Andrew Clavin and Dan Crenshaw dissect journalism’s collapse, framing media as a "rotten" institution after Epstein, Weinstein, and COVID-19 missteps like CBS’s Amaris Vera hoax. Clavin contrasts Trump’s China warnings—validated by the pandemic—with media bias favoring Beijing while attacking U.S. policies, citing NBC’s inflated death counts. Crenshaw’s Fortitude counters "outrage culture," using his Afghanistan recovery to argue resilience over emotional reactions, blaming media for sensationalism and Pelosi’s opposition to Trump’s early China travel ban. They link systemic failures to elite cover-ups, from Hollywood’s abuse scandals to pandemic PPE shortages, urging spiritual fortitude amid cultural decay. [Automatically generated summary]
For weeks now, we've been watching the White House press corps wander into presidential briefings in complete ignorance, ask the same questions in an attempt to make the president look bad, and get smacked in the face with their own stupidity in a manner reminiscent of an old vaudeville comedian who steps on one end of a floorboard in such a way that the other end levers up and clobbers him.
And sure, it's been fun.
For some of us, American journalism takes us back to those bygone days when we'd sit of a Saturday morning watching Wily Coyote try to catch Roadrunner only to have his latest Acme device blow up in his face and send him plummeting over a cliff until he either smacks into the earth or ends up hosting a weekend show on NBC, whichever is most humiliating.
But since journalists aren't doing anything else worthwhile, I thought I would make a few suggestions of other ways they could entertain us throughout the lockdown.
For one thing, maybe they could organize a sort of Hunger Games type competition where people like Chuck Todd, Jim Acosta, and Nora O'Donnell hunt each other down over a savage, unforgiving landscape until only one is left who can then be put to good use as a kitchen scullion or human sacrifice.
Or we could have a game show where George Stephanopoulos, NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack, and former NBC anger anchor Matt Lauer try to guess the names of the women whose abuse they facilitated by spiking stories about Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein, or in Lauer's case, just by abusing them directly.
And finally, they could all participate in one of those church fundraiser type dunking games where they sit on a wobbly board over a pool of water and we throw baseballs at a target until we knock them in.
This would be cheap and easy and could be set up in just as much time as it takes to boil the water.
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-dunkity.
Ship-shaped dipsy-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.
There's a famous story about the French king Louis XVI at the start of the French Revolution.
When the liberal-leaning Duc de la Roche Foucault informed him of the storming of the Bastille, the king asked, Is it a revolt?
And La Roche Foucault answered, No, sire, it's a revolution.
Three years later, the king was in prison.
A year after that, he was executed by the guillotine.
The story reminds me of the look on the face of Nicolae Chiescu, the brutally murderous dictator of Romania when it was under the rule of Bernie Sanders' honeymoon spot, the Soviet Union.
I can remember around Christmastime 1989, as the Soviet Union began to collapse and protests spread through the slave empire's satellites.
Chiescu stood out on the balcony of the Communist Party headquarters to give a speech to the protesting crowds.
He had had an iron grip on his country and he didn't realize he had lost it.
The look on his face, and you can still see this on YouTube, it is really worth watching, the look on his face when he realized that this was no revolt, but a revolution, is something anyone who saw it will never forget.
I'll never forget it.
A few days later, Christmas Day, in fact, after Ciescu and his wife tried to flee and they were captured and summarily tried, they were executed the moment sentence was delivered.
Now, please believe me when I say I am not comparing American journalists to the King of France or the dictator of Romania.
After all, the King of France at least knew how to dress well, and Chescu was a psychopathic killer, so at least he had a talent.
My only point is that those who have an iron grip on power and information sometimes are the last to find out that the days of their dictatorship are done.
I'm going to show you some fun, stunning fake news in a moment that proves my point.
But no one knows the future, that's why they call it the future.
But I just think the end has to be coming for these journalist clowns.
In the past few years, we've seen the networks try to sell us a Russian collusion hoax, a total hoax, and then cover up for the CIA and the FBI schmucks who perpetrated the hoax.
We've seen them run a vividly dishonest attempt to destroy a Supreme Court nominee, Kavanaugh, and then cover up for Joe Biden.
Why Netsuite Matters00:02:40
They're doing that right now.
We've seen NBC, pardon me, and ABC cover up for rapists like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.
And now we see all of them doing everything they can to destroy the president and restore the status quo of power to failed elites.
I don't believe this can go on.
And I truly cannot wait to see the look on these people's faces when they look down at the deplorables from the balcony of their watering holes and realize this is not a revolt.
