Andrew Clavin dissects the media’s shifting COVID-19 narratives, from de Blasio’s theatrical "General Iissimo" act to Pelosi’s hypocritical pivots and Chuck Todd’s biased framing, while defending Trump’s adaptability—like extending restrictions to April 30th—against Fauci’s inflated death projections. He exposes media fear-mongering (e.g., suppressed China data) and praises essential workers, mocking outlets like The New York Times for demonizing cops while ignoring their sacrifices. The episode also debunks the "evangelicals vs. science" trope, citing Galileo and Newton’s faith, and slams FDA red tape blocking treatments, contrasting it with private-sector fixes like gamma-sterilized masks—ultimately framing the crisis as a clash between truth and partisan media agendas. [Automatically generated summary]
Officials around the country are devising new plans to deal with the Shikom flu.
In New York City, Mayor Vladimir de Blasio has announced that in order to halt the spread of the virus, he will from now on dress in a bright red military uniform with tremendous epaulets decorated with a braided gold fringe.
De Blasio, or General Iissimo as he'll now be known, will proceed to march back and forth on the balcony of Gracie Mansion, shouting commands at New Yorkers to remain indoors until everyone realizes that it is he who should be president and not someone else without a bright red uniform and golden epaulets who is not named de Blasio.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom is dealing with the virus by grinning in a genuinely weird and sort of scary way that seems totally unrelated to the meaningless but high-sounding phrases coming out of his mouth.
After that, he plans to order California neighbors to spy on one another to make sure no one is taking more walks than he's supposed to.
He'll also order police helicopters to fly overhead for no apparent reason in order to create a sense of futuristic paranoia and oppression.
Baltimore Mayor Jack Young has asked city residents to stop shooting one another in order to free up hospital beds for people with the virus.
Baltimoreans hope these restrictions will be lifted quickly so as not to harm the city's economy, which mostly revolves around bullets.
The news media is also chipping in by screaming inflated disease numbers completely out of context and describing worst-case scenarios as if they were inevitable while staring into cameras with wide-eyed, fear-haunted faces before moving on to recount individual agonizing deaths from the virus, hoping they will serve as an example of how to irresponsibly spread unnecessary terror.
And of course, governors, mayors, and the news media will all continue to work together to blame Donald Trump for whatever happens next.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So during this crisis, we all want the same things, to confirm our biases and destroy our political enemies.
And to do this, we have to seize on any gotcha moments we can in order to drive our points home on Twitter while others are wasting their time treating the sick and delivering our food and medicine and things like that.
But if you're going to do gotchas, you gotcha got to do the gotchas right.
For instance, accusing people of underplaying the Shikom flu early on, that's not actually a good gotcha.
It's true, as the New York Times has repeatedly pointed out, that President Trump at first said the flu was just one person coming in from China and we have it under control.
It's also true the New York Times, as they seem to have completely forgotten, also played down the flu, publishing an article that said fear was spreading faster than the disease and the real problem was that people who had the disease were being stigmatized.
That is always first and foremost in the minds of the people at the New York Times.
The Washington Post also played down the virus and told people to get a grip, G-R-I-P-P-E, to emphasize that the regular flu was worse than this one.
And of course, Bill de Blasio is probably still telling people to go to Madison Square Garden or into the subway or whatever.
I don't know, because anyone who listens to what Bill de Blasio is saying at any time deserves everything he gets, including Bill de Blasio.
It's very rare that wise people see unexpected cataclysmic events coming.
Wise people are wise because they know the way things usually work.
And they know they don't know about the unexpected because it's the unexpected.
That's why they call it that.
The sort of person who accurately predicts a disaster has almost always been predicting disasters wrongly for the past 50 or 60 years before he finally lucked out and got one right.
No one goes back to examine the 400 times he told you World War III was right around the corner, and no one asked whether he ruined his life panicking and sheltering in place for no reason in order to pat himself on the back when a real crisis finally came.
And what about the experts?
Why didn't anyone listen to the experts?
You hear this all the time.
The reason is because if we all listened to overcautious experts all the time, we'd live in terror of petting our dogs without washing our hands afterward, which would just be a lousy way to live.
The fact is, predicting the unexpected is not a skill.
It's usually just a coincidence attendant on perennial panic and fear.
As I keep saying, emergencies do bring out people's personalities, including whether or not they can adapt to new circumstances and learn new things instead of just returning to the vomit of their old philosophies and hatreds.
I go after the New York Times, for instance, because they're a dishonest, communist-sympathizing rag that opposes the principles of the American founding and clothes itself in the reputation it acquired back when it was a newspaper in order to spread disinformation with false authority.
Emergencies Reveal Personalities00:15:23
That's a good reason to go after them.
I usually support Donald Trump because I think he genuinely wants to make things better in this country, and more often than not, he actually succeeds.
