mean, some of the women that you see at these places are so beautiful you can't believe they're real and it is.
It is really an amazing.
They have an amazing genetic gift and an amazing genetic gift of talent and they should be able to use it.
We should be able to enjoy it without them telling us what to think or what is going on, stuff they know nothing about.
And so I have some hope.
I have some hope that maybe under the Trump administration, people are waking up to the fact that the media is complicit in some of the bad things that happen in this country, and they're certainly complicit in telling lies, and if they could just develop a little this much humility, if Chuck Todd could just develop this much self-awareness, things might start to change, we might start to unite and because we, both sides are telling the truth and hearing the truth, it would be a beautiful thing.
We will be back telling the truth right here tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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 Wall Show and the Michael Knoll show.
Thanks for listening.
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