It's a revolution.
All right, let me take a moment before I get to the ad and talk about the fact that our ads matter so much to us.
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All of us are struggling.
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I try out everything or make sure they're tried out if they're not something that I can try out.
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They stick with us.
They stick with me when I say all the stuff that I say, the controversial stuff that I say, but they stick through it and they take the hits.
Hopefully you'll give them some good hits and use their products.
Let me talk about NetSuite.
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If you want to know how to run your business, you have to know how do you spell clavin.
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I just make it look easy.
Mailbag is tomorrow.
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China's Moral Competition00:12:04
Ask me anything you want, politics, religion, your personal life.
All my answers, guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
For the better, you have to tune in to find out.
Congressman Dan Crenshaw, future president of the United States, will be here later on in the show.
Let me just play this for you because, right, we're all in this time of anxiety and fear.
We don't know what's going on.
CBS News, CBS News runs this interview with a woman who says she's a nurse who had to leave her job.
Here is a portion of that interview.
I quit my job today.
I went into work and I was assigned to a COVID patient on an ICU unit that has been converted to a designated COVID unit.
None of the nurses are wearing masks, not even surgical masks in the hallways when they're giving report to each other.
I had my own N95 mask.
I told my manager, I understand we're short on supplies, but let me protect myself.
Let me feel safe.
I have family that I have to come home to.
And the way things are looking, this isn't going to get any better.
America isn't not prepared and nurses are not being protected.
So the first question is, what the hell is the music for?
It's not a television show.
It's real life.
And the second question is, is it real life?
And the answer apparently is no.
According to Chrissy Clark at the Federalists, I held off on reporting this because I wanted to confirm it.
But this woman calls herself Amaris.
Her name is Amaris Vera, I believe.
She is a popular, she has a popular site on Instagram.
She has bipolar disorder.
She has admitted this thing has been overwhelming to her.
She has not been an employee at the hospital for over a year.
CBS has clarified this, but the clarification doesn't mean anything.
They have not, as far as I know, at least before I went on the air, I was checking, they have not retracted it.
What the hell?
What the hell?
How bad do you have to be?
How wicked do you have to be?
How ignorant?
How stupid?
How incompetent?
How corrupt do you have to be to put that on the air when people are struggling, when hospitals are struggling, when genuine heroes are out on the front lines treating this disease, terrified for their lives?
How corrupt do you have to be?
It cannot, it cannot go on.
All right, let's talk about this.
Let's start with some real news, which is Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of England.
He is now in the ICU.
You probably remember he got the virus, said, I'm going to stay at home as a precaution.
He said his symptoms weren't bad.
They got worse.
Put him in the hospital, just saying, oh, it's just a precaution.
Now he's in the ICU.
They're saying it's just a precaution.
He's not on a ventilator.
Last I looked.
He is conscious.
Apparently, they're saying he's doing well and all this stuff.
But obviously, this is the sort of thing, this is the sort of story that has made me reluctant to jump on any train that declares that we know what's going on.
Some people are saying we're overreacting.
I get it.
I do get it.
Some people are going further than that.
Oh, it's a terrible takeover of the universe.
We're living in this science fiction loss of rights.
And I don't believe that in the least.
I believe that people are actually, these are actual human beings struggling with a crisis and sometimes doing a bad job and sometimes not and they may be overreacting, but we don't know.
I mean, we're going to come out of this.
We still may not know.
Remember, we still may not know when it's over.
Today, the CDC, the head of the CDC, went on and said the numbers are going to be much, much, much better than we feared they were because of the social distancing.
So if they're much better, some people are going to say, well, what an overreaction that was.
But other people are going to say, no, it was because they did these things.
So we may never know.
In Sweden, remember I told you they refused to do the lockdown.
The prime minister there, Stefan Lofen, said that he wasn't going to do it.
And now he's warning that the country could face thousands of coronavirus deaths.
That would be a real rebuke to their more laissez-faire attitude.
Maybe, maybe.
We'll see how that pans out.
We still don't know.
You still have to measure it against the suffering, the suicides, the pain, the unemployment that come with locking down the economy.
The numbers here, they're over 10,000.
A plurality of those are in New York.
I mean, we have had this thing in New York where it is plague central, and we don't know where, you know, whether or not that's what the reasons for that are.
Still, mostly people with underlying conditions, mostly people who are older.
And that's why we have to put everything we have into saving the clavin.
