Andrew Clavin dissects how COVID-19 exposed media polarization, mocking New York Times’ Charles Blow and Don Lemon for framing the crisis as a "culture war" while ignoring economic devastation like negative oil prices. He contrasts Mayor Eric Garcetti’s immigrant-inclusive response with journalists’ one-sided narratives, then pivots to Christopher Caldwell’s argument that 1960s civil rights laws created a "second constitution," reshaping private freedoms—with Reagan and Trump as reluctant stewards of this shift. Clavin ties it back to Tiger King’s narcissism, suggesting animal welfare rhetoric mirrors political elites’ human failures, ultimately framing the pandemic as a symptom of deeper societal fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
Journalists and other Democrats are demanding the TV station stop airing President Trump's briefings on the Chinese virus.
On Knucklehead Row, the op-ed page of the New York Times, a former newspaper, aptly named columnist Charles Blow wrote, quote, Trump's flagrant disinformation cannot be released to America without being filtered through our unreasoning hatred and corruption.
Trump claimed that it was dangerous to allow China to dominate the supply chain, but now we at the Times have uncovered the truth that allowing China to dominate the supply chain is actually dangerous.
Trump said it was unsafe for us to have open borders, and now it turns out open borders are not safe in the least.
Trump said that globalization would allow rogue nations to take advantage of us, and now instead we find ourselves being taken advantage of by rogue nations because of globalization.
We can no longer stand by and let this man lie until we correct him by rephrasing what he said to make it sound like we said it first.
Otherwise, people will begin to think our so-called expertise and educational credentials are meaningless garbage, and then we are so, so screwed.
Unquote.
Nancy Pelosi also said the briefing should be canceled, remarking, quote, every time he talks about people being ruined or out of work, it puts a bad taste in my mouth, ruining the experience of my Brickley's chocolate ice cream, which cost me a fortune to have shipped in fresh from Narragansett, unquote.
In a sharply worded editorial issued from the delightfully pink bathroom of her $7 million home in Scarsdale, NBC anchor woman Shapely Nudnick said, quote, no one can possibly understand these briefings without our explaining them because they're all full of like facts and numbers and stuff which need to be clarified by our gross misrepresentations, unquote.
Journalists are suggesting the briefings be stopped and replaced by commentators screaming insults into the camera and comparing Republicans to Hitler.
That will at least make America feel like things are getting back to normal.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is ticked-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
As America struggles to reopen, our culture war wounds are also opening wider and the press is making it so much worse.
I want to wax just slightly philosophical about this to explain why I hammer this point so hard.
One of the weirdest interviews I ever did was with a local BBC radio station in northern England.
Points of View Matter00:15:08
I'd written a novel called True Crime about a man on death row and the interview was hostile toward me because I had made a lot of money on the book and movie rights.
BBC interviewers and British socialists, but I repeat myself, hate it when you bank money.
When I remained unruffled, he started to try to get me to condemn capital punishment, which is what the book is about.
And I wouldn't do it.
And I said, I don't actually think the novel is a political instrument.
The interviewer snapped at me, tell that to George Orwell.
I was about to explain why the George Orwell example proved my point about the novel when he literally hung up on me.
There was a click and I was talking to no one.
Here's what I would have said.
Orwell's novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, are attacks on Soviet communism, so they're political in that sense.
But because they're also great novels, their tropes like Big Brother and speech shutdowns can also be applied to far-right fascist regimes.
The reason for this is because every single system or ism is open to abuse by sinful humans.
People like isms.
They're attracted to them because they offer certainty.
They flatter the power of the powerful and they flatter the intellects of intellectuals.
They make us all feel the unsolvable problem of human evil can be suddenly solved if we just get the right system and it's run by people exactly like us.
Ordered Liberty, on the other hand, is a complex grown-up idea that tries to make room for as many different points of view as possible and to give them as much range as possible in their individual human sphere.
Ordered Liberty requires what I call a meta-point of view.
A meta-point of view is what novelists and other artists use to make sure their personal outlook doesn't make their work simplistic.
It's one of the themes of the novel True Crime, which features a reporter who is a truly awful person, but he's nonetheless the hero because he searches for the truth even when it conflicts with his own opinion and points of view.