Both Trump and the Times have made mistakes and will make mistakes, but it's not the mistakes that should govern our reactions to them.
It's what they stand for all the time.
That's where you find the really good gotchas.
All right, let us talk about the fact that you're sitting at home, you're ordering things online.
I know the stuff I order just gets crazier and crazier.
I think I have a walking teddy bear coming that lights up whenever you call it nicknames.
I don't know what it is.
But the thing is, whatever you're ordering online, you want to get it at a deal.
Honey can help, right?
Honey is something, you install it in your computer.
It sits there behind the scenes.
And when you go online and shop, I'm usually on Amazon.
When you go online and shop, it will search for coupons and deals that you can pick up that the site itself may not tell you about.
Honey automatically finds the best promo codes and applies them to your cart.
I used it yesterday, and it really saves me some money.
Imagine you're shopping at one of your favorite sites, Target, Best Buy, Sephora, anyone.
When you check out, this little box drops down and all you have to do is click apply the coupons.
Honey has found it's over 18 million members, over $2 billion in savings, which is pretty good.
Most of that went to me, actually.
Not using honey is literally passing up free money.
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Plus, it's backed by PayPal, so you know it's good.
Get honey for free at joinhoney.com slash Andrew.
That's joinhoney.com slash Andrew.
So I had a very touching experience yesterday as I was taking my walk, and I'll tell you about it.
But first, let's catch up on the news.
Trump has reassessed.
Remember, he said he was hoping that we could pull off some of these restrictions by Easter.
That turns out, he says, to have been aspirational.
He has now pushed up the deadline to April 30th, the end of next month.
Here he is making the speech as a briefing.
Have to follow the guidelines that our great vice president holds up a lot.
He's holding that up a lot.
He believes in it so strongly.
The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end.
Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to April 30th to slow the spread.
On Tuesday, we will be finalizing these plans and providing a summary of our findings, supporting data, and strategy to the American people.
I'm a very stable genius.
Wait a minute.
Archives just threw that in.
He didn't say that.
And Fauci has now got new numbers, which are not great.
Here's his latest.
When you use numbers like a million, a million and a half, two million, that almost certainly is off the chart.
Now, it's not impossible, but very, very unlikely.
So it's difficult to present.
I mean, looking at what we're seeing now, you know, I would say between 100 and 200,000 cases, but I don't want to be held to that because it's, excuse me, deaths.
I mean, we're going to have millions of cases, but I just don't think that we really need to make a projection when it's such a moving target that you could so easily be wrong.
Okay, so the headline immediately is 200,000 deaths.
They're going to be 200,000 deaths.
Let me explain what's happening so you get to understand why this happens.
They have a computer model.
I explained this to you last week.
They have a computer model.
They feed in numbers.
The computer extrapolates.
It doesn't know, oh, that we're going to shelter in place.
It doesn't know we're going to come up with medicine.
It doesn't know we're going to discover things that work and things that don't work.
It has no way of telling that.
As new information comes in, they feed new information into the computer and it adjusts the model.
And at the end, they always say the same thing.
See, our models are right.
Because by the time they get there, the model and the actual numbers are the same.
So that's what Fauci is saying.
What Fauci is saying right now.
Remember, the models originally were 2.5 million deaths in America.
Now it's 200,000.
We don't know how many of those people are people who would have died anyway.
They're 90.
They got the disease.
And yes, they died with the disease, but they didn't die from the disease.
So just watch the way the headlines do this because they do the same thing with climate change and they're doing it now.
It's a way of spreading fear.
It's bad, bad reporting.
Okay, let's talk about this gotchas thing.
Let me just tell you something incredibly touching that I saw yesterday.
I was taking a walk in my neighborhood and I've got hills, so it's a good place for me to get exercise and all the parks are now closed.
And I saw two young people, young lovers, talking to each other in a driveway through the bars of the gate on the driveway.
In other words, they were six feet apart.
They were sitting there.
They were talking.
They couldn't touch each other.
They couldn't come through.
And I was reminded of the old myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, which a generation ago, everybody would have known immediately what I was talking about.
But it's a myth from Ovid about two lovers.
It's actually, I think it's probably the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet.
It's a myth of two lovers in Babylon, I think it is, and their families are feuding.
And so the only way they can talk to one another is through a little hole in the wall.
And that's the play they put on in Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night's Dream.
And it has a very tragic ending.
But I was just thinking of these two lovers, like nothing ever changes, right?
This is Ovid is writing in ancient Rome, and he tells the story of these two lovers who have to, because of circumstances, talk through a wall.
And here they were right in front of me talking through a wall.
And I was thinking about the fact that they're doing that.
They're not doing that for each other because if one or the other of them gets sick, they're probably going to be fine.
They're doing that for their mom and dad, for their grandparents.
They're doing it for me because we all have to be thinking about me, right?
We all have to be thinking to save the Clayman because that's the, we can't, all the other people who die, we can get back because they only exist in my imagination.
