Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 838 skewers Iowa Democrats for pushing Biden, Sanders (a "Soviet-lite" socialist with shifting stances), and Warren (heritage fraud) while ignoring rural voters who allegedly back Trump. He praises Trump’s economy—rising life expectancy, stock highs—but blames his low approval on media bias and Never Trump hypocrisy, contrasting it with Pelosi’s impeachment overreach and Hirano’s dismissal of constitutional law. The episode ties 2020 to a culture war: NFL’s sexualized Super Bowl show vs. heartland values, while Sanders’ "Bernie bros" are framed as violent threats, unlike Trump’s supporters. Media bias, the 1619 Project, and cancel culture (e.g., American Dirt) are attacked as leftist propaganda, with conservatives cast as free-speech defenders. McConnell’s Garland block is defended as legitimate, exposing left-wing double standards on democracy. The show ends by pitching The Daily Wire’s election coverage as the antidote to mainstream media’s "woke" distortions. [Automatically generated summary]
All across the Great Hawkeye State, corn-fed Americans will be leaving their farms and small towns in order to decide which Democrat candidate will best serve the interests of New York and Los Angeles.
These are down-home heartlanders who are tired of Donald Trump and his shenanigans.
They want to return to the good old days when Ma and Pa and Aunt Matilda could sit out on the front porch and watch the factory close while smoking methamphetamines until they died.
To bring back those fine times, Iowa Democrats have assembled a choice slate of white people who have promised to return this country to solid American values like socialism and sexual perversion.
There's Joe Biden, who could become the first candidate ever to win in Iowa while believing himself to be in Ohio.
There's Bernie Sanders, who says Iowans need to taste the joys of socialism because they taste almost exactly like a pet cat roasted over a trash fire.
There's Elizabeth Warren, who traces her heritage back to the state's Iowa tribe, the people who invented the process of sitting on the ground, stirring dirt with a stick until Europeans come and take your land away and build a civilization.
There's also Pete Buttigeg, who is touting his record as mayor of a city of 100,000 people, all of whom hate him.
And there's Amy Klobuchar, who is thought to have a chance to pull off a surprise victory once voters find out whom she's running against.
During the complex caucus process, voters will gather with their neighbors in living rooms across the state and watch on TV as less intelligent voters brave the freezing weather to gather in schools and meeting halls, where they will support their favorite candidate by standing in a group, hoping no one recognizes them and realizes they're backing such a loser.
Those Iowans who enjoy having jobs, of course, will stay home till November when they vote for Donald Trump.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, 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, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
You know, in case you didn't notice while you were suffering through the clavinless weekend, Friday, even though I wasn't here, was a sensational day for the good guys.
The nonsensical Seinfeld impeachment trial came a cropper when Republican senators voted not to hear any more testimony.
Our friends in the United Kingdom said goodbye to the sovereignty-destroying EU.
And it was announced that the Trump administration had sent yet another major terrorist on a surprise trip to hell.
This brought an end to an almost mind-bogglingly successful January, record stark stock market highs, a couple of major trade deals, the killing of Qasem Soleimani in Iran, plus American life expectancy, which had been dropping because of drug use and suicide, rose for the first time in three years, which I suspect is at least in part because Trump paid attention to American job creation instead of globalization.
Any other president at this point would have been re-elected by spontaneous voice vote.
But while Rasmussen now has the president's approval rating at 50%, the RCP average still has it underwater by seven points.
Part of this is because of a relentlessly dishonest left-wing press and its constant barrage of distortions and name-calling.
But I think it would be dishonest in the extreme not to blame some of Trump's low popularity on Donald J. Trump himself.
The same gritty pugilism that gives him the guts to take on the establishment also gives him a nasty streak.
It may actually derive from a nasty streak he already had, and that turns a lot of voters off.
That Democrats should capitalize on Trump's negative traits is no surprise.
Your Briefcase Matters00:15:40
That's their job.
That's what they're supposed to do.
But the prissy hysteria of conservative never-Trumpers is now beginning to look downright absurd.
If guys like Max Boot and the newly minted Democrat Bill Crystal, he announced he was a Democrat and Republicans wept.
Even Mitt Romney, if they think Trump's boorishness overrides his accomplishments, maybe they should ask themselves the following question.
What did they do or fail to do that made voters turn to a man like Trump to get the job done in the first place?
Before they pick holes in Trump's massive successes, maybe they should examine their own failures.
Their failures to address the culture.
and stand up to the press, their failure to stop the growth of government, their surrender to globalism and its destruction of American jobs, the loss of young American minds to the disease of socialism, and the loss of young American lives in wars with no exit strategy.
