Ep. 846 – Corruption Eruption exposes how CNN and MSNBC once hyped Michael Avenatti as a Trump-fighting hero before his extortion convictions, while the DOJ’s selective prosecutions—like Flynn’s vs. McCabe’s—reveal partisan weaponization. The episode ties systemic corruption to socialism’s centralized power, contrasts China’s 150M COVID lockdowns with U.S. open-border risks, and accuses the Washington Post of echoing Beijing’s propaganda by dismissing Wuhan lab theories. Ultimately, it frames leftist governance as inherently more dangerous than free-market "shenanigans," warning of inequality under authoritarian control. [Automatically generated summary]
American journalists and other pitiful misuses of the miracle of human life are engaged in searching what archaeologists say may have once been their souls in the wake of Michael Avenatti's conviction on charges of fraud and extortion.
The lawyer Avenatti had made frequent appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and other mainstream news outlets despite some early hints that he was sleazy and dishonest, like his frequent appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and other mainstream news outlets.
CNN's Brian Stelter, who calls his show reliable sources with a straight face, says he can't understand how he got it so wrong.
Addressing the CNN audience as the audience was about to board his flight to Tacoma, Stelter said, quote, I ask myself if perhaps my flagrant bias in favor of Democrats, combined with my deceptive presentation of myself as objective, had left me so dishonest and corrupt that I had to admire Avenatti dishonesty and corruption lest I be forced to confront my own.
But then I think, nah, it was probably something else, unquote.
Commentator Ana Navarro, who speaking on ABC, once compared Avenati to the Holy Spirit, said she now feels the comparison may not have been 100% accurate.
The 1980s immigrant from Nicaragua issued a statement in her native communist saying, quote, there were in fact many similarities between Avenatti and the third person of the Trinity.
For instance, the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son, and Avenatti rips off strippers before extorting sneaker companies while swindling his clients.
So it was an easy mistake to make, unquote.
Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says he felt, quote, snookered by Avenati because Avenati pretended to be a corrupt lowlife, but turned out to be an incredibly corrupt lowlife, and Toobin fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.
All the leftist journalists say they will continue to examine their consciences for another hour or so and then go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winding, also singing hunky-dunky-duty.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
You are probably familiar with the old saying, nature thrown out the door comes back in through the window.
The idea, obviously, is that you can't banish nature from human affairs no matter how hard you try.
You can write trans women or women as many times as you like on your Twitter feed.
You can even use capital letters, but the minute you let trans women compete against real women in sports, say, your Twitter feed will be thrown out both the door and the window, and nature will come back in.
It doesn't have a homey saying of its own, but the same can be said of human corruption.
Throw corruption out the door and the Democrat Party will come in through the window.
All right, I'm joking, there's corruption on both sides, but the corruption of socialism, of leftism, is almost always worse than the corruption of freedom.
In government, corruption usually takes the form of officials unfairly using power for either personal or political gain.
So the more power the officials have, the more corruption is likely.
Socialism, which replaces free enterprise with government control of the economy, increases the power of government and therefore increases the reach of government corruption.
If you have two fairly equal competitors in business, say you got Chevrolet and the Ford Motor Company, they can't really bribe the public to like one car more than they like the other.
But if some civil servant decides which car will get the big contract, it's easy to know where to send the bribery check.
Here's the problem.
Because there's always corruption in every system, and because power is spread out in a free, non-socialist society, corruption appears everywhere in a free society.
There's always someone breaking the rules or abusing his position.
Petty corruption is widespread in free societies.
And because socialism, with its pseudo-Christian pretense at charity, tends to attract young people who are naive and idealistic, socialism presents itself as being less corrupt.
The idealists who follow Bernie Sanders say are frequently not corrupt themselves because most of them have no power.
It's only when socialism becomes the law of the land that you go from the widespread petty individual corruptions of freedom to the deep, pervasive systemic corruption of socialism.
This is why American socialists had to destroy our education system before Bernie Sanders could finally rise as far as he has.
Because if you have a good education, you already know all this.
The spread of socialism depends on youthful ignorance and idealism.
And now you know.
All right, we're going to talk about corruption, corruption in the press, in the DOJ, in China, maybe even in the Democrat Party if we get that.