A meta point of view used to be, it used to be what journalists and comedians used to make sure they saw the world from as many different points of view as possible and therefore presented the news and human comedy without prejudice.
So it applied to all of us.
We saw a meta point of view right here on this show just the other day when Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, who disagrees with homosexual behavior, came on and told us how he treats homosexuals just the same as straits when they come to his makeshift hospitals for help.
That is definitely meta and it makes sense.
Pardon me, it makes sense that it comes from Graham because we derive our meta point of view from a little-known philosopher and son of the living God named Jesus of Nazareth who said, love your enemies, which is the ultimate meta point of view.
The opposite of the meta point of view derives from closed systems like Freudianism and postmodern Marxism.
They pretend to be meta while they actually seek to subsume all other points of view into their overarching point of view.
And what we're seeing right now in this country as the Chinese flu starts to divide us is too much Marx and too little Jesus.
And it's hurting all of us on the left and on the right.
We're going to talk a lot about this in a minute, but first let's talk about Life Lock because you're online a lot, you're staying at home, you got to be protected.
And you know, you'll see people who are always prepared for everything.
They've got a band-aid if they have a cut, if you have a battery, they have all the different batteries.
But if they're worried about identity theft and they're only monitoring their credit, they may not be as prepared as they think.
With your breached information like your name, social security number, and more, criminals can commit identity theft.
And that's why LifeLock sees more threats, like someone taking out a payday loan in your name.
They alert you to possible suspicious activity.
And if you end up having an identity theft issue, and this is the big part, you'll have a dedicated identity restoration specialist just a phone call away.
And that's the important thing because once your identity is stolen, it's a mess.
It's hard to put back together.
No one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses.
But with breaches on the rise, it makes sense to be prepared.
Join Life Lock today and save up to 25% off your first year.
Go to lifelock.com slash Clavin.
That's lifelock.com slash Clavin to save 25% and also to be tested on whether you know how to spell Clavin.
Amazingly, that is exactly how I don't know how they prepared that song so quickly.
So I want to play this tremendous GOP ad, which drives home what we were talking about yesterday, about the total cluelessness of the elite to the fact that they are sequestered from the lives of individual human beings.
This is about Nancy Pelosi and her stupid ice cream.
You don't want to eat up everything all at one time.
I can't do it much longer.
I'm trying so hard.
Did we say enjoying?
Having to admit that, yeah, we're starving and I like it better than anything else.
Taping this segment, there are 22 million people out there.
This specific program is about stopping job losses today.
This is hurting people bad.
Other people in our family look for some other flavors, but...
Right now, it's survival.
You don't know where that next something else will come from.
I don't know what I would have done if ice cream were not invented.
I just wondered.
Let them eat ice cream.
That's the clue.
You know, rich people are more like this than poor people.
I used to work in a gas station.
I was a gas jockey.
It was right on the border of a rich neighborhood and a poor neighborhood, and the poor people were always nice to me, and the rich people were almost always nasty to me.
And it wasn't because of the money itself.
It was because the money allows them not to see the lives of other people.
And that's what I mean by not having a meta point of view.
Poor people see rich people because they're on TV and they talk to them and they make the movies and they make all the entertainment.
Rich people can protect themselves from seeing what the lives of people who are struggling are like.
And the same thing is true on the right and the left.
The right people see left-wingers because they're everywhere.
They have all the news stations and the movies, but left-wingers don't see right-wingers, and that's why they sacrifice a lot of their point of view.
It is also true that right-wingers can become sequestered.
I'm hearing a lot of this from the people saying this is all not a hoax, but they're saying it's a political ploy, that there is no flu.
It's just the flu.
It's, you know, we don't have to shut down.
Our rights are under attack.
I don't believe that temporary local lockdowns in an emergency are a systemic threat to our civil rights.
And also, you know, a lot of the figures and the facts and figures that people are throwing around are not necessarily applicable because they suffer.
I'm talking about us on the right here because they suffer from a typical right-wing lack of imagination.
We love our numbers.
We love our statistics.
We think they solve everything.
They don't.
There's a human element that sometimes the left, I'm just telling you, sometimes the left sees better than we do.
And that's why they're so good at the arts and that's why we suck and we've let them take over the culture.
Let me show you exactly what I mean.