Trump has some bad habits and an excellent presidential record.
What have the Never Trumpers got?
Not a damn thing.
I'm going to look at the illusions that take place in politics today, but first let us talk about your briefcase.
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And people will look at you and say, there's a man who knows how to spell Clavin.
Hey, today is the end of Another Kingdom.
And the letters I've been gotten have been incredibly moving to me.
Thank you for sending them.
If you haven't been listening, go start listening and get now.
It's all available to everybody.
The last two episodes are now available to everybody.
Austin Stevens, Kyle Perrin, who did the sound work, Jonathan Hay produced, and even Michael Knowles did a spectacular job bringing this thing to life.
It is just, it really is terrific and you should listen to it.
And if you want to see Michael Knowles, who has, I'm not even sure he'll be back.
He's been in Washington all this time, but we will be having a backstage tomorrow evening for the State of the Union.
So the impeachment thing, they're still in the impeachment trial arguing that they should throw Trump out of office for some reason, but obviously that's not going to happen.
And while everybody's sitting around and scratching their chin and saying this is a historic moment, I think Trump got it exactly right.
He was in Iowa just showing up the Democrats by having a tremendous, huge rally, and this is what he had to say.
Washington Democrats have spent the last three years trying to overturn the last election.
I'm not, why am I not worried?
I should be worried.
You know, remember Nixon?
It was like a dark period, right?
It was a very dark period.
It was like, oh, you think about it, right?
And with Clinton, it was not good.
They say that with Johnson, it was a long time ago.
None of us remember, but they say it was a very dark period.
This is a happy period for us.
It's a happy period.
It's a happy bird because we call this impeachment light.
This is light.
It's light.
It's impeachment light.
And of course they're cheering there.
Arthur, he's brought jobs back.
He's brought manufacturing back.
He's paid attention to the country.
The fact that people are not killing themselves, to me, is just a huge, huge deal.
It tells you a lot about what he's done for the country while the press and the Democrats were sitting around saying how horrible it all was.
You know, I watched the Super Bowl.
I thought it was a wonderful game, just a really entertaining game.
Congratulations to Kansas City, whichever state they happen to be in.
Trump said, I think he said that they were in Kansas, where they're based in Missouri.
But Kansas City, of course, is in both Kansas City, Missouri and the Kansas City, Kansas.
It's all basically one big town.
Anyway, congratulations to them.
Loved seeing Andy Reid win.
Love seeing Mahomas do such Mahomes do such a great job.
He seems like a really good kid.
It's really nice to see somebody of good character excel like that.
And everybody, the conservatives, and congratulations San Francisco.
They have nothing to be ashamed of.
They played great and they did a really good job for the last 10 minutes, but they really were terrific.
But, you know, a lot of people were complaining about the halftime show.
Now, I never watched the halftime show, but in this one, J-Lo and Shakira were doing these very sexy dances.
And J-Lo, who looks great for, I think she's 172, she's grabbing her crotch and shaking her butt and all this stuff.
And, you know, what would it take for the NFL?
Look, nobody's against this stuff.
We've all seen this stuff at this point, but what would it take for the NFL to say, you know, people are watching this with their kids.
Maybe we should have some family entertainment during the halftime show.
They don't care.
They do not care.
The Democrats don't care.
The people in the cities do not care about the people.
So when the people in Iowa go out in 40-degree weather, whatever it is they're 30, in California, that's called 30-degree weather, and vote for these people, they should be thinking, this is the new, as Rahm Emmanuel recently called it.
He said, they're looking for a new metropolitan majority.
They do not care about the homeland.
They do not care about the heartland.
And I think that we should remember that.
You could see it in the Super Bowl.
I mean, again, J-Lo's a tremendous talent.
Shakira, I like her too.
But it's like, couldn't she put on some family entertainment for the rest of us?
They just don't care.
All right, let's take a closer look.
I want to take a closer look first at the impeachment, then we'll get to the Iowa, as Rush always calls them, the hawkeye cauckey.
The turning point came, I think it was Friday.
Lamar Alexander, he's from Tennessee, and he's not running for reelection, so he don't care.
He's going to do what he thinks is right, right?
And he was a guy that they were thinking might vote for more witnesses.
But he said something really interesting.
He said basically what I've been saying on this show.
What Trump did was inappropriate.
Trump has got a big mouth.
But this is not an impeachable offense.
So let's listen to Lamar Alexander doing the right thing.
I think he shouldn't have done it.
I think it was wrong.
