Ep. 847 – Mini Mike vs Crazy Bernie pits Bloomberg’s blunt, fact-based attacks on Democratic hypocrisy—like his time-travel quip to fix past gaffes—against Shapiro’s fear of Sanders’ socialism, while Clavin dismisses the Biden-Bernie divide as "fast vs. slow socialists." The episode also slams overzealous white-collar prosecutions (e.g., Martha Stewart’s 5-month sentence vs. Blagojevich’s pardon) and defends Trump’s pardons as corrections to bloated sentencing, contrasting them with media distortions like the NYT’s misrepresentation of his law enforcement claims. Listener Q&A tackles Hollywood blacklisting for conservative views, gender dysphoria therapy dilemmas, and combating progressive indoctrination in schools, framing resistance as a moral imperative over careerism. The core argument: unfiltered truth and free markets outperform performative politics. [Automatically generated summary]
Michael Bloomberg has decided to use a portion of his 60 billion buckaroo fortune to help to build a time machine and travel into the past and change who he was up until he started running for president.
The itty-bitty candidate has already spent somewhere between 12 and a gazillion simoleons and advertisements depicting him as voters wish he were, but now he feels those ads don't quite accomplish the necessary task of changing his history of high-handed contempt for ordinary Americans and supercilious statements that treat other people as a sort of chess problem only he can solve.
Bloomberg says he has already sent an offer of 40 squillion potatoes to Doc Brown from the Back to the Future movies in hopes he'll help invent the time traveling device and also intends to enlist the aid of Mr. Peabody and Sherman and H.G. Wells, though he'll offer them less money because they are cartoon characters and dead, respectively.
Bloomberg says that by traveling back into the past, he will be able to correct his mistake of telling the truth, which makes it almost impossible to get elected as a Democrat.
In a statement to the belt buckle of the person standing next to him, Bloomberg said, quote, when I said that stop and frisk saved lives or that loaning mortgages to people who could not pay them back contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, those statements were 100% accurate and therefore approximately 95% more accurate than a statement by a Democrat candidate is allowed to be.
When I go back in time, I will change those statements to statements that are only 5% accurate, which will then allow me to apologize for that 5%, which Democrat voters apparently like, unquote.
Bloomberg says he will also change that time he said that a 95-year-old with cancer should be left to die because it would save money.
This time, he will say a 95-year-old with cancer should be left to die unless he's named Michael Bloomberg.
Trick a warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I go hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winning, 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.
All right, as the big political season heats up, it's not a bad idea to pause every now and again and think about what politics is and what it's for.
Ben and I had this really interesting disagreement about this on the last backstage show.
Ben said he'd rather see Joe Biden run against Donald Trump than Bernie Sanders.
Ben feels that Biden is slightly more likely to beat Trump, which would be bad, but if he beats Trump, he'd be less likely to destroy the country, which would be, if not good, at least better than disastrous.
Bernie is less likely to win, but if he does win, it would be a catastrophe.
So Ben hopes it'll be Biden or someone like him.
He doesn't want to chance the catastrophe of a Bernie win.
I want to see Bernie get the nomination.
I agree with Ben on the facts.
Bernie is less likely to win, but if he does win, it could be a catastrophe.
And since no one knows the future, and Bernie could win no matter what the polls and pundits say right now, Bernie's nomination would be a bigger risk than having someone like Biden in there.
But for me, that's what politics is all about.
That's what it's for.
After all the scandals are scandaled, after all the dirty tricks are played, politics is about policies and ideas, and candidates with different opinions should have a chance to fight it out in front of the people so the people can decide.
Bernie's rise is due in part to ignorance and a toxic leftist culture for sure.
No question about that.
But also, people are worried.
They're worried about the cost of health care and they're worried about the slow growth of wages and the rise of inequality.
Boots on the Feet00:03:24
These things bother people and he can't just ignore them.
Personally, I think leftism made all those problems worse.
Hyper-regulation and the spread of the administrative state turned capitalism into crony capitalism.
The healthcare free market has been hobbled by government interventions.
And in my humble opinion, feminism vastly increased the number of available workers, making each worker less valuable, less able to negotiate a raise.
And that's why wages are stagnant.
But whatever caused the trouble, the trouble is there, and we should have a debate on how to fix it.
That's what an election is for.
Without the real debate, what you get is just this unceasing incremental growth of government.
That's the kind of thing you had under Bush and Obama both.
