Ep. 875 dissects Bernie Sanders’ 2020 exit—300-delegate deficit behind Biden—while Trump accuses DNC rigging, warning of defector chaos via Project Veritas footage. The host frames COVID-19 as a partisan Rorschach test: leftists blame capitalism, rightists deny severity or peddle conspiracies, yet Trump’s 1.8–2% mortality data and border closures outpaced leftist-run cities like NYC. Fauci’s revised 60K death toll and phased reopenings clash with Cuomo’s fearmongering, exposing media bias. Mailbag shifts to governance: Clavin rejects post-Civil War rollbacks but urges strict constitutional limits on bureaucrats, dismissing virtue as the antidote to authoritarianism. Ethical trade dilemmas (Uyghur camps) and Christian cohabitation debates collide with hard truths—economic pragmatism vs. moral complicity—while creative discipline trumps inspiration. The episode ends with Klavan’s show teeing up China’s cruelty, Biden’s decline, and Trump’s resilience as the only clear path forward. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, Bernie Sanders is out of the race and we'll talk about that.
But first, to bring you up to date, here's the latest on President Trump's last press briefing.
Trump told the assembled journalists that he was now considering defunding the World Health Organization.
ABC's John Carl asked, you won't be funding who?
And the president said, that's right.
And Carl said, no, who?
And Trump said, yes, who?
And Carl said, but who won't you be funding?
And Trump said, exactly who I won't be funding.
And Carl said, but I don't understand who.
And Trump said, what are you some kind of idiot?
And Carl.
And Carl and Carl said, who are you calling an idiot?
And Trump said, no, I'm calling you an idiot.
I'm not funding who.
And Carl said, who?
And Trump said, which.
And Carl said, you're not funding which.
And Trump said, no, who?
And Carl said, you.
And Trump said, what about me?
And Carl asked, who will you no longer be funding?
And Trump said, I'm glad we finally got that straightened out.
In five, it was funny when Abbott and Costello did it.
It's still funny.
In five interviews with various news outlets after the exchange, Carl told Wolf Blitzer, Joe Scarborough, Xi Jinping, who was sitting in for Lester Holt, Don Lemon, and a shadowy figure from Phoenix TV who suddenly vanished,
leaving only the faint smell of opium and 20,000 dead Italians that Trump had been rude and unreasonable in refusing to answer his question and was probably afraid Carl's masterful journalism would uncover that the president had inflated the health benefits of an anti-malaria drug because he'd invested $17 in a mutual fund that included a company that manufactured mosquitoes.
I'm not sure if this is, I'm this funny or it's just Bernie.
Trump responded that Carl was an idiot who couldn't even spell World Health Organization.
Then the two men attacked each other and rolled around the floor in a cloud of dust with shoes and various other pieces of clothing flying into the air as they beat one another senseless.
Hooray for Ashford Degree00:04:32
Meanwhile, the economy crashed and all the government's computer models turned out to be wrong, but no one remembered to ask about that.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this at last is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Come on.
Come on, man.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boom.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy.
The world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the real news.
I'm probably just laughing because Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race.
Who doesn't?
Who doesn't?
We're going to talk about that in just a second.
But first, let me just point out my talented colleague over at City Journal, Christopher Rufer, wrote an article there entitled The Rorschach Epidemic.
And his observation is that partisans on all sides are using the current crisis as proof of their favored positions.
Leftists see a failure of capitalism.
Rightists see the effects of stifling regulation.
China fans see the effectiveness of their authoritarian model.
And sensible people see an oppressive communist Chinese government, which covered up while the world grew ill because they eat bats like savages.
Ruffo makes the larger point, quote, the virus reminds us that in a time of panic, people retreat to their familiar corners and that the most extreme views find an audience, unquote.
This seems no doubt true.
And I think part of the reason is that in moments of high emotion, people lose their patience and they want answers right this minute when learning the truth takes time.
Recently, I was reading an essay by the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky because after reading the New York Times in the morning, I wanted to check in with someone more moderate.
Trotsky, writing in the Great Depression on the eve of World War II, was practically rubbing his hands together at what he thought was the failure of capitalism.
The depression and the rise of Hitler were proof positive to Trotsky that the predictions of Karl Marx were coming true as promised.
If Trotsky could have lived into the 1990s, it would have struck him like an ice axe to the head that what had seemed obvious in his little sliver of time turned out to be completely wrong in the long run.
It was capitalism that adapted and thrived and communism that devolved into a dead idea that could only be believed by Bernie Sanders, which is an excellent reminder that emergencies don't change first principles.
That's what you've got to stick to.
Human dignity requires freedom.
Freedom requires harsh limitations on the powers of government, including its power to use your money.
And it also requires virtue on the part of the people.
Capitalism is moral and works.
Socialism is slavery and doesn't work and is also slavery.
Or did I mention that already?
The flu is the flu.
It will come and go and take some of us with it.
The moral imperative of liberty and the sinful, corrupt, and power-hungry nature of the human soul will still be here when it's gone, same as they were before it came.
Not one eternal thing will change.
That's what makes them eternal.
Yesterday, today, and forever, our battle cry should always be freedom and don't eat bats.
