Andrew Clavin dissects Biden’s South Carolina win—48% to Sanders’ 13%—while mocking his rambling metaphors and framing Sanders as a "communist" threat, praising Trump’s China travel ban and economic policies. He contrasts conservative marginalization of extremists with Democrats’ embrace of radical figures, then pivots to Fauci’s denial of being "muzzled," promoting Daily Wire memberships with anti-socialist rhetoric. The episode also critiques Trump’s Taliban negotiations in Afghanistan, calling it a necessary withdrawal from an unwinnable war, while attacking Democratic cultural concessions like Friends apologies as left-wing overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Biden has won the primary in South Carolina, and now he says it's on to South Carolina.
Biden won when black voters rejected Bernie Sanders and his socialism, as one black voter told an exit pollster, quote, the way I understand Bernie's plan is I do the work, then a white man in a big white house takes my money and spends it on what he wants to spend it on.
Then I go back to work, and then he takes my money again.
That reminds me of something in black history.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but it wasn't good.
Unquote.
In a moving victory speech to a schoolyard full of little girls who kept backing away until they hit the far fence, Biden said, quote, you know, a lot of people said a frog couldn't become an ashtray, but I just kept saying, where am I? and pushed on until a man or even a truck isn't the same thing as a guy I used to know named Cornpop, or maybe it was popcorn or possibly jujubees.
I love those, except the black ones, you got to stick those under the seat, unlike black voters who you just have to lie to a lot.
Why, I remember the time I got arrested trying to fight apartheid with Nelson Mandela.
His hair smelled as good as a little girl's, unquote.
The other Democrat candidates said they were not discouraged by Biden winning the primary.
Bernie Sanders, in a speech to the Castro Literacy League and execution squad, said, quote, I happen to believe that I have presented the best and quickest way to turn this country into a ravaged wasteland full of poverty and despair, and I don't think the voters will settle for second best, unquote.
Elizabeth Warren said she hoped her fellow socialists actually would settle for second best.
And Pete Buttigiegs dropped out of the race, saying he just realized he's been reading the Bible upside down and could be in big trouble.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped itsy-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.
So the conservative political action conference, CPAC, was going on over the weekend.
I noticed there were lines, people lined up to see Michael Knowles and have their pictures taken, which marks the death of the conservative movement.
But Donald Trump was there giving one of his barn-burning and occasionally hilarious speeches to raucous applause.
And meanwhile, nearby, an alternative conservative conference was taking place, the America First Conference with Nick Fuentes and Michelle Malkin.
Now, I'm in deep disagreement with the America Firsters.
I've talked about this.
Theirs is a sort of old-fashioned European-style blood and soil conservatism, which, as I've said, might make a certain amount of sense in European countries founded on racial identity.
But I think those ideas are essentially un-American and ultimately un-Christian.
Plus, I actually love living in a revolutionary, multi-ethnic, crazy quilt America that binds together different kinds of people under the aegis of our very specific founding ideals of limited government, personal liberty, individual responsibility, and so on.
That's what the left is trying to destroy.
That's what I like.
So I disagree strongly with Fuentes and Malkin, but I think it's utterly 100% wrong to ban them from broad-based speech platforms like Twitter or YouTube or Facebook.
Let them speak.
That is also part of the American way.
But it's not wrong to keep them out of places where they oppose their ideas, like CPAC or like the Young America Foundation.
Just like a religious service has a right not to have other religions preach in their hall.
Christians can say to Muslims, you can't preach here.
Muslims can say to Jews, you can't preach in our mosques.
I mean, that's what it is.
It's an idea.
Mainstream conservatives have the perfect right to say to America first, no, you don't represent what we represent.
Go speak elsewhere.
And that's what CPAC did to the America Firsters.
That's not censorship, though the Firsters like to play victim and pretend it is.
But here's the more important point.
Notice that the right marginalizes people we feel are bigots and Jew haters and radicals.
Now let's turn to the left.
They have their crazies too.
They have people who praise mass murderers for their literacy programs.
That's insane.
They have people who, just like the America Firsters, are anti-Semites, who can't conceive why a free country like America should ally with a free country like Israel.
Why We Left Helix Sleep00:02:52
That's a puzzler.
They find that puzzling.
The left has people who want to destroy the free enterprise that makes this country great.
And whereas we on the right relegate the America Firsters to the sidelines, the left has their crazies and their haters and their destroyers in the Senate, in the House, behind the news network anchor desks and on the presidential campaign trail.
Every philosophy has its extremists, and we're responsible for our response to them.
That's why the right sends ours to the margins.
The left wants to send theirs to the White House, and that makes all the difference in the world.