Jefferson said this.
He said, the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
That's what happens if no one debates it, if no one says stop.
Debate and disagreement hone arguments and wake the public up to fresh possibilities of action.
I know it's hard to remember that in the midst of all the shouting, but that is exactly what politics is for.
That's what we're supposed to be doing.
Freedom is a precious gift, and Bernie Sanders is a threat to freedom.
But you can't force people to be free.
They have to choose it.
Let Bernie openly make the case for socialist slavery.
And if we can't win that argument, we don't deserve the freedom we have.
All right, we're going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about the Democrats' struggle and Mike Bloomberg's past.
Some interesting conversation about Mike Bloomberg's past.
Also talk about Donald Trump pardoning Blago from Chicago.
And we'll get some more about him and Bill Barr.
And we have the mailbag, so all your problems will be solved.
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Mike Bloomberg is surging in the polls all through his spending a squillion potatoes on ads.
That's why I say a squillion and a gazillion and simoleons and potatoes, because when you have that much money, it just doesn't mean anything.
It's just all nonsense.
Mini Mike is a five-foot-four-inch mass of dead energy.
Moderates in Politics00:15:24
But still, you know, the thing about this is, is everybody's talking about the divide in the Democrat Party.
But I want to be really clear about what this divide is.
I talked about this once before, but it's really important that you understand this is not a divide between leftists and moderates.
That is not what's happening, okay?
The MRC, the wonderful guys of the Media Research Center, they did a montage of the press trying to sell you this idea that these are moderates with every now and again an interspersed statement of one of the actual candidates.
Bernie Sanders won the progressive primary there in Iowa, and Pete Buttigieg won the moderate one if he took his votes from the other two moderates in the field.
Butigech is a moderate running as a moderate.
Be the most progressive presidential nominee we've put forward in a generation.
The moderates, former vice president Joe Biden and former mayor Pete Buttigeg.
Moderate messaging by Biden, Butige and Amy Klobuchar.
Middle-the-road moderate like a Joe Biden and a Pete Buttigeg.
Raise your hand if governor, if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants.
Because she's a centrist, because she's moderate, because she builds coalition, i've always thought that there could be a lane for Amy Klobuchar.
You got a moderate in second place and a moderate in third place.
I do support capitalism, but not unbridled capitalism.
Amy Klobuchar kind of regaining that that, that centrist middle ground.
Klobuchar is a centrist choice.
We need universal health care.
It is a battle on the moderate side between those between Butige i'm all for a wealth tax and and Robuchard.
The Green New Deal is so important right now for Pete Butige, centrist Democrats, centrist candidates like Pete Buttigegerate, am I right?
And the Electoral College amend the constitution if necessary.
He's more of a moderate Democrat selling that hard.
But it just ain't so and i'll tell you why.
What the real division in the Democrat party is is a division between fast socialists and slow socialists.
There is not one of them who wants to solve the problems we have, whatever problems they think we face by free market means.
I mean, if you look at I you know, I say this all the time if you look at tv sets, the tv set that would have cost you literally ten thousand dollars five or six years ago now costs you six hundred seven hundred dollars.
Same tv set.
That's because Obama never said, i'm going to give everybody a tv set.
Everybody has a right.
You know, Bernie Sanders never said, I happen to believe that everybody has a right to a television set.
If that were true, television sets would cost ten thousand dollars because there'd be no reason to bring down the price.
The free markets solve so many problems, but none of them wants to use it.
Do you know that our emissions, the uh polluted pollutions, pollution that we send out in the United States, has dropped more than any other country by a long chalk or like twice as much as the next country down?
That's after losing the Paris Accord.
After leaving the Paris Agreement from Obama, where Obama heroic Obama battled the sun.
We left that we're doing better.
Why?
Because the free market.
Because we want uh freer, we want cheaper, cleaner energy and that means less coal and more natural gas.
The free market works, not one of these guys, not one of them, supports any free market solutions.
They only let as much free market in as they need to create the wealth they want to take away from you to spend on their projects.
So let's take a look at Mike.
You know this is really interesting.
Mike is now moving up on the ballot and uh, Bernie Sanders, our old pal, is not happy about it.
Let's give us a quick Bernie clip on uh on Bloomberg.
Here is the message, anybody here, worth 60 billion dollars, you can run for president and you can buy the airwaves.
My friends, that is called oligarchy, not democracy.
All right, but who knows about cocaine?