I think of communism when I think of it.
Corruption In The Press00:14:59
So do I.
So do I, little voice in my head.
But first, let us talk about HR, human resources.
It is one of the biggest problems businesses have when you have a business like the Daily Wire, which has grown so far, so fast.
It can be a real problem keeping track of people, especially complying with all the different rules, which are different in every state, and you got to comply with them.
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B-A-E, and there are no easy things.
Mailbag is tomorrow.
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Absolutely.
I completely agree.
I concur with that assessment because I will answer all your questions about politics, about your personal life, about religion, anything you want to ask me.
And all my answers are guaranteed 100% correct just for the price of subscription.
And they will change your life.
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Now, when I'm talking about corruption, I'm not talking about shenanigans.
Politics is full of shenanigans.
And I go easier on the shenanigans of the right than I do on the left for the simple reason that the left is socialist.
They're the bad guys.
Freedom is good.
I support the good guys, right?
And if they have a little bit of shenanigans, I look the other way.
Same way I look the other way.
If a police officer kicks a murder suspect down a flight of stairs, I'm like, oh, that's too bad.
But I treat the murder guy a lot differently than I treat the cop.
Same way here.
I treat socialists much harder.
But I'm not talking about shenanigans.
I'm talking about genuine corruption.
Michael Avenatti, this guy who was stormy.
How could we ever have imagined that a guy who defended a stripper trying to take down Donald Trump for a completely consensual affair was, how could I even ever have thought he was a dirty guy?
But he was convicted.
He was really convicted for trying to extort more than $20 million from Nike.
He's still got other federal indictments out open in California, another one for prosecutors in Manhattan for embezzling money from Stormy Daniels.
You know, what he did was he had evidence, he said he had evidence that Nike employees had funneled secret payments to the families of top high school basketball players in apparent violation of NCEA rules, and he called them up and he did that tough guy thing where he said, I'm going to destroy you guys if you don't do this.
So the press loved this guy, all right?
They just love this guy.
Play a quick part of that montage of this.
He's Donald Trump's worst nightmare, Michael Avenatti.
Joining us once again is Michael Avenatti.
Let's bring in Michael Avenatti.
Michael Avenati.
Michael Avenatti.
Michael Avenatti, thank you very much.
He's out there saving the country.
John Meacham says he may be the savior of the Republic.
You are something of a folk hero now.
I owe Michael Avenatti an apology.
I've been saying enough already, Michael.
I've seen you everywhere.
What do you have left to say?
I was wrong, brother.
You have a lot to say.
I am just dying to hear what you think.
These people all like you.
I'm the only person right here Donald Trump fears more than Robert Miller.
We think you guys are the tip of the spear that's going to take down Donald Trump.
How dumb would you have to be to find the creepy porn lawyer impressive?
Well, if you want to know how dumb, here's Brian Stelter examining his conscience in the wake of Avenatti's conviction.
I've been getting some grief from Sean Hannity this weekend, speaking of Fox, right?
From Hannity for once suggesting that I thought Avenati could be a serious candidate for president.
So give me a media critique.
Was that stupid on my part?
What do you make of how Avenati was covered by CNN and MSNBC?
Well, I think one of the weird and in many cases distressing things that Trump has done is basically to Trumpify his opposition as well.
And you see this very often in the conspiratorial mindset that many of his detractors take online.
And I think that bore itself out in the phenomenon of Michael Avenatti as well.
Ever met someone who was so extremely dumb that they don't know how stupid they actually are?
It's Trump's fault that Brian Stelter is corrupt.
Brian Stelter says, what's the problem here?
Is it me licking up to Michael Avenatti and telling him he was a serious contender for the presidency of the United States?
No, no, no, no.
It's Donald Trump.
He's so biased that he blames the guy he's biased against for his own bias.
So what we have is that the press is corrupt.
We've said this a million times, but it's just true.
We have a corrupt Democrat press.
And that creates problems for all of us when looking at corruption.
So let's take a look at what's going on at the DOJ, all right?
At the DOJ, I talked about this last week.
The problem is when the press isn't covering corruption, we start to cover it ourselves.
We start to talk about it ourselves, and we start to see corruption on the other side and not see our own corruption and think, well, if they did it, we can do it and all this stuff.