We're going to talk about Biden's win in South Carolina and the aftermath, the wild politicization of the coronavirus and the fact that they're denying that they're wildly politicizing it, and the Afghan peace deal, which is a really big deal that nobody is really covering very much.
But first, let us talk about Another Kingdom.
The second entry in the Another Kingdom trilogy is coming out.
The novel is coming out.
You can already pre-order it.
It's published tomorrow.
You can pre-order it on Amazon, but it is out for real tomorrow.
Austin Lively, who was once just an out-of-luck Hollywood screenwriter, is now a chosen hero caught between two worlds and in two dual quests, both in Los Angeles, California, and in the magical medieval world of Galeana.
It's a fantasy adventure that millions of people have listened to on podcasts.
You've heard the podcast.
Get the book today on Amazon.
It's a beautifully, beautifully produced book, and you can read it again and again, and you will like it.
All right, let's start with the aftermath of Joe Biden, which was basically the big news was that Pete Buttigej dropped out.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
I have to start with Helix Sleep.
They call it Helix Sleep, but for me, it's Helix Lie Awake Comfortably because I never sleep.
But on a Helix mattress, at least as I'm lying awake, I'm lying awake thinking, wow, I am really comfortable lying awake here all night long.
But you will probably fall asleep because that's what most people do when they hit a Helix Sleep mattress.
Helix Sleep has a quiz that takes just two minutes to complete and matches your body type and sleep preference to the perfect mattress for you.
Go to helixleep.com slash Clavin, take the quiz, and they will match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life, or for me, the best lying awake of my life.
Whether you're a side sleeper, hot sleeper, you like a plush or firm bed with Helix, there's no more confusion and no more compromising.
Helix mattresses have a 10-year warranty.
They're made here in America, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
Helix is also offering up to $200 off all mattress orders at helixleep.com slash Clavin.
Get up to 200 bucks off at helixleep.com slash Clavin.
You can sleep soundly or lie awake thinking to yourself, how do you spell Clavin?
Delegates and Entitlement00:10:42
There are no easy things.
As I was saying, let us start with the aftermath, which is Pete Buttigieg dropping out.
Here he is giving his concession speech, I guess you'd call it cut two.
We got into this race for a reason.
We got into this race in order to defeat the current president and in order to usher in a new kind of politics.
And that meant guiding our campaign by the values we like to call the rules of the road.
And every decision we made was guided by these values.
One of those values is truth.
And today is a moment of truth.
After a year of going everywhere, meeting everyone, defying every expectation, seeking every vote, the truth is that the path has narrowed to a close for our candidacy, if not for our cause.
And another of those values is responsibility.
And we have a responsibility to consider the effect of remaining in this race any further.
So that's a lot of garbage because really he ran a windy, empty campaign that was an imitation Obama campaign.
Here is him matched to Obama, Cut 22.
The way we do every other election, bring him against the person who got the most votes.
Just a thought.
Brings us together.
This country was built.
And there is a movement reaching in church basements and barber universities and women.
And if the boy can line up the role of it, then we can line up the Senate.
Shines as a beacon around the world once more.
And this is our chance to answer that call.
Come on.
I don't like the guy very much.
I think he's an empty identity politics candidate.
I never liked him.
I think his ideas were actually radical.
He just looked like a moderate on TV.
The other big news, of course, was that Tom Steyer dropped out of the race.
And the other big news was that Tom Steyer was in the race to begin with, which you may not have known.
So that is what happened afterwards.
Let's look at the race itself.
Now, obviously, this was Biden's plan.
This was his thing that he was touting all along, that he had a firewall because the black folks were going to turn out in South Carolina and put him over the top.
And that's exactly what happened.
Now, again, I've often said that this doesn't work all the time when you wait and you think I'm going to win down the line.
And it still may not work because we're just tomorrow is Super Tuesday, and he's still trailing in every possible poll.
But this was a big victory over Bernie.
He got 48% to Bernie's, about 13%, I think it was.
And also, it means this was the first big state with a lot of delegates.
And remember, the Democrats parcel out their delegates according to what percentage you won.
You have to win over 15% most places, but then you get a partial amount of the delegates.
So now Biden and Bernie are virtually tied.
I think Biden has 54, Bernie has 58.
So, you know, I just want to bring you back.
You heard me say last week, you know, don't pay attention to the press telling you that Bernie has this thing sewn up.
He is the frontrunner.
There's no question about that.
But he hasn't got it sewn up yet.
And you have to remember when you're just a note when you're following the press that this is what I call the one run rule.