Anyone ever seen cocaine?
Hold it one at a time.
What about cocaine?
Good thing, bad thing, what?
That's Bernie, also with a little side lesson on cocaine.
But that's Bernie doing his routine.
All leftist routine is I am a victim, I'm a problem, money is evil, money is bad.
If you bought it, it's no good.
If you bought it, it's no good.
If I just get it, it's somehow good.
But that's obviously ridiculous.
Money is one of the ways in which we express power, in which we express value, in which we can use and with which we can buy speech and ads and all this stuff.
There's nothing wrong, nothing inherently wrong with Mike Bloomberg doing what he's doing unless he happens to be a Democrat.
And this is the thing I want to look at with Mike Bloomberg, is the things he has said that he is being hit on are so often true but unacceptable to Democrats.
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There are no evil things.
K-L-A-V-A-N.
So much of what, this is what really fascinates me.
I don't like Mike Bloomberg.
I think he was a decent mayor of New York.
He didn't let Giuliani's New York collapse the way Bill de Blasio is letting it collapse.
But he was a decent mayor, a fair enough mayor of New York, nosy guy, contemptuous guy.
But a lot of the things he says were literally true.
A lot of things he's being hit on.
Here's him talking about transgender people in an election.
If you go to the middle of the country, people would say if your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go and go to the locker room with their daughter, that's not a winning formula for most people.
They care about health care, they care about education, they care about safety and all of those kinds of things.
And some of these social issues that, and it's not just the American government, the EU government does it as well.
We're focusing on a lot of things that have little relevance to people who are trying to live in a world that is changing because of technology and communications and things like that.
So you have this double vision, right?
Because he says he, she, or it, which is very dismissive.
And he's a very dismissive guy.
He's a very contemptuous, high-handed guy who looks at you and me and everybody who doesn't have $60 billion as just something he's a little chess piece.
He's going to move around on the board.
Just like Soros is the same way.
Soros protects all his money on his island retreats, but he wants to spend your money.
He wants to tell you what to do with your money because if you were as smart as he is, you'd be as rich as he is.
Bloomberg is the same exact way.
But the thing that he actually said is actually true.
When Obama started talking about transgender people, because Obama's always talking about these social issues to distract from the fact that his economic and foreign policies were failing miserably, and that's what he would do.
He would distract you with this stuff.
When he started talking about transgender kids using the opposite bathroom, I turned to a liberal friend of mine and said, you just lost the next presidential election.
This was before Trump and before all the confusion, but I said, you just lost the next presidential election.
And he said, well, don't you care about transgender kids?
And I said, frankly, I couldn't care less one way or the other about transgender kids, but this Chicago Paul, this product of one of the most corrupt political environments in the country, he makes it to the White House on a bad election, basically.
Not a dishonest election, but an election where his opponent really didn't know what he was doing.
He makes it to the White House.
And now he's going to tell somebody in Nashville, Tennessee, who should use the bathroom in his child's school?
You know, what the hell?
Is that what Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, George Washington were thinking about when they fought for your liberty?
No.
This guy is reaching into every aspect of your life, telling you his stupid leftist theories about gender and forcing them on you, even if your culture and the culture of your neighborhood and all the people on your neighborhood disagree with him.
If every single person in your neighborhood disagrees with him, what the hell is the president of the United States telling you about your local school district?
What is he doing that for?
So what Bloomberg was saying was exactly true.
He didn't say, I don't like transgender people.
He didn't say which bathroom they should use.
He just said, these are not the things that we should be talking about in a national election.
It's literally true, but you cannot bring it to the Democrats because that's what they're all about.
Here's another one.
He's talking about the 2008 crash and what caused it, is Cut 17.
There was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone.
Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, people in these neighborhoods are poor.
They're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages.
Tell them your salesmen don't go into those areas.
And then Congress got involved, local elected officials as well, and said, oh, that's not fair.
These people should be able to get credit.
And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn't as good as you would like.
See, so this is literally true.
The New York Times reported on this all throughout the run-up to the financial crisis.
They were reporting on this.
They called it redlining, right?
The politicians called it redlining and said black people were being cut out of mortgages.
But it wasn't true.
The Times reported on it.
The former newspaper actually reported on it that it wasn't true.
They were just not loaning money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back.
And were a lot of those people, too many of those people, black?
Yes, they were.
But still, they weren't not loaning them to them because they were black.
They were loaning it to them because they couldn't afford to pay it back.