Inappropriate was the way I'd say improper, crossing the line.
And then the only question left is, who decides what to do about that?
Well, who decides what to do about it?
The people.
The people is my conclusion.
You know, it struck me really for the first time early last week that we're not just being asked to remove the president from office.
We're saying, tell him you can't run in the 2020 election, which begins Monday in Iowa.
If this weren't an election year, would you have had a different, would you have looked at this differently?
I would have looked at it differently, probably come to the same conclusion because I don't think what he did, I think what he did is a long way from treason, bribery, high crimes, and misdemeanors.
I don't think it's the kind of inappropriate action that the framers would expect the Senate to substitute its judgment for the people in picking a president.
You know, I think that's exactly right.
Trump, like I said, he talks without thinking.
He went after the Ukrainians.
I think he was probably actually thinking about corruption and including Joe Biden in that.
I don't think he was thinking, oh, I can destroy Joe Biden and thereby win the election.
I think that's silly.
I don't think he's afraid of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden hardly knows where he is at this point.
He's getting 100 old white people at his events.
I don't know what's going to happen in Iowa today.
But I don't think Donald Trump sits around shivering in his boots over Joe Biden.
Maybe he does.
I don't know.
But as I say, this was a nonsense, that this, after the Russian collusion hoax, that they thought this has moved nobody's ideas.
But here's what I want to look at.
I was talking before about the Never Trumpers.
They attacked Donald Trump, but they don't stop and think, well, why?
Why did the people, why did the people who are almost always wiser than the experts, why did they go for Trump?
What were we not doing?
What was Bill Kristol not doing?
Bill Kristol with all the wars and backing this guy, you know, kind of wild idea to transform the Middle East into a democracy, one big democracy.
You know, now he's a Democrat.
Well, why?
You know, why doesn't he say, hey, you know, maybe I was wrong.
Maybe Donald Trump has something to say.
Maybe the people have something to say.
Listen to Nancy Pelosi as a reporter asks her about Trump's exoneration in the Senate.
When this is over, Washington, do you think that President Trump will be chastened and understand that he's got a Congress watching him?
Or will he be emboldened because the Senate will have acquitted them?
Well, he will not be acquitted.
You cannot be acquitted if you don't have a trial.
And you don't have a trial if you don't have witnesses and documentation and that.
I would hope that the senators, if it comes to a tie or if there's a question of hearing testimony or receiving documents, would leave it up to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Republican appointed, in a Republican-majority court, I would think that they would have confidence in the Chief Justice of the United States.
That's really his title.
And that's interesting to me that they're afraid of breaking a tie with the Chief Justice of the United States.
Does the president know right from wrong?
I don't think so.
She's become a crazed lunatic.
So we're talking about attacking Trump without taking a look at yourself, right?
Because Trump is not a perfect guy.
He's a flawed guy.
But he exists in context.
He exists in the context of American politics, which is frequently, almost always at election time, a binary choice.
They keep attacking him.
But listen to what she just said.
You're not acquitted if you don't have a trial.
Think about that in your own life.
I accuse you of whatever I accuse you of, rape, murder, fraud, whatever I accuse you of.
You're not acquitted without a trial.
In other words, you're guilty until you're proven innocent.
And the reason she thinks that, of course, is because the press will back her up.
If the press wouldn't back her up, if the press would say, hey, you know, you didn't convict him.
He's not convicted, so he's innocent.
You know, she would have to answer that.
Who's being un-American?
The whole argument about impeachment was, oh my gosh, our Constitution is under attack.
Our Constitution is in danger because Trump said something to the president of Ukraine.
You know, that's really what undermines our Constitution.
And there's Nancy Pelosi telling us, you know, the guy is guilty, essentially, until he's proved innocent.
That's what she said.
You're not acquitted without a trial.
So when she says, you know, Trump doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, again, look in the mirror.
Look in the mirror.
Look at who you are.
Look at what the Democratic Party is.
Maisie Hirano, this is the same woman from Hawaii who told during the Kavanaugh trial, told men they should shut up, which of course is the great Democrat argument for everything shut up, you know, because you're making a good point and we have nothing to say.
Here's her reaction to the defense of Donald Trump.
I don't care what kind of nice little legal constitutional defenses they came up with.
It's like, I used to have a landlord in New York who was a pornographer.
He was a horrible, horrible guy.
And he was always trying to screw us.
He was always doing stuff that he wasn't allowed to do.
And I went down to him once and I said, you know, you can't do that.
It's not legal.
And he was like, there's a little cockroach of a man.
He went, no legal, no legal.