Because if you ever watch a baseball game and one team, the Yankees are one run up and Boston is one run down.
You look in the Yankees dugout, they're kidding around, they're having a good time.
They think everything's tickety-boo.
They think everything's terrific.
You look over to Boston, they're depressed, they're down.
It's one run, that's one swing of the bat, and everything changes.
So you have, it's just human nature.
You have this feeling that whatever is happening now is going to keep happening.
And that is just not the truth.
So here is Biden taking a hit at Bernie in his victory speech.
This is Cut 14.
Join us!
My fellow Democrats across America, join us.
If Democrats want to nominate someone who will build on Obamacare, not scrap it, take on the NRA and gun manufacturers, not protect them.
Stand up and give the poor a fighting chance for the middle class get restored, not raise their taxes and keep the promises we make, then join us.
And if the Democrats want a nominee who's a Democrat, a lifelong Democrat, a proud Democrat, an Obama-Biden Democrat.
Join us.
So that's Biden basically saying Bernie's not a Democratic, and as always, identifying himself with the popular last president, Barack Obama.
However, he still hasn't gotten Obama's endorsement, and here he is pretending that that's okay with him.
This is cut three.
I don't think it's time.
He and I have talked about this in the very beginning.
I have to earn this of my own.
Remember, George, the first thing that everybody said when I announced the opposition, the Democratic opposition said, well, Biden feels entitled because he's vice president.
Imagine had the president endorsed me, it would have been, well, Biden's entitled because he thinks he's entitled because the president endorsed him.
President and I are close friends.
And I have no doubt when I win this nomination, he will be out there full bore for me.
You're a lion dog-faced pony soldier.
He is a lion dog-faced pony soldier.
He would crawl on broken glass on his hands and knees naked to get that endorsement.
And the only reason, you know, and it is, you know, Steve Bannon is now saying what I've been saying for a long time, that there's still this possibility that Michelle Obama or Hillary might get in if Bernie is the nominee, someone as a dark horse, as they used to call him, to oppose Bernie at the last minute.
You know, Michelle Obama, I think she'd be a strong candidate because people like her so much, at least out of the gate.
But I really don't think she wants it.
I don't think Obama wants to go back.
So I'm not sure.
Obviously, I don't know her mind, but I doubt that Hillary would just be a terrible mistake.
They'd be actually better off with Bernie.
Bernie might actually come from behind.
And Bernie is still, there's something thuggish about Bernie when they bring this stuff up, but Bernie is still saying that he deserves it.
He was challenged.
Who was it who was challenging him?
George Stephanopoulos, I think, was challenging him that he said the last time out in 2016, he said that, you know, that it really mattered who got the delegates, who got the delegates, not the voters.
But now he's saying something different.
Here's the cut from Bernie.
I want you to think about it for a moment.
If we go into Milwaukee, into the Democratic Convention, with a lead, having won many, many states, having won the people's vote, and that is reversed at the convention, how do you think people all over this country are going to feel?
Do you think really that will give us the unity?
You talked about unity.
We need unity.
If you reject the candidate who has the most votes from the people and you win it through superdelegates and the Democratic establishment and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, do you think you're going to have the energy and the excitement and the grassroots movement to defeat Donald Trump?
I honestly don't think you will.
I think Bernie has a point here.
You know, there's always the establishment always thinks the establishment candidate will win, but they haven't noticed that something is happening.
Something is happening all across the West.
What I think it is, is that the old ways have crumbled, the old ideas, the old consensus, the intra-agency consensus, as they put it, has crumbled and the new consensus has not come along.
Of the two candidates, not only is now Trump going to be the youngest man in the race, he is now the youngest guy by like five, four or five years in the race, but I think he's the one with the freshest ideas, oddly enough.
I mean, freedom is always a fresh idea because there's always someone trying to take it away.
But Bernie is basically saying the same thing he's been saying since 19, I think it's 22.
No, really, it's since the Soviet Union.
He's been saying the same thing.
He pretends it's different.
He preaches.
I think it's communism when I think of Bernie.
You know, I don't know who said that.
I just had a voice in my ear, but it's communism.
It is communism.
And people keep saying, well, they keep tagging him as being a communist.
If you're praising Castro for his literacy program, you're a communist.
I mean, you can hide it all you want.
Biden, by the way, I mean, this is the thing that you should point out.
The Democrat Party is now a leftist party.
Biden has no spine.
He has no principles.
He has nothing he believes in.
And if you don't think he is stupid enough to follow the Democrat Party down the socialist road, here is him talking to people about taxes.
It cuts six really well with that one point nine trillion dollar tax cut that increased really good shape, right?
Really changed your...