Once you had all those mortgages, all those mortgages out there that people couldn't pay back, the market, the banks started to say, well, what are we going to do with this?
And Wall Street started to come up with all these tricky deals.
And so all those bad loans went out into the financial system.
And when the housing market collapsed, the whole financial system collapsed.
He's exactly right.
That's exactly what did it.
But the Democrats want to sell you the idea that that's not what it was.
It was evil Wall Street.
Barney Frank, when George W. Bush told Barney Frank, we got to stop doing this, Barney Frank said, I'll roll the dice.
He rolled the dice and got snake eyes.
Chris Dodd was getting sweetheart deals from these places and was building them back up.
And who wrote the reform, who wrote the reform bill under Barack Obama, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the guys who helped cause this crash.
Let me just play you one cut.
This is cut number two of the House Majority Whip James Kleiberg talking to Neil Cavuto.
And Cavuto says, no matter what you think of Trump, he's done pretty well for black people.
Whether you like his style or not, or tweets or not, or comments or not, he's delivered the goods for a lot of African Americans, has he not, with record low unemployment levels for one group after another, mostly with African Americans.
You don't think that's something that's constructive?
No, no, because it's not true.
You know what I mean?
I mean, it's not true.
Go ahead.
I'm saying that African-American unemployment is not the lowest it's ever been, unless you count slavery.
We were fully employed during slavery, so it all depends on how you measure this up.
You were fully employed during slavery.
He's a full employment.
That's slavery.
You know, if we have to have jobs, that's no good.
I mean, this is the kind of talk they sell to black people.
And I've seen this again and again.
I see people saying, you know, yes, some of his policies have worked, but it's the things he says.
It's the way he says them.
It's like arguing with your wife when she's being irrational.
It's not what you said.
It's how you said it.
Well, this is the thing.
You know, like I said, I don't think Mike Bloomberg would be a very good president.
I think he would drive me personally insane.
I don't think he really cares about the ordinary person.
But, but the Democrats have actually created a system in which a candidate cannot tell the truth and especially cannot tell the truth to minority people.
Once minority people start to realize what the truth is, they're going to start voting Republican.
And that is why they hate.
They don't, you know, Trump does tell a lot of kind of carny Barker exaggerations, but they don't hate him because he lies.
They hate him because he tells the truth.
And that is not a Democrat policy.
All right, let's take a look at what Donald, the Donald is doing.
He gave a really interesting talk to the press yesterday.
I was really one of his better ones.
But, you know, they're still, they're trying to gin up this crisis with the Justice Department and Bill Barr.
And remember, Barr said, if you keep tweeting, you're making my job impossible.
And because Trump had tweeted about Roger Stone, he should cut back on the recommendation of Roger Stone's sentencing.
He did cut back on the sentencing, but said it wasn't because of the tweet, but it makes me look bad, blah, So then they start to sources, sources start coming out.
Oh, everybody's got sources.
Oh, the sources, the sources.
The sources say Barr is about to quit.
And the Department of Justice says, no, Barr is not about to quit.
And Trump came out and they asked him about the fact that Barr said, you're making my job more difficult.
And Trump was really honest about it.
I do make his job harder.
I do agree with that.
I think that's true.
He's a very straight shooter.
We have a great attorney general, and he's working very hard.
And he's working against a lot of people that don't want to see good things happen, in my opinion.
That's my opinion, not his opinion.
That's my opinion.
You'll have to ask what his opinion is.
But I will say this.
Social media for me has been very important because it gives me a voice.
Because I don't get that voice in the press, in the media.
I don't get that voice.
So I'm allowed to have a voice.
It's a really fair comment.
He said it twice.
He said, everybody's allowed to have an opinion.
And without social media, I would just be a victim of the fake news and the fake news.
We've seen all the hoaxes that they've put forward, the Russia hoax and this hoax and that hoax.
You know, this is social media is the way I reach the people.
He was very honest about it.
And he said, you know, yes, that makes Barr's job harder.
He's making it harder, but he continually expressed confidence in Barr.
He continually said that Barr was an honest, straight-shooting guy and a strong guy.
And he understood, he clearly understood where he was coming from.
He did at one point say that Trump said, I'm the chief law enforcement officer in the country.
And Barr, in fact, is the chief law enforcement officer in the country.
But just to show you, just to show you what Trump is talking about, the New York Times then ran a headline saying, Trump says he's the law of the land, which he didn't say.