All right.
Let us talk for just a moment before we get to Bernie about Ashford University.
You're at home.
Good time to get an advanced degree.
We all have an idea of what our dream job looks like, but someone isn't just going to hand it to you.
Odds are you'll need at least a bachelor's degree to make that dream a reality.
And it's hard to go back to school while you're working.
That's why you'll love Ashford.
Ashford University's online bachelor's and master's degree programs allow you to learn on a convenient and flexible schedule.
You can study wherever you're the most comfortable learning.
Enrolling in one six-week course at Ashford makes you a full-time student.
So you can do it right at home.
Listen, this is the time.
This is a great time to get an advanced degree.
They really are helpful.
Or to get a bachelor's degree if you haven't had that, which is especially helpful.
You can pursue the master's or bachelor's degree you've always wanted in programs like business administration, healthcare administration, and psychology, just to name a few.
The SAT, GRE, GMAT, and other standardized test scores are not required for enrolling at Ashford.
Ashford University is accredited by WASC, Senior College, and University Commission.
Get on the road to earning your degree and making your dream job a reality.
There's no fee to apply at ashford.edu/slash Andrew.
That's ashford.edu slash Andrew for no fee to apply, ashford.edu slash Andrew.
Not all programs are available in all states.
Fauci's Last Night Comments00:14:31
I just have to look at the other.
All right, so Bernie's out.
Here's his speech.
I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth.
And that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden, and the path toward victory is virtually impossible.
So while we are winning the ideological battle, and while we are winning the support of so many young people and working people throughout the country, I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful.
And so today, I am announcing the suspension of my campaign.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that, quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, end quote.
The fight for justice is what our campaign has been about.
The fight for justice is what our movement remains about.
Today, I congratulate Joe Biden, a very decent man who I will work with to move our progressive ideas forward.
So he endorsed Biden and Biden gave his reaction in a conversation with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Are Fig Newtons your favorite snack?
Well, they're among my favorite.
You know why?
They're small and I can sneak them.
You know, you can buy little packs of them, and I get them on the planes when I fly back and forth.
But the thing that is the thing that everybody makes fun of me, that when in doubt, I have a peanut butter jelly sandwich.
But I learned everybody was making fun of that, and I found out John Kerry has the same addiction, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwich is always good.
My daughter and I enjoyed it when you were in Michigan, and you shared your fake newtons lemon.
Oh, that's right.
I had some then.
I remember that.
So the Democrat Party is in the best of hands.
Interestingly, Sanders said that he would remain on the ballot in the remaining states in the calendar to amass more delegates to have influence at the Democrats' convention.
So he's going to extort concessions out of Biden at the convention, assuming Biden actually makes it to the convention or knows where it is.
Trump's tweet was, Bernie Sanders is out.
Thank you to Elizabeth Warren.
If not for her, Bernie would have won almost every state on Super Tuesday.
This ended just like the Democrats and the DNC wanted.
Same as the crooked Hillary fiasco.
The Bernie people should come to the Republican Party for a trade.
You know, that is interesting because that is the big question.
The big question now is we all remember those Project Veritas videos of those radical Bernie supporters who said if Bernie didn't get it, this Milwaukee will burn and all this.
And big, big question whether those people are going to follow Biden because about 15% of them polled have said they would join Donald Trump.
They're looking for change and they're going to obviously get a lot more change with President the Donald than they're going to get with Biden.
So interesting times to come.
Meanwhile, you know, really interesting, here's something really interesting.
You know, today I was, yesterday, last night, I was studying some of the numbers and looking at what's going on.
And there's a lot of stuff on the right as well as the left, a lot of like hysteria about we're in a police state and all this stuff.
And I thought, you know, I'm looking at these numbers and I started to think, gee, you know, what if actually the Trump administration has done the right thing and they're doing a good job and the things are getting better.
And, you know, the one narrative that nobody wants to talk about is that Trump has handled this as well, you know, making mistakes, obviously, but as well as a human president was going to handle this.
I'm a very stable genius.
He's a very stable genius.
And interestingly, this morning, Fauci, Dr. Fauci was on the Ed Henry show on Fox, and he was talking about what's happening.
And he said that a corner is being turned in New York, where obviously the center of all this has been.
Yeah, that's the cut I want.
Let's play that cut first.
The number of deaths on a given day continue to increase.
You know, at the same time, seemingly paradoxically, but not, we're saying that we're starting to see some glimmers of hope because the deaths generally lag by a couple of weeks behind what's fueling the outbreak, namely the number of new cases and the number of hospitalizations.
So at the same time as we're seeing an increase in death, like typically what we're seeing now from New York, over the last few days, there's been a stabilization and a decrease in the hospitalizations, admissions to intensive care, and the requirements for intubations.
That means that as we get further on beyond this week, we should start to see the beginning of a turnaround.
So this is absolutely good news.
The latest computer models.
And, you know, I always tell you, you get tomorrow's news today on this show.
It really, I mean, half the time, I'm obviously, you know, sort of kidding, but it is actually also absolutely true.
I have gotten this thing.
I've been right on this thing.
I've been as right as Donald Trump thinks he is, which is an amazing thing.