So we don't have the sort of confidence that the people who are tasked with exposing corruption are going to expose corruption.
And we get a little crazy about it too.
So last week, I talked about the fact that Donald Trump tweeted that Roger Stone's, the recommendation of Roger Stone being sent away for up to nine years for this process crime that came out of the Mueller case, right?
He lied and he tried to intimidate witnesses.
Roger Stone lied and tried to intimidate witnesses in the Mueller investigation after Mueller already knew that the whole Russian thing was a hoax, all right?
So it was a process crime.
It was a crime that wouldn't have existed, but he did commit it.
He got convicted.
And then the prosecutors, overriding, by the way, I think the local governor, I can't remember who it was, who said, you know, this is way too much.
They recommended they go away for nine years.
Trump then tweets, that's ridiculous.
And the DOJ rescinds the recommendation, causing the original prosecutors to walk away.
And three of them quit the case.
One of them quit the DOJ.
I said on Thursday, this was bad for Trump.
Trump should not have done this.
And I wrote a column about it.
And the usual Trumpers show up and say, no, whatever Donald Trump does, it's right.
If Donald Trump does it, it's right.
You don't know you didn't win the presidency.
Oh, you're a cuck.
Oh, you're the crap, right?
And that happens.
That happens because our press is corrupt.
That happens because our press can't be trusted to expose the corruption on both sides.
Trump made a mistake.
And of course, right after I said it, because here you get tomorrow's news today, Bill Barr comes out, the last honest man in Washington, D.C., comes out and says it's not helpful for Donald Trump to do this.
Play the first bar clip.
To have public statements and tweets made about the department, about our people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we're doing our work with integrity.
Of course it does.
It makes him look bad, right?
It makes him look bad when the president tells him to do something and he does it.
He was going to do it anyway, but it's still, it makes him look bad.
And now, Stone, by the way, is asking for new trial because one of the jurors was a stone Democrat.
And Trump is tweeting about that.
But now there's this big petition going around to get Barr to resign.
We'll look at that in just a minute, but let's first talk about business and numbers.
If you run a business, I run a business, I am a business, you have to know what your numbers are: what's going in, what's coming out, where things are going, where things are being allocated, what are you doing with the money that you're making and trying to make and with the development.
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That's netsuite.com/slash clavin.
Netsuite.com slash clavin.
If you want to grow, you got to know how to spell clavin.
There are no easy thing about it.
K-L-A-V-A-N.
I make it look easy.
That's why you think there are ease in it, but there is no ease in Claven.
So now the press, there's a petition going around.
2,000 former DOJ people, the petition was made up by a left-wing organization.
They gathered all the information.
And of course, Joe Biden and the press are piling on.
Here's Joe Biden.
This has been the greatest abuse of power I have ever seen at the hands of this president who has no, no sense of decency or understanding of the Constitution.
And Barr is facilitating it is beyond my comprehension.
I've been around a long time, used to chair the Judiciary Committee for years.
No president, no president, no president has ever intimidated a general attorney general into abusing power as much as this man has.
You're a lying dogface pony soldier.
He is a lying, dogface, pony soldier.
Whatever that means, that is what he is.
John F. Kennedy's brother was the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy, and was constantly running political interference for him.
We remember that Eric Holder was Obama's wingman, right?
He went out and he covered up the fast and furious scandal, and Obama protected him by giving him executive privilege, which he should not have had.
Aloretta Lynch, of course, we remember meeting with Clinton, Bill Clinton, with Bill Clinton on the tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation.
And remember that Eric Holder didn't prosecute the IRS at all, didn't do anything at all to the IRS after they targeted grassroots Tea Party organizations to keep them silent during Obama's reelection campaign.
But the most important thing the Obama administration did, and this is, I mean, because Obama was scandal-free, he was scandal-free, because Obama was scandal-free, We don't think about this enough.
He didn't enforce the law.
Let me just read you a little piece from Politico 2012, all right?
This is Politico.
They're not that, you know, left-wing or right-wing.
They're a little more to the left than to the right, I think.
But here it says, the federal government won't deport undocumented immigrants under age 30 who came to the United States as children.