If somebody says to you, well, you know, I've seen this on a lot of right-wing programs, okay?
The heart attacks kill half a million people a year and flu causes 60,000 people a year.
And we don't shut down for those things.
That's what I hear right-wingers saying.
And the problem with that is, is that's not the way this flu operates, right?
It hits areas very intensely.
So in other words, like something, the last time I looked, it was 46% of the cases were in New York.
I don't know if that's still operational, but let's say it's 40% of the cases are in New York.
So if, for instance, you know, I've heard people say, well, we could suffer a million deaths and it still wouldn't be worth this lockdown.
Maybe if a million deaths were spread out over the course of the year in every town and city and borough in the country, if that happened, maybe we could get through a million deaths.
But if 45% of those deaths, if 40% of those deaths are in New York and take place in a month and Broadway is lined with corpses, not so much.
Why?
Because we're human beings and we feel things very intensely and our inner lives change and when our inner lives change, believe me, believe me, the facts change.
When our inner lives change, the way life looks changes.
Let me just point this out.
On 9-11, 3,000 people died in New York City on one day.
So it wasn't just that there were 3,000 people.
You couldn't come on, you know, Fox or some right-wing station and say, well, 3,000 people die all the time.
It was 3,000 people murdered in one place in one day.
We've been at war for 20 years.
20 years, a record for us in this useless war in Afghanistan because 3,000 people died on one day and we got so ginned up.
Our emotions got ginned up.
Rightly so.
Rightly so.
3,000 people murdered in New York in one day is a disaster that has to be addressed.
Okay, this is not murder and it's not war.
But think about this for a second.
Since the 1980s, approximately 700,000 Americans have died of AIDS, right?
That's a lot of people, but since the 1980s, 700,000 Americans have died of AIDS.
Our entire attitude toward gays has changed.
Gay marriage would not exist.
It would not even be an issue if AIDS hadn't happened.
If AIDS hadn't brought to light that sometimes the guy next to you, who you like or who's your cousin or your uncle or your son or your friend turns out to be gay, that's what AIDS revealed to us.
And it also showed us that, you know, when people suffer, we suddenly realize, oh yeah, they're people.
They're like us.
It changed everything.
And that's 700,000 people over 40 years, if I've got it right.
Yeah, it's like 40 years at least, right?
So it's not just the number of people.
These statistics are meaningless.
The thing is meaningless, but you have to use your imagination.
You have to see how it works.
It's the fact that it's happening very intensely in places and in individual places over a very short period of time and overwhelms the system.
Now, on the other hand, of course, of course, economics matter.
I mean, our economy matters.
So we all have points of view.
And if we could just have people who would report on all these points of view and take all of them into account and give us a full, rounded, global picture of what's happening, we could make better decisions and stop sounding like idiots on Twitter, pounding our fists into our palm and demanding that things be different than they are.
You know, Donald Trump sent out a tweet yesterday.
He said, in light of the attack from the invisible enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our great American citizens, I will be signing an executive order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States.
Probably a political move.
Administration officials, I'm reading this from the Wall Street Journal.
They said the order wouldn't make substantial changes to current U.S. policy.
Even without an executive order, the administration has already all but ceased nearly every form of immigration.
Most visa processing has been halted, meaning almost no one can apply for a visa to visit or move to the U.S. Visa interviews and citizenship ceremonies have been postponed and the refugee program paused.
The Wall Street Journal has previously reported migrants caught crossing the border are now immediately expelled once they're found.
This is an economic matter.
I mean, the tweet was just to give it to the left and have them bloviate, which they did, and I'll show you in just a minute.
But the point is, the point is shutting down immigration is the right thing to do because we have to protect American jobs.
We have now learned that globalism is a mistake.
We've now learned that we have to protect American jobs.
We have to protect the American supply line.
Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, and some of these mayors, we really have to bring back tar and feathering.
I don't want to see him guillotined, but a little tar and feathering can be a good thing in these situations.
He goes on with Don Lemon and Don Lemon tease him up with this let's attack Donald Trump question.
And here's what Garcetti says.
I believe in governance by law, not necessarily by tweet.
I'm proud to be the grandson of an immigrant from Mexico.
That's why I'm the mayor today.
We have a president who is the grandson of an immigrant as well, who married immigrants.