So she's like, I don't want to hear none of this constitutional legal.
You remember the treasure of Sierra Madre where the bandits come and they try to coax Humphrey Bogart out from behind a rock by telling him they're the police.
And this is Bogart.
This is a famous, famous scene from this movie.
Play this.
Where are your badges?
Badges?
We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges.
I don't have to show you any stinking batches.
Don't show me the stinking constitution.
We don't need a stinking constitution.
That's amazing, Rono.
And you know, they keep telling us, oh, it's an emergency.
It's an emergency.
Donald Trump spoke to the Ukraine and their constitution is crumbling into ashes around you.
And then they come up with stuff like this.
Adam Schiff, again, this guy to me is the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy.
Little pencil net attitude.
You know, I can't tell whether they're actually playing these things or I'm just hearing them in my head.
But listen to his reaction to this whole thing.
He has been lying.
He has lied repeatedly.
He's lied again and again and again to the press and the public.
And yet they have him on.
They don't say to him, you know, you keep lying.
Why should we believe you now?
But here he is talking on Face the Nation.
There's nothing that I can see that we could have done differently because as the senators have already admitted, we proved our case.
We proved our case.
Now, the president's lawyers have said time and again, I think, hoping through sheer repetition to make something true that is in fact untrue, that the process in this impeachment was different than in Nixon and Clinton.
In fact, the president had the same due process rights, which he did not avail himself of in this process as in the prior ones.
That is not an excuse that should be used by any senator for not fulfilling their obligation to hold a fair trial.
They're not spectators.
They have control of the proceedings and they could have insisted on witnesses and documents and for whatever reason chose not to.
And for those who would say, well, let's let the voters decide when the president is trying to cheat in that very election and they don't want the voters to have the full information.
They want the president to continue to be able to cover it up.
That's just completely unsatisfactory.
It's ridiculous because they accused him of obstructing Congress because Trump used his due process rights.
They're the ones, they're the ones who ignore the concept.
We don't need no stinking constitution.
And so when they yell at Trump, they really, they should look in the mirror first.
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Figuring Netflix Finances00:03:36
I just make it look this easy.
So let us go to Iowa for a minute.
You know, you know what?
I want to riff for it just a minute.
You know, Bernie Sanders is in some of the polls he's leading in Iowa, and it's no surprise that he would be leading Joe Biden as such a deadhead.
And I was thinking, you know, Joe Rogan, who's a really good podcaster and Ben knows him, says he's a nice guy, but he was talking about Bernie being consistent.
And I hear this about Bernie Sanders all the time, that he's consistent.
Like at least he really sticks and he believes what he says and he really does stick to what he says.
And I was thinking about this, you know, and I just have to riff on this for a minute because I was thinking, you know, I'm a writer.
I'm an artist.
I know about certain things.
I know about literature.
I know about politics.
I've been following politics very closely my whole life.
I've been a journalist.
I've been a reporter.
And so I know about politics.
I know a lot of different things.
But I don't know anything about money.
I don't know anything about finances.
I know about economics, but I don't know about finances.
And after a while, I started to notice that every now and again, my wife, who is a lovely, lovely person, and I, you know, I didn't marry my wife for her brains.
I married her for her legs, like, you know, like you do, right?
But every now and again, I would notice she would say something like, you know, this new company, Amazon.com, maybe, maybe we should invest in this.
You know, I'm a guy.
I would say, oh, honey, you're on Amazon.com.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You know, back in the day, and I'm observant.
I watch the way people react.
And I would notice a lot of people would treat my wife like that and treat other women like this.
And back in the day, I'm talking about a long time ago, maybe the 80s, certainly in the 90s, every now and again, my wife would say, you know, I don't think we're going to have these watch movies on these DVDs forever.
I think one day they're just going to pipe them right into our television sets.
And all that, I swear, this is almost verbatim stuff.
The guys around would say, oh, Johanna, starling, you don't understand the capacity of the fiber optics numerology.
Well, never, you can't do that.
But, you know, my wife would just, I don't know.
I think they're just going to, you know, they'll just stream it into your TV one day, and everybody would laugh.
After a while, right, after this happened seven, eight, or nine times, I started to say, like, oh, I get it.
I'm the idiot.
You know, she actually, I don't know how she knows.
She's a woman.
She has no capacity to reason, but somehow, somehow she's figuring this stuff out.
She's figuring this stuff out.
So now, you know, we would go into these meetings, you know, as a family, you go in to talk to your financial advisors.
And the financial advisors are all guys or women who think they're guys and they all sit around.