Well, you did.
Well, that's good.
I'm glad to see you're doing well already.
But guess what?
If you elect me, you're not going to have your taxes are going to be raised, not cut, if you can benefit from that.
I was like, did you like, you like the Trump economy?
Well, vote for me and I'll destroy it.
And Obama did do that.
You know, it is hilarious that Obama keeps claiming that he's responsible for the good economy.
Although I noticed he went silence when the stock market tanked recently.
But he keeps claiming that this economy is his economy.
But what he can't answer, and what, of course, no one would ask him, is how can it be your economy when Trump had to get rid of all your regulations for the economy to take off the way it has?
And here is my favorite cut of the weekend is Biden talking to Chris Wallace, who's congratulating him on his victory and saying, is he going to have a funny nickname for Trump, the way Trump calls him Sleepy Joe?
I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to try to assign names and insults to the stable genius.
This is a guy who doesn't know what he's doing.
He doesn't know how to run the country.
He is making us more unsafe the way he's responding to the coronavirus.
He has done virtually nothing well that I can see.
And so I can hardly wait to debate him on stage.
I want people to see me standing next to him and him standing next to me.
We'll see who's sleepy.
Mr. Vice President, thank you.
Thanks for your time.
Please come back in less than 13 years, sir.
All right, Chuck.
Thank you very much.
All right.
It's Chris, but anyway.
I just did Chris.
No, no, I just did Chuck.
I tell you what, man, these are back-to-back.
Anyway, you do it early in the morning, too.
Safe travels on the campaign trail.
Chuck Todd Challenges Trump00:16:20
Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Have you ever seen an angry lion mother pick up her pup or cub by the neck and just shake it back and forth?
I think that that is what Donald Trump is going to do to Joe Biden if he's the candidate.
I genuinely think, I genuinely think of the two candidates that Bernie has a better chance.
And that's dangerous for the country because Bernie is a genuinely dangerous man.
I think he's a sick person.
I seriously do.
I think they keep saying that Trump is a sick person, but I don't see that.
I think Trump is a rude, garrulous, huge character.
But Bernie, to stick with a philosophy that has left so many dead, to stick with a philosophy that has destroyed so many civilizations, to stick with a philosophy that has been proved wrong again and again and again is some kind of mental glitch.
That is not something that ordinary people do.
All of us, all of us learn from life and all of us change our minds and all of us say, you know what, this didn't work.
I'm going to do something different.
But not Bernie, not Bernie.
And he's, you know, it's an interesting thing to me that he has this enthusiasm.
He has the enthusiasm from young people because they have nothing to compare their lives to.
They don't understand anything about that.
But it is Trump.
It is Trump who has the new idea, the fresh idea, for the simple reason that freedom is always a new idea.
Freedom is always and ever fresh.
Let us talk about brushing your teeth twice a day.
You are supposed to do that at least for two minutes and you're supposed to do it at least for twice a day and quip makes it easy.
And it makes flossing simple too, which is also a big deal.
I just went to the dentist and they praised me for my flossing.
And I wish they'd give me a little trophy that I could put up, but they didn't.
But it starts with an electric toothbrush.
They have told me this again and again at the dentist, using an electric toothbrush.
Use floss.
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So your routine is always right.
And if you go to getquip.com slash Clavin right now, you'll get your first refill free.
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Quip is the good habits company.
I know when I spell get quip, you're thinking, yeah, but how do you spell Clavin?
There are no easy things.
No ease in Clavin.
I just make it look easy.
So the coronavirus.
You know, there's really no point in a way in talking about the news about the coronavirus because it's a virus.
It acts the same way as every other virus.
It spreads.
Stay home if you're sick.
Keep your kids home if they're sick.
Wash your hands.
They tell you not to put your hands on your face, but human beings are always putting their hands on their face.
But, you know, I mean, I know my eyes get itchy around this time of year, so I try to put a Kleenex in my eye.
You know, just do the regular things.
It's a virus.
It will spread.
But here's the thing that you want to notice.
First, Donald Trump has done a lot of good things.
The Trump administration, let's say, has done a lot of good things that have kept the spread of the coronavirus slow in the United States.
It's going to spread here.
Viruses spread.
That's what they do.
But he has done a lot of good things that have kept the spread slow.
New York Times, I'm quoting Matt Morgolis over at PJ Media.
New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that the Trump administration took, quote, aggressive measures like barring entry to non-Americans who were recently in China and advising Americans not to go to China or South Korea and that this strategy worked despite the fact that the World Health Organization officially poses travel and trade restrictions and reiterated that even as it declared and reiterated that,
even as it declared the epidemic a global emergency on January 30th, so the World Health Organization was saying no travel restrictions.