We can't run away from who we are and the people who are helping us most right now.
I think we are all in this together and all life matters.
And this isn't going to get stopped by playing politics.
I think that Mexico is more worried about the rate of infection from the United States right now than vice versa.
So let's make sure that we stay connected and engaged with the world.
And let's not start writing off anybody in this country just because of where they come from.
Some of the darkest chapters of our American history are written in times like the World War II when we scapegoat people and try to change the subject.
This is a public health emergency.
This is not an immigration emergency.
So I hope we can stay focused on what this really is.
So let's pretend that Don Lemon is a five-year-old who's taking a preschool class in journalism, okay?
Don't you start to ask some questions of this guy?
Don't you start to say to him, well, wait a minute, wait a minute.
You know, as you just said, Donald Trump is married to an immigrant and is the grandson of immigrants just like you are.
What makes you think that he doesn't have a feeling for immigrants?
You know, maybe there's a reason for this.
How about this?
How about this?
How about that?
You know, how about the economy?
How about American jobs?
How about the fact that letting people in is dangerous right now?
You know, just ask him some questions.
Just ask him some questions just because you maybe agree with him, just because he references your point of view.
A journalist is supposed to have this meta-point of view that allows him to question everybody.
I have never complained about the treatment of Donald Trump by the press.
I complain about the treatment of Donald Trump by the press in context with their treatment for eight years of Barack Obama.
Oh, Mr. Obama, what enchants you about being president?
I love your tie, Mr. Obama.
Oh, you were giving the nuclear weapon to Iran.
What a brilliant thing, Mr. Obama.
That's my problem.
You can't suddenly put your journalist testicles back on and call yourself a journalist because suddenly now Donald Trump is in office.
It doesn't work that way.
Everything is in context.
My problem is that everything is from one side and it is damaging.
It's damaging to us as well.
It is damaging to us as well.
Yesterday, oil dropped to a price, a negative price, a negative price.
They can't give the oil away.
That's going to mean plenty of jobs get destroyed.
AOC is saying, don't you love to hear that?
It's going to help the environment.
She tweets out, I love to hear this.
And then she raised, you know, she got rid of it because it means people are going to be out of work.
She says it's time for workers to get together with a Green New Deal.
There's no Green New Deal for workers because the government can't create jobs.
The government cannot create jobs.
The government can only take money that would be used to create jobs and use that money to create fewer jobs than it would have created had it been left in the free enterprise system.
But the fact that he, Eric Carset, if Eric Garcetti were asked the tough questions, if he were asked the tough questions by somebody who was not a houseplant, by somebody who was a five-year-old taking a preschool class in journalism, it would make him a better mayor.
It would make him a better person.
It makes all of us better people when we question our assumptions.
It makes all of us better people.
You know, that sound of certainty, that sound of self-certainty goes right through me, okay?
And maybe it's from being a novelist, maybe it's from practicing, you know, meta-ways of thinking as an artist, but it makes me nuts.
It's not that you can't be certain of anything.
I am certain my Redeemer lives.
I am certain my Redeemer lives.
But when people tell me that people who are not certain that your Redeemer lives are going to go to hell, I suddenly think, you know what?
That is truly, truly above my pay grade.
There are certain things that we just don't know about.
I really like the fact.
I really do like the fact that Trump has remained positive in this and is talking about the economy is cut too.
Believing in Reopening00:10:28
Following the release of our reopening guidelines, governors across the country are looking forward to phase one and announcing plans for an economic resurgence.
We're going to have a resurgence at a time when millions of American workers and families are struggling with the financial consequences of the virus.
It's critical to continue the medical war while reopening the economy in a safe and responsible fashion.
So the thing is that Trump is talking about a very cautious reopening plan.
I mean, it is a cautious, stately reopening plan.
And some of the people protesting are even protesting against Trump's reopening plan.
But this isn't an intelligent thing.
With all the screaming going on, with all the culture war screaming going on, the fact is things are being handled the way they have to be handled.
I think they are.
I think this pretty, look, there's no such thing as an emergency or a disaster in which people don't make huge mistakes.
Not just mistakes, huge mistakes.
Or as we say in the Trump era, huge mistakes.
That's every disaster.
That is every single disaster, huge mistakes, every single one.
So that's true.