And, you know, I keep telling you about the computer models, and I'm getting a lot of letters from engineers saying I've gotten this right.
The computer, the way I'm talking about computer models are right.
They've now dropped and are predicting 60,000 deaths, which is a very, very bad flu season.
That's about what happens in the worst flu seasons in America, 60,000 deaths.
And so we started at 2 million.
Remember, that was from the Imperial College in London.
Now, then we went down to 240,000.
And remember, that was what NBC mistakenly called the worst case scenario.
While Fauci, to his credit, by the way, has always been saying this is the way computer models work.
He keeps saying that, and the press then translates that into the worst possible news it can come up with.
And now they're saying 60,000, which again is good.
And you'll notice that Fauci is very convinced that this is because of the social distancing, that the reason it's coming down is because it's not just because the computer models were wrong.
He believes it's partly because of the social distancing.
And Ed Henry, who was doing a very good job with this interview, asked about, should we now start thinking about planning the way forward?
Do you think it's now time to have the conversation, to begin planning to start opening up pieces of the economy?
Well, obviously, we're doing that right now, even as we speak.
I mean, you don't want to let up at a time that's premature.
But right now, we are clearly looking at if we, in fact, are as successful as we hope to be over the extended 30-day period that the president announced several days ago, namely extending the period of restrictions and guidelines to the end of April, that if in fact we are successful, it makes sense to at least plan what a re-entry into normality would look like.
That doesn't mean we're going to do it right now, but it means we need to be prepared to ease into that.
And there's a lot of activity going on.
I was down in the White House in the Roosevelt room last night until late at night discussing just what you're saying right now.
So this is a good thing.
You know, it's not taboo.
It's not taboo to talk about going forward.
I mean, it's taboo to some of the mainstream media who want to spread despair and terror, but it's obviously in the administration.
They are doing what they're supposed to be doing.
You know, one of my favorite columnists, and I think one of the most underrated columnists in the country is Holman Jenkins Jr.
One of the reasons I know he's brilliant is he's now saying what I've been saying for four weeks.
That's how you can tell who the really good columnists are because they catch up with me eventually.
But, you know, here's something, he writes this very well, so it's worth reading.
He says, there'll be much to criticize about the Trump administration's response, just as we can never forgive FDR's baiting of Japan with embargoes while leaving the fleet bottled up in Pearl Harbor.
Kennedy's actions at the Bay of Pigs, Johnson's in the Tonkin Gulf in the midst of a global flu pandemic that was particularly fatal to young adults, Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, sent packed troop ships to intervene in World War I. If Truman had let Stalin know the U.S. was prepared to spend 36,000 lives and threatened nuclear war over South Korea, the Korean War never would have happened.
He says, I could go on.
Mr. Trump is the worst president we've ever had, just like some of the best presidents we've ever had were the worst presidents we've ever had.
He says, from the bottom of my heart, let me point out how genuinely worthless some journalists are as thinkers and critics when they venture beyond their job of getting quotes and facts right.
The media is staffed with people for whom the hindsight fallacy is not a fallacy, right?
That you should have seen it coming, which is what we've said.
It's not, nobody sees it coming because you're always being warned about a lot of things all the time.
Nobody knows which disaster is the one that's going to hit.
And we can't prepare for everything.
I mean, you know, we talk about a pulse bomb.
You talk about diseases.
You talk about the internet crashing or somebody getting a worm into the internet.
All these things are possible.
You work hard to try and safeguard the systems that we have, but it's the threat that you don't see coming.
It's the unknown unknowns, the things that you don't know that you know.
So on the right, you know, I'm hearing these kind of conspiracies that this is insane, that we're in a police state.
You know, that's not true.
But it is true where violations of rights are going on.
It is almost all on the left.
It is absolutely true that when you look at Bill de Blasio in New York, the guy, you know, the guy is still driving 11 miles to Brooklyn, I think it is, to take a walk in Prospect Park, you know, when he's shut down everybody else.
The mayor of Chicago, a far, far leftist, gets her hair done, which you're not supposed to do.
And she says, well, you know, I take my hygiene very seriously because a leftist is important and you're not.
And this is the thing, this is the thing about all leftists, every single one of them, you scratch them, you find an authoritarian, where Trump consistently has been for freedom.
Trump continually has defended the Federalist Project.
He's continually defended the Constitution.
He's explaining the Constitution to the same damn reporters who called him a Nazi, who said he would wait for an emergency to take things over.
And on the right, you're getting these other kinds of conspiracies.
You know, Deborah Burks said this yesterday about how they're counting the number of deaths.
There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition.
And let's say the virus called you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem.
Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.
Right now, we're still recording it.
And we'll, I mean, the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection, the intent is right now that those, if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.
So the right on Twitter kind of went crazy and they said, oh, you know, if you get hit by a car, but you have COVID-19, they're counting it as a COVID-19 death.
And that's not what she means.
That's not right.
What she's saying is if you have a heart condition and you get the flu and you have a heart attack, that's a COVID-19 death because you might not have had that heart attack without the flu.
They're not inflating the numbers.
And in fact, there's a good reason to think that people are dying in situations where they're not recording them.