We have to save the clavin because, you know, I'm the sort of target for this disease hanging out outside going, come out, clavin, come out.
We've got to make sure that it can't get me because once I'm gone, we're totally lost.
But you know, the numbers are starting to look a little better in New York.
The numbers are leveling off in New York, and we don't know.
There's some people who are saying that the countries that got hit worst social distanced first.
So we still, we still are not sure what's going on.
The thing that is unbelievable to me is this, the fake news at this moment, when it's so hard to get the news.
There's so much we don't know.
There's so much we legit don't know that people in the news business are not, they're not sending in medical reporters, they're not sending in science reporters, they're not sending in economic reporters, they're sending the clowns.
Remember, this old Steven Sondheim song, send in the clowns.
That's what these briefings look like.
They keep blaming Trump for being Trump.
He rambles, he says things, he tapats his own horn, he's Trump.
I get it, but that's not the point.
The point is, who cares?
Really?
Who cares?
How's he doing?
How is he reacting?
And the reporting is absolutely unbelievable.
NBC, and let's remember this is NBC who killed the Harvey Weinstein story while they were killing the Matt Lauer story.
These are dishonest people.
NBC runs a story today saying the virus killed 1,264 people over 24 hours in the U.S. as of 2 a.m. on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new death was reported.
The city of Wuhan in Hubei province, where the new virus was first identified, prepared for lockdown measures to be lifted.
Wow, those Chinese are doing a great job at lying.
You know, why?
What on earth?
What on earth is NBC reporting news from China as if it were the truth?
It is just unbelievable to me.
Yesterday, in the briefing, Trump went after this reporter.
This reporter started talking to him about the fact that the Chinese companies like Huawei have donated medical supplies and equipment to the U.S. to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, there have been reports that some of the Chinese equipment that's being sent out doesn't work, but she's making this speech, and he stopped her and he said, this is a statement more than a question.
And here's a little bit of the exchange.
Trump started talking about the fact that we've had this trade deficit with China that he's been trying to fix.
Now China's going to spend a lot, has agreed to spend $250 billion, many billions of dollars in our country, much of it going to farmers and manufacturers.
So I'll let you know.
I mean, I hope they're going to honor the deal.
We'll find out.
Are you cooperating with China?
Who are you working for?
China?
You work for China or are you with a newspaper?
Who are you with?
Hong Kong Phoenix TV.
Who owns that?
China?
Is it owned by China?
Hong Kong.
No, is it owned by the state?
No, it's not.
It's a private law in the public network.
Okay, good.
Okay.
Look, I'll let you know.
I'll give you a good answer to that in a few months.
I wanted to see what they do.
Because it's time for them to help us.
It's time right now for China to help us.
And hopefully they do.
So, of course, liberals on Twitter were going nuts.
They were calling him a pig.
They were saying he's a misogynist and all this stuff.
She was lying.
She was lying.
Phoenix TV is an arm.
It has an independent shell company that owns it, but it is subject to the dictates of communist propaganda.
It's a communist propaganda instrument.
It's an instrument of Chinese communist propaganda.
Why?
Why the press who questions every word out of the president's mouth?
If he says, oh, things are getting better, they go, but it's so bad.
It's so bad.
Why on earth are they not questioning China?
I mean, Nadia Shadlow wrote this piece, and Good for the Atlantic, which sometimes they used to really be a lot more fair.
They've now gone woke and leftist a little bit, but they're still publishing some stuff.
Nadia Shadlow was briefly in the Trump administration, and she wrote this piece called Consider the Possibility that Trump is right about China.
This is why.
This is why they are taking Chinese propaganda, the word of a country that wants to destroy us, that oppresses its own people, that has never owned up to the oppression and murder they have done in their country, in their country, to their own people.
Why?
Why should our press talk about them?
I mean, you've got Thomas Friedman in the New York Times saying, oh, if only we could be China for a day, we could fix everything, because the experts have done such a great job.
So she writes, Nadia Shadlow writes in the Atlantic, even as the current emergency has proved Trump right in fundamental ways about China specifically and foreign policy more generally, many respectable people in the United States are letting their disdain for the president blind them to what is really going on in the world.
Trump's point of view, the COVID-19 crisis reveals what his strategy asserted, that the world is a competitive arena in which great power rivals like China seek advantage, that the state remains the irreplaceable agent of international power and effective action.
And, you know, this is the important thing, that this virus, the situation, I'm willing to grant he made mistakes.
I'm willing to grant he didn't take it seriously fast enough, whatever.
Still, it has proved everything he said right.
