Andrew Clavin dissects COVID-19 media hysteria, exposing Associated Press’s falsified NYC mass graves photo and Paul Krugman’s doomsday projections while contrasting Trump’s pragmatic shutdowns with Gretchen Whitmer’s $10K fines for "looking out windows." He slams the New York Times for burying Tara Reid’s corroborated Biden assault claim, praises Bill Maher for calling out China’s wet market relativism, and mocks Fauci’s shifting virus narratives—from January’s "low risk" to later blame-shifting. The episode also defends Trump’s China policies as prescient, slams leftist open-borders rhetoric as a "slow-motion invasion," and mocks Cuomo’s corruption while praising his pandemic pragmatism, ending with a swipe at media fearmongering over facts. [Automatically generated summary]
As the long Chinese flu crisis created by China continues to be Chinese, different sorts of Americans are handling it in different ways.
Republican President Donald Trump says he's forming a commission to examine how to get the country back to work again.
Conversely, leftist columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times, a former newspaper, says Trump is wrong and we should instead despair and die, languishing in our homes until the food runs out and we devour first our pets, then our children, after which only those people who wear tinfoil hats so they can receive messages from heaven, which is located on the planet Bing Bong, will be allowed to emerge into the light of a new tomorrow and build an entire society of people named Paul Krugman, who worked for the New York Times,
a former newspaper which will have now become Thoth, the many-eyed destroyer of worlds.
In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott is preparing to gradually lift lockdown orders and reopen the economy.
In Michigan, Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer has ordered $10,000 fines for anyone who looks out their window or believes in God and has signed into law a decree allowing her to wear military uniforms, including a large Napoleon-style hat with a peacock feather in it.
The law also requires anyone who thinks of her to remark out loud how attractive she looks in her new hat and how powerful yet merciful she is in her complete control of every aspect of Michigan life.
Those who do not will be executed along with anyone who takes a walk or seems hopeful.
Several Republican governors have issued no lockdown orders at all, fearing they might violate the public's constitutional rights.
Democrat governors, meanwhile, gathered in a Chicago strip club to celebrate their ascendancy to absolute power over American life by getting the haircuts and massages they require to keep them relaxed and attractive as they rule the universe as if they were gods.
So a pattern is beginning to emerge.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
So I hope you all had a happy Easter.
Obviously, a quiet Easter.
Mine was quiet, but it was meaningful, and maybe I'll get to talk about it a little later in the week.
But I was reminded over the weekend of a story.
I've told this story a couple of times, but not for a long time.
It's worth retelling.
Back in the mid-1980s, I was working on my novel, Don't Say a Word, and I had this cool plot twist that involved New York City's Potter's Field, which is a burial ground for the unclaimed poor, and it's out on Heart Island, which is a little island in Long Island Sound.
Civilians weren't allowed to go out to the island, so I convinced a reporter pal of mine to do a story about it, a radio story, and I went with him, pretending to be his producer.
And I can't tell you who the reporter was because he's now a very big media muckamuck.
But the two of us rode out to the island with a press officer from the city, and we were on a barge loaded with coffins, which were these sad, inexpensive wooden boxes.
I could see through the knotholes.
I could see the bodies wrapped in plastic inside.
And we went out to the island.
We watched the bodies buried in a mass grave.
And while my friend asked typical reporter questions about the budget and so on, I was asking questions like, if a bad guy wanted to bury jewels in one of these boxes, how would he ever find them again?
Until finally the press officer turned to me with this kind of odd look on his face and said, who are you again?
And I pointed at my friend with a straight face and I said, I'm his producer.
Anyway, I did my research and Heart Island figured in the novel and became the site of the climax of the movie.
So the other day, the reason I was reminded of this is the Associated Press put out an aerial photo of a typical Heart Island mass burial like the one I watched, and it went viral as a sign that masses and masses of deaths were occurring in the city.
So many that people were being shoveled into mass graves on Heart Island.
Politico wrote an article about it that was not exactly dishonest, but it was very deceptive.
Its lead was, the number of burials at New York's Heart Island has increased five-fold as the death toll from the coronavirus continues to rise.
Well, sort of.
Burials on Heart Island take place when there are enough unclaimed bodies to make a burial run.
With New York, a Chinese flu hotspot, mortuaries cleared out a lot of the unclaimed bodies to make sure there was enough room for people who were dying, who were coming in.
So there was a surge at Potters Field, a one-time surge at Potters Field.
In fact, at the very worst, it seems that the New York death toll might have more than doubled per day, which is bad, right?
But it's the caseload at the same time that's happening, the caseload is starting to drop, which is a very hopeful sign.