But I am real.
So we have to remember that once we lose me, we lose me forever.
And, you know, it just points out that all of this stuff, all of the stuff that's happening is depending on the people, the people.
We keep talking about Trump did this and Pelosi did this and this and that.
We got all the gotchas that's going on.
You got to stop for a minute and remember the guy who's delivering your food.
You got to stop for a minute and remember the guy who's driving a truck cross country to get goods out there, to get all the stuff delivering.
It doesn't deliver itself.
And, you know, we always, I said this last week too, but it's worth remembering.
We always talk about how things are going to become, people are going to become obsolete.
Oh, you know, mechanics, robots are going to take care of all this.
I remember that scene in Logan where all the trucks are going back.
It's the future and all the trucks are going back and they have no drivers.
Never going to happen.
Nobody believes me about this.
It's never going to happen for the same reason there's never going to be a passenger jet without a pilot in it.
Because if the machine breaks, you need a pilot to land the plane and a truck.
Those trucks weigh a gazillion tons.
They're just as dangerous as a plane.
If a truck goes out of control, if a terrorist should hack in to the computer system of a truck, it can kill just as many people as a plane crash.
Not going to happen.
We're always going to need truckers behind the wheel.
We're always going to need pilots at the helm of planes.
And those people, we got to remember them because they're the ones at this moment.
And the doctors and the nurses and the cops and the firemen, remember all the talk about the cops and how evil cops are?
Not so much, right?
Because remember, these are the guys on the front lines and these are people who are not the politicians, who are not on television all the time, all the gotchas flying back and forth.
Ignore the fact that these people are soaring like eagles and they're doing it for us and they're making the country work.
And they're the ones who are making the country work, not anybody who's in charge.
Let me talk about bad gotchas and good gotchas.
This thing about going back to the past.
Nancy Pelosi, you know, Nancy Pelosi did this thing.
It's just an appalling thing that she said where she went after Trump for his reaction.
Here she is.
Let's listen to her.
His denial at the beginning was deadly.
His delaying of getting equipment to where it continues, his delay in getting equipment to where it's needed is deadly.
What did he know?
When did he know it?
That's for an after-action review.
But as the president fiddles, people are dying.
And we just have to take every precaution.
But are you saying that his downplaying ultimately cost American lives?
Yes, I am.
She's become a crazed lunatic.
Well, she's become a crazed lunatic.
But let's just go back a month, right?
When the big, big problem for the left was not how many people were going to die, not how many people got sick, not the right thing to do, but what name were we calling the virus?
What name were we calling the virus?
So Nancy Pelosi took her entourage into Chinatown.
This is like a month ago.
She takes her entourage in Chinatown with a breathless reporter, so excited that we're going into Chinatown to rid, to rid China.
Nancy Pelosi is going to rid Chinatown of the evil stigma that Donald Trump was putting on her by calling this the Chinese flu, the Wu flu, or the Kung Flu, or the Flu Manchu, whatever we were calling it.
And this is what she said.
She has been going around to show that it is perfectly safe to be here.
She says that this is a very special place to her heart because she started a lot of her early campaigning when she started her political career, some of it right here in Chinatown.
And we got some word from her earlier on sort of the message that she's trying to purvey here.
It's exciting to be here, especially at this time, to be able to be unified with our community.
We want to be vigilant about what might be on the what is out there in other places.
We want to be careful about how we deal with it.
But we do want to say to people, come to Chinatown.
Here we are.
We're, again, careful, safe, and come join us.
It was all bullshit.
Nancy Pelosi a month ago.
If you've ever been in Chinatown, it's packed.
It is packed with people.
I mean, this is Nancy Pelosi.
Trump is getting so upset, he's threatening to take over the federal government, take over her district.
He says it's such so trashy, and it is her district.
While she's been impeaching Donald Trump, her district is falling apart.
The thing about Pelosi is Pelosi has become such a complete political animal that she has lost the point of what she's doing.
I have no doubt at some point in her life, she went into politics to make a difference for the good.
She has lost that entirely.
She's such a creature of this media, this media bubble that she lives in.
She's such a creature of the winds of opinion that blow through and are not the opinions of human beings.
They're not the opinions of real people.
There are the opinions of media people that surround her and create this atmosphere in which she operates that she has lost the plot of what she's doing.
You know, the other one is de Blasio.
De Blasio is a complete incompetent.
He's a socialist, but he's an idiot, and he's also just lazy.
He doesn't really want to be doing his job.
And he was attacked for the things he said because he was saying way, way into the spread of this thing.
He was going, go out, go to restaurants, save the economy.
Yay, go to the, and now he's questioning about this.
This is Cut 15.
He's questioned about this, and I loved his response.
In retrospect, is that message at least in part to blame for how rapidly the virus has spread across the city?
Jake, we should not be focusing, in my view, on anything looking back on any level of government right now.