It has proved his general attitude, which was the opposite of the attitude of the elites, the opposite of the attitude of the experts in the State Department.
It has proved his general point right, that we are a world of countries, a world of countries.
Not all the countries are morally equal.
Not all the cultures are morally the same, and they are in competition with one another.
And it's not a pure capitalist competition.
It is also a moral competition.
This was what Reagan said about the Soviet Union.
He said, it's not like we and they are morally equivalent.
It is not the same thing.
We are not morally equivalent to the Chinese.
And I shouldn't have to say that we're not perfect.
Ha ha ha.
Obviously, we're not perfect.
But we are a country dedicated to good values, and they are a country dedicated to bad values.
We have to win.
And, you know, it is, it's just amazing to me, this coverage.
It really is.
It's like, you know, you don't want to go over the top.
I see people going over the top on the measures that governments are taking.
Oh, it's oppression and so on.
And I don't like to talk like that, but the press is the one thing that has been exposed as rotten to the core.
And it was exposed by the Harvey Weinstein as rotten to the core.
It was disposed by the Jeffrey Epstein story as rotten to the core.
And the fact that it has never had to pay for that, that Andrew Lack is still heading NBC after he did those things.
These are amazing things, amazing things.
Can anybody say, can anybody say that their coverage of one party is the same as the other party?
I mean, even Chuck Todd, who is the most, he's either clueless or dishonest.
I don't know which.
Powerful People, Petty Outrage00:15:15
I really don't.
But he is the one guy who keeps saying, no, the press completely, it's completely fine.
Is he really going to tell us that their coverage of Trump is the same as their coverage of Obama, Obama, who set the Middle East on fire, who lets ISIS take over the Middle East, Trump, who destroyed ISIS in the Middle East?
Are they really going to tell us they've covered them the same way?
Nobody.
Nobody can do it.
You know, all of this, all of this, there's this dust up in Hollywood, which I just find really illustrative of what's going on, right?
In some ways, you can say, oh, it's silly.
Who cares about what the people in Hollywood are saying?
But I'll tell you why I don't think that that's the right attitude.
Alyssa Milano, right?
She is this actress.
She's been on a couple of TV shows.
What was she on?
She wasn't charmed.
You know, she was never really a big actress, But she became a big deal during the Kavanaugh hearings, during the Kavanaugh hearings, when he was accused of doing something stupid when he was a teenager.
And, you know, having done stupid things when I was a teenager, things I'm ashamed of to this day, I never cared.
I never cared what Brett Kavanaugh did or didn't do.
But as the evidence came in, it became very clear that the woman who was accusing him, Blasey Ford, was not supported by the evidence.
She was not supported by the evidence.
Was I there?
No.
All I'm saying is the people that she said were there said they weren't there.
The people she said would back her up didn't back her up.
Important, right?
But Alyssa Milano was on the front line sitting behind Christine Blasey Ford with a sign, you know, don't confirm, don't confirm Kavanaugh and saying it's the Me Too movement and a big engine behind the Me Too movement.
And she said, she said this.
Let me be as clear as possible.
I believe Christine Blasey Ford and I demand that our senators vote to reject Brett Kavanaugh as the next justice of the Supreme Court.
Every person who refuses to, every person who refuses to loudly and openly reject Brett Kavanaugh's nomination is telling every generation of Americans that an alleged abuser's career is more valuable than a survivor's humanity.
And the highest court in our lands is no place for an alleged sexual offender to sit.
Now, what were the things you didn't hear in there?
Due process, proof, evidence, listening to both sides, you know, innocent before proved guilty, all those things.
Now she's backing Joe Biden.
Okay, now she's backing Joe Biden.
Now, Kavanaugh was accused of being, when a teenager, of laying on top of a girl in a threatening, and, you know, if it were true, it would have been a nasty thing to do, you know, definitely deserves a slap upside the head and all this.
But that was it.
Tara Reed is saying that Biden pinned her against the wall and stuck his hand into her body, okay?
Which as an adult, as an adult and as a powerful person, did this, right?
He was a senator at the time.
It was 93.
So here's Alyssa Milano, why she's not taking that seriously.
So I believe that even though we should believe women, and that is an important thing, and what that statement really means is like, you know, for so long, the go-to has been not to believe them.
So really we have to sort of societally change that mindset to believing women.
But that does not mean at the expense of not, you know, giving men their due process and investigating situations.
I like that.
And giving, you know, it's got to be fair in both directions.
So that's the guy who's interviewing her.