So it's possibly the numbers are underrated.
They're doing the best they can.
It's a disease, right?
There's not going to be any good news.
Diseases don't come with good news.
They come with disease.
That's what it is.
It's a mess.
It's a situation where you've got this great, big, sprawling country.
They are actually doing the best they can.
And the one narrative that nobody is following is, hey, maybe they're doing a good job.
And it's beginning to seem like maybe they are.
If they can start, if they are talking and planning, Fauci says he's in the White House late last night talking about how you move forward, how you go forward.
They're discussing this.
They think it's going to be a kind of start and stop kind of process where you let some people out.
You got to get the testing in place.
And it's really the difference in tone, the difference in tone between the optimism of Donald Trump and the relentless negativity and overblown predictions of the left.
The left is experiencing the audacity of hopelessness.
They are actually trying to be as audaciously hopeless as they possibly can be.
Why?
Because if the thing is really bad come November, maybe, maybe, maybe that'll give Dopey Joe a chance to wander into the White House where he will make the inaugural speech which will begin, where am I?
And that, I guess, is what they're hoping for.
I don't think so.
You know, let's take a look.
Let's pause and take a look at the way Trump is talking versus the way the leftists are.
I mean, for one thing, you've got Trump talking about, he says, I'd like to bring the economy back with a bang.
I think this is, what is it, 19, is that right?
Some Democrats, because they view this as a campaign issue.
They want to make Trump look as bad as they can because they want to try and win an election that they shouldn't be allowed to win based on the fact that we have done a great job.
We built the greatest economy in the world.
I'll do it a second time.
We got artificially stopped by a virus that nobody ever thought possible.
And we've handled it and we've built a team and we've built an apparatus that's been unbelievable.
And, you know, when he says nobody ever thought this possible, they can go and cherry pick people who said, yes, this is the problem.
This is the problem.
But that's not it.
You know, the thing is, of course there were predictions of pandemic, but they're predictions of everything.
They're predictions that the climate is going to kill you.
You know, how are you supposed to know?
And now we see that these computer models are nothing.
They're just guesses with computer put in front of it, you know, computer guesses, and they can be incredibly wrong and they keep fixing them and then they say, oh, we got it right.
I want to show you, though, how the press is selling, is selling hopelessness.
Let's take a look at Chris Cuomo.
Now, Chris Cuomo is suffering from this disease.
I hope he gets better soon.
He's still an idiot, okay?
It doesn't change.
It hasn't changed that.
He's got a high fever.
I truly do.
I truly hope he gets better soon and he's on the mend.
Predictions Gone Wrong00:07:48
But still, what he does here is really unfair.
He attacks Trump for being a hopeful guy.
And please listen carefully to what Trump says in this clip organized by Cuomo.
Get real.
The past is over.
There can be no more letting politics reinforce our worst instincts.
We need to build on our best instincts.
And that said, well, I'm asking you all to do that.
The man at the top refuses to change.
He said within a couple of days, the cases will be down to zero.
Well, the cases really didn't build up for a while.
But you have to understand, I'm a cheerleader for this country.
I don't want to create havoc and shock and everything else.
I'm not going to go out and start screaming, this could happen, this could happen.
That's exactly what leadership is.
Anybody can tell people what they want to hear and make it easy.
And then you know what you get?
Exactly where we are right now.
That was the most asinine statement of leadership I have ever heard.
So he's saying, I love this thing.
Trump says, I'm not going to say this could happen and that could happen.
He's not going to go to worst case scenarios and conjecture things that might never happen.
And Cuomo says, that's exactly what leadership is.
It's terrifying people with possibilities.
It's not, how can you preach hope in the darkness?
But before you forget the clip that he played of Trump, let's play the real clip of what Trump actually said unedited.
Cases really didn't build up for a while.
But you have to understand, I'm a cheerleader for this country.
I don't want to create havoc and shock and everything else.
But ultimately, when I was saying that, I'm also closing it down.
I obviously was concerned about it because I closed down our country to China, which was heavily infected.
I then closed it down to Europe.
That's a big move, closing it down from China and then closing it down from Europe and then ultimately closing it down to the UK.
And it was right about that time.
But I'm not going to go out and start screaming, this could happen, this could happen.
So, again, as president, I think a president has to be a cheerleader for their country.
But at the same time, I'm cheerleading, I'm also closing down a very highly infected place, specifically the location, as you know, in China that had the problems.
And we're closing it down, but we close it down to all of China, then we close it down to all of Europe.
Those were big moves.
So he says, I'm talking hope.
I'm being as hopeful as I can be while I'm taking the actions that you have to take, like the duck who looks serene on the surface of the water, but his work is paddling as fast as he can underneath the water.
Think about this for just a second, all right?
Take Trump out of it because, you know, Trump does, he rambles and he doesn't, he's not the most articulate guy and he's got the hyperbolic language and all that stuff.
Okay, fine.
Take him out of it for a minute.
He's a great big character.
This is a great big country and Trump is a great big character, right?
And he actually fits the country.
But think for a minute if you're watching a movie and you've got a hero.
Because one of the things that Hollywood always does is they take people like Harvey Weinstein and they portray them as Richard Gere.