Cost of Speaking Out00:15:56
He didn't say that.
You know, he did make a mistake.
It's not true.
He's not, the president is not the chief law enforcement officer.
The attorney general is.
But still, still, you can see why he has to speak for himself, even when he makes the kinds of mistakes he makes.
And then we'll take a look at the Blago from Chicago, which is a really interesting pardon.
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So he commuted this.
Yesterday he unleashed a bunch of commutations and pardons.
And anytime this happens, Republican or Democrat, the other side pounces.
Oh, the corruption.
Oh, the terribleness.
Trump is, I think, at this point, has pardoned or commuted the sentences of about half as many people as Clinton did, more, I think, than Barack Obama at this point.
And it's interesting that he does it now.
Usually they do it at the end of term or even really just before they're about to leave office, so nobody can really get them for it.
But the big one, the one that got me, some of these things were really good, right?
Some of them were really good.
Michael Millikan was not a bad guy, and he got a pardon.
He'd already served his term, but he was just part of the Reagan rise of very vigorous investments.
And he invented what were called junk bonds.
And I think it was Rudy Giuliani who went after him for kind of minor stuff.
And, you know, I thought it was right to give him a pardon.
But the one that got me, I have to say, a little bit, was Blagojevich.
Blagojevich was the, Ron Blagoevich was the governor of Illinois, and he was a classic, classic Chicago Democrat.
This is the culture out of which Obama came.
He was a classic Democrat from Illinois.
They caught him on tape.
I have this brief cut of him on tape.
When Obama left the Senate because he became president, Blagoevich said, I'm going to sell.
Somebody's going to have to buy this Senate appointment.
And here they caught him on tape.
Got this thing, and it's f golden.
And I'm just not giving it up for finging enough.
I love it.
These guys, these corrupt guys are just so funny.
He also wanted a $50,000 contribution, campaign contribution from the CEO of a children's hospital before he would allow millions of dollars of state funding to go into the children's hospital.
Was total scum.
And he was just a classic Democrat.
I just love those guys because they're so out there out in the open.
But here is the trial where he was finally convicted.
This is cut number five.
I just want to ask this one question.
Your Harry Potter facts were not accurate.
Who did the research?
There was not a specific direction to do the research on Harry Potter, but the inability to learn the product.
And there was an issue in the inability or your inability.
I suppose I should have directed everybody else to learn the product.
You're doing wonderfully.
Everything's great, but you keep losing and you're running out of people.
Right.
And you're the project manager.
Right.
I know.
And governor, I have great respect for you.
I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don't give up.
But Rod, you're fired.
He got 14 years, 14 years in prison for getting the houses at Hogwarts wrong.
You know, the names, he called them Figgleworth or Diggleworth.
I don't know what the hell he called them.
But I think 14 years was a little strict for that.
Although maybe holding up the children's hospital for 50 grand was worth 14 years.
So he served eight years in prison.
And again, the guy was a Democrat, a corrupt Democrat.
I'm not sure.
You know, I'll talk about what Trump was thinking, what I think maybe Trump was thinking in just a second.
But first, let's get his remarks as he left prison.
And also, just the unfair.
I'd like to just report for a moment on the unfairness of the fact that he still has all this hair.
You send this corrupt guy.
What the hell?
You know, I'm an honest man.
I've lost it all.
You send this corrupt guy to prison for eight years and he walks out.
And the only thing that's happened to him is his hair has turned silver.
Life is just unjust.
But here he is talking about his release.
I want to express my most profound and everlasting gratitude to President Trump.
He didn't have to do this.
He's a Republican president.
I was a Democratic governor.
My fellow Democrats have not been very kind to him.
They've, in fact, they've been very unkind to him.
And what he did was, I think, something that deserves a great amount of appreciation on my part personally.
And he has, from me, my deepest, most profound, and everlasting gratitude.
And I can't wait to get home.
I miss my daughters.
I miss my wife.
I miss home.
He's got obviously a big fan in me.
And if you're asking me what my party affiliation is, I'm a Trumpocrat.
He's a Trumpocrat.
So anyway, I have to say, I have a weak spot for white-collar criminals, even guys like this.
I mean, the guy's a bad guy, and he deserved to go to prison.
There's no question about it.
But eight years is a long time in prison.
You know, it's like when they sent Martha Stewart to prison for insider trading, I thought, whew, you know, my streets are safer now.