This is just about how we save lives going forward.
We all were working.
Everybody was working with the information we had and trying, of course, to avoid panic.
And at that point, for all of us, trying to keep not only protect lives, but keep the economy and the livelihoods together.
See, this is what I mean.
I'm willing not to go back in the past if we do it for everybody.
But the problem is, of course, it's all fine until we start talking about Donald Trump.
And de Blasio knows he doesn't have to do it because he knows the press will do it for him.
I want to just play one more clip of Fauci talking about Trump's aspirations to get everything back to normal around Easter and the fact that that's not working.
Fauci tells how that happened, this cut eight.
You know, interestingly, you know, we showed him the data.
He looked at the data and he got it right away.
It was a pretty clear picture that Dr. Debbie Burks and I went in together in the Oval Office and leaned over the desk and said, here are the data.
Take a look.
He looked at them.
He understood them.
And he just shook his head and said, I guess we got to do it.
So that's the thing I want to talk about, about gotchas, all right?
A gotcha is fair if it indicates the way a person usually is and something, if it indicates something that is absolutely true about it.
Donald Trump has a big mouth.
He said things like, oh, he started musing online about whether he was going to quarantine New York.
That was a mistake.
You know, it's like, he's not going to quarantine New York.
You know, and Cuomo saying that would be war, which is also a stupid thing to say.
You know, there are things you don't have to say out loud.
Not every thought that goes through your mind at three o'clock in the morning has to be tweeted out on your cell phone.
That's just the truth.
It's fair.
It is fair to talk about the fact that Trump talks too much or that he says things without thinking, and especially in a crisis when he's the leader and we need him to do the right thing.
It is a fair attack.
But it is nothing.
It is nothing compared to the absolutely wicked way Nancy Pelosi has behaved by holding up a relief bill to try to get diversity quotas into it, to try and extend the role of government to try and keep funding abortion.
And she did do that despite the fact that all the fact checkers say she didn't do it.
She did.
That's a wicked thing to do, right?
And it's a wicked thing based on behavior.
That's the way she was behaving before this thing started.
It is a wicked thing to impeach the president over absolute trash.
It's a wicked thing for the press to hold up the country for three years on a complete Russian collusion hoax, a complete hoax, a hoax with nothing in it.
And that was done to create an atmosphere of panic.
Those are the things, it's a fair gotcha when you call people out for the things they do normally.
But if you're going to call Trump out for the things he says and make Andrew Cuomo your God, uh-uh, I'm not listening.
That's just ridiculous.
All right, let us talk for just a moment here about my beard.
I mean, really, we should always be talking about my beard.
It's so beautiful.
It's so soft.
And one of the things, you know, one of the things I've done during this time is I have taken certain conditions of discipline and extended them, right?
I have tried to keep my hygiene really good.
I've cut my drinking down to nothing.
I don't smoke cigars.
I'm not smoking any cigars because I want my lungs to be in good shape.
But I take care of my beard, right?
Because I don't want to come on one day.
Somebody says, oh no, what's happened to Clavin?
You know, I don't want to go on looking like a hermit, right?
So that is why you want to take care of yourself during this thing so you don't get out of control.
Beards can dry out.
They can get itchy.
They can look dumb.
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Chuck's Concerns About China00:11:52
So you do want to look good.
You do want your beard to smell good and be soft.
You know, when I started, I shaved my beard off for a while when I started growing it back.
Somebody had to remind me that you have to take care of it.
For a short time, Beard Supply is offering my listeners 25% off.
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All right.
So it so often comes down to the press because it's not just about what's being done.
It's about how it's being reported, okay?
It is what kind of reporting they're doing and why they're doing it and what their motives are.
And really, while ordinary people have soared to great heights, and while I think Trump is really trying to do the best thing and is actually succeeding more often than not, he's listening to people, he's being flexible, he talks a little too much sometimes, but still he corrects himself.
He doesn't stick, he doesn't stick to what he says if it's wrong.
He changes his mind.
That's a beautiful, beautiful trait.
There's very few people who actually do that.
A lot of people, once they say things, feel they have to defend it to the death.
Trump doesn't do that.
The press is sinking in its own hate like a dinosaur into a tar pit.
They cannot stop.
They can't stop the misinformation.
They can't stop the crummy reporting.
You know, they put out a chart showing that America has now topped in absolute numbers the number of cases, right?
Now, think about this for a minute.
They're comparing us to Italy, to Germany, to South Korea, to all these places that have nothing like the population they have.
And what's missing?
Who does have the population we have?
And more, China.
But China's very low on the chart because weirdly, the disease went to about 80,000 cases in China and then stopped utterly.
And you know what else happened?
It was really interesting.
It's kind of a miracle.
Not only did they stop rising, did the cases stop rising, but everyone who said that they hadn't stopped rising vanished.
It was as if they had never existed.