So clearly, the political piece, like a lot of journalism right now, is written to make things sound even worse than they are, much worse than they are.
America's Grim Milestone00:03:43
My question is, why would you do that?
What investment does some of our journalists have in overemphasizing what is admittedly a bad situation?
To be clear, I have no patience with people who are going online saying, oh, it's just the flu and people don't know what they're doing and why did we have to overreact.
It's not just the flu.
It spreads faster and it causes more suffering and hospital overcrowding.
And the experts and the politicians are doing the best they can in an unknown situation.
But a crashed economy, as everybody keeps saying, is also a problem.
And we need facts to make good decisions.
One thing I've said from the start is this is a time to remember how people behave.
Not just your friends, but also journalists and politicians, everyone.
For too long, much too long, this country has been living in a postmodern empire of lies, where you can lose your job for speaking plain facts, for saying men are not women, or women may have different qualities and abilities than whatever it is that they don't want you to say.
This country needs a new commitment to truth-telling.
It should start now, and we should make it start by paying attention to the people who lie to us.
Now, let me tell you something that is true, which is our wonderful sponsors need your support.
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All right, let me show you what I mean about the way they're reporting this.
Here is a montage from our friends at Newsbusters.
We love them over there, the Media Research Center.
Here's a montage of networks reporting a death toll number that came in over the weekend.
It's cut three.
The death toll in this country is surpassing 20,000.
That includes more than 2,000 lives lost in the last 24 hours.
America's deadliest day yet.
783 deaths in New York alone.
This latest surge pushing the U.S. total beyond hard-hit Italy after already overtaking Spain, now the deadliest nation in confirmed COVID-19 fatalities.
Tonight, a grim milestone for the United States.
More than 20,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.
This country now leading the world in reported deaths from the virus.
Today, the United States surpassed Italy as the country with the most deaths.
So far, more than 20,000 Americans have died.
About a third of all deaths have happened in New York.
New York State alone has more coronavirus cases than any country on earth.
U.S. Surpasses Italy in COVID Deaths00:14:54
So, Professor, would you say it's time for everyone to panic?
Yes, I would.
Well, exactly.
I mean, some of you may have noticed that America is a little bit bigger than Italy.
So, yeah, in number of cases, America is first.
In a number of cases, it is fourth among the top six countries.
And in number of deaths, of course, it's also first, but it's fifth among the top six countries.
And we don't even know that much about it, but clearly that was designed to make you feel bad.
It was designed to make things seem even worse than they are.
And it's not minimizing the situation.
It's not saying it's all a conspiracy to take our rights away or anything like that.
It is, those are networks.
That's not cable TV.
Remember who lies.
Remember the way they tell stories because it's going to matter when things calm down as well.
All right.
Now, before we even get to the stories about the virus, I mean, the stories about the virus are always going to be there, so we'll come back to them.
But I want to start with a non-virus story.
I want to go back to this Joe Biden thing with the sexual allegations, because there have been some amazing, amazing stories over the weekend.
You know, we on the right have been complaining that after the Kavanaugh hysteria, the absolute hysteria over Brett Kavanaugh.
And think back to what that was like.
Think back to the articles, the op-eds that were written, and these really burned me.
The op-eds that were written by women saying, I was attacked when I was young, and therefore I know that Christina Blasey Ford is telling the truth, that I know that Brett Kavanaugh is guilty because I was attacked.
I mean, why does something like that even belong in a respectable journal or in a respectable newspaper?
Why would anybody say that?
I mean, I could say that about anybody.
No one, zero people, have run that story about Joe Biden.
Now, remember, this is a lady, Tara Reid says in 1993, Biden, you know, there are all these reports of Biden smelling people and rubbing people and nudging people, and he's gotten a complete pass from the left.
It's like, oh, that's just Joe.
It's good old Uncle Joe.
You remember Uncle Joe?
You probably had an Uncle Joe in your house that you're still going to a psychiatrist for.
So there was good old Uncle Joe.
They kept telling us, you know, it's like suddenly he gets a complete pass.
But the thing is, this lady says, Tara Reid says, he pushed her up against a wall and put his hand inside her body.
And when she fought her way away from him, he said, oh, gee, I thought you liked me.
I mean, that's a genuine sexual assault.
That to me is even worse than what they accused Kavanaugh of and what they accused Kavanaugh of happened when he was a teenager, what they're accusing Biden, he was a grown man.
Still, still, like, I'm not saying it's true.
I'm not saying at all that it's true.
It has nothing to do with that.
This is not what the story is about.
The story is about the way it's being covered.