Nobody's going to jump out of the shadows and fold my sheets for me or anything like that.
I just thought that's ridiculous.
It is ridiculous to send a person like that to prison.
Prison for me is for people who need to be off the streets and it is for punishment.
And this guy got punished.
But even, you know, there's a woman, Natasha Korecki, who writes for Politico, I think it is.
She wrote a book about this.
She covered the trial and she said, you know, all she heard during the trial from everybody was that sending this guy away for 14 years was ridiculous.
The judge, she says, was the same judge who in 2009 had sentenced mob informant Nick Calabrezi to 12 years in prison.
Cabrizi helped take down the Chicago mob as being an informant, but he also killed 14 people, 12 years in prison for killing 14 people.
You know, it just, I think that Trump is trying to say enough of this overzealous prosecutions of people for white-collar crimes.
And I think he's right about that.
I mean, I think there's just too much in it for prosecutors to get a celebrity, to get somebody famous and bring him down.
Guys like this need to be cleaned, like the Blago need to be cleaned out of government, but do you need to send him away for 14 years?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not sorry.
I wasn't sorry to see him go, but I'm not sorry to see him back.
All right.
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Mailbag!
Sorry, so it doesn't always change your life for the better.
That's how we got that scream in there.
Now I'm going to probably read some terrible, tragic question as I'm cracking myself up.
From Jacob, dear Supreme Leader of the Multiverse, in several older speeches in the main part or in the Q ⁇ A, you said more or less that you lost big Hollywood contracts because you spoke your mind, but that you never lost a minute's sleep over it.
Isn't that a little misleading since you never sleep?
A more serious question.
Is there a situation where you would keep quiet?
If so, where and why?
If not, why?
Your sincere reader and listener, Jacob.
Yes.
And it's a really good question.
It's a really good question because I sometimes am afraid that I come across as somebody who just gets in like I'm pugilistic like Trump and I'm not, you know, that I get in fights over everything.
It is true.
I sincerely believe that I was blacklisted for my politics.
Not like officially, not like a name went around on a blacklist.
It just made it very, very, it's very hard to sell anything anyway in Hollywood, but I was selling two and three scripts a year for a period of time.
And that just stopped dead when I came out as a conservative.
And I really do believe that that just made it harder and harder for me to get to sell things.
But the trick at any moment is knowing what's at stake and what the real fight is and what the cost is of staying silent.
Because you know there's a cost of speaking, right?
You know there's a cost of coming out and saying your opinion to people in power who disagree with you.
But the question is, what is the cost of staying silent, right?
So if I go in and, you know, and I'm looking for a job, I'm looking for a job.
I'm not going to express my opinion to people.
I'm not going to tell them what I think.
I'm not even going to contradict them if they say something that I disagree with.
I'm looking for a job.
I don't want to get in their face at all.
But let me give you an example.
I think I've told this story before, but it's worth telling.
A fairly famous director found an old script of mine that had been puttering around Hollywood for years.
It had been optioned and fallen out of option, and so it was free.
You could buy it and make it if you wanted to.
And he called up my agent and he said, I'd like to talk to him about updating the script.
And this was during the Mitt Romney Obama election.
And I went in to talk to this famous director about a script.
Obviously, a good thing.
All I want to do is sell him my script.
I want to update the script and get paid for that.
That's all I want to do.
I'm not there to fight politics with him.
And if he had said, you know, I'm for Obama or I want to vote for Obama, you know, I wouldn't have said a word.
I would have said, good luck, God bless, right?
But he came in and within 90 seconds of this meeting beginning, which made me believe that he knew exactly who I was and he knew my opinions because they were already out online.
They weren't as widespread as they are now, but they were already out in line.
Within 90 seconds, he said to me, Republicans don't care about Mitt Romney.
They just want to get the N-word out of the White House.
And he didn't say N-word.
He said the word.
If I just smile and take that, what's at stake?
What's the cost of saying silent?
That essentially is telling this guy that he owns me, that I am going to let him call me a bigot.
I'm going to let him say that my beliefs are racist, that I'm not sitting here worried about policy, which is all I was worried about.
I never cared about Obama's color one way or the other.
I thought it was kind of nice that we had a black president after our history, but aside from that, it didn't really enter my mind.
Once I say that, he owns me.
He owns my moral standing.
I'm never going to be able to get in his face.
I'm never going to be able to say what I think.
I'm never going to be able to express what I believe.