His name is Annie Cohn.
He's called Radio Andy.
He's my favorite part of that clip.
I like due process.
I like that.
Why didn't anybody think of that before?
Due process.
Maybe we should write that into our laws or something.
What a wonderful, you know.
I mean, what a fraud.
What a total fraud.
Come on.
You know, nobody, nobody can say that she's holding one of these people to the same standard as she is the other.
Again, one as an adult stuck his hand into a woman's body, allegedly, allegedly.
One of them, as a kid, as a stupid teenager, is accused of having, allegedly also of having gotten drunk and laying on top of a girl before he fell off laughing.
Okay.
So Rose McGowan, who is clearly a very troubled person, who was one of Harvey Weinstein's victim and was a co-star with Alyssa Milano in this witch TV show Charmed.
And, you know, well, I'll get back to this in a sec.
So Rose McGowan, she went on and she ripped her on, what was it?
I think it's CBS, ABC.
I can't remember.
Anyway, here's the interview where she says, I don't care what Alyssa Milano says.
Your former charmed co-star, Alyssa Milano, gets a lot of credit for helping me to go viral.
So?
Are you proud of her?
I don't like her.
Why?
Because I think she's a lie.
Why?
Do you think I don't know these people?
I'm not looking at this from the outside.
I have a lot of experience.
I know she's married to a CIA agent.
Do the math.
Who's behind Times Up?
CAA.
Where do they meet?
CIA.
Who needs good PR?
CIA.
Who are part of the pimp problem?
CIA.
These are very powerful people you're talking about.
They are.
So am I. All right.
So CAA, obviously a big agency out here, one of the kind of an agency that founded the new Hollywood.
Very, very powerful out here.
And they represented many of the actresses who were sent to meetings with Weinstein at his suite at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.
That's why she's calling him part of the pimp problem.
You know, everybody knew what happened to an actress who went over to his suite at the hotel.
It was not a secret, certainly not a secret at CAA.
And now they're embracing the Times Up movement.
And she's saying, yeah, this is good PR, but it's all the same people, right?
And when Weinstein was trying to kill Ronan Farrow's expose in the New Yorker, he called the CAA managing partner, Brian Lord, who told Weinstein that Farrow, a CIA client, wouldn't meet with him.
And CIA has apologized.
They say we apologize to any person the agency let down for not meeting the high expectations we place on ourselves as individuals and as a company.
What I'm saying is Rose McGowan is right here.
I mean, Rose McGowan is pointing to the fact that these are people who participated in this.
This is an industry, Hollywood, that has participated in this forever.
As I've said, not a mile and a half away from me, there is a statue of the casting couch to commemorate the casting couch.
It's a joke, but still, there it is.
It's not like nobody knew the casting couch was part of Hollywood.
But the reason I talk about this is because this is the entire press.
This is the entire press corps, the people we're depending on for news and information.
When I talk about the fact that NBC covered up for Harvey Weinstein while covering up for Matt Lauer, when I talk about the fact that George Stephanopoulos, who covered up for Bill Clinton, is now running the news division at a network that covered up for Jeffrey Epstein during the Hillary Clinton trial.
This is not paranoia.
This is actually things that are happening.
I'm also talking about the fact that it's NBC who released the tape of Donald Trump making boorish remarks about women, holding on to it until the moment they thought it would hurt him most.
And these are the people, this is the flow of information.
So the flow of information that you're getting is just simply, is simply an attempt to maintain a certain degree of power in certain hands.
So that every time you read the New York Times, every time you turn on one of the networks, every time you listen to NPR, you are listening to that effort to maintain what they think should be the power structure.
And again, you know, the thing about this is, is it's not the fact that they think that they are being evil.
It's not the fact that they think, oh, we've got to destroy, you know, Donald Trump because we don't like his hair.
It's because they believe in certain principles.
They believe in principles of abortion.
They believe in principles of internationalism.
They believe in principles of guaranteed income, of spreading the wealth so that people, when they lose their jobs, will take their money and go away and not bother them with things like meaning and the fact that they're individuals who want to have dignity and work and be part of society.
Never mind, just take your money and go away and let us do what we're doing here.
This is an elite that is closed off and it is fighting for its life.
I mean, it is fighting for its life because Donald Trump got elected.
And Donald Trump, you know, Walter Russell Meade calls him a wrecking ball president.
And that is, that's a good description of him.
He's all over the place.
There are times when he makes me cringe.
You know, I know that Knowles always loves it when he's making these jokes.