So they probably weren't real to begin with.
Here's how the press from our friends at Newsbusters, here's how the press is reporting these numbers.
The United States now has the most cases of COVID-19 anywhere in the world.
With the United States now reporting the highest number of cases around the world, far more than any other place in the world.
The first country to report more than 100,000 confirmed cases.
Outstripping China and Italy.
When we appeared to pass China and then Italy.
Surpassing China and Italy in the most perverse possible version of Trump's signature slogan, America first.
The U.S. has the highest number of confirmed cases in the world.
Has the U.S. tops the world in coronavirus cases?
The United States now has more than 120,000 confirmed cases, the most in the world.
Of course, that requires that you believe all the other countries reporting, including China.
Donald Trump don't trust China.
China is ass.
That last voice before the Chinese guy.
That last voice is Jake Tapper, who every now and again emerges from the corruption at CNN and asks an actual journalistic question because he used to be a good journalist.
He'll say, like, well, yeah, that's true if we accept what China is saying.
There is no if.
They're lying.
They lie all the time.
They're communists.
lie.
You know, it is just amazing.
Paul Krugman tweets out this chart and just Paul Krugman, who has not been right about anything and yet never changes.
He's like Bernie Sanders, hasn't been right about anything for 50 years, still will not change his mind because it is the narrative that matters, not the truth.
Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, I know you're going to sit there and go, wait, Hillary Clinton did something wrong?
Hillary Clinton did, you must be sexist to say that Hillary Clinton did something wrong.
Hillary Clinton tweets out these numbers and says, this puts a new twist on America first.
I mean, those are numbers of people who are ill, Hillary.
I mean, just saying, just saying, you know, unbelievable.
And the people are disappearing and they're in China who the whistleblowers are disappearing.
They're closing borders.
They're closing hotels.
They're getting new equipment in.
They're obviously having a terrible time over there.
Here's Tom Cotton, who's been the one person who wants to remember this after this is over, and we should.
It's not just that they won't allow the CDC into the country.
They also have kicked out reporters from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
That's the hallmark of a communist government that is trying to cover up the biggest story in the world.
You know, and here's the other thing that gets me about this.
Trump, when this started, when this first began, I thought, wow, Trump was right about everything, and he was especially right about China.
We used to make fun of him.
Even I used to make fun of him.
China, China, China, China.
He was right.
China was taking over the supply chain in a way that was incredibly dangerous.
We don't live in a global world.
We live in a world of competing countries, some of which hate us.
China is a wicked country.
It's not the people, obviously.
It's not the people.
It's the leaders, the Chinese leaders.
They're a wicked country who want to destroy us and want to dominate us.
And so when they take over the supply chain, that's dangerous.
Who is talking about that?
Nobody except Donald Trump.
Nobody except Donald Trump.
So Donald Trump says stupid things sometimes.
So Donald Trump attacks people and it can be petty.
Absolutely.
But he was right.
They did this to Ronald Reagan, too.
Ronald Reagan said, you know, we can beat Russia.
That was not what the elites, not what the intellectuals, not what the favored were saying.
And so they went after him like crazy.
Oh, he was in movies with monkeys.
Oh, he just recites movie lines.
He doesn't know what he was talking about.
Ronald Reagan was right and they were wrong.
And then when they were wrong and Ronald Reagan was right, oh, it was Gorbachev.
It was Gorbachev.
Gorbachev, who would have kept the Soviet Union alive forever.
They said, we'll go with him because he's really one of us.
They'll do the same thing with Trump.
Trump was right about China.
He was right about borders.
Do you want people who are sick just coming in here illegally?
No.
You know, he was right about globalization.
We don't live in a global world.
We cannot pretend to.
We can't be like, you know, Steven Pinker saying, oh, we're a citizen of the world.
You're not a citizen of the world.
You're talking like that because you're an American who lives in a free society and other societies are not free and want to take over our society or at least break it.
And so that's the thing.
Trump was right about all this stuff.
And so his funny tics, his eccentricities, his flaws, I don't know.
You've got to measure them against the fact that they were right.
The idea here is always to create this idea that Trump is chaos.
Trump is everything he does is wrong.
His pocket square is wrong.
His tie is wrong.
Whatever.
Whatever he is.
Good morning is wrong.
Here is Chuck Todd, who has got to be, I mean, I talk about a dinosaur sinking into a tar pit, Chuck Todd.
And it's hard to tell Chuck Todd apart from the tar.
If the tar is hatred and the dinosaurs of the press, Chuck is a kind of multi, you know, kind of biform creature, half dinosaur, half tar.
Here he is talking to Joe Biden.
Do you think there is blood on the president's hands considering the slow response?
Or is that too harsh of a criticism?
I think that's a little too harsh.
I think what's happening is the failure to, as I watched a prelim to your show where someone said that, made the phrase, used the phrase that the president just thinks out loud.