The Trump administration was saying yes, and that has helped.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton said on Friday that the single most consequential and valuable thing done to stop this virus from already spreading throughout the United States was when President Trump decided to shut down travel to China last month.
He also acknowledged that the so-called experts who opposed the decision at the time eventually admitted that it bought valuable time to prevent the spread of this virus in the United States.
The CDC's public health preparedness and response team called the travel ban an extraordinary measure, not in a good way.
And China blasted the travel ban.
And by the way, what's his name?
Chuck Schumer, the Democrat who's just been doing nothing but complaining.
He didn't defend this at all.
He was too busy with impeachment to defend the China ban.
So we're going to play a little game called the Chuck Todd Todd Challenge.
Republicans have been complaining that the Democrats are politicizing this virus, which is despicable.
It is despicable to do.
It is a despicable thing to do.
I understand politics.
I don't mind playing a little politics, even with an emergency, but it's despicable what the Democrats have been doing.
And Chuck Todd says he doesn't see it at all.
So he's talking to Mike Bence, who's heading, obviously, the task force on the virus.
So Chuck Todd plays a montage of Republicans and conservatives accusing the Democrats of this.
And then Chuck Todd makes a comment.
Virus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.
Democrats are using this for their political gain to try and stoke fear in the American people, which is shameful, wrong, and I think un-American.
To try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump's streak of winning is a new level of sickness.
None of this seems to match the facts.
What facts are there that Democrats are doing this?
Seems like people are asking questions and they're concerned about the virus.
This implies some sort of political motivation, which is kind of gross.
It's kind of gross, says Chuck Todd.
So let's take the Chuck Todd challenge because Chuck never sees this.
Chuck is always, I don't see any bias.
Do you see any bias?
You know, he's like Admiral Nelson putting his telescope to the eye that's gone.
He just doesn't see it.
It's gross.
So let's take a look at what Trump said at one of his rallies about the Democrats and the viruses, Cut 12.
Listen carefully.
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus.
You know that, man.
Coronavirus.
They're politicizing it.
We did one of the great jobs, you see.
How's President Trump doing?
They go, oh, not good, not good.
They have no clue.
They don't have any clue.
They can't even count their votes in Iowa.
They can't even count.
No, they can't.
They can't count their votes.
One of my people came up to me and said, Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.
That didn't work out too well.
They couldn't do it.
They tried the impeachment hoax.
That was not a perfect conversation.
They tried anything.
They tried it over and over.
They've been doing it since she got in.
It's all turning.
They lost.
It's all turning.
Think of it.
Think of it.
And this is their new hoax.
Okay, very clear to anyone who speaks English as a first language what he was saying, that they have perpetrated this is they're politicizing this, and that's the hoax, okay?
Which he later made clear in answer to a question, but it was obvious, it's very clear to me.
I'm sure it's very clear to you.
Here's what NBC, including Chuck Todd, since we're taking the Chuck Todd challenge, here's how NBC reported the story.
He was pressed about his comments at a rally Friday night where he called coronavirus a Democratic hoax against his presidency.
NBC's Hans Nichols is at the White House with more.
Hans, good morning.
Good morning, Willie.
President Trump was pressed to clarify his Friday night comments when he called concerns about coronavirus the Democrats' new hoax, suggesting that Democrats were inflating the threat for political advantage.
Now, in that surprise press conference yesterday, the president tried to explain that the hoax he was referencing had nothing to do with the very real public health risk.
I'm not talking about what's happening here.
I'm talking what they're doing.
That's the hoax.
That's just a continuation of the hoax, whether it's the impeachment hoax or the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.
This is what I'm talking about.
Certainly not referring to this.
How could anybody refer to this?
This is very serious stuff.
How is this strategy going for him where he's trying to have it both ways, sort of as candidate Donald Trump at the rally firing up the base and president Donald Trump in that briefing room?
Well, you know, I do think something changed when we had the first American death.
I mean, you saw the president's tone changed a lot yesterday afternoon.
So in other words, it was only the death that made him change from saying what he said to saying what he said he said, which was the same thing.
He's backtracking by saying what he said he said, which was what he said.
So he's backtracking.
That's Chuck Todd lying.
And here's following the Chuck Todd challenge.
Did the Democrats, are the Democrats politicizing this?
Here is Joe Biden, Cut 15.
I don't want to talk down the possibility of us being able to do this well, but the idea that Donald Trump said just several days ago this was a Democratic hoax.
What in God's name is he talking about?
What in God's name is he talking about?
Has he no shame?