But still, at the same time, these guys are doing what they have to do.
They didn't want to see New York lined with bodies.
They didn't want to see Broadway lined with bodies.
So they shut down to deaden the curve.
Now the curve has been deadened.
Now we cautiously go back to work.
That makes sense.
The screaming and the yelling on both sides at this point is absurd.
All right.
Let's talk a little bit about one of our favorite sponsors, rockauto.com.
Now, rockauto.com is not just one of our favorite sponsors because we love saying rockauto.com, but we do love saying rockauto.com.
There's no question about it.
And what a godsend it is to have in this time when we're locked down, something wrong with your car, you need a part for your car.
You even just want to work on your car in the garage to give yourself something to do.
You're not going to drive to the car parts store.
You go on your computer and you use rockauto.com.
It's much easier than walking into a store and someone asking you questions who knows less about it than you do.
Rockauto.com catalog is unique and remarkably easy to navigate.
They have everything you need, no matter what car you've got, whether it's an old car, the car you drive around, or a classic, it doesn't matter.
Rockauto.com is what you want to be saying because you just want to be saying rockauto.com.
And then you get not only get to say that, you get great parts for your car at a good price.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck and write Clavin in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know we sent you and also write it in the box that says how do you spell Clavin, which is right there on my own.
I should point out that we've got the mailbag coming up tomorrow.
You want to go on the daily.
You want to sound like that?
Go on the dailywire.com website and subscribe.
And then you can be in the mailbag.
Go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag image, and you can ask me any question you want about religion, politics, your personal life.
All my answers will be guaranteed correct and they'll change your life.
Will they change your life for the better?
That's, you know, what do you want from me?
I'm doing the best I can.
All right.
So, so this is the way everybody is seeing this culture war.
And this is the way the New York Times covers it.
This is the New York Times, by the way, where they blamed Fox News for killing a guy by an article written by someone who said, This guy watched Fox News and then he got the flu and died.
You know, this very writer had actually blown off the virus, had actually said it's not that serious.
So they're just covering it from one side.
They have no meta-point of view.
And they have a headline, How Abortion, Guns, and Church Closings Made Coronavirus a Culture War.
Now, that right there, right there, that is one-sided, right?
It's not abortion, guns, and church closings that made coronavirus a culture war.
It is the clash between people who think those things should go one way and people who think those things should go another way, right?
There's a clash, there's a disagreement.
I'm fine with there being a disagreement.
I'm willing to debate the disagreement.
It's not, they didn't create, they didn't make coronavirus a culture war.
The two sides made coronavirus a culture war because it is a culture war, because it comes in to a culture war.
You know, I've recently rejiggered my bookmarks, right?
I go through a list of sites every day, and I took Drudge off because Drudge is now useless.
And I put Dan Bungino's great new site on, which you should really look at.
It's really kind of a replacement for Drudge.
I don't know if they say Drudge may have sold the site, maybe he's not doing it anymore.
I don't know, but this site is now completely nonsense.
But I also put on Axios.
Axios leans to the left, but it gives some fair coverage to both sides of the story, and I really appreciate that.
And they covered this with a thing by Jim Vandehey, just saying Republicans and Democrats experienced very different realities with the emergence of the virus.
Conservatives live in states with fewer cases and consume far more skeptical coverage of the virus threat.
Liberals, especially in big cities, experience more death and consume far more ominous coverage.
That's novelistic meta-thinking.
It should be journalistic meta-thinking.
I shouldn't have to attach it to novelists.
That is meta-thinking.
He even links to the New York Times piece here, but he probably being a liberal, he probably doesn't know that the Times piece is skewed, but at least his writing, his writing is not skewed.
You know, I've also noticed that women are, you know, women are typically more anxious than men.
I think they're evolved that way for good reasons.
Maybe it's just Brian Stelter who's more anxious than men, but I thought it was all women.
But the thing is, it is not a sin against America.
It's not a sin against liberty to point out that we could possibly reopen too fast.
Anthony Fauci was on with George Stephanopoulos, who used to silence women for Bill Clinton and now is on the network that spiked the Jeff Epstein story while Hillary Clinton was running.
Just a coincidence, total coincidence.
No reason to ask him about that.
But Stephanopoulos is basically begging Fauci to say things that can be later used to mean that right-wingers are being foolish.