And my wife would say things, you know, like, I think this new company, Netflix, looks like we should invest it.
And the guys would do the same thing.
These guys are, oh, and they wouldn't even talk to her.
They wouldn't even answer her.
They would answer me.
You know, she would say, I think Netflix is a good thing to invest in.
And they would answer me.
And, you know, these financial advisors, they always talk in these platitudes that don't mean anything because they don't know anything.
So they want to confuse you so you think they do know something.
So they'll say, you know, well, well, you know, darling, you know, you can't close the barn door until the hen is turned on the tractor.
You know, and go like, I don't know.
But see, now I'm watching.
I've been watching my wife all these years and I've started to catch on, right, that I'm the idiot and she knows what she's talking about.
So now I go home and I sit in my easy chair and I light a cigar and I say, honey, you just go right in there, sweetheart.
And you just spend as much of our money as you want in that Netflix.com.
If you think this crazy Netflix thing is a good idea, why you just put our money in that Netflix thing and while you're up, would you get me a sandwich?
Because I'm sitting here.
And, you know, and I say, you know, and don't forget to, don't forget to sell high.
Right-Wing Media's Influence00:15:11
That's very important because I'm still a guy.
I still have to be a pompous ass and act like I know something, right?
And that's how, that's how I got to be a rich guy, right?
Because I paid attention and I learned things.
The Democrats never learn anything.
The Soviet Union is a slave state.
Thousands and millions of people are murdered and then the whole thing collapses and they go, that was a good idea.
That wasn't as bad as people say.
And that was actually kind of a good idea.
Cuba, they're driving cars that were made before they invented the car.
They're driving like horse buggies because they're stuck in this slave economy that is just absolutely terrible.
And Michael Moore's going over there.
Castro, he's the man.
He's the man you want to look to to figure out how things are done.
Venezuela, you know, really, they're literally cooking cats because they're hungry, because they have socialism in Venezuela.
And Sean Penn is out there going, oh, you know, at Ugo Chavez, they never learn anything.
So now they've got Bernie.
Let's play Bernie's ad.
This is Bernie telling you that the real, the way we got to go is socialism.
Tell how good I feel by how nervous the establishment is getting.
Suddenly, Donald Trump is talking about our campaign.
Suddenly, we have the Democratic establishment very nervous about this campaign.
We got Wall Street nervous.
We got the insurance companies nervous.
We got the drug companies nervous.
We got the fossil fuel industry nervous.
We are their worst nightmare.
Could there really be a political movement in America which brings together blacks and whites and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans, gay and straight to stand up as working class people fighting for change?
This is their nightmare on Elm Street.
Well, I think he's a communist.
I mean, you know, look, I think of communism when I think of Bernie.
Now, you could say socialist, but didn't he get married in Moscow?
And that's wonderful.
Moscow is wonderful.
You don't think necessarily, well, whatever.
But you don't necessarily think in terms of marriage, Moscow.
And it's wonderful.
I'm not knocking it, but I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist, but far beyond a socialist.
You know, the funny thing about Bernie Sanders, and here's the thing.
Who was it who said foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?
I think it was Emerson who said that.
The foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds.
Being consistent, my whole point here is that being consistent sometimes means not learning anything.
You know, when you watch life, you learn stuff.
You're supposed to learn stuff.
That's the whole point of getting old, right?
It's like you learn stuff, you get wise because you say, oh, I've seen this before.
That's not the way it works.
There's a really good piece in the Wall Street Journal today by one of their opinion editors, Elliot Kaufman, who talks about the fact that actually Bernie has not been as consistent as all that.
And he says, during half a century in public life, he's been consistent up to a point.
He says, Mr. Sanders has dependently denounced oligarchy and proclaimed himself a democratic socialist.
But his definition of the term has radically changed.
Last year, Bernie Sanders said his goal was, quote, an economy in which you have wealth being created by the private sector, but you have a fair distribution of that wealth.
That is kind of the Scandinavian model, right?
It's the private sector creates the money because they have competition, because they can fail, because they take risks, they do all that stuff, but then you tax them heavily and you create all these social services.
However, this piece in the journal goes on, Sanders had a different vision in the 1970s when he sought statewide office four times as the nominee of the Liberty Union Party of Vermont.
Campaigning for U.S. Senate in 1971, he demanded the nationalization of utilities.
That's the national government takeover of utilities.
In 1973, he proposed a federal takeover of, quote, the entire energy industry.
And in 1974, he wanted a 100% tax on all income above $1 million.