We're in a situation where, and I respect Vice President Pence and him being put in charge, but we should be hearing from the scientists.
You lying dog-faced pony soldier.
You're lying dog-faced pony soldier.
But not that the Democrats are politicizing this at all by taking anything out of context.
No, Here is Bloomberg.
Scott Pelley, who is a Democrat hack on CBS, actually stopped Bloomberg from saying this, although he didn't quite get it right either.
I find it incomprehensible that the president would do something as inane as calling it a hoax, which he did last night in South Carolina.
He said that the Democrats making so much of it is a Democratic hoax, not that the virus was a hoax.
This is up to the scientists and the doctors as to whether there is a problem.
Little Michael will fail.
So Capelli almost gets it right.
He said the Democrats were politicizing it.
That's the hoax.
They're blaming it on Trump.
That's the hoax.
Here's Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Her headline is, Trump makes us ill.
Going viral is not a good thing this time.
Gail Collins says, let's call it Trump virus.
If you're feeling awful, you know who to blame.
Hey, Chuck, you know, this is the Chuck Todd challenge.
Aren't these people politicizing this?
Isn't this the Democrats and the press, but I repeat myself, politicizing a virus that is going to hurt some people and certainly has already made people sick.
You know, Thomas Chatterton Williams, who is a writer for all these places, the Atlantic and Harper's and all these different places, he put out a picture.
He tweets a picture of Mike Pence, the vice president and his task force, praying before they have a meeting, which is very common among people who believe in God.
I like to pray before meetings and before doing everything, basically.
And so he puts out the picture of that and he says, Mike Pence and his coronavirus emergency team praying for a solution.
We are so screwed.
That's like, you know, like, even if you don't believe, even if you have no faith, and I respect that, I think you're nuts, but even if you have no faith, what's the harm?
It's not like they're going to have the conversation.
They're praying for guidance, which, by the way, works every single time, but never mind.
Elizabeth Warren, I love her comment.
She says, she sees this picture and she says, we're facing both a public health crisis and a potential economic crisis.
We urgently need top experts at the table in public health and medicine, many of whom are women.
There are no women.
Oh, God, this is not happy.
She's not happy.
Then there's the New York Times reporting that Dr. Fauci, who's one of the, he's the lead guy at one of the, not at the National Institute of Health, but at the place that deals with infectious disease places.
And the New York Times says, Dr. Fauci has told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything, anything more without clearance.
Here's Fauci responding to that.
Let me clarify it.
I have never been muzzled ever.
And I've been doing this since the administration of Ronald Reagan.
I'm not being muzzled by this administration.
What happened, which was misinterpreted, is that we were set up to go on some shows.
And when the vice president took over, we said, let's regroup and figure out how we're going to be communicating.
So I had to just stand down on a couple of shows and resubmit for clearance.
And when I resubmitted for clearance, I got cleared.
So I have not been muzzled at all.
That was a real misrepresentation of what happened.
This is going to blow up in the Democrats' face big time because I'm sure the virus will play itself out and I'm sure there'll be problems, but it will play.
The public are watching, they see this, and the Democrats will have to pay for this in the election.
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War and Taliban Trust00:08:46
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So virtually uncovered by the press, or at least down at the bottom of their coverage is the fact that Donald Trump is moving to end the 18 war, 18 year war in Afghanistan.
He has made a deal, a tentative deal with the Taliban, the evil Taliban.
Here's Mike Pence announcing this is Cut 21.
The agreement signed today represents a historic step forward on the path to peace.
And we remain hopeful that it will hold.
Now, that being said, the president said, if the Taliban continues to keep their word, and we just went through seven days where we saw a dramatic reduction of violence, violence against American forces in Afghanistan and innocent civilians.
If that continues to hold, the president's made it clear that we're going to be able to reduce forces in the region.
So, you know, you ask if this is a good deal.
Well, here's what's in it, reading from the Wall Street Journal.
The Taliban or their representatives have agreed to negotiate with the elected Afghan government for the first time.
The Taliban want to establish an Islamist emirate and have previously refused to talk to the Kabul government.
The Taliban have also promised to reduce their attacks on Afghan civilians and troops as a week-long test leading to Saturday demonstrated is possible.
For the first time, the Taliban have also, and this is a big one, they've forsworn support for al-Qaeda and are promising to prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven for any group planning attacks against the U.S.
And that's the reason the U.S. sent troops there after 9-11, because that's where the staging took place.
And of course, the big question is, do we trust these guys, Margaret Brennan?
I have to pause for a job.