He is basically calling me a piece of garbage, and I'm sitting there taking it.
And here's what I said.
This is almost an exact quote.
I may not remember it exactly.
I said, well, you know, I think it's a little more complicated than that.
That was what I said.
That's all I said.
But the meeting was effectively over.
I mean, I knew the minute I said it, he shut me down.
I called my film agent, who was an extremely liberal guy who just thought Obama had dropped out of heaven, dropped out of the clouds from heaven.
Even he hit the roof.
Even he said I had been abused in that meeting.
So what was at stake there was basically my integrity, basically my freedom to speak, my freedom to be a person in a relationship instead of just some guy who was going to kick to the curb.
So that's the kind of place where you have to say something.
And as you can hear, I did not say, you're a jerk.
That was a stupid thing to say.
I just said, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that.
I was pretty sure he knew who I was and what I believed.
So he knew what I was saying.
What I was saying to him is, no, I'm not going to sit there and let you call me a bigot.
That's the kind of thing that costs you money.
And if you want to, it costs you contract.
And in my case, really cost me my Hollywood career eventually.
If you're not going to do that, however, you're nobody.
And why I say I never lost any sleep about it, and I really never have.
I've never lost a moment's sleep about it, is because I would so rather be me even expressing that much of an opinion than write movies.
Once they can't take your integrity away, they really can't take anything away from you.
So if I have a hard time getting a job, if I have a hard time writing the kinds of movies I like to write or selling the kinds of movies I like to write, I'll go off and do something else.
I'll do what I'm doing right this minute, which I enjoy tremendously.
It is just not worth it.
So it's not about being pugilistic.
It's not about starting fights.
It's about knowing what's at stake in any given conversation, knowing what you're fighting for, knowing when you have to say what you have to say.
And that's why it's very hard.
I know that sometimes people say, if you're in school, just keep your head down and shut up.
I don't think you can always do that.
I think sometimes you have to express your opinion just to remain an honest person of integrity.
I hope that's a complete answer.
From Isaac, dear master of all multiverses and arbiter of answers.
That is one of my titles.
I am a conservative and a Christian, and I believe in the differences of the sexes and that God made us to be different and to suit different roles.
I don't accept the nonsense put forward by the left, that gender is separate from sex.
However, I experience gender dysphoria.
I know that this is a psychological problem and that I need to solve it, but any therapist I approach will only give me affirmation therapy and I am ashamed to approach my family, friends, or religious leaders.
And so I come to you, social and political commentator who I only know on the internet.
What would you advise me to do?
Well, first of all, I'm really sorry for your trouble.
That sounds to me very painful.
It doesn't take much imagination to think that it must be incredibly psychologically painful to feel that you were somehow in the wrong body or just that you are somehow at odds with your body.
There are all kinds of different ways to be at odds with your body.
And that certainly does seem to me like a painful one.
Deciding Your Own Meaning00:06:25
And you're right to be suspicious of therapists.
Their therapists trend toward the left very strongly.
They trend toward, you know, they'll put out ads, you know, I'm trans-friendly and all this stuff.
And that's not what you're looking for.
However, they're not all like that.
They're not all like that.
And you can search for them.
I think psychology today has a website called Find Your Therapist or something like that that will help you.
And if you find somebody, you can find them who doesn't say that on their website, that I go out of their way to say I'm trans-friendly, then you can interview them about how they feel.
In my personal opinion, you also don't want a Christian therapist who's going to tell you that he wants you to go that way.
I believe that being a therapist, like being a journalist, is what I call a meta-profession.
It's a profession where your job is not to find the meaning of what you do.
It is to find the facts of the case and let other people find the meaning for you.
So that's why I frequently tell Christians not to go to Christian therapists because I don't think that they should be supplying the meaning.
I think you should be supplying the meaning and what they should be doing is just like any doctor.
You know, you don't necessarily go to a Christian surgeon, right?
You go to a good surgeon.
You go to a surgeon who knows if he's going to operate on your pancreas.
You want him to know where your pancreas is, right?
So when you go to a therapist, you want him to know how the human mind works.
You don't necessarily want him to tell you the meaning of what you're saying.
You want him to get at the facts of what you're saying.
The only thing I can tell you is, listen, again, I'm sorry for your pain.
The only thing I can tell you is, look, ultimately, a lot of this stuff comes down to a choice you make about how you live with the things inside you.
And every choice you make, no matter who you are, comes at a price.