In 1976, he asserted that workers needed to take immediate control of the economy if we are to survive and called for public ownership of utilities, banks, and major industries.
He had a plan for public control over capital.
As late as 1987, he asserted that democracy means public ownership of the major means of productions.
He was, in fact, a communist.
And now he's saying, well, he believes we should tax the, you know, the people who create the wealth are going to create the wealth, but we should tax them and spread that around.
You know, that, to me, is a remarkable change, really.
And it's an admission of failure without having what it takes to come out and say you failed.
And it worries me that he won't come out and say he's failed, because in fact, I don't think he does believe he's failed.
I don't think he does believe that communism has failed.
I think he just thinks that this is what will sell.
You know, this is something the Democrats are talking about openly now.
They're talking about the fact not that they're wrong, not that the socialism is wrong, not that single-payer health care is destructive and actually destroys innovation and destroys the kind of great health care you can get here in America and would get more if you would take the government out of our health care system, if you would reduce government interference in our health care system, our healthcare system would get better.
They're not really talking about that.
They're talking about how far they can go and still get elected.
That is what they're saying.
And so if Bernie Sanders has changed, you have every reason to question why, why he hasn't just come out and said, you know, yeah, you're right.
The socialism I used to support when I honeymooned in the Soviet Union, that does turn out that people get murdered and then it collapses.
So yeah, let's not do that.
But Norway looks nice.
You know, Norway is good where they have tremendous offshore drilling and then spread some of that wealth around into a lot of programs.
But he hasn't done that.
So he hasn't been consistent.
In fact, he's just been dishonest.
And the question is, is he being dishonest now or was he being dishonest then?
Crazy dude.
Dishonest.
He is one crazy dude.
He is one crazy dude.
And was he being dishonest when he said when he supported the Soviet Union and Nicaragua and Castro?
Or is he being crazy?
Is he being dishonest now when he says he's changed his mind?
It really is an important question, one they should be asking.
Listen, this year is going to be nuts.
I mean, we are going to watch these Democrats keep trying one way or another to get Trump out of office.
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I want to return to this theme of taking a look at yourself in the mirror when these people who are criticizing Trump, whether they're on the left or the right, criticizing Trump in this kind of vacuum, as if he's acting like in a vacuum.
He's not in the swamp.
He's not in this kind of slowly growing blob of a government that sucks everything into itself and then destroys everything it touches and makes American life a little worse.
He didn't come to power, you know, didn't come into the presidency while Americans were killing themselves in record numbers so that our life expectancy was dropping because of despair.
Like that never happened.
That wasn't happening.
Like, why, why, no one, does anybody ever turn to Barack Obama and say, you supervised a period of American despair so bad that our life expectancy dropped.
Nobody says it.
It's all evil Trump, evil Trump, evil Trump.
Listen to Bill Maher talk about why he likes Bernie.
I don't think the Republicans anymore believe in democracy.
Well, I thought when Mitch, when Merrick Garland didn't get his hearing, I thought, oh, well, they can't subvert democracy more than that.
And Mitch McConnell said, hold my beer.
Well, I think today.
But today, though, today we really ought to stop because today was a monumental day, a very bad one for the history of our country.
And the Senate basically gave the finger to the country and basically did not do that duty.
And now it's up to the people of the country to say, we are the only ones that can stop this.
I disagree with, I think we're going to win in November, but you have to go vote.
But I tell you why Bernie Sanders is attractive to me now, because he's the only Democrat who, like Trump, has an army.
Who, when it gets to this other level, he's got a bunch of badass motherfuckers who will get in the streets.
You're so overdramatic, man.
Look, wait a minute.
Like Trump, he's got an army of badass MOFOS who will get out in the streets.
Where's Trump's army of guys who do that?
Where are Trump's Antifa?
Where are the people for Donald Trump who are out there beating people up and hurting people?
Where are the guys, all those Bernie bros that Project Veritas has caught on tape saying they're ready for violence?
They won't bring it in right away.
But if we lose this election, there's going to be violence.
Cities will burn.
I don't hear Donald Trump's people saying that.
I don't hear all those people, those people at the rallies who are shouting USA, USA, saying, and if we lose the election, we'll burn the place down.
You know, this is the thing.
Who is Bill Maher talking about?
When he talks about the death of democracy because Merrick Garland didn't get in, that is democracy.
Democracy is using the levers of power that you have in a legal way to get what you want.
That is part of being in a republic.
Obviously, we're not a democracy.
We're a democratic republic.
But all Mitch McConnell did was he used the powers that he had.
He was in the majority and he held up the vote on Merrick Garland until the election and they won the election.