He should stop thinking out loud and start thinking deeply.
He should start listening to the scientists before he speaks.
He should listen to the health experts.
You know, I got to hand it to Biden.
That's a fair response.
And he didn't sink to the level of Chuck Todd, who should, you know, Chuck Charlie shouldn't be ashamed of himself.
He hasn't got the ability to be ashamed of himself.
But this is the reason that Trump goes after the press.
And they make a big fuss over this.
And people say he should stop being so mean to the press.
I don't think he should stop being so mean to the press.
He went after, what's the woman at PBS?
I can't remember her name.
Her last name is El Cindor.
And she started asking a question, and he just beat the living crap out of her.
Have we got the yummy Al Sindor from PBS?
You said New York might not need 30,000.
You said it on Sean Hannes, Fox News.
You said, why don't you people act?
Let me ask you.
Why don't you act in a little more positive?
It's always trying to get away from you.
My question to you.
Get you, get you.
And you know what?
That's why nobody trusts the media anymore.
My question to you is, how is that going to end?
Excuse me, you didn't hear me.
That's why you used to work for the Times and now you work for somebody else.
Look, let me tell you something.
Be nice.
Don't be surprised at that question.
Don't be threatening.
And this is the same woman, by the way, who said that somebody in the administration called it the kung flu or something like this, made an anti-Chinese remark.
And then when asked who it was, she couldn't name him.
If you can't name him, it didn't happen.
You're a reporter, right?
You're supposed to be telling the truth.
You know, my favorite comment about this was from Maggie Haberman, who is a definite person I think is really in a shameful position.
And I'll explain why in a minute.
But she feels this mistreating the press has gone too far.
I have to be honest that his attacks these days on media don't generally don't prompt the same reaction that they used to.
I think it's become part of the noise.
I think that he tends to return to the same trick over and over again.
And I just think it sort of loses its spark after a while.
So, I mean, it just is what it is.
I understand that he's frustrated.
I understand that he's having a hard time, but that has nothing to do with whether what we're saying is true or false.
And this is a president who has said all kinds of things that are not true about this crisis, continues to say them, including about the availability and frequency of testing, vis-a-vis the population in the U.S.
I think he needs to be more concerned with how his own government is performing as opposed to how the media is performing.
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
That was an information-free statement.
She has no information that his attacks.
His attacks on the press are landing.
The press's popularity is dropping while his is going up.
That's why they want to cancel the briefings.
That's why they want to boycott the briefings because they're actually working.
The people see what the guy is doing.
They see him as a personality.
They see when you see his personality.
Again, he talks too much.
He says things he shouldn't say sometimes, but he's doing a good job and he's listening to the experts.
Does anybody think Joe Biden, who hardly knows where he is, is going to do a better job?
And let me just remind you again, I know I've slammed this a million times, but I'm going to say it again in her book, Smear.
Cheryl Atkins, an actually good reporter, reminds us that one of the hijacked emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign talked about Maggie Haberman when she was working at Politico, saying, we have had her tee up stories for us before for Hillary Clinton and have never been disappointed.
While we should have a larger conversation in the near future about a broader strategy for re-engaging the beat press that covers Clinton, for this, we think we can achieve our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie.
She places the stories for him and then the New York Times hired her.
It is just amazing.
It is just amazing.
And remember, the idea is to create, it's not to get him this time or that time.
It's to create a narrative that everything he says is wrong.
It's always chaos.
Even he can't disprove the stories fast enough to get rid of that illusion of chaos.
That illusion is what the press is all about.
Shame on him.
All right, we've got to take a break from YouTube and Facebook.
Let me remind you that we're doing these all access lives.
I did one on Thursday.
It was great, except the camera wasn't working that well, so we're going to fix that.
But it's a more relaxed way for us to get together with you and to hear from you during this time of isolation.
Jeremy does it, Ben does it.
I think do we let Knowles do it?
I don't know if we let we've quarantined Knowles not because he's sick, but just to get rid of him.
I think Walsh does it.
It's a way for us to talk to you members.
The show was intended for our all-access members, but during this emergency and time of isolation, we've opened it up to all our members.
And in doing so, we accelerated the launch.
So please let us know what you think of it.
Access Live: Enlightenment Narrative00:05:40
It's on at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.
And you can join us on the All Access Live show.
And if you're a subscriber, you can just send in questions, which I just love.
I just love hearing from you myself, and I'm sure everybody else does too.
We want to talk to you.
We don't want to just be sitting here talking to ourselves.
So come over to All Access Live at 5 California time, 8 p.m. in New York.
All right.
come on over to dailywire.com and subscribe so you can be part of the All Access Live crew.
So let's talk about the bigger narrative, because, you know, you do get involved in the narrative on the day, but it's important to look at the bigger narrative.
Nowhere, if you want to look for the narrative, the place to go is the op-ed section of the New York Times, or as we call it here, Knucklehead Row.