So now the New York Times, the New York Times, which ran stories about Kavanaugh that were absolutely disgraceful, bringing up charges that were later debunked, finding anything he once said about being drunk or drinking or liking beer and using that to mean, oh, he must be a sexual, you know, to create a picture of him as a man who commits sexual assault.
Meanwhile, woman after woman after woman who knew him well and was longtime associates of his said, oh my gosh, here's a guy who really treats people, including women, with respect.
So basically, Blaisey Ford had no backup.
No one supported her story.
She didn't remember the details.
She didn't tell anybody at the time.
Tara Reed, on the other hand, did tell people at the time.
She remembers a lot of the details.
The people she told at the time remember the details.
She's now filed a police report as well.
So the New York Times runs this story about these charges and they say a friend told a friend said, by the way, on page 20, a friend said that Miss Reed told her the details of the allegation at the time.
Another friend and a brother of Ms. Reed said she told them over the years about a traumatic sexual incident involving Mr. Biden.
Then it says, no other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reed's allegation.
The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.
A similar set of facts.
Well, they found no pattern of sexual conduct by Mr. Biden.
The original story and the original tweet that they sent out said no other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of our reporting, nor did any former Biden staff corroborate Reed's allegation.
We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden beyond hugs, kisses, and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.
They cut that line out.
They put it in a tweet.
They're lying dogface pony soldiers.
They are lying dogface pony soldiers.
They also lied and they ultimately got to Trump.
Now, what does Trump have to do with this story?
Zero.
He has nothing to do with the story.
What is the point?
Unless you're a leftist saying, well, look at Trump.
Trump did things too.
And listen, I'm not backing Trump's sexual behavior.
I'm not attacking anybody on this except the New York Times, a former newspaper, now a lying dogface pony soldier.
All right, so now they write, Mr. Trump has even boasted.
Notice the even.
So it's not so bad, you know, whether Biden knocked a girl against the wall and rammed his hand up her.
That's, you know, that allegedly, allegedly, again, but they're just comparing accusations.
Mr. Biden has even boasted about his mistreatment of women in a 2005 recorded recording.
He described pushing himself on women and said he would grab them by the crotch, bragging that he could get away with anything because of his celebrity.
He did not say that.
That is an absolute mischaracterization of what he said.
He said women will allow celebrities to do anything, even grab them like that.
Okay, that's what he said.
I mean, just you're a newspaper, right?
Just get it right.
Again, not backing Donald Trump's behavior, not backing or accusing anybody except the New York Times.
These are liars.
These are people who are distorting the news.
They're judging one group of people, their people, by one standard and judging another by another standard.
And when you're dealing with something like this, there's got to be one standard, right?
There's got to be this is the way women should be treated.
This is the way everybody should treat women.
It means that, you know, we understand that there's a possibility of witch hunts.
We understand there's a possibility of everybody being accused.
I mean, at one point, Dustin Hoffman was accused of inviting a girl to his hotel room, and she said no, and he said, okay.
That's not an abuse.
That's an invitation.
So, I mean, the kind of, the way it's being reported is just utterly, utterly different, completely different.
And remember, one was Supreme Court Justice nominee.
The other is running for president of the United States.
So it's an equally important story, at least.
So now, Dean Biquet goes, yeah, it is Biquet, I think.
It's not Biquette.
Biquet goes on with Mr. Potato Head, what's his name, Brian Stelter, on the hilariously named Reliable Sources.
And this is the way Mr. Potato Head treats Dean Bakay of the New York Times as this story is coming out.
It touches everybody's lives, the tragedies of people dying alone, hospitals struggling.
The sheer enormity of the story, I think, is larger than any story I've been involved in in my career.
In your career, wow.
And that makes the president's tweets toward you in the New York Times seem all the smaller.
He's tweeting these small complaints claiming that anonymous sources are made up.
Can you just help us reality check, fact-check that?
I think if anybody reads the stories he's referring to, they will see quotes from emails within the government, quotes from reports from within the government, on-the-record interviews from people within the government.
Yes, there are some anonymous sources.
But largely, this is a very powerful portrait inside the government based on the writings and the words of people in the government.
I would actually hope that people read the story and the headline.
I would hope that the president reads it because I think his tweet maybe indicates that he had not read it.
Wow, Dean.
Wow.
Wow, Dean.
Gee, gosh.
How small is Donald Trump compared to you?
You're so big, Dean.
Wow.
How small and petty is Donald Trump?
Could you fact-check how petty Donald Trump is for me, please, Dean?
Please, Dean.
I mean, here's a guy who just ran a story based on an entirely different standard of behavior about one candidate than they did about another nominee.
Here's a guy who could be asked about Maggie Haberman.
You know, she was revealed in one of the Pilfered emails.