If they'd lost the election, Merrick Garland would have gotten in.
He knew that.
He was taking a risk.
He did what he had to do.
That's not the end of democracy.
I mean, this is not a place where we all vote on things and that's what becomes true.
This is a process that has been created to keep us from being too much of a democracy because democracy inevitably descends into chaos.
So who is, who are Donald, you know, when he says that, like Donald Trump, you know, Bernie has an army.
They're waging war against people who aren't in the streets.
They're threatening violence against people who aren't threatening violence to them.
I mean, if you really want to see, here's Jill Filipovic.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
She is an author.
And she's talking about the press.
If you just want to see self-blindness in action, she's talking about how the press is selling fake news.
You know, you have a right-wing media apparatus, you have a liberal media apparatus, and what you believe depends on where you get your news.
I'm not sure that's right.
I think we have a propaganda apparatus, and I think we have a media apparatus that is trying to tell the truth and tell the whole story.
And what I think is particularly fascinating is how much that right-wing propaganda apparatus has become so deeply intertwined with Trumpism that it not only primed the audience for Trump to rise to power, but it's now repeating the kind of Trump-Roy Cohn playbook of lie, disseminate misinformation, like the quote that you had up on the screen, minimize, deny, and essentially project what you're doing onto someone else.
And to see how tremendously effective that has been and to see not only right-wing media, but now also Republican senators and Republican politicians also jump on board, it's terrifying.
And I don't know where we go from there to come up to come to this kind of universal national agreed upon truth.
That is an amazing piece of video.
I could almost just watch that all day.
I mean, let's unpack it a little bit.
First of all, she accuses the right of projecting what they're doing onto other people.
And then she says, you know, people say there's a right-wing and a left-wing media, and your attitude depends on where you get your news, but no, no, no, no.
That's not it.
That's not it.
There is a right-wing media and the truth.
There's a right-wing media, and then there's the people trying to tell the truth.
And you can tell this, she goes on to say, because the right-wing media is just really supportive of Trump.
Now, first of all, the right-wing media is a rebel band, right?
I'm the right-wing media.
I'm a media who believe, I'm part of the media who believes in freedom and obeying the Constitution.
That's what I believe.
That's all I believe in, really.
That is my entire political agenda right there, is your freedom, individual freedom, and obeying the Constitution so that the government doesn't get too powerful, as I feel it already has, all right?
I'm on the internet.
You know, I'm doing, we're here the Daily Wire.
We're building this little rebellious thing.
NBC, right?
ABC.
These are the powerhouses in the news.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, these are the establishment things.
The New York Times, which spreads its budget across the country, that's the powerhouse.
So when she says there is this evil right-wing media, she's talking about the rebellion.
She's talking about the people who are standing up to the smothering, massive communication network that the left has built out of its corporations.
And then she says, oh, and the right-wing media is just all tied up with Donald Trump.
As if the left-wing media was not supportive of what was that guy's name, Ohama Cabana, something like that.
Obama, Obama.
I forget because his legacy is now just radioactive dust blown away on the winds of history.
So it's hard to remember his name.
But it seems to me that when Obama or O'Hara or whatever his name was, when he was president, it seems to me that the media was supporting him full-throatedly.
And that was all the media, the big media, the mainstream media.
There's a reason they call it the mainstream media.
It's not because it's mainstream politically.
It's because it holds the center of the avenue and doesn't let other people pass through.
So that's just an incredible, incredible piece of blindness.
Here is Marigay from the New York Times Editorial Board.
Okay, this is from the New York Times editorial board.
First of all, she doesn't look old enough to be on any kind of board, but here she is on the editorial board.
And she's talking about the fact that they decided not to see witnesses in the trial because basically they said, hey, if you had proof against Trump, you would have gotten your witnesses in the House, but you didn't go through with that process because you said that was too much due process for you.
So here's Marigay commenting on what that means for all of us in America.
Americans Losing Faith00:06:06
For that majority of Americans, what we're witnessing tonight is really a capstone in just total collapse of faith in American institutions.
I think if you're an American who believes the evidence that the House managers laid out, you have to be thinking to yourself tonight, I need to get myself and everybody on my block and everybody in my family to a poll very quickly, because otherwise this president is not going to be held accountable.
And, you know, I have to say, as somebody who grew up with a father who grew up in the Jim Crow South and in the Jim Crow Detroit, a lot of what this has looked like from the Republican side, the kind of imagining and the farcical nature of this, the lack of good faith argument, sounds very familiar to me.
And it's actually quite scary.