I always say nice things about Margaret Brennan, but I do want to say, you know, CBS now has Margaret Brennan and Catherine Herridge, both of whom do an excellent job and who are straight shooters, who ask tough questions of both sides.
They should get rid of Nora O'Donnell.
Nora O'Donnell is just bad.
She's a Democrat hack.
And when they have real reporters like Brennan and Catherine Herridge, they should capitalize on that.
I'm bringing some more.
Anyway, Margaret Brennan had Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, on, and she asked him, can we trust the Taliban?
This is Cut to F4.
And you trust that?
Don't trust anything.
We're going to deliver.
It's about actions.
The agreement set out the conditions.
It set out the space.
But no, this deal doesn't depend upon trusting anyone.
It has a deep, complex, well-thought-out, multi-month negotiated verification complex and mechanism by which we can observe and hold every member of the agreement accountable.
We'll do that.
It's not about trust.
It's about what happens on the ground.
Now, I've talked about this for a long time.
I was over in Afghanistan for a very brief period of time, but I came back completely convinced that there was not that much that we could do there.
It is hardly a country at all.
It is a large expanse of savage territory filled with little tribes that are still fighting feuds of, you know, of 200-year-old grudges.
They are not, it's not like Iraq, where there was this infrastructure of civilization that could be changed.
And when Obama ran for president and he said the real war is in Afghanistan, we have to win there.
And this false war where we went after Saddam Hussein for no reason was in Iraq, I felt he got it exactly wrong.
I'm not saying we should have gone into Iraq, but I am saying that that was a war that was winnable.
We had it won, and then Obama lost it.
We had it won, and Obama lost it.
That's just the truth.
The surge won the war in Iraq in the month before Obama took power.
There were no American casualties.
By the time Obama left office, the ISIS had a piece of Syria and Iraq the size of Ohio.
That was pure incompetence, pure incompetence in Obama.
You know, a lot of people say Obama was evil.
I deny it.
A lot of people say he was a Muslim spy, but he was an incompetent, and he was an incompetent because his philosophy was wrong, because his view of the world was wrong, because he didn't know how politics and human beings work.
And all he was good at was electoral politics and identity politics.
That's all he could do.
Everything he touched turned to crap.
That is just the truth of the Obama administration.
So he came in and did exactly the wrong thing.
He had a surge in Afghanistan, which was never going to help all that much.
18 years, 18 years means that there are soldiers, there could possibly be soldiers fighting in Afghanistan today who weren't born when the war began.
That's no good.
That is not the way you want to fight a war.
Trump is right about this.
He says we're a police force in there, and we're a police force in a country that essentially can't be policed.
And it's Trump's desire, his absolute thundering desire to get us out of there.
It is what is motivating this.
And, you know, well, Pompeo says this.
Here's cut five of Pompeo still talking to Margaret Brennan.
Donald Trump is not going to take words on a paper.
We're going to see if the Taliban are prepared to live up to the commitments they'd made.
The Bush administration and the Obama administration both tried to get the words that were on the paper yesterday, that the Taliban would break from al-Qaeda publicly.
We got that.
That's important.
Now, time will tell if they'll live up to that commitment is our expectation.
They have promised us they will do so, and we'll be able to see on the ground everything they do or choose not to do.
And whenever you end something like this, the question is, did our people die in vain?
And here again, again, from the Wall Street Journal, he says, this is their editorial page.
Our forces have denied terrorists a safe haven and protected the homeland from another large-scale attack.
We've killed the al-Qaeda leadership, including Osama bin Laden.
We've assisted a Kabul government that while far from perfect is free and democratic.
We have brought basic education to millions of young Afghans who never had it, and we have trained and equipped Afghan security forces to defend themselves.
No one should diminish the sacrifices that Americans have made with their lives and long deployments by dismissing these achievements.
Will they last?
You know, ultimately, I'm sorry, but that's up to the Afghans.
The Democrats are already playing politics with this.
They're holding their fire a little bit.
You know, it's people like John Bolton and Liz Cheney who have come out against this, but the Democrats are holding their fire a little bit because they don't want to look like they're against peace.
So they haven't been enthusiastic about this, but they haven't quite attacked it yet.
But the thing about it is, is ultimately the country belongs to the Afghans, you know, and it's like these Taliban people want an Islamist government.
They come in, they murder teachers who teach, they did this.
This is actually stuff they did.
They murdered teachers who taught girls.
They tortured girls for learning things.
If the Afghans want that country, that's the country they're going to get.
You know, I wish, listen, I wish I could reach out and protect every girl who comes under the rule of these Islamist monsters.
I wish I could, but I know I can't, and that's a tragic fact of life, and it's a terrible, terrible thing.