She was revealed to be a friend of the Clinton campaign, someone the Clinton campaign thought that they could rely on to spread the news as they wanted it to be spread.
Why did you hire her?
Gee, Dean, wow, why did you hire her?
Maybe you could fact-check me on this, Dean.
Why did you hire her to cover the White House after she'd already been exposed as a partisan?
How about the Russian collusion hoax that turned out to be nothing?
All the Maggie Haberman stories that you filed from unnamed sources that turned out really not to be all that true, that kind of turned out to be planted by people like Brennan and people like Comey, you know, who were trying to sell the story in a certain way.
Wow, Dean, could you just fact-check me on how much you lied about this?
I mean, this is the thing, and it's an entire way of thinking.
You know, Bill Maher, I always give credit to Bill Maher because I respect him even when I disagree with him.
Here's something he said the other day.
This is cut one about the virus.
It scares me that there are people out there who would rather die from the virus than call it by the wrong name.
This isn't about vilifying a culture.
This is about facts.
This is about life and death.
We're barely four months into this pandemic, and the wet markets in China, the ones where exotic animals are sold and consumed, are already starting to reopen.
The PC police say it's racist to attack any cultural practice that's different than our own.
I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear this was just a different way instead of an abhorrent human rights violation.
It's not racist to point out that eating bats is bat crazy.
So they immediately attacked him.
The Daily Beast, Bill Maher, goes on despicable, racist rant.
You know, the journal Nature's Apologizing to China and all this stuff.
But that's the world.
That's the world we're going to come back to.
And that's the world that we really have to correct.
That's the problem.
The problem that he can't say that without being attacked as racist.
Speak the simple truth.
That's what we have to pay attention to.
Keep track of the liars.
Keep track of who they are so we remember when we come back.
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So let's let's talk about the virus.
Now that we're talking about lying and we're talking about the way things are being sold, let's talk about the virus.
You know, Jesse Waters is a kind of a comical guy on Fox.
He's not the guy I'm the first guy I turned to for the news, but he did an excellent interview with Fauci over the weekend.
And here's just one exchange he had where he said, well, let's hear what he says.
Cut 16.
In late January, you were telling people, early February, this was nothing to be concerned for most Americans.
Americans, for the most part, were not at risk.
It was in January at a time when the Chinese were saying first that it was only going from an animal to a human.
And then when there were human cases that looked like they were transmitted, that it was very inefficiently transmitted.
It was at that time in, I believe, mid-January, that we made the statement that if, in fact, that's true, that this is mostly animal to human, and we're not in China and it's very inefficiently spread, that in fact it may not be something that is of a major threat outside of China.
When it became clear that not only is it transmitted efficiently from human to human, but that it was very, very contagious.
So China lied, people died.
I mean, that's basically what happened.
China was, and they're still lying.
And when they talk about, you know, before when I was reading those statistics saying we're number five on the list of people dying, that's not including China because China lies.
Russia lies.
You know, we don't know what they're doing.
India doesn't have good stats.
You know, we don't know what's going on in a lot of these countries.
We probably have a fairly high level of stats, not good testing still, but still, you know, we just don't know all the stuff.
So he's talking about the fact of fog of war.
He's talking about the fact that he didn't know what was going on.
Experts are always, listen, even before there was any disease, experts are telling you, don't shake hands.
If you go for a walk, wear a helmet.
That's what experts are like, especially medical experts.
All right.
So now he goes on Jake Tapper, and he was asked basically if Trump could have acted earlier about this hindsight fallacy.
Here's what he said.
This is cut 12.
It's the what would have, what could have.
It's very difficult to go back and say that.
I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives.
Obviously, no one is going to deny that.
But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated.
But you're right.
I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different.
But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
As well, there should have been, right?
Because you don't know what's happening.
Nobody knows what's happening.
Facts Determine Actions00:15:12
They have these incredible.
I mean, let me just play Ezekiel Emmanuel.
All right.
This guy, this is Rahm Emmanuel's brother.
This is the guy who helped engineer Obamacare.
This is the guy who helped engineer Obamacare.
This is in March 27th.
Listen to what his expert opinion is of what's going to happen next.
Right now, if you look at the numbers, we probably have a million COVID-19 cases in the country.
And if this is doubling every three to four days, that means that we'll have 100 million people who have COVID-19 in about four weeks.
That was three weeks ago.
There are about 1,800,000 cases in the world, in the world.
And we still haven't reached a million here.
I think I can't remember what the number is here right this minute.
But he's talking about 100 million people, cases in the country.
I mean, you know, talk about being guano crazy.
That's the kind of thing that Trump is hearing.
That's the kind of thing that politicians are hearing.