Every choice you make is going to come with a price.
There's going to be some pain in any choice you make.
And so what you want to do is you want to make the choice that is in keeping with your values, right?
In keeping with the meaning of life as you see it, not as a therapist season.
That's why I don't want you to go.
I don't think I wouldn't go to a therapist who was going to impose any meaning on it, even if it's a meaning that I happen to agree with, like Christianity.
I wouldn't want a therapist imposing on it.
I think that with this stuff, you know, gender dysphoria is a strange thing because I'm not always entirely sure what people mean by it.
Does that mean when they say I'm gender dysphoric, do they mean I just want to sleep with somebody of the same sex, in which case they're just gay?
Or do they mean that I want to dress a certain way or that I act a certain way?
It's a whole range of ways to be a man, a whole range of ways to be a woman, a range of ways of being individualistic.
So if you are, you know, I mean, look, there's no prize for being the, you know, biggest, burliest man in the world, and there's no prize for being the sweetest, dearest feminine girl in the world.
It's just the way people are.
So you just may be within a range of masculinity, or you may seriously feel that you're in the wrong body in some indefinable way.
And then that's something you're going to have to deal with because it's something you may be dealing with no matter how much therapy you get.
It's something you may have to deal with for the rest of your life.
And as I say, there are a million ways to deal with things, and every one of them comes at a cost.
Every one of them comes with some suffering because life always includes some suffering.
But I wish you luck and do try and find a therapist.
You're going to need one and try to find one who will just take you as you are and let you find the meaning of it.
From Joseph, dear Andrew, we live in an extremely liberal town outside Boston and our 11-year-old son attends the local public middle school.
He's constantly bringing home stories of ultra-progressive discussions and assignments.
One included required reading about how the U.S. Army committed genocide with the Indians.
The latest story is a global warming quiz in his science class where the question was asked, why don't conservative politicians and news outlets believe in global warming?
What's the matter?
Can't the kids spell a hoax?
No, the answer the teacher expected the students to regurgitate was because they are greedy.
Bravo to our son who said that is a lie.
We pay taxes in the schools and deserve to have our kids educated without political or religious bias.
How can we fight this political indoctrination?
We're at the point where we would even hire an attorney to act on our behalf, but don't know who to turn to.
All right, so in a situation like this, you got three choices, right?
You can pull out.
You can homeschool, you can go to another neighborhood, you can spend the money to put your kid in a private school that doesn't have these values.
You can just get out of the situation.
Another thing is you can eat it.
You can just suffer through it and form some kind of alternative universe, you know, a church group or, you know, a group of like-minded people so your kids can also have a culture that gives them a choice against the culture of the school.
Or you can stand up and battle it.
And if you do that, I suggest you do it in increments.
I mean, that's a choice that I think is completely valuable, completely worthwhile.
And you do that in increments.
First, you go to the teacher who gave that quiz and say, look, you know, we disagree with you, and we have a right to have our kid educated to hear both sides.
And maybe the teacher, I would go to the teacher, not the principal, because principals are just trained to say, hmm, good point.
I'll take that under advisement and then do absolutely nothing.
But if you go directly to the teacher and the teacher puts a face on you and says, oh, here's a human being who disagrees with me, that can be very helpful.
Then, of course, there's the school board.
You can go to the school board, stand up before the school board.
You can run for the school board.
There are probably other people who agree with you.
You can form a group of people who speak out at the school board and say, hey, you know, this is not fair.
As you put it, we pay taxes.
We have a right to get non-biased, non-political education.
Just teach our kids how to read and do math and shut the hell up.
You know, I mean, that is something you can do.
So you got to choose what's right for you.
Do you pull out and homeschool or private school or move and get your kid a different kind of education?
Do you eat it and try to form a life where your kid has another set of values?
Or do you fight it out?
And, you know, I can't tell you which one to do because it's really you have to gauge which one is best for your family.
Your family may be hurt by a fight, you know, by going in and having the fight in your school.
Your kids might not like that or they may not like pulling out.
You have to decide that for yourself.
Personally, I would have a hard time just eating it.
I would have a hard time just sitting by and doing nothing and letting it go over my head.
But again, that's a personal choice that you have to make.
I'm out of time.
We got one more day.
This is a short week.
Is that what it is?
Yeah, it was a short week.
And then the Clavenless weekend will be upon you.
So you want to get all the Clavin-y goodness you can, be here tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show00:01:09
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