But sometimes I'm just thinking, no, you know, you are the president.
Not everything is a joke.
Not everything is to be sloughed off.
You know, he is a wrecking ball president, but you got to think, why was he put in there?
He was put on in there to wreck something that needs wrecking.
And not one of these damn people, not one of them, not one of them has turned around and said, why?
Why is he in there?
Maybe our power, maybe we failed.
Maybe we did something wrong.
Maybe our power is too insulated.
Maybe our ideas are too insulated.
None of them has done it.
None of them.
And I just think, you know, it is time.
The time has come for them to think it through.
And they're obviously not going to do it because they're like Louis XVI.
They, until the moment, until the moment, the crowds are outside like Chescu, until the moment, they won't stop shouting.
They think it's a revolt.
But I think it's a revolution, and I think their time has come.
And I think they really have to look to it, or we're going to have to do something about it ourselves.
All right.
We have Dan Crenshaw coming up in just a second.
Let me remind you that we're doing all access live.
We meant this for all access members, but we're giving it to all subscribers.
We just sit and chat with you.
It's at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.
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All right.
Dan Crenshaw is, as you know, the future president of the United States, but he's currently biding his time as Texas 2nd congressional district, the congressman in Texas, Texas' 2nd congressional district.
He's a former lieutenant commander in the Navy SEALs, where he earned two bronze stars, a Purple Heart and a Navy Commendation Medal.
His new book is Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage.
It's out now.
Congressman, are you there?
Yeah, I'm here.
Good to see you, Andrew.
It's good to have you on.
I'm a big fan, and I'm glad to get a chance to talk to you.
I really appreciate it.
I was looking at your book, Fortitude, American Resilience in an Era of Outrage.
And the first thing that struck me about it, as obviously you're an example of fortitude.
You have been a Navy SEAL.
You've been injured very badly.
Why is fortitude the opposite of outrage?
Well, fortitude, by definition, is resilience in the face of adversity.
Outrage is allowing your emotions to overcome you.
So those are pretty polar opposite things.
And I'm not saying outrage is always unjustified.
Of course, it can be.
But it is always useless.
It is always useless.
Whether it's justified or not, it's always useless.
And it does take an element of fortitude to actually stop yourself from emotionally reacting.
It's hard to imagine many instances in your personal life when that emotional reaction had a better outcome for you than a better, more thought-out reaction would have.
I mean, I think most people can agree with that, right?
That doesn't mean you're always going to be perfect and be this stoic.
I'm certainly not.
None of us are.
I didn't write this book about how perfect I am.
I wrote it about my own shortcomings as well.
And I wrote it about what we should aspire to.
And, you know, so each chapter is a lesson in how to overcome that outrage culture and how to identify it and how to overcome it.
So it's really about personal fortitude.
And I try to make these lessons very applicable to even the smallest of things.
But it's also a culture book.
And especially wraps up that way in the last chapter.
It really is about our American story and who we want to be and how we need to get there and what we need to remember about ourselves and about the grit and American tenacity and the American spirit to get us back to where we need to be.
And you know what?
Now is a really good time to do that because this book was written about petty outrage.
This book was written about stupid cancel culture and all that nonsense and microaggressions.
But you know what?
Now we actually have real aggressions.
Okay.
We have a real virus that is plaguing the world.
This would be a really good time to remember who we actually are as Americans.
When you were wounded in Afghanistan, I mean, it was a really bad injury.
When you woke up and you were threatened with blindness, what was the path that you had to take to deal with that?
What was the mental path you had to create for yourself?
It's interesting.
People ask me a question a lot, and the question goes something like this.
What was it like knowing that you might be blind?
Because doctors didn't think I would really ever see out of my good eye ever again.
It was really badly damaged.
They were hopeful I might see lights and shapes.
But the way I answer that question is, and I answer it truthfully, which is, I don't know.
I really don't, I don't know what that mental state is like because I never felt it.
I believed, even if that belief was not based in reality, I believed that I would see again, and I believed it was just a matter of time.
And I just had to get through each day or each five minutes, really.
And that kept me sane.
Now, how I did that, I don't know.
Maybe I'm stubborn.
Maybe I'm stupid.
Maybe God gave me the strength to not go insane.
Frankly, that's probably the more likely reason.
I also learned it from Buds.
I mean, I learned going through the hardest training in the world that it really is about that next five minutes and that you have to keep your eye on the ball, so to speak, in this case.
No Plan B00:10:54
That's somewhat ironically.