And so when Richard Gere has two girlfriends and you think, wow, that's kind of cool because it's Richard Gere and he's handsome.
And then you think, oh, but really, this is about a fat, ugly little man in Hollywood, okay?
So if you take Trump out and you have him played by whoever your favorite hero is in the movies, Tom Hanks or Brad Pitt or whoever it is, and you think here is a guy telling the people behind him in a disaster to have hope.
But meanwhile, he's firing over the parapet at the bad guys.
You know, he's saying, don't give up.
You know, this is going to be all right.
We're going to come through this.
But meanwhile, he's fighting the bad guys.
That's what Trump is doing.
That is essentially what he's doing.
And then one narrative, the one narrative on the right and the left, the one narrative that nobody has thought of is maybe this is as good a job as a human president can do, right?
It's not without mistakes.
It's not without saying stupid stuff.
It's not without moments that you wish weren't there.
You know, that's part of his humanity and also part of the size of the guy, which is a guy who's that large a character is going to do big things.
And when he does something dumb or says something dumb, it's going to be, again, a big thing.
So this idea that something is terribly wrong with our response may just be kind of a natural panic reaction that we're all feeling anxiety, we're all feeling afraid, but maybe this is the best way to navigate through.
It kind of seems like it is.
You know, there was a JD Vance, the guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, wrote a really good Twitter thread where he was just examining some of the numbers because one of the things that the right is saying is, oh, it's just a bad flu.
And it's obviously not just a bad flu.
And the reason I say it's not just a bad flu is not only because Boris Johnson in England is still in the hospital, still in the ICU, and that's kind of strange for just a bad flu.
It's not just that.
It's the reports from the front lines, what the doctors are saying, the weary doctors, the fact that the hospitals, and obviously it's not as bad anywhere else as it is in New York, but New York, New Orleans, Chicago, all the Democrat places where they told everybody it was going to be fine and are now blaming Trump.
Those are the places where things are bad.
And they're obviously, this is not your normal flu season.
Something has gone terribly wrong.
And so Vance was looking at the numbers and he was saying, you know, once you look at the countries where there is a large enough sample, because a lot of the people on the right are looking at Iceland where nobody's sick because nobody's there, right?
It's just a big rock.
And he says, if you look at the places where there's a large sample, it's looking like that the death rate for this thing is around 1.8 to 2%, which is 20 times, if my numbers are right, the flu is like 0.1%.
That's like 20 times the flu.
And obviously it's very contagious and it seems to spread with incredible speed.
So I don't think that Trump has been insane or absurd to close down the economy and to do, you know, who cares about the economy more than Trump?
Nobody, literally nobody has more involved in the economy than he does.
I mean, we've all suffered.
People have suffered very much and lost jobs and all this, but Trump will lose his job too if he can't bring the economy back online.
His idea to hear the president say, I built the best economy we ever had once and I'll do it again, to me, that's the kind of talk I want to hear out of the White House.
And meanwhile, let's take a look at Ezekiel Emmanuel.
Ezekiel Emmanuel is the older brother of Rahm Emmanuel, who was Obama's chief of staff.
Ezekiel Emmanuel is one of the main architects of Obamacare.
And here's what he's talking about.
Realistically, COVID-19 will be here for the next 18 months or more.
We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications.
If we prematurely end that physical distancing and the other measures keeping it at bay, deaths could skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands, if not a million.
We cannot return to normal until there's a vaccine.
Conferences, concerts, sporting events, religious services, dinner in a restaurant.
None of that will resume until we find a vaccine, a treatment, or a cure.
Again, the audacity of hopelessness.
And when you think about it, if you think about the corollary of what he just said, the logical inference that you can make from what he just said, it's that Trump is doing the right thing.
He's saying we can't go back.
So he's saying Trump did the right thing by emphasizing the social distancing.
It's worse than the place, worse in places where they didn't do that.
So that Trump was doing the right thing.
Why shouldn't we trust him and his staff to do the right thing again, to open up when things can be opened up?
Mailbag Moment00:02:14
And again, it's not going to happen all at once.
It's not going to be right away.
It's not going to be without thought.
More testing is going to have to be in place, different kinds of testing.
We're going to need to be able to test people for antibodies.
But all of these things, you know, maybe what we should do is take a deep breath and listen to some of these conferences, these briefings carefully that the press doesn't want to cover because they get insulted, and maybe have a little bit of faith and trust in a guy who's doing a good job.
There's an interesting idea for you.
All right.
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It's where me and Ben and Jeremy Boring, the God King and Knowles and Matt Walsh, we all sit down on different nights each day of the week and hang out with you for a little bit.
It's not a show like our regular podcast, but more like a conference call or kind of happy hour where we just talk about what's on our minds and anything can happen.
I think the other day Walsh's son interrupted him and he just beat the hell out of him.
No, I'm joking, of course.
But I couldn't help myself.
But anyway, it's a great show.
I actually enjoy it.
It may be my favorite show of the week because I get to talk to you and people ask really interesting questions.
And of course, my answers are guaranteed 100% correct, as they will be momentarily when we get to the mailbag coming up.