And it's one of the reasons when Democrats side with people like Ilhan Omar, they should question themselves and question the kind of philosophy they are linking with.
But, but, of course, it's possible.
Look, the Afghan people are no worse than the American people or better than the American people, except for the fact that they've been shaped by ideas.
This is why, you know, at the America Firster rally that I opened by talking about, they were saying, oh, you know, these main conservative ink, they call us, conservative ink, the evildoers at conservative ink, they just believe in these nebulous things like ideas.
Well, ideas have big effects.
Everything we're about is ideas.
They think everything we're about is about the color of our skin.
They think everything is about where we come from on the map.
Do we come from northern Europe?
And then we can do these.
It's just not true.
It's not even true scientifically.
They keep thinking that they know genetics and all this stuff, but genetics accounts for very little of what people are.
It's what happens after you were born and the way you're treated by people and the way you're treated is governed by ideas.
And ideas matter so much.
And that is always what we're fighting for.
We're never fighting.
Me personally, I'm never fighting against people.
I'm fighting against ideas and fighting against the people who spread bad ideas.
And this is the thing in Afghanistan.
Listen, Islamism is a terrible, terrible idea, but surely, surely there is a version of Islam under which people can live in a civilized manner.
I know there is.
Apologizing for Reality00:03:43
I know there has to be.
People can transform religions by translating them through the God that lives in the human heart.
And that has been done a million times with other religions.
It can be done with Islam.
If they are going to choose Islamism, if they're going to choose the Taliban, then the Taliban is what they're going to get, and there is nothing we can do about it.
I don't want to say that the people who died over there died in vain because they helped people who were there.
And each one of those lives is an individual life.
Each one of those lives was made better because the Americans were there.
But ultimately, that place, they call it the graveyard of empires for a reason.
It's because empire after empire after empire, including the British, including the Russians, have gone in there and found that they just ate them alive.
We need to get out.
Trump is 100% right.
This is a victory.
All right, a final reflection.
This is from our friend Christian Toto at Hollywood in Toto.
I always love Christian because he pays attention to the culture, which is something we don't pay attention to enough on the right.
HBO Max streaming service, which is a separate streaming service than HBO itself, is going to have some kind of friends reunion.
It's a little unclear, but the cast of friends is going to come back and it's unscripted, so I'm not sure it's going to be an episode or whether they're just going to sit around and talk about it, but it's going to be shot on the old set and all the Friends fans are very excited.
So Christian gets Holly Thomas at CNN.
Who writes, as even devoted fans can recognize now, Friends often ended up on the wrong side of cultural history, highlighting many troubling norms of its time.
What was this?
The 90s, right?
It was Friends.
This reunion on HBO Max is a timely opportunity for fans and new observers to ponder exactly why many people still love this show and to ask what the hopefully older, wiser group of friends might potentially acknowledge on the Central Perk sofa this time around.
For starters, the Friends Reunion might take a stab at talking about the original show's glaring lack of diversity because it was about a bunch of white people or the rare occasions someone who didn't fit the mold appeared on Friends.
They were used as a foil for the L'Oreal Ready cast's experience.
Take the treatment of Chandler's Chandler's apparently but not explicitly transgender dad who was played by Kathleen Turner and his identity, her identity wasn't ever addressed head-on in the show.
But the general impression is that it's confusing and therefore traumatic for Chandler, which is reality.
So basically she wants friends to apologize for reality.
There are other LGBTQ concerns the gang could talk about.
One of the show's longest running jokes is that Ross was dumped by his first wife Carol for another woman, Susan.
While it was unusual in the 1990s to feature a gay female couple on TV and particularly groundbreaking for its time to feature them as parents, that visibility is undermined by the main joke being that it's embarrassing for Ross to have been dumped for another woman.
I know men who've been dumped for women.
It is incredibly embarrassing.
The slut-shaming mentality of the 1990s also occasionally emerged on Friends.
One of the early sticking points of Richard and Monica's relationship is how many sexual partners Monica has had.
When Monica reveals the number, Richard, her boyfriend, sits down, breathes a relief sigh, and says, you had me thinking it was like a fleet.
The strong implication is that had the number been higher, that would have been a problem.
So she wants them to apologize for reality and human nature.
Just amazing.
And what Christian Toto says is they will.
They will do it.
And if they do, it will be a shame.
And it is a shame.
It is a shame that the left feels that they are so dominant in the culture that they can force even big stars to get rid of to apologize for even a popular show like Friends.
Our fault.
We let it happen.
We got to stop it.
I got to stop.
Tomorrow is Super Tuesday.
Left Dominance Shame00:01:12
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