It is a temporary de facto implementation of part of the stalled DREAM Act, right?
It's a loud message to Hispanic voters to remember Obama in November.
They are not enforcing the law.
They are told Obama told the DOJ not to enforce the law.
On gay rights, too, the administration has asked agencies to do less.
In February 2011, the Justice Department announced it would not defend the Defense of Marriage Act against court challenges.
It wouldn't enforce the law.
The 1996 law, which bars the government from recognizing same-sex marriage, appears headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
They weren't going to defend it.
In August, Obama's DHS announced it would no longer deport the non-citizen spouses of gay Americans, a direct contradiction to the Defense of Marriage Act.
The tactic has its start.
In the earliest days of the administration, the Department of Justice announced it would not prosecute medical marijuana users or suppliers in states where it's legal, despite the state laws contradicting the federal laws.
Last September, the DOJ also announced a change of legal interpretation that effectively legalized internet gambling.
Now, whether you agree with that or disagree with the laws themselves, think about it for a minute.
In our government, we have legislators, right?
What do they do?
The name kind of gives it away.
They legislate.
They make law.
Then we have an executive.
What does he do?
Once again, friends, the name gives it away.
He executes the law.
He executes what the legislature does.
What if, what if the president says to the DOJ, don't enforce the law?
That's what he did repeatedly, don't enforce the law.
The legislature ceases to exist.
All these people who are accusing Donald Trump of being the king, right, never said a word about this.
They never said a word about Obama openly bragging, parading the fact that he was not going to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, that he wasn't going to enforce it, that he wasn't going to enforce the laws against illegal immigration.
That was fine, as long as you were doing it.
And that was fine.
But this, where Donald Trump sent out a tweet and there is no evidence whatsoever that Barr was responding to that tweet, it just, as Barr himself said, made him look bad because Trump doesn't have enough control over himself.
And Trump made a mistake.
He made a political and moral mistake, right?
That's what happened.
He made a political and moral mistake that made one of his best people, Bill Barr, look bad, right?
That is time for the press to come out and call Barr names and call.
You know, this is a guy whose reputation is basically perfect.
There's nothing in his reputation to suggest that he would sell out.
He himself has said, I can't be bullied.
I'm not going to be bullied by Donald Trump.
But the press is so corrupt that we can't see, we can't, we have to sort of take the law into our own hands and we start saying, well, whatever Trump does, it's okay because the press is so corrupt, they're not calling out the corruption of the Obama administration.
Barr is an honest man.
Trump hasn't done anything illegal.
He hasn't done anything wrong.
He just did something morally stupid.
That's all it is to it.
And it put one of our best, most honest guys in the crosshairs.
And that's a mistake.
Now, now, while we're looking at the corruption of the DOJ and while we're trying to see where that corruption is, we have to look at the story of Andrew McCabe.
It is an amazing story.
And first, we will talk, before we get to that, let us talk about rockauto.com for the simple reason I love to say rockauto.com.
FBI Whistleblowers Revelations00:11:56
It is so much fun to say rockauto.com that if your car needs a part, you want to say rockauto.com.
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It has everything you need from brake parts, tail lamps for any car you want.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Clavin in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know we sent you.
And you got to say Claven, but how do you spell Clavin?
Be idiot.
There are no easy things.
So they're not going to prosecute Andrew McCabe, okay?
Here's the thing.
Andrew McCabe, who has been under the gun for lying to Congress, is not going to be prosecuted according to the DOJ.
And here is McCabe responding to that news.
The added insult and suspicion that comes with being under criminal investigation just made the entire experience a million times worse.
And I have to say that as glad as I am that the Justice Department and the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office finally decided to do the right thing today, it is an absolute disgrace that they took two years and put my family through this experience for two years before they finally drew the obvious conclusion and one they could have drawn a long, long time ago.
Come on.
Come on, man.
Let's look at this.
As this news comes out, Lisa Page, the adulterous lover of Peter Strzzok at the FBI, right, the lawyer, she tweets out this thing with her wearing a t-shirt, says, I'm done being quiet.
And she's lifting a glass of wine saying, cheers, Andy, okay?
Let's remember what it was that Andrew McCabe did, all right, about two weeks before the election on 2016.