Oh, hey, hey, oh, hey, ho.
Let's go all turn down to Knucklehead Row.
So on Knucklehead Row, there was a wonderful article called The Road to Coronavirus Hell was paved by evangelicals by Catherine Stewart, except they then changed the title.
They changed the headline because that was a little bit too hateful.
Then they changed it to the religious rights.
Hostility to science is crippling our coronavirus response.
This is by Catherine Stewart, who wrote a book called The Power Worshipers Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
She says, Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government, and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise in the current crisis.
We are all reaping what that movement has sown.
You know, by the way, on the numbers, talking about the numbers, about how they're not worse than other people's numbers, our numbers of deaths are actually quite low given comparison to the rest of the world.
They're down under 2% so far.
So we're doing something right.
And it probably has to do with the fact that our healthcare system is not a system, but a free, more free market than other places.
So she goes on to say, at least since the 19th century, when the pro-slavery theologian Robert Louis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as theories of unbelief, hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States.
And the denial of science and critical thinking among religious culture conservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis.
Let's let Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council make his response.
Let's go back and do a little history here.
We would not have hospitals in America if it weren't for churches.
In fact, in New York City, two of the three top hospitals have their roots in the faith community, a Presbyterian and a Jewish hospital.
The people on the left are the ones that have trouble with science.
They're the ones that have a problem with the chromosomes that design, that define male and female.
Christians don't have a problem with science.
In fact, while they're attacking Christians, it's the Christians that are out there serving the first responders.
In fact, many of the first responders are Christians, like my daughter, who's an evangelical who is working in the hot zone in the ER room, who volunteered to serve and work with the corona patients, the coronavirus patients.
So this is just, again, this is the New York Times attacking people of faith.
But it's not new, Shannon.
You know, this is the thing.
When he says it's not new, he says it goes back to the 1980s.
It goes back to the 14th century.
Okay, this is a narrative that has governed, that has governed Western thinking for a long time.
I call it the Enlightenment narrative.
The narrative is that we lived, that there was Rome and Greece, the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, and then they fell partly, this is part of the narrative.
It was Christianity that helped bring Rome down.
And then we lived in darkness under the church, under the shroud of the church, until the light of science broke through and we threw the church away and went forward into a grand new day.
It's just not true.
And there was a famous book written about it opposing religion against science.
You've all heard the myth of Galileo that he was threatened with torture for believing that the earth went around the sun and as opposed the other way around.
Those stories are muddled.
They're not true.
But the thing is, you can always pick out the bad guys.
Every group has people in it who are stupid, who say stupid things.
Groups have people who are not stupid, who sometimes say stupid things.
You can always isolate those people and quiet out all the rest of them, right?
If you quiet, if you make the other people go away and just focus on a guy who says something stupid, you can then tar an entire movement, in this case, an entire religion, when in fact, every single person who invented science in the West, every single person who brought science back to the West was a believer.
Newton, Galileo was a churchman, Francis Bacon, a churchman.
They were all part of the church.
And it was the church that shit, you know, after Rome fell, Europe was taken over by savage tribes, by primitive tribes, primitive German tribes.
It was the church who civilized them.
It was the church who over long centuries trained their minds until they were ready for reason and ready for science.
It was under the auspices of the church that they discovered science.
It was the kind of church reading of the scriptures that allowed science to thrive even when it seemed to contradict literal interpretations of the scripture.
All of this, all of this is untrue.
And the way that they do it is by posing false narratives all the time, right?
You know, the idea is they're anti-government.
Well, there's nobody who thinks there shouldn't be a government except anarchists, and anarchists are half social or half communists.
There's nobody who thinks there shouldn't be a government.
Pro-Freedom Narratives00:03:27
It's a question of the proper role of government.
You can't have a debate when somebody says, I think the government should take over everything.
And if you don't agree with me, you're anti-government.
You know, that's ridiculous.
I'm pro-freedom.
I'm pro-freedom.
I understand there has to be a government to protect freedom.
I understand there can be too much government.
I understand that everything government does comes with a cost that's not just financial, that also comes in terms of freedom.
And we're seeing that now.
We're seeing that in the, you know, in this emergency, you have people selling the narrative of, oh, see, now you're dependent on the government.
Don't you want to be dependent on the government all the time?
Oh, see, now you have a ventilator stuck down your throat.
Don't you want to have a ventilator stuck down your throat all the time?
The fact is, the fact is, the government does important things, does good things.
The FDA is a perfect example.
The FDA is a perfect example.
Scott Gottlieb, the guy who formerly ran the FDA, he's talking about the fact that the FDA has to dial back regulations to get these tests out.
These new tests have to be passed quickly because the tests are key to getting this under control.
Here's Gottlieb.
The career professionals in that device center have been moving very quickly, getting tests to the market now that that has been opened up.