You know, there are a lot of politicians out there that I strongly disagree with, and all politicians behave in ways I don't like.
I mean, apparently, politics just require some kind of behaviors that are not the sort of behaviors that we normally approve of.
Okay, I'll buy all that.
But a lot of the guys, a lot of the people are trying to do the right thing, even though I disagree with their philosophy, even if I disagree with the way they go about things.
A lot of them are trying to make things go well because their fortunes depend upon that.
Their fortunes depend upon that.
When you've got a guy saying, yeah, there's going to be 100 million.
Look, there was one case today and there's two cases, one case yesterday, and there's two cases today.
Extrapolate that for 50 days and my God, it's just going to double every day.
You know, they just don't know.
And I've talked endlessly, I'm not going to go into it again about how computer models work.
And the fact is that they only are guesses.
They're guesses made by people putting information in and the computer does the calculating.
That's all the computer does.
And because we worship science as if it were a God, we hear the word computer and think, well, that must be scientific, but it's not.
It's a guess.
It's just somebody, you could do it with a pencil if you wanted to take more time.
So that's the kind of thing that people are dealing with.
So now Fauci's comments are reported as, oh, Trump didn't do enough.
He wasn't listening to the experts.
Which is obvious nonsense.
Trump would never, I mean, he would never have shut down the economy if he weren't listening to the experts.
If he didn't care about human life, he would never have done it.
The economy is his main accomplishment.
He knows that.
His political fortunes depend on it.
I mean, the kind of thinking that goes into the Trump derangement syndrome is so convoluted.
I mean, if you strip away from him every strip of decency, if you take from him every ounce of human caring and compassion and decency and just look at him as a politician who wants his fortunes, his political fortunes to go well, the economy matters to him.
He would never have done what he did if he weren't getting the message from experts that this is a dangerous thing.
And, you know, by the way, the guys on the other side on our side, the right-wingers who are saying, oh, this is a total overreaction.
These guys are stupid.
You know, they're not the ones in charge.
They're not the ones in the arena.
You know, they're not looking at this bulldozer coming down the road and threatening to kill thousands and thousands of people.
They don't know how many cause how much human suffering cause how many pictures of morgues set up on the street.
They don't know what is coming out down the pike at them.
They are acting in the dark as best they can with the expert opinions they have.
So there's just a lot of this hysteria.
And by the way, I should mention that Trump, Deanne Lorraine, who was a former Republican congressional candidate, tweeted out, Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier, he could have saved more lives.
Fauci was willing to tell people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about.
And she wrote, time to fire Fauci.
And Trump retweeted that.
So maybe Fauci is thinking, huh, you know, I'm at her.
So let's start looking around for another job.
But no, you know, I mean, the thing is, there are these signs of hope popping up.
The numbers in New York, even though the numbers of dead are climbing, as Fauci has explained, the number of cases are declining.
And he is saying what everybody is starting to talk about.
It's time to start thinking about coming back.
Here he is at Cut 14 talking about how we can do that.
I think it could probably start at least in some ways, maybe next month.
And again, Jake, it's so difficult to make those kinds of predictions because they always get thrown back at you if it doesn't happen.
Not by you, but, you know, by an even number of people.
We are hoping that at the end of the month, we could look around and say, okay, is there any element here that we can safely and cautiously start pulling back on?
If so, do it.
If not, then just continue to hunker down.
And there's, as he always does, speaking very carefully, but also speaking clearly.
I mean, if you listen to what he says, I have to say, I respect him.
I don't always agree with him, but I respect him.
And the fact that he does try to tell the truth, and then people twist a lot of what he says, and he gets nailed for that.
And here is Trump speaking the way I want my president to speak.
It's cut eight.
I want to get it open as soon as possible.
This country was meant to be open and vibrant and great, not where people are, you know, staying in.
No, I'm not.
I would love to open it.
I'm not determined anything.
The facts are going to determine what I do.
But we do want to get the country open.
So important.
See it on socks.
You know, isn't that the way you want your president to talk?
I mean, is that not the way you want your president to talk?
I wrote a column.
You know, I do a weekly column.
It usually comes out on Saturday because I want to make sure nobody sees it.
No, I do a weekly column.
They put it up on Real Clear Politics, so it did get some play.
Just saying, you know, Trump at this point has actually earned the benefit of the doubt.
He has earned it from the right and the left because he has been right when the right and the left have both been wrong.
He was right about China before anybody else.
And he was right about China when the left was saying, oh, Russia, Russia, Russia, about nothing.
And when the right, like the Wall Street Journal types on the right, were saying, oh, no, you'll start a trade war and our stock portfolio will go down.
He was right.
He was right about that.
He was right about borders.