So come to, you will, that's what you're going to sound like in just moments.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
We need your support.
We love your support.
And we also like to hear from you, which we can't do unless you're a subscriber.
Sometimes people write to me on the sly and they ask me personal questions.
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So is it an evil thing that I cracked up in the middle of that flu stuff?
Citizen Concerns About Unchecked Law00:07:02
I don't know.
Probably not.
Mailbag.
The top of the mailbag.
That's the virus.
That's the virus.
Mailbag.
Hello, Mr. Clark.
This is not a question, but a thank you.
Recently, my girlfriend was going through something at her work and was really worried about it.
I recall the mailbag question where you were talking about worry and how people hold on to their worry and that worry is something in the future that didn't happen.
I listened and mentioned some of the stuff you said, and she told me that she felt better afterwards.
So once again, thank you for sharing your knowledge.
And it looks like your answers are indeed 100% correct.
So I just wanted to pass that on to you so you know that it's not just me making it up.
From Joseph, hello, wonderful Clavens, sir.
I have just a quick question.
Do you think there is any point in the United States history that we could roll back our government to maybe after the Civil War or somewhere around there and then start over again?
I love the show and almost starved to death during the Clavenless weekends, keep up the good fight.
You know, actually, Joseph, I think that that's thinking about it the wrong way.
The idea that, oh, you know, back in the old days, our government would have been yay small and let's make it yay small again.
I don't think that that's the right way to think about this.
The government is going to be big.
We are now a massive country.
We're not 13 colonies in an agrarian society anymore.
We are largely an urban society.
We are huge, okay?
The government is going to be huge.
It's not a question of small government, right?
It's not a question of the size of the government.
It's a question of limited powers, of enumerated powers.
What can the government do?
And if those powers are not listed in the Constitution, it can't do them.
And that's the thing that we've lost.
And we've lost it in a lot of ways.
The worst way right now, I think, is through what they call the administrative state, the deep state, all these unelected bureaucrats who are not, no matter what you read in the New York Times, a former newspaper, which once would have known this, because it once was a newspaper, would have understood this.
They are not protecting the Constitution.
They are unelected.
Doesn't mean they ain't good people.
Doesn't mean they ain't trying to do their best.
Doesn't mean they're not patriots.
It truly doesn't.
It's the system.
It's not the people.
It's the same thing with the press.
The press is corrupt.
The system of our news gathering is corrupt.
Some of the people in that system may be good people, but if they're in a corrupt system, they're going to be acting corruptly.
This is the thing.
A corrupt system corrupts everybody within it.
And so the problem with the bureaucracy of unelected people who get to make decisions and then try the people who violate those decisions and then interpret the law, that is a problem.
You should not be writing laws that are over 10 pages long.
You should not be writing laws that are a thousand pages long.
When they go before the Supreme Court, the court, I think it was Scalia who once said, you're not going to torture us by reading this law to us.
We can't read the whole law.
Well, if you can't read the whole law, you can't know what's in the whole law, and you just have to trust unelected bureaucrats to interpret it.
These are the problems that we're facing.
It's not a problem of, oh, you know, back in Washington's day, they wouldn't have done this and they wouldn't have done that.
Because, you know, back in Washington's day, they put people in the stocks.
They knocked their ears.
They flogged people.
We don't want to go back to those days.
We want to live by the standards we have today, but we want the government's powers enumerated.
We want them to stick to those powers and not continually interpret the Constitution to say they can do, as one California legislator said during the Obama era, anything they want.
They cannot do anything they want.
We should tell them what they can do and what they can't.
That's where freedom is.
That's where freedom is.
And listen, one more thing while I'm on this rant.
If we want them to behave like that, we have to behave with virtue.
We can't behave as if freedom is our top priority, our top priority, should be acting in a good, positive way for everybody concerned.
And then the government can back off.
That's why the government, as all the founders said, is for a religious people, a virtuous people, because otherwise it just becomes chaos and people start looking for strong, authoritarian leaders.
From Robert, hello from Australia.
Do you think that importing so much stuff from China makes us as morally reprehensible as them, given that they have practically slave labor?
And they are using, I think, some of their Uyghur Muslims who they've got in concentration camps.
I think they're using them for slave labor.
Well, no, it doesn't make us as reprehensible as them, but it is a fair moral consideration.
It is something we should be talking about and that conservatives have, we're not talking.
I don't expect the left to talk about anything.
I expect nothing from the left.
I think they've lost their way.
I think they're in a dark wood.
I think they're clinging to a Marxist philosophy that is hundreds of years old and a complete failure.
But the right, there are important conversations going on on the right about who we are, about who we're going to be, about what we stand for and what it is we're trying to conserve.
And I think the right fell down a little bit on this when global trade was doing so well and people were, you know, I would have these conversations with conservatives.
People were out of work in the Midwest and they would say, yes, but their iPhones cost so much less.
Their iPhones cost so much less because Chinese slaves were building some of the parts.
And, you know, I think that, yeah, we do have to pay a little bit more to be moral.
You know, I think that we can't be perfect.
We're not going to be perfect.
In some countries, people are paid nothing, you know, a dollar a day, but that pittance is enough in their country to raise their standard of living.