I think that there are opportunities to sterilize masks.
I've talked to some doctors that are using gamma radiation to sterilize masks.
There's certainly secondary procedures for sterilizing masks that can help increase the supply chain.
I also think that there's an opportunity to get a therapeutic.
I'm very hopeful that by the summer we could have a therapeutic available authorized by the FDA.
You look at the monoclonal antibodies that are in development.
See, but the problem with the FDA, like the problem with all government, it is in government's nature to grow.
The FDA has done things like barred people who are dying from using experimental drugs.
And their excuses are, well, you don't want to give them false hope.
And my feeling is, yeah, give them any hope they can get.
They're dying.
You know, they're good people to test things in.
If they're willing to be tested, if they're fully informed of what the consequences are, of course, you should let dying people test new experimental drugs.
That's just the government going out of its way, the government being oversafe.
This is why we shouldn't listen to experts in times of non-crisis because we do not want to live.
We don't want to drown, as a great writer once said, we don't want to drown in a sea of security.
That was Katsunsaka said that.
If we all listened to our mothers, he said, we would drown in a sea of security.
Same thing is true of experts.
And the New York Post, the newspaper of record, has an editorial saying how red tape has crippled America's coronavirus response.
A very different, that's a very different narrative than the one we're hearing from the press.
As Americans watch governors and city officials plead with the private sector to produce ventilators and personal protective equipment for frontline medical workers, they must be wondering why don't our hospitals have what they need to confront the coronavirus.
Most of the country was woefully unprepared for a pandemic, and pre-crisis federal regulations have slowed responses now to a painful crawl.
When you hear Andrew Cuomo complaining about the fact that he hasn't got enough ventilators, he hasn't got enough beds.
Beds are frequently controlled by the state.
The state has regulations that says, oh, you don't need more intensive care units.
I mean, the last person who should be telling a hospital whether they need more ICU beds are the states, but they do.
They have these regulations that keep them from increasing their ICU, their critical care units, unless the state approves.
And these are the things that slow things down.
Things That Slow Down00:03:39
It is not obviously.
And then the way they phrase the debate as well, you don't want safety regulations.
Yes, you want safety regulations, but like everything else, they have to be made with common sense.
And if there is one thing we can count on the government not to have and experts not to have, it's common sense.
All right, a final reflection.
You know, I've been touting this show, The Sinner, a couple of times, and I can't talk anybody into watching it.
It's on USA.
And it's got Bill Pullman, who is just a terrific, terrific actor.
Season three finally ended.
Season two was a sophomore effort and not as good as season one.
Season one was based on a novel by Petra Hamisfar, a German crime writer.
But this season, nobody's talked about the fact that this season is based on the Leopold and Loeb case.
Somebody wrote an article called, Is This Based on a True Story? and then had no answer.
But it's based on Leopold and Loeb, who were two murderers who decided, read Nietzsche and decided, oh, we could commit the perfect murder.
And in fact, the philosophy hid their homosexuality and their psychosis, and it hid all these things.
And they just barely, their case became famous because I think it was Clarence Darrow made a famous speech against capital punishment that became the center of the case.
But the cases inspired all these different movies.
Rope, Murder by Numbers was another one and inspired season three of The Sinner.
But by the time, the show was a couple, maybe one episode too long.
It may have been one episode too long, but it was really well written, really deeply thought out, beautifully acted, especially by Bill Pullman.
He plays this incredibly neurotic detective, but just a really good piece.
And by the last two episodes, it was absolutely terrific.
In fact, by the last two episodes, I was thinking, wow, this is actually a terrific piece of writing.
I'm trying to find the guy's name.
I think his name is Derek.
I don't want to get it wrong.
I'll type it in and see what he says.
Writer of The Sinner.
Derek Simons.
Good.
Derek Simons wrote these and he created this one.
He hasn't talked much about the Leopold and Loeb case.
But the idea is it's two guys who we find out very quickly have sort of dabbled with Nietzsche, have dabbled with this idea that great people create their own morality.
How can we get in touch with life?
What dangerous things can we do to make ourselves more alive?
And Bill Pullman plays Harry Ambrose, this detective who is as far disconnected from life as it is possible to be.
And he becomes fascinated by this guy.
And he becomes fascinated with what does this guy have that maybe he can give him to help him in his life.
And the answer comes at the end.
The true answer comes at the end.
And it's quite shocking.
Pullman's performance, unbelievably good.
The guy has been, he's never been like the top star.
He's always been a kind of a, not a bit player, he's been like the second lead a lot of times, but he's the lead in this and he's doing a great job.
I just recommend it.
I just think people are missing out.
The first season and the third season are both really, really good.
All right, a new week begins.
We are sheltering in place, but we will be with you here.
I hope you will tune in.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
And if you want to help spread the word, give us a five-star review and also tell your friends to subscribe too.
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Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Klavan Show00:00:42
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