People on the left, obviously, they want to kill.
They want to destroy the West and they want to destroy the country by opening the borders, which is you can't have a country like that.
But even people like me were sort of saying in a high-minded way, we're saying, well, you know, we have this wonderful creed and the creed will assimilate people.
Well, yeah, that's true of a few people coming in at intervals.
I think anybody can become an American.
That's fine, but you can't just have this slow-motion invasion that was taking place.
And he was talking about that first.
He was talking about globalism.
Globalism is a mistake because countries are not just economic entities.
They're also moral entities.
And some are wicked like China and some are good like us.
So he was right about a lot of stuff.
It's time to kind of give him the benefit of the doubts.
He's going to make mistakes.
He's not going to have hindsight.
We all have hindsight.
You know, he doesn't have that.
It is time to start to wonder, maybe he is doing the best possible job that anyone can do at this point.
All right.
Let us talk for just a moment about our new deal, because I know you're all hunkering down, you know, trying to save the clavin.
This is what this is all about.
Let's not forget.
Let's always put, you always have to put your purpose in front of you.
You can't just think, oh, I have to sit here in this house.
You are saving the clavin.
You stay indoors so that you dead in the curve.
Then you go out.
And if you live, ultimately, I go out because then we know it's safe.
But what are you going to need?
You are going to need more leftist tears tumblers.
You need them for yourself.
You're going to need them for your family, whoever is locked up with you.
And so we have a deal.
When you become a Daily Wire Insider Plus or all Access member, we will give you two of the magnificent.
Here they are.
You can see them right here.
Two of the magnificent, unbreakable, made.
They are made of obsidian and gold.
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You could sell any one of these for millions of millions of dollars.
We're giving them to you.
I am lying, but we're giving them to you for free when you become a Daily Wire Insider Plus or All Access members.
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And just as a reminder, both Tumblers may not get to you at the same time, but you will definitely get two of them for the price of one.
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All right.
Now, the other thing, you know, I'm talking, I keep talking about the fact that in emergencies, you pay attention to how people behave, right?
You pay attention to how people behave.
And you do that because then you get to know them.
You know who they are.
You know whether you can depend on them.
You know how you can depend on them, whether you can depend on them one way and not another way.
Whether they're honest, whether they're steadfast, whether their values actually are brought into action, whether their beliefs are actually lived beliefs are just things that they talk about.
You know, I, for instance, like I'm willing to throw, you know, I have a lot of talk about Christianity and about good, but I'm willing to throw all of you to the dogs just to save my life.
So now you know, don't stand.
Don't let me get behind you because I'm going to push you out the door.
It's like Stalig 17.
I'm going to push you out the door to see if you get shot.
And if you don't, then maybe I'll come out.
But the other thing that's important to notice is who suddenly becomes a tyrant?
Because this is the thing, the other thing about Trump that really, really bugs me.
I would like to see every damn one of those guys who went on CNN and MSNBC and said that Donald Trump was Hitler and said he was just waiting for a crisis.
Oh, it was going to be the burning of the Reichstag.
Then our democracy was toast.
All those guys who went on the John Brennans and who had their pompous, dishonest, you know, sales pitch that this was the end of democracy.
And oh, how thankful we should be to unelected bureaucrats who are saving us from the evil of an elected official doing his job.
All those guys, I would like to see a written and engraved apology sent to the White House saying, you know what?
We called you Hitler, which is the ugliest thing you can call another human being.
And we were wrong.
We were totally wrong because you haven't done that.
But some people have.
Some people have.
And I think it's worth noticing who they are, the biggest one, because a lot of them, a lot of these stories, obviously online, we get to see every single person, right?
Every single thing that any person does anywhere in this country of over 300 million people, we see it on Twitter.
We see it on Facebook.
It goes viral and it looks like, oh, this is what's happening.
But no, most of the people who are screwing up are minor, minor officials.
Sometimes it's the police.
Usually the police are not to blame.
It's usually because they're getting kind of foggy instructions from on high.
However, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, I think, is a pretty, that's a pretty big name.
She has actually been touted as a possible VP for Biden.
Biden said, they said, what about Gretchen Whitmer for VP?
And Biden said, what does VP mean?
And they said, vice president.
And he said, I'm the vice president.
And they said, never mind.
We'll talk about it later.
But obviously, she's been touted around and she has really overstepped.
I mean, I was joking about her in the opening wanting to wear a Napoleon hat.
Only half a joke.
It's like a kind of a joke, but not really a joke.
She's banning stuff.
She's saying, you know, you can go in and buy candy and you can buy lottery tickets, but seeds, seeds are inessential and paint.
You don't want to paint.