I think we're in a very scary moment.
It's a very scary moment.
I mean, because of what?
Huh?
How dare you?
How did she get to Jim Crow from people saying now we don't want to hear what?
I do not, this is from the New York Times, remember, which has got their famous 1619 project that says America was formed to preserve the institution of slavery, which is just an untruth.
It is just not true.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., right, the black Harvard academic, said they are ignoring the role of, he says they ignore the role of Africans in promoting slavery.
Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the American Revolution, says that the 169 project is just not true.
But even so, that is now being spread in our high schools, right?
This is now being spread that more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states have adopted the 169 printing project as part of their curriculum.
They are spreading lies about America, the kind of lies that she was just telling right there, but all they see is, oh, how evil, how evil and racist, how racist they are.
This is the same thing that's happening in Brexit.
They voted, people saying they voted for Brexit.
All the pundits in the UK are saying, oh, they voted for Brexit because they're racist, because they just didn't want all these people coming in.
Do they ever listen?
Do they ever learn?
Do they ever pay attention?
Do they ever say, hey, maybe these people are against socialism because socialism doesn't work?
Maybe they're for Brexit because they want their own government to be run by their own people.
Is that so terrible?
Is that such a terrible thing?
They want England to be run by the English, the UK to be run by people who live there.
It is amazing that these people just never look in the mirror.
All we hear is Trump, Trump, Trump.
It is truly amazing.
All right, a final reflection.
And this is something I have to talk about.
Carol Markovitz writes about this in the New York Post.
There's a novel out called American Dirt.
And American Dirt came out and it got the full court press.
Oprah Winfrey loved it.
And all these people were backing it.
And she was the lady who was the author, Janine Cummins, was going to go on a book tour.
This is a left-wing book, okay?
It's a novel about a mother and son pair of migrants on the run from murderous drug lords.
It's gotten glowing praise.
All the main people who promote books have promoted this book.
But suddenly, the criticism of the book comes out from the woke crowd.
These people are so woke.
They are just too woke.
They're too woke for school, man.
They just know so much.
And they say that it shouldn't have been written is a book about Hispanics or has Hispanics in it that shouldn't have been written by a white woman, right?
And it got so bad.
They started to threaten her.
You know, they started to threaten her life and just scream and yell.
And they said that there was a, they just, they did the usual thing, this cultural appropriation, all this stuff.
They had to cancel the woman's book tour.
They had to cancel her book tour because they were afraid for her life.
And they're afraid for their company.
You know, they don't want their company to be attacked from this stuff because they think that this is where their audience is.
And once they get the woke crowd against them, then of course the New York Times will fall in line and you need good reviews from the New York Times if you're going to sell books and be in the culture.
Because the thing is, listen, we put out another kingdom.
Hundreds of thousands of people listened to Another Kingdom and loved it.
If we had had that, if we had sold that many books, that would have been number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list.
Not many fiction works of fiction sell 200,000 copies, right?
That's not the way that works, right?
So we'd have been, but, but because we're conservatives and A, because the left is against us, and B, because the right isn't for us, because the right doesn't stand up and build venues where we get reviews and we get awards and we can praise each other, they don't do that.
It won't have the same cultural relevance that you will have if you bring something up and the left-wingers at ABC and the left-wingers at CBS and the left-wingers at CNN and all the left-wingers who dominate the culture praise the thing that you do.
So they have got to kowtow to these 10 or 20 woke protesters who shut people down and make people afraid and make people afraid to speak and say, you know, this is taking over.
It's taking over the YA industry, that you're not allowed to write about stuff that you don't know anything about.
So that you haven't lived.
You have to write your lived experience.
If you're a white person, you can't write about being black.
If you're a white person, you can't write about being Latino, whatever.
You have to write your lived experience.
Instead of writing what novels are, instead of writing fiction.
So it's the right.
It is we on the right who are defending this left-winger's right to write the book she wants to write.
It is we on the right who are defending a left-winger's right to speak, okay?
And yet, we're the ones they think they should be afraid of.
They think they should be afraid of us destroying their freedom when we are defending even their freedom.
It is an amazing, amazing thing.
They have walked through the looking glass, and that looking glass is called the mainstream media.
And they have lived in the mainstream media so long that they haven't peeked out to look at reality and see it's them.
It's them who threaten freedom.
It's not Donald Trump.
It really isn't.
He has all kinds of problems, but one of them is not that he's threatening the Constitution or their freedom.
That's coming from them.
Through The Looking Glass00:01:26
Don't forget backstage tomorrow to watch the State of the Union.
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