He was then the deputy director of the FBI, and the Wall Street Journal ran a story that questioned his fitness to lead an investigation of Hillary Clinton, right?
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that McCabe's wife had received $675,000 in donations from a political action committee that was controlled by Clinton's friend, the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe.
I'm getting some of this from Andy McCarthy over at National Review.
Okay, so the reporter on the story, right, was a guy named Devlin Barrett.
So he's saying that Andy McCabe is not the guy to investigate Hillary Clinton, right?
So he calls in and he says, why are you the guy who's going to investigate the probe of the Clinton Foundation?
And remember, James Comey at this point is investigating Hillary Clinton's server, right, and is talking about whether to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton's server, which he ultimately did because they had found classified information on Clinton's AIDS thing.
I know this gets very complicated.
I'm trying to simplify it as much as I can, right?
So they're having a conversation about whether to reopen the case and Andrew McCabe gets on the phone and Comey tells him to get off the phone because his reputation has been tainted by this Wall Street Journal story.
So this makes McCabe angry.
He gets in touch with who?
Lisa Page, right?
He gets in touch with Lisa Page and he has her leak a story to the Wall Street Journal about how McCabe and a high-ranking Obama Justice Department official got into it, basically about the Obama administration trying to shut down the investigation into Hillary Clinton and McCabe was standing up for keeping the investigation going.
You got it?
So in other words, first, the Obama administration putting pressure on the DOJ to shut down an investigation into Hillary Clinton, right?
That's the story.
Second, McCabe leaks that to restore his information.
He then goes in and blames someone else for leaking it to turn the information away from him.
He lies to Congress about all of this stuff, and this story gets dropped.
Now, now these charges have been dropped, right?
So the corruption, if you're looking at that, if you've got Lisa Page, the woman who was tweeting to her adulterous lover, Peter Strzok, about how we have to stop Donald Trump, right?
And some of that attitude went into the Russian investigation.
And you've got them leaking this story and then lying about it.
And those charges are dropped.
Now let's compare what happened to General Michael Flynn, right?
This is a former three-star general who pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russia's, with the Russians' ambassador, right?
Now, this is right after the administration came in.
He did nothing wrong, right?
This is important.
General Flynn did nothing wrong in talking to the ambassador.
It was part of his job, but he didn't get the story right when he talked to the FBI.
And what happened was Andrew McCabe called up Michael Flynn and said, oh, we're just going to drop over.
We want to talk.
You know, what does it say?
McCabe called Mr. Flynn personally.
This is the deputy director of the FBI called this three-star general on other business.
He was discussing an FBI training session.
And on that thing, he said, you know, we have to have a couple of agents come over and sit down with you and talk about some other stuff about this talking to the Russian ambassador.
Just a casual thing.
You don't need a lawyer.
Didn't tell him he needed a lawyer.
Didn't tell him that lying to the FBI is a crime, that making a mistake is a crime.
Here's James Comey, whose idea this was.
This was James Comey's idea, bragging about this to Nicole Wallace.
You look at this White House now, and it's hard to imagine two FBI agents ending up in this sit room.
How did that happen?
I sent them.
Something I probably wouldn't have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation, a more organized administration, in the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration.
The protocol, two men that all of us have perhaps increased appreciation for over the last two years.
And in both those administrations, there was process.
And so if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel and there'd be discussions and approvals and who would be there.
And I thought it's early enough.
Let's just send a couple guys over.
It was all bullshit.
Yeah.
Well, it was.
I mean, these are these guys conspiring.
The administration has just gotten started.
They are conspiring against this president.
This is a corrupt DOJ before Barr got there in the scandal-free Trump administration.
The Obama administration, the very fact, the very fact that the press calls the Obama administration scandal-free condemns the press.
Because if it was scandal-free, it was because they didn't do their job, right?
So Michael Flynn is sitting over there.
He's had a completely legal conversation, a completely legal conversation with the Russian ambassador.
And remember, now they're sending out this stuff about, you know, oh, Trump colluded with Russia.
Remember, this entire hoax is going on.
If Trump colluded with Russia, so anything that happens with Russia must have been a problem.
And they get Michael Flynn and this, and they go over there, and even the FBI agents, even the FBI agents said he wasn't lying.