And, you know, like she's talking about you can't go outside.
You can't go visit your neighbor.
It's like, you know, this is America.
You know, the Wall Street Journal made the point today.
This is still America.
People are going to start to, you're going to start to have civil unrest in your hands.
You're going to have to start to have civil disobedience.
And if this is working, which it seems it is, it seems that social distancing has helped flatten the curve, as they say.
If it's working, you want people to do it.
They're not going to do it if you get unreasonable.
Louisville, Kentucky, a big city.
The mayor, Greg Fisher, said he was banning Easter services, drive-in Easter services.
That's where people are sitting in their cars in a long line.
Nobody's close to anyone.
Nobody's breathing on anybody else.
There's still social distances.
He was banning those.
He was threatening to take pictures of the license plates and send out fines.
He was telling people to there were going to be criminal penalties.
He was telling people to squeal on anybody who was there.
Luckily, one congregation sued and a federal judge, Justin Walker, went medieval on the guy.
He said, this is what the judge said in his decision when he wouldn't let him do this.
He said, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter.
That sentence is one that this court never expected to see outside the pages of a dystopian novel or perhaps the pages of The Onion.
The mayor's decision is stunning and it is beyond all reason unconstitutional.
The thing about religion is, you know, you can say, look, we're not going to let anybody congregate right now because it's a health crisis.
That's okay.
And the religion may not get an exception in that case.
But you can't do things for religion against a religion that you didn't do against everybody.
You can't single out religion.
And there's nothing wrong with people sitting in their cars for Easter.
It's just an absolute overstep.
It's hostility toward religion.
It's this thing, oh, I have power now.
I'm just going to use it.
Police in Brighton, Colorado handcuffed a father who was playing in an empty park.
He was playing basketball in an empty park with his wife and kid.
Police in D.C. are going after people just sitting on park benches now.
In Beverly Hills, they're telling you you have to wear a mask.
You know, masks don't protect you.
They do protect other people.
So if you're by yourself, there's actually no reason to wear a mask.
There's a video that's gone viral of a cop chasing a jogger on an empty beach.
I mean, listen, you know, you've got to remember that the rights still count.
I mean, I know I am not one of these people.
I have not come out and been hysterical about this.
But there are places, there are pockets of places where people have gone nuts.
And it's good to remember who they are because a lot of them aren't Republicans.
You know, Greg Abbott is talking about reopening Texas.
A lot of Republicans have not had any lockdown procedures.
You know, we should check in on Sweden.
I mean, I haven't heard that Sweden has been a disaster, which means that it probably hasn't been so far.
And they had no lockdown.
You know, we should find out who did what and pay attention because we know that whatever, we know from that story about Biden, we know that the standards are going to be double.
If the left didn't have double standards, they wouldn't have double standards at all.
Cuomo's Responsible Approach00:03:26
So, you know, I want to take a look at Andrew Cuomo.
I am not a fan of Andrew Cuomo's, and I think he has said repeatedly that he is not leaving the governorship of New York.
He's not running for president.
He's not running for vice president.
I think one of the reasons is because of this Buffalo Billions scandal.
I've been trying to get somebody from New York to come on and talk to us about it.
We haven't found the guy yet.
But this Buffalo Billions thing was one of those stupid setups where you pay businesses to stay in the state because you're over-taxing people.
And so he was taking tax, he was over-taxing people.
Businesses were leaving.
So he was taking people's tax dollars and paying it to businesses.
And of course, it immediately became corrupt.
Four people, I believe, have already been convicted of corruption and spreading bribes and all the taking bribes for who gets the money.
One of them was a guy named Joe Percoco, who was called Cuomo's third brother.
He was supposed to be just a very, very close associate of Andrew Cuomo.
So I think this is the reason Cuomo's not going to run.
I think there's a lot of corruption in this administration.
I'm not saying he's a good guy at all.
However, however, he is one of the governors who is working for his state, right?
This is one of these things in an emergency.
These guys either continue to bash Trump, like Richard Whitmer, they go nuts and they decide I'm Napoleon.
She's going to show up in a military costume.
But Cuomo, I think, has been handling this in a responsible way.
He's been trying to help the people in his state.
He's got a city that is worse than a lot of countries.
And he said good things about Trump.
Here's cut four.
He says Trump is working with him.
We have kept politics out of this crisis.
And I've worked very hard to do that.
I've worked very hard to keep myself out of the politics.
I have no personal politics, not running for anything.
I'm governor of New York.
Thank you.
And that's where I'm going to stay.
I've worked very hard with the President of the United States.
We've had our political differences in the past, no doubt.
But there's also no doubt that I've worked hand in glove with the president here.