I can live with that.
I can live with raising the standard of living.
I do not want jobs to leave America to go somewhere else.
I'm not a citizen of the world.
I'm a citizen of this country.
You can tell because I'm saying whatever I want without getting arrested.
That's how you can tell.
I'm a citizen of this country.
I owe this country.
It is my motherland.
I owe it.
I should love it.
I owe it love and respect and devotion.
And so I want it to come first.
So, you know, there are lots of things we have to take into account.
And one of them is, yeah, we cannot be thriving on the backs of slaves.
We cannot be thriving on the backs of slaves.
And just because we don't see them, just like the baby in a mother's womb, just because we can't see it, doesn't mean it's not real.
Doesn't mean it's not a person.
Doesn't mean it doesn't have rights.
And these are things that, yeah, we should definitely take into account.
And I think the right lost its way in getting so enamored of capitalism.
And capitalism is a beautiful thing, but they get so enamored of capitalism, they forget virtue first, always virtue first.
All right.
Chad, dear Almighty Clavin, in this time of the crazy pandemic, people are going nuts buying everything they can get their hands on.
Not only is the toilet paper gone, the ammo shelves in my local store are almost bare.
Makes me want to ask you this question.
What will happen in a real emergency, the type of emergency that makes it so we don't have running water, electricity, and anything to fill our leftist tears tumbler?
People, activists, as if that's happening now, but I'm sitting at home sipping leftist tears and using electricity.
You know, thanks for all you're doing this crazy time to save the Clayton.
It's an excellent question, and it's a question that we should be asking and asking about the future.
And this is what I'm talking about.
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that you can't know what the next problem is going to be.
Ideas From Without00:10:30
You never know.
There's always all these predictions.
But people have written, you know, novels about what would happen if there was a pulse bomb and all our electrics went out.
You know, it's been raining here in California, which it never does in April because obviously these are the end times.
It's been raining here.
And, you know, you lose the electricity.
You lose everything.
I lose my ability to talk to you.
I lose my ability to order out.
I lose all the stuff that is making this crisis as easy as it's possible for it to be.
And so you're absolutely right.
Our grid needs protecting.
The more, you know, I remember during the blackout in the 70s, came on my birthday in New York City.
I went to make sure my parents were all right and they lived on the 33rd floor and I had to walk up 33 stories.
And at the time, I was, you know, 20-something and it was easy.
But I was thinking, gee, you know, you can't build a building like this without an elevator.
But once the elevator goes off and you're an older person, it's very hard to get up and down the stairs.
We become dependent on these machines and we have to protect these machines.
Our military runs on computers.
Our police run on computers.
Computers are easy to hack into and destroy.
We have to be thinking about that.
It's absolutely true because what you say is right.
I mean, things, this is a low-level, this is a low-level emergency.
It could be much worse.
From Brandon, I have recently become, began to develop my relationship with Christ and become a Christian through the study of the Bible.
Oops, sorry.
Through the study of the Bible and with help and the guidance.
Ah, there it is.
Sorry.
Of individual, knowledgeable individuals such as yourself and my own family.
I've been struggling most recently with the guidance in the Bible that shows that living together with my girlfriend before marriage is immoral and sinful.
We have been together for two years and have been living together for the majority of this time and have planned to be married soon.
However, knowing what the Bible says, I'm struggling with the fact that my relationship has been sinful and continues to be.
I want to be married to my girlfriend, but I'm having trouble reconciling my immoral relationship according to the Bible and choosing to continue forward with the marriage.
Would this be wrong after living in direct contrast to the word of God?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
You're basically saying, I slept with a girl and now I should dump her because she's not a virgin.
Absolutely not.
Marry her.
That is absolutely ridiculous.
That is not good thinking.
And it's not biblical thinking at all.
You know, the wonderful thing about Jesus, the wonderful thing about Jesus Christ is he is in the business of forgiving you.
That's the shop he is in.
You know, it's like, remember, you know, Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown had the little sign that said psychiatry, five cents.
Well, Jesus is like forgiveness free.
Okay.
So, you know, you will be forgiven, but if you now feel that you're in a sinful relationship and can change that by marrying this young lady, marry her.
I mean, that is, of course, the right thing to do.
I mean, and you will be forgiven for the things that went before in Jesus Christ, but you can't be forgiven if you continue doing something wrong without acknowledging that and making the change.
To throw her out, to throw her out because you have been in a sinful relationship with her instead of marrying her and making, as they used to say in the old days, an honest woman of her, that's not good thinking.
I don't mean to make fun of you, but I'm just saying that's kind of like that's kind of the worst possible outcome you should actually be changing and making your relationship, bringing your relationship into line with your beliefs in Christianity.
All right.
Here's a kind of a rant from Chuck in which he's talking about the horrors of the way that the Chinese treat animals.
And he says, a culture which perpetrates such horror on animals is monstrous, vicious.
It's not PC to acknowledge, but no matter, I would urge you to consider animal welfare as a conservative value, but know that would likely be a fruitless effort, as it seems never a topic for conservative punditry.
There are many, like myself, socially conservative, habitually excluded from party discourse because we oddly feel torture of God's creatures is wrong.