We didn't get the feeling he was lying.
We got the feeling he made a mistake when he said he didn't remember what he was talking to the Russian ambassador about.
There are accusations.
I don't know how much of this is true.
There are accusations that the FBI threatened to prosecute Flynn's son.
And that's why Flynn pleaded guilty.
Now Flynn wants to take back his guilty plea.
Very, very difficult to do.
It's a really difficult situation.
So Flynn, this three-star general, is under the gun, right?
Has been essentially convicted.
He's pleaded guilty.
And McCabe gets away.
And Lisa Page, you know, the adulteress is like toasting.
You know, this is a corrupt organization.
James Comey, that's corruption.
I'm sorry, that's corruption.
This is a targeted attack on the president of the United States.
When he calls it a coup attempt, he's absolutely right.
When he calls it a hoax, he's absolutely right.
But the press has got nothing but time to go after Bill Barr.
And, you know, I think this just distorts the entire conversation.
I think it distorts us.
It makes it very hard for us to get clear about how we feel about corruption because I don't believe it's true that they were corrupt so that we can be corrupt.
I do believe it's true that our shenanigans is better than their shenanigans because our shenanigans is in favor of freedom.
So all the stuff about, you know, killing the Merrick Garland confirmation, that's political shenanigans.
That's not corruption.
Nobody's taking money or doing the wrong thing.
They're actually following the law when they did that.
Mitch McConnell was doing what was right for his political party.
That's shenanigans.
I'm all for it when the right is doing it because they're doing it in the name of freedom.
But this is corruption.
This is abusing your power to go after people and pin them to the wall and send good people to prison.
And I would like to know, because I don't know, why the case against McCabe was dropped.
That is the thing we're going to have to find out in the days to come.
Let us talk about a message.
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You are the people who keep us independent, honest, and one step ahead of the left.
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So let me illustrate why, why this becomes a bigger problem when you've got centralized government, when you have control of the economy, when you have control of health care, when you have control of businesses, when business.
when you can take people's money away, when the people in power have the power to decide whose money gets taken away, right?
I'm going to have a wealth tax, a special wealth tax for anybody who does too well in business, anybody who creates too much wealth, we're going to take some of that wealth.
Every time you centralize power, you centralize corruption.
And there is a difference.
There is a difference between the fact that individual people are corrupt and corruption in every democratic free society.
Corruption is widespread, but it tends to be trivial.
Virus Origins Debated00:09:20
It tends not to be so deep.
It doesn't really matter if the head of a company cheats on his wife in the boardroom.
That's a bad thing.
He should be fired.
But it doesn't really bother you all that much.
There's always going to be corruption and some of it is serious corruption.
But when all the power is centered in government and you know who to bribe, then all you have are the powerful and the people who are wealthy enough to control the powerful.
That's why in a capitalist society you have these gradations of inequality.
We have inequality under a capitalist system, right?
You have poor people going up slowly by steps to the very rich.
In a socialist society, you don't have that.
You have the powerful and you have the people who are out of power.
And that's it.
You have the powerful and the poor.
You have the people waiting on breadlines.
And then you have Bernie Sanders, the czar, saying breadlines are a good thing because you have bread.
So that's another reason we need communism.
There it is.
Another reason.
Because, you know, that's all you've got.
That's all you've got is the people in power and the people who have no power, zero power.
And that's the thing that Michael Moore and people like Bernie Sanders want because they think they're the ones who are going to have the power, right?
It's never your turn to go off to the Lubianca prison and never come back.
You always think it's going to be somebody else.
Let's take a look at this thing, this corona virus that's going on in China, that's coming out of China.
And I haven't talked about it much because you never know how much of this is being overemphasized and there just aren't enough facts.
And one of the reasons there aren't enough facts is because of the Chinese lie.
Right now, and this is coming from the New York Times, a former newspaper, so, you know, obviously no enemy of communism.
This is half of China's population, half of China's population is facing new travel restrictions.
What are there?
A gazillion people in China, so half of them are facing new travel restrictions.
Across China, officials have imposed controls of various kinds on people's movements, hoping that minimizing contact will prevent the virus from circulating further.
To gauge the scale and breadth of these policies, the New York Times examined dozens of local government announcements and reports from state-run news outlets.