And he has been responsive to New York and responsive to New York's needs.
And he's done it quickly and he's done it efficiently.
I've literally had conversations with him in the morning where he turned around a decision by that afternoon.
I've been in the federal government.
I know what it's like to make a decision.
And he has really responded to New York's needs.
And then he said this, which I just think is a really important point.
This is cut five.
It's very hard, especially at this time.
And you start to hear this dialogue on reopening, and you start to hear people with political theories on whether we should reopen faster, whether we should reopen sooner, why are people against reopening?
Why are people in favor of reopening?
That is corrosive and destructive.
And if we don't stop it, it will feed on itself.
There are no political conspiracies here.
All the projection models have basically said the same thing.
Everyone has basically said the same thing.
You know, I agree with this.
I'm not a fan of his.
I don't agree with his politics.
I think he's been an overspender.
I suspect there's corruption in.
I know there's corruption in his administration.
Four guys, four big people have already been convicted.
But what he's saying is right.
Most of these guys are just trying to get it right.
Brilliant Vertigo Reflection00:03:36
Most of them are working in the dark.
We're all working in the dark.
They've got numbers.
They've got experts.
They've got to listen to the medical people and they've got to listen to the economic people.
They are doing what they can do.
Pay attention to the guys who aren't.
Pay attention to the guys who are arresting fathers in their own backyards playing basketball with their kids.
Pay attention to the governors who are seizing too much power, but also pay attention to the guys who step up and put politics aside for a couple of minutes and try to get this right because those are the guys we're going to have to rely on when all this passes away.
All right, a final reflection.
You know, every weekend, I've been trying, my wife and I, to watch a kind of classic movie.
I've seen them all, but my wife hasn't seen some of them.
And last Saturday, on Saturday, we watched Vertigo.
Vertigo, one of my favorite movies, one of the most formative movies of my life, a movie I saw when I was a little kid.
It completely transformed the way I thought about life, about storytelling, about everything.
And I've seen it again and again, but I hadn't watched it for a long time.
I was shocked at what a great, great movie it is about a private eye who has acrophobia.
He gets vertigo if he goes up too high, who was hired by a friend to follow his wife because he says he believes his wife is possessed by the dead and he follows her.
It's Jimmy Stewart as the detective.
They call him Scotty.
And it's Kim Novak as the wife.
And they start basically to fall in love with one another.
And here's just a quick exchange.
They have a famous exchange of dialogue.
Oh, I don't know.
Shopping?
No.
Well, anywhere in particular?
No, I just thought that I'd wander.
Oh, that's what I was going to do.
Oh, yes, that's what I forgot.
It's your occupation, isn't it?
Yeah, well, don't you think it's kind of a waste for the two of us?
Water separately.
Only one is a wanderer.
Two together are always going somewhere.
No, I don't think that's necessarily true.
He left a darling.
Only one is a wanderer, two are always going somewhere.
don't think that's true.
It's a movie about a man who is looking for an ideal woman and about a man who is looking for a woman to, I don't want to give too much of it away, but to bring a woman.
A man is trying to defeat death.
He is trying to defeat death and he's also looking for an ideal woman who may or may not exist.
It is a brilliant, brilliant movie.
It is a movie about the human condition.
It's a kind of goofy thriller, but it's so deep, so rich, so meaningful that I could not, I just can't recommend it highly enough.
It is based on a novel by two French authors who also wrote the book on which Dia Balik was based.
Dia Balique is a brilliant French thriller that Hitchcock loved and he envied.
It was made in black and white, very small, and it got wonderful critical reviews.
And Hitchcock, who was always being kind of sloughed off as just a thriller director, was jealous of Dia Balique, and so he made Psycho to kind of compete with it, a small black and white film, and finally got some of the respect that he so deserved.
Vertigo is frequently named as the greatest movie of all time.
I don't believe in greatest movies of all time, but it certainly belongs in whatever top list you're making.
A top list without Vertigo in it is not a proper list.
Obviously, for modern tastes, all these movies are going to be a little slow, but it is worth watching, and the last half hour is as great as anything ever put on film.
All right, back again tomorrow.
Podcasts Fall Apart?00:01:34
We will talk more about what's going on.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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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.
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Production assistants, McKenna Waters and Ryan Love.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
As the coronavirus doomsday models fall apart, the alarmists who pushed them are doubling down on their draconian policies.
We will examine the value of civil disobedience when power-hungry hypocrites get exposed and lash out.
Then, the former Biden staffer accusing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of sexual assault files a formal police complaint, and the mainstream media go into full cover-up mode to protect Joe.
Finally, we take a look at the glaring logical fallacy at the heart of the left's favorite coronavirus narrative.