Fauci, if you listen to what he actually says, is presenting a medical point of view.
He is not a banker.
He's not an economist.
He is on the White House team to present the medical point of view.
And the things he says make a lot of sense to me.
At the end of this, at the end of this interview with the guy who silenced women for Bill Clinton on the network that silenced Jeffrey Epstein while Hillary Clinton was running, at the end of this interview, he made this point.
Clearly, this is something that is hurting from the standpoint of economics and the standpoint of things that have nothing to do with the virus.
But unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not going to happen.
So what you do if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you're going to set yourself back.
So as painful as it is to go by the careful guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening, it's going to backfire.
That's the problem.
A perfectly reasonable point.
If we all go back to work and we all get sick, the economy is going to take a second punch when it can't withstand it.
Not saying we shouldn't reopen.
We have to reopen.
It really is that time.
We have bent the curve.
We flattened the curve.
It's time to start going back.
You know, again, I'm just being reasonable.
I'm just saying do things cautiously, one thing at a time.
And always remember, save the Clavin.
That's the most important thing.
The most important thing is that I remain safe.
But no, really, you know, do you remember, you know, I love Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz is my political spirit animal.
I mean, he represents most of the things that I believe politically.
But I remember when he made a mistake during the debates with Donald Trump and he accused Donald Trump of having, I can't remember what it was, New York values.
That was what he said, New York City values.
And of course, Trump struck back saying what a great city New York was.
And we all remembered 9-11 and the courage of New York police officers and New York fighter fighters.
And it kind of backfired on Ted.
So the reason for that is in the end, we are Americans.
We understand in our hearts that there are differences between us.
But in the end, most of us could get along.
In the end, we respect one another enough to get along.
It is the press that stands between us.
It is the communication industry that makes us hate one another.
It makes the left only see conservatives from the point of view of left-wingers, so they think we're all a bunch of rubes.
And it makes the right only see left-wingers from the point of view of activists, so we think they're all a bunch of communists.
And, you know, it has allowed, it has allowed the communists and the kooks like AOC and Ilhan Omar to get higher within the ranks of the Democratic Party than our kooks, because we're human beings and we have kooks, but they tend to be on comment sections.
They tend to be guys like Alex Jones, who nobody really, you know, who he has his audience, but they're just people who are gathering around that stuff.
They're not making it into the mainstream the way the left makes it into the mainstream.
Donald Trump made this point, by the way.
He talked about the fact that it's the press that is fomenting this stuff.
I do think that the press, the media, foments a lot of this, a lot of anger.
I really believe it foments tremendous anger.
For instance, I'll be asked a tremendously hostile question from somebody, and then I'll answer it in a hostile way, which is appropriate.
Otherwise, you look foolish.
Otherwise, it looks like just walk off the stage and bow your head.
I can't do that.
You know, I just can't do that.
But a lot of these questions that are asked from certain networks are so hostile.
And there's no reason for it.
You know, and they're not just hostile to the president.
They're hostile to us.
You know, that's the thing.
They're hostile to the rest of us.
The Washington Post, Philip Rucker, column this.
He was talking about Trump supporting the protests, which Trump has done in a cautious way.
He's basically said, I'm for everybody.
I understand they have problems.
Cut number three.
He knows that these are his supporters.
They may not all be his supporters.
We're not sure who they all are going to vote for in November, but many of them are Trump supporters, are waving Trump flags.
And Trump, the president, knows that he needs to show some solidarity with them.
It's one of the reasons why, for example, after the Charlottesville attack, he showed solidarity with the neo-Nazi protesters there.
In this case, he's trying to show solidarity with these folks saying, I stand with you.
Why We Talk About NetSuite00:03:29
I believe in what you believe in, which is getting back to work and reopening this economy.
And he has defended their right to protest, which is in direct violation of the social distancing guidelines that his own administration has put out.
This is, I mean, first of all, all the lies, the thing about supporting the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, which Trump never did.
He said, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis.
I'm talking about people.
You know, they just continue to reiterate these lies, hoping they just stick.
I played yesterday, but I have another cut, but I don't have time to play it now of Obama basically saying that the Occupy protesters who went out and they were socialist anarchist protesters who went out basically supporting them.