The Times analysis found that at least 150 million people in China, over 10% of the country's population, are facing government restrictions about how often they can leave their homes.
150 million people are being told how they can leave their homes.
Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton, who has been on this very carefully, he says that the situation is much worse than China is letting on.
This is the first cut five.
This situation is very grave, in part because, as you say, China was lying from the beginning and they're still lying today.
And also because there are so many unknowns about this virus.
For example, how many people one person can infect once they have the virus, the extent to which it's contagious before one is symptomatic, or the mortality rate.
That's why I've been saying for almost a month now that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, to quote Benjamin Franklin, and why the president was so smart to ban travel coming from China just a couple weeks ago so we didn't have more than 20,000 people landing in our country every single day from mainland China.
All right, so we're going to get back to that, right?
He's banned travel and that, and Cotton's saying that is a good thing.
And this stuff is happening over there.
Like one doctor who was the guy who actually broke through the news embargo in China and told people about this virus.
He has died apparently from the virus.
Another doctor who is treating people has died from the virus.
And Cotton is saying the original story was that because China has these open food markets, the virus got into these food markets and then went out and spread through these food markets.
And Tom Cotton says that's not what happened.
Here's what we do know.
This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market.
Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China, who have published a study in the international journal The Lancet, have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market.
The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market.
So we don't know where it originated, but we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that.
We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.
Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says.
And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.
Okay, so that's like a Stranger Things kind of Stephen King thing where there's this lab nearby, where the near the market, where this thing started, and he's not.
It's a lab where they study, probably so they can kill us.
They study viruses.
He's not saying that that's where it originated.
He's saying there's a chance, and we don't know because there's no information coming out, because the Chinese control the press, the leftist press.
I want you to listen.
First of all, the Washington POST, Where Democracy DIES by taking thousands of dollars from the China Daily to run news stories that are like Chinese propaganda in the Washington POST, that look like post stories, even though they are marked as advertisement, and the China Daily has has been accused of not reporting this.
You have to report this stuff to the federal government and they haven't been doing this.
But the Washington POST gets a lot of money from Chinese advertisements.
So the Washington POST, Where Democracy DIES in darkness, at the Washington POST right, attacks Tom Cotton and says he's spreading this conspiracy theory, which you just heard what he said.
He's not spreading the theory.
He's saying we don't know, but this is something that's also possible.
They call and they keep calling it throughout the story.
They keep calling it debunked.
It's a debunked story.
It ain't debunked.
Here is the Chinese ambassador, Kui Tiangkai, responding to Tom Cotton.
You listen and you tell me whether he debunks this story.
It's very harmful, it's very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors, and spread them among the people.
For one thing, this will create panic.
Another thing is that it will fend up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things that will really harm our German efforts to combat the virus.
Of course, there are all kinds of speculations and rumors.
There are people who are saying that these viruses are coming from some military lab, not of China, maybe in the United States.
How can we believe all these crazy things?
In fact, if that doesn't sound like a Democrat to you, I don't know what does.
We can't say these things because of the effect it's going to have on the people, not because they're untrue.
And remember, again, Cotton didn't say this was the truth.
He said this is one of the things he's looking at.
We can't say these things.
Oh, you're a bigot.
You're bigoted against Asian people.
And oh, yeah, maybe it's really a laboratory in the United States that's doing all this.
I mean, it is classic left-wing propagandizing.
And then the Washington Post steps up after taking thousands of dollars from China Daily to run ads that look like news stories in their paper.
The Washington Post steps up and says, oh, well, it's debunked.
It's debunked.
It ain't debunked.
It's not debunked because the press in China is corrupt.
And so we don't know.
And this is the thing.
You know, I'm not saying that the Democrat Party and the Chinese Communists are the same people.
I'm saying there is a leftist mindset that is the same.
That's all I'm saying.
There's a leftist mindset that is the same.
That information can be controlled for the good of the people because the people giving the information know better than the people.
That's the first thing.
That it's bigotry to challenge that idea.
That's another thing.
Oh, yeah, and it's not us doing it.
It's you doing it.
Okay, that's the system.
That is the whole system.
And, you know, it's hard for us.