And so there's a goal in mind, and I have a chapter in the book called No Plan B.
And No Plan B is fundamentally about not quitting.
Don't live your plan B.
That doesn't mean don't have contingencies in your life.
It doesn't mean don't change directions when it makes sense.
But, you know, if Michael Knowles isn't good at doing a podcast, then he should quit.
At least in Ben Shapiro's mind, in your mind, right?
But I'm just kidding, everybody.
I love Michael.
He's my friend.
But that's not quitting, right?
So, but only you know when you've quit, and that's what that chapter is about.
And because you give yourself a choice, and that's how people quit SEAL training.
They gave themselves a choice.
They wanted to do this, but they weren't sure if they could make it, but they want to give it their best.
Well, then they'll quit.
I guarantee they'll quit.
Only the guys make it when they're like, oh, I'm just going to do this or I'll die.
I'll die or I'll do this.
It's one of the two.
And if you have that mentality, you'll win.
And you should live your life that way.
I'm not saying everybody's going to become a SEAL, but you have to live your life with this Plan A purpose.
You know what you want.
You know you're going to live that way.
And every small decision makes up that bigger purpose.
And that's what living your plan A really is.
You know, you're looking at this moment, obviously.
We're in this crisis.
Well, first of all, let me ask you flat out.
How do you think the administration is doing so far?
I think they're doing the best they can.
We can always look in hindsight and say, well, at this point, you really should have industrialized that PPE production, that ventilator production.
But that's not always a fair criticism.
The fair criticism is to go back in time.
What did you know at this point?
What did you ignore deliberately?
And when we do that in a fair way, what we actually find, and I did a whole podcast on this where I read out the timeline of who knew what and what actions were taken.
And when you do that, what you actually find is most of the media was downplaying this way more than President Trump was.
In fact, President Trump is the one who made the extreme decision, and at the time, this was extreme, to stop flights or restrict travel coming in from China.
On that same day, on the exact same day he did that, what did Nancy Pelosi do?
She proposed the No Ban Act, which would be a congressional mandate not to do what Trump did, to say that he doesn't have the power to actually restrict that travel.
And so we can say with 100% confidence how the Democrats would have reacted to this, because they tell us, right?
Joe Biden told us how he would have reacted to this.
He would not have implemented that travel ban.
Nancy Pelosi has told us she would not have implemented that travel ban.
Now, in hindsight, they agree with it.
But if they were in charge, we can safely say with 100% confidence they would not have done that because they've told us.
So, you know, I don't like that finger pointing, but they've forced us into that finger pointing.
And it can't stop right here.
We can't all just come together and give each other some grace and say, hey, I don't think the Obama administration had a crystal ball.
I don't think they should have known that they needed extra PPE in the national stockpile after it was depleted.
I want to be able to give them that grace because, frankly, I think that's objectively true.
You know, when you're preparing for disasters, you're mostly just preparing for the last one because you don't have a crystal ball, and it's very difficult to look ahead.
And so, you know, I agree with what Fauci said recently.
I mean, it's hard to imagine an administration doing much better.
It doesn't mean they're perfect, but then if you're going to claim that they should be perfect, we need to objectively state what perfect is and then objectively state what reasonable is below that.
And our political opportunism that has been prevalent in this country that seems incapable of doing that, unfortunately.
And I'll call it out when I see it, but I hope it ends.
We're talking to Congressman Dan Crenshaw's book is Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage.
I just want to ask you one last question before I let you go.
If outrage is a problem, the press, American journalism seems to be in a very bad way.
And right now, it seems to be really shaming itself.
This is my opinion.
I'm interested in what you think of their role in creating the outrage culture.
Yeah, a huge role.
I mean, I talk about them in my book.
And there's other books that are well written, written by liberals.
Matt Talibi and Haight Inc. really examines the role of media and the changes in media that have contributed to outrage culture.
Again, my book is not a dissection of the actual problem.
It's an offering of solutions.
But it's a huge part of it because of the headlines they write, right?
And they're designed quite deliberately to make you enraged.
There are certain words that have an emotional meaning, and they deliberately use these words.
And actually, a lot of journalists get pissed off about this because a journalist might write the story.
And you've seen this as much as I have.
A lot of times the story itself might actually give you the context and balance that you might be looking for.
But the headline is totally misleading.
It's editorialized in a huge extent.
And that's the industry and the corruption of the industry that has occurred.
And it's really sad, and it really contributes to this in a terrible way.
The media, and just to maybe answer your question further, the media have acted terribly during this entire pandemic.