It's a better cut.
Yesterday, he didn't quite support them.
In this cut, he does.
But the thing is, they just see it from one side, and it hurts all of us.
We, all of us, we all of us have got to get a more rounded, more meta-view of the country, the complex free country that we're in.
Listen, I've got a really interesting interview coming up.
I hope you will stay on for it.
It's Christopher Caldwell.
He has written a fascinating book.
You won't believe the stuff he said.
If I had hair, it would have made me stand on end.
You really want to stay tuned for that.
First, we have to talk about NetSuite because this is the time when small businesses are hurting.
You have got to be able to know how your business is doing, what your numbers are, especially if you've got stuff going on online and you're trying to keep your business going.
You do not need the uncertainty of not knowing what's happening.
NetSuite by Oracle is the world's number one cloud business system.
With NetSuite, you get financials, cash flow, payroll, inventory, and more all in one place.
So you have clear visibility and total control of your business.
NetSuite customers have the flexibility to work from anywhere with immediate clarity on critical information right at their fingertips.
How important is that right now?
It's amazingly essential.
They've got over 20,000 companies who trust NetSuite to help them stay in control.
Right now, you can receive a free guide called Managing Business Uncertainty.
That could be helpful.
And schedule your free product tour right now at netsuite.com slash Clavin.
Don't wait.
Get your free guide and schedule your free product tour at netsuite.com slash clavin.
That's netsuite.com slash clavin.
You want to know right now, if you want your business to do well, you've got to know how to spell clavin, which is K-L-A-V-A-N.
There aren't.
I really just make it look this incredibly easy.
Also, today, tomorrow, Wednesday, backstage, 4 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Eastern, we will have a Earth Day backstage because we're all celebrating Earth Day.
We don't really care about Earth Day, any of us, but we will be here.
We do care about talking to one another.
So we will have a backstage.
Then you also want to subscribe to get your two, count them, two leftist tiers tumblers.
If you get an all-access member or an Insider Plus membership, you get two of these spectacular golden onyx hand-carved tumblers.
You get all kinds of benefits, including being in the mailbag tomorrow and having all your problems solved.
So you want to be there.
Stay tuned.
Christopher Caldwell is coming up with a really interesting book that we really want to talk about.
coming up.
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, as well as a contributing editor for the Claremont Review of Books and a fellow at the Claremont Institute.
Reagan's Legacy in the 60s00:09:39
His new book is The Age of Entitlement America since the 60s.
It's out now.
Chris, are you there?
I'm here.
Good.
I'm really glad you came back.
Thanks very much.
So I've read a long excerpt of your book.
Is it fair to say that your book says that the civil rights law is inherently at odds with the Constitution?
It's fair to say that it poses some pretty serious challenges to the Constitution as we've understood it.
Can you explain it?
Can you tell us how it does?
Well, I would say I think the story starts with the seriousness of the problem of racial segregation, which went on for centuries.
It proved impossible to fix with the tools we had.
In the beginning of the 1960s, I think people began to look at it in a new way.
I don't think they had any moral revelations.
I don't think the people who lived in the 60s were superior to, say, Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass or other people who'd really done some serious thinking about it.
I think what was different about them was they had a different idea towards power.
I think they said that much stronger measures were going to need to be taken.
And so you had a huge criminalization of all sorts of behaviors that had previously been considered kind of maybe they weren't too pleasant, but they were just part of an ordinary part of life.
You know, what you said about people, you know, in your own home, in your own business, whom you invited to join your business, whom you invited to study at your school.
Those things could have racist consequences, but they were considered private matters.
After the early 60s, they no longer were.
So what happened was you basically had a you had a reinterpretation, to use the gentlest word I can find, of the First Amendment, which ended one of the central things about the First Amendment, which was the freedom of association.
So in doing that, I mean, they promised this was not going to basically end our civil rights, but it really has become, the way you describe it, it's like two parallel constitutions going on at the same time.
That's exactly right.
Okay.
And one of the things the book goes into is the way this state, you know, the impulse, I think, in the early 1960s was not as popular as we paint it today during African American History Month, but it had a certain momentum behind it.
And I think that people understood the need for civil rights.
They did not really understand the logistics of how civil rights was going to be enforced.
And it turned out to require a ton of government.