It is hard for us to keep our minds straight, to keep our minds straight when we know the people that we have assigned that we trust or want to trust to get at the information are themselves corrupt.
Think about what this coronavirus means.
Think about what it means about open borders, about open borders and sanctuary cities.
Think about that for a minute.
Is there no reason to control our borders?
Is there no reason when a virus can spread in a communist country so much faster and more completely than it might spread here because nobody wants to tell the truth?
I mean, Tom Cotton compares this to Chernobyl, where the lack of information and the dedication to communism made it hard to spread the information.
Is there no reason to keep people from that country from coming here?
Is the only reason you might keep them from coming here because they're Asian?
Or might it be to protect your population from their population, to protect the effects of your good government from the effects of their bad government?
I mean, that is one thing right there, open borders.
Another thing, government health care.
Is there no reason to say that there shouldn't be independent voices, doctors who are not dependent on the government, doctors who are dependent on private practice, who don't have to say what the government wants them to say, who can come out and talk to the press, a free press and tell them what's going on?
This coronavirus attacks everything the left is, everything they are.
And that's what they're running on in the Democrat Party, everything that the left is.
All right, a final reflection.
I finally got to see some of the movies that were nominated for the Oscars over the weekend.
I finally caught up.
And so I'm going to give my Oscar because let's face it, who cares what Oscar they give?
Oscar-Winning 1917 Shot00:03:21
One of the pictures I got to see was 1917, a story that kind of steals the last reel of Gallipoli.
It's about two guys who are sent out on a mission to cross through enemy territory in World War I, and they went across to the enemy territory to call off an attack because the Allies are going into a German trap.
So they send these two guys off and it's all shot as if It's not really shot in one shot, but it's made to look like the whole thing is one continuous shot.
And I'll talk about it in just a second, but here's just a clip of the two stars, George McKay and Dean Charles Chapman, as the two men sent on this mission.
Did you hear that story about Wilco, how he lost his ear?
I'm not in the mood.
Keep your eyes on the trees, top of the ridge.
Bet he told you it was shrapnel.
What was it then?
Well, you know his girl's a hairdresser, right?
And he was moaning about the lack of bathing facilities when he wrote to her.
Remember those rancid jokes, Harris?
Anyway, she sends him over this hair oil.
Smells sweet, like golden syrup.
Wilco loves the smell, but he doesn't want to cast it around in his pack.
So he smathers it all over his barnet and goes to sleep.
And in the middle of the night, he wakes up and a rat is sitting on his shoulder, licking the oil off his head.
So this is by Sam Mendez.
Sam Mendes, when I lived in England, was a big stage director.
I've talked about his wonderful Don Mar Warehouse cabaret.
I took the real-life daughter of Sally Bowles to see the cabaret for the first time she had never wanted to see it.
She sat next to me and wept through it.
Sam Mendes, really talented director, and it is a beautiful film to watch.
The fact that it's shot as if in one shot gives us this kind of relentlessness.
You know, you're not going to get a break.
You know, you're going to live through this every step of the way.
Acting, as you could see in that clip, is great.
Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch show up each for one scene.
A couple of other, that great actor, Andrew Scott, who is in Fleabag, who plays what they now call the Hot Priest.
He's just called the Hot Priest.
Now, that's Andrew Scott's name for the rest of eternity.
He shows up for one scene.
A lot of good English actors in it.
It is a really good, suspenseful, entertaining film.
Is it a great film?
No.
It has nothing to say about World War I.
It has nothing really to say about anything.
It's just a story, and it's a good story.
When you think about great World War I films like All Quiet on the Western Front or Paths of Glory that are absolutely sensational, it is nowhere in that league, but it is a good movie.
It is very entertaining.
If you can see it in the theater, it's so beautiful to watch that that's the best thing about the picture is just how incredibly lovely it is to look at and how it gets its effects, its emotional effects from its beauty.
So I totally recommend it.
Should it have won the Oscar?
No, it should not have.
It should not have.
And I will talk tomorrow.
I probably won't get a chance tomorrow.
So I'll talk on Thursday about Parasite, which I also saw.
And then I will give The Clavin, which is so much more important than the Oscar.
Be here for the mailbag tomorrow.
Talk About Parasite00:01:14
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