They waste America's time in those press briefings asking the president the stupidest possible questions that elicit no information whatsoever.
They're just meant to be combative.
And I would point out that the media has two roles.
One is to be adversarial to the government.
But the other role is to also inform the public in the fairest way possible.
They're doing the adversarial part the best they can.
They don't do it to Democrats, but they love doing it to the president.
I don't mind that they do it.
I just want them to do the other part also.
I want them to do the part where they inform the public fairly.
And they've been failing miserably at that.
Congressman Dan Crenshaw, thanks for coming on.
I know you've got to go.
I hope you'll come back.
The book is Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage.
Thanks a lot, Dan.
Hey, thanks a lot, Andrew.
All right, a final reflection.
One of the things I have to say that has been difficult for me is this is going into Holy Week in lockdown.
And obviously, I'm attending church online.
I'm going on and watching it, but it's not the same.
And I know that Passover is coming tomorrow.
And it's tough for people to celebrate these holidays.
Obviously, God is wherever we are, and he will be there.
But it's been difficult.
And I was watching, Judge Janine was talking to Franklin Graham, and he's been under fire because he doesn't toe the politically correct line in terms of gay people.
And yet here he is setting up hospitals in Central Park, and the left is fretting over whether he's going to treat gay people the same, which he obviously is and has said he always does.
And it's not a Christian thing to reject them for medical care.
But Judge Janine had him on and asked him to make a statement about why God permits such things as this pandemic to happen.
And this was his response.
Man has turned his back on God.
We have sinned against him.
And we need to ask for God's forgiveness.
And that's what Easter's all about.
It's about God so loving the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but should have everlasting life.
Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
He didn't come to condemn the world, but to save the world.
And if we put our faith and trust in him, he'll forgive our sins, and he'll heal our hearts, and he'll change the course of our lives.
And this pandemic, this is a result of a fallen world, a world that has turned its back on God.
And so I would encourage people to pray and just let's ask God for help.
So the left universally made it sound as if what he was saying is we've been naughty and this is God's punishment for us.
And I'm not the Graham whisperer.
The guy is obviously a big-time evangelist.
He can speak for himself.
But that's not what I'm hearing him say.
What I hear him say is the simple truth that the world is broken.
The world is not what it's supposed to be.
None of us is what he or she is supposed to be.
I don't think anyone ever looks at himself and says, you know, maybe Chuck Todd does, but the rest of us, nobody looks at himself and says, boy, I'm just, I am exactly what I was meant to be when I was born.
This was the perfect, I'm now my ideal self.
You know, nobody says that.
This is a broken, broken world.
And nature is broken.
And nature itself is free to do the things that it does.
And this is, in the Christian worldview, this is what is called the state of sin.
It's not like, oh, I did something bad and now bad things are happening.
It's more like this world is in and of itself broken in all of its systems, in all of its ways, in all of our hearts, in everything that it does.
And that's why the result of the pandemic.
The idea of Christianity, as I see it, is that we live in a broken system, but there is a larger system which is not broken.
There is a larger system that is not broken, and the idea is that a doorway named Jesus Christ has opened up between one system, the broken system, and the other system.
And we can't just walk through that doorway, but we can open the communications between the perfect system that is God's system that was supposed to be ours and the system that we live in, which is man's system and which is broken.
And we have radio contact, basically, through Jesus Christ with that bigger system.
And, you know, the only thing I wanted to say about this is that a lot of times Christians are so used to talking to other Christians that they don't know what they sound like when they go on TV.
And of course, we have this hostile, hostile press, which is hostile to the idea of God.
It's hostile to the idea of Christianity.
Specifically, it is more hostile to the idea of Christianity than it is to Islam or to other religions that it doesn't associate with ourselves, which is what it hates, is Western civilization.
But this system, this idea that this system is broken, I think is just, you only have to look in your heart.
You only have to look in your heart and measure the distance between who you feel you could be and who you actually are and how far that distance is and who it is more times than not that stands in your way, namely you.
And you know that what Franklin Graham is saying is absolutely correct.
So anyway, going into this holiday, whether it's Passover or Easter, Holy Week, you know, I think it's just important to remember that this is what we're working on.
We're working on establishing contact with a better system that is a bigger system, that's the eternal system, and that is our system, ultimately, if we make our way into the arms of God and into the ideas of God.
And I just wanted to say that because I know we're all celebrating by ourselves, and it's nice to remember that we're all also celebrating together.
Celebrating Faith and Family00:01:30
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You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.