So I'll forgo belaboring this.
May it just suffice that it's not only in China that abuse of human rights and ethnic minorities, but also in their torture of animals.
Listen, this is, I think, something that we talk about on the right.
I know that both Jeremy and Ben have talked about this, and I've talked about it.
My feeling about this is, yes, I think we can treat our animals better.
I want to make sure, first of all, that people have enough to eat.
I obviously put the welfare of human beings first.
I am disturbed by the fact, and this is something that is noticed in the book and in the movie Silence of the Lambs, that, you know, with a killer, Buffalo Bill, refers to human beings as it, but then he talks to his dog as if it were a human being.
And this is true, I think, of Yuval Harari.
It's true of many thinkers who basically deny the inner reality of being human.
They think we're just meat machines, but they, for some reason, they acknowledge the humanity and the inner reality of being animals.
And that is a trait that I've noticed that people who deny humans their humanity frequently pass that humanity, do acknowledge the humanity of animals.
And those are the things that I think conservatives get their backup about.
We want to help people first.
We want to make sure people go first.
I don't think there's anything wrong with eating animals.
I think that's part of the reason we have animals, but that doesn't mean we have to torture them.
And it's another thing we could probably pay a little bit more for is making sure that animals get good treatment.
I don't think that's wrong.
I don't think it's silly to think about these, as you say, these are also God's creatures.
We share the world with them.
They're not on our level.
They don't have our self-consciousness.
They're not as important as us, but in our self-consciousness, we understand their feelings as they don't understand ours.
And I think we have to acknowledge that.
We have to do the best we can without making life worse for people, much worse for people.
And again, I think they do talk about that on the right.
I don't think you're being quite fair about that.
And I don't think you should be quiet about it.
I think you should just make sure that you put human beings first.
All right, I'll do one more from Zach.
I am an aspiring fiction writer and do my best to write every day.
However, sometimes I do not have a current project or idea to inspire me.
Do you have any suggestions of writing exercises or activities to use when you are writing without the inspiration of your muse?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance and save the clavin.
Many of these are signs, save the clavin, and all of them, of course, should be, but some people just are not thinking clearly.
Yeah, you know, there's two things.
There's two different things here.
One is when you say without your muse.
You know, the muse comes when it comes, but the work has to be done.
And the muse gives you an idea, but of course it's you who work on the idea.
Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
The muse comes at rare times, and then you get the idea, and then you use your craft and your talent to bring the vision given to you by the muse.
And I do believe that ideas come to you from without.
You bring the ideas given to the muse to the page by working every day, just like you're doing now.
That's one question, okay?
The other question is, what about when you're between projects?
And there's nothing wrong with taking some time off when you have nothing to say.
It's nothing wrong with, you know, with being still.
There's nothing, you know, the old joke that all writers have to explain to their wife, every writer has to explain to his wife or her spouse or her husband, has to explain that when you're sitting staring off into space, you're working.
I mean, it's really tough.
It is really tough for the spouses of writers to get this right, that when you're sitting there twiddling your thumbs, that's part of your work.
When you take a walk, that's part of your work.
So there's nothing wrong with being between projects and saying, okay, this is a day when I'm not going to do this.
You don't want to let your discipline lag.
And so on the days when, you know, there's nothing wrong with journal writing.
There's nothing wrong with writing things that you're not going to publish on days when you're not going to go to work.
There's nothing wrong with making sure you hit your hours and fill the time.
But for instance, after writing a novel, which is a very long project, I will take some time off.
I'll stop and I'll just say, okay, let the brain recharge, let the ideas come back, let me think about things, let me look at things without figuring out how to describe them.
There's nothing wrong with that either.
So you're asking two different questions.
You should be able to work without being inspired because you should be able to use the inspirations you've had and work them through.
So that's one thing.
You shouldn't be waiting around to be touched by lightning before you sit your butt down in the chair and go to work.
But the second thing is you also shouldn't be afraid between projects to sit still and think.
And sometimes, you know, Raymond Chandler, who basically was the inspiration for my form of discipline, said that there should be a certain amount of time during the day.
He recommended four hours, which is the way I lived for most of my life.
He said, there's a certain time of the day when you don't do anything else except write.
He said, you can sit there.
You just can't do anything else.
And so sometimes not writing, but sitting still and thinking is an important part of the process.
And I think you shouldn't be afraid to do that.
I got to stop there.
I'll be back again tomorrow.
We'll talk more about what's happening with Bernie and Joe, what's his name, and more about the crisis we're 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.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
And our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Assistant Director, Pavel Wydowski.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio mixed by Robin Fenderson.
Hair and makeup is by Jessila Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistants, McKenna Waters and Ryan Love.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
Our exalted experts want to hold us prisoner to coronavirus for another 18 months while prosecutors dish out felony charges to formerly free Americans who have the gall to go outside for a walk.
Science Behind Outrageous Political Power Grabs00:00:14
We will examine the junk science behind the most outrageous political power grab of our lifetime.
Then China infiltrates a White House press briefing.
President Trump threatens to cut funding for the World Health Organization.
And Joe Biden steps up and addresses the nation about his weakness for Fig Newtons.