So in addition to these new crimes created in the civil rights law, you also have new sort of government authorities to police them.
You know, you have a, you know, you have an expanded civil rights commission.
You have an EEOC.
You have offices of civil rights in every cabinet administration.
And then you have lots and lots of other administration, legislation, the Fair Housing Act, the Higher Education Act.
And pretty soon you have a real governmental juggernaut that can get stuff done very quickly without ever involving the democracy.
And as time went on, I think people looked for other uses for that.
And so it was no longer limited to southern segregation.
It started to be used to enforce bilingual education, gay rights, women's rights, all sorts of things, you know?
And it became a new way of conducting government that didn't really involve the old checks and balances.
One of the things that I think conservatives have to readjust their mind to a little bit is your position of Reagan in all this, Reagan's role in sort of really keeping this alive when perhaps he had been elected to put a dent in it.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
You know, Reagan, I think, is one of the three great politicians of the 20th century, the others being FDR and LBJ.
And what great politicians do is they tend to form the biggest and least likely coalitions.
They really can bring a country together.
And that's what Reagan did.
And I give him a lot of credit as a politician.
I think to those conservatives, to those who brought him to power thinking he would be a conservative president, there was a lot of disappointment.
I think that there was, you know, this is the meat of my book, and it takes a lot of time to develop.
But I, you know, the rebellion against the 1960s, it took a lot of time for people to understand it was okay to say, you know, I'm uncomfortable with what's going on.
I don't like it that, you know, women all feel they have to be in the workplace, things like that, things that sounded edgy to say.
It took them a while to find each other.
But by the late 1970s, I would say the country was in a tremendous ferment.
And we had other things going on.
We had inflation.
We had humiliation, first in Vietnam, then in Iran with the hostage crisis.
And I think the country was about as conservative as it ever was in the 20th century.
And I think it was a conservative uprising that brought Ronald Reagan to power.
But when he came to power, I think he discovered that this second constitution, as we have called it, was really too powerfully entrenched to remove.
And so he found a way that conservatives could make their peace with this new alien-seeming part of the American governmental system.
And the way that he found was a sort of a privatization, a sort of grandfathering in of the old country on private means.
So he did not repeal the reforms of the 60s as he had explicitly promised to do.
But he gave people the means to live as if the 60s hadn't happened.
And the way he gave them the means was through deficit financing, through tax cuts.
Yeah, so they could continue to live at that level without actually creating the wealth that was needed to live at that level.
I mean, where does this put Donald Trump in the progression?
I mean, he seems to have been brought to the fore by the same kinds of forces that elevated Reagan.
Is that fair?
I think that's right.
I think all these things become a lot easier to understand if you look at American politics with a kind of European lens.
In Europe, they really have, when people look at their, all political systems seem to have like really three forces.
There are conservatives, there are socialists, but there is also something called liberals.
And liberal is a completely different meaning than we are meaning of the word liberal.
It basically means people who believe in freedom.
That is free markets, you know, personal liberty and that kind of thing.
In America, you know, liberals either go, these people either go with the left or they go with the right.
Ronald Reagan was really, he was not a pure conservative.
He was much more of a conservative liberal.
That is, he had some strains of conservatism, like Christian piety, but he also had strains of this liberalism, like the free market.
And at the end of the day, it was really the free market that he cared about.
I think that in 1988, when he was leaving office, I think that the people who wanted a more open economy were very happy.
The people who were upset about abortion and prayer in schools and things like that really didn't have much to show for it.
And so I think that at that point, and particularly when the Cold War ended, you started having people like, say, Pat Buchanan saying, wait a minute, what did I get out of this whole thing?
This actually was for, you know, this Reagan revolution was for one part of the Reagan coalition.
We could call it the Jack Kemp part of the coalition.
But there was this other part of the coalition.
You saw it first with Pat Buchanan.
I think you saw it later with Ron Paul in the first decade of this century.
And now you see it with Donald Trump, which is actually a little bit more conservative.
And I think the key thing in here is immigration.
You know, obviously we don't want to have a racist country.
There has been scars left by real institutional racism.
Immigration And Animal Identification00:03:57
Is there some way out of this mind?
Is there some way out of this situation?
You're very careful in your writing not to sort of make demands, but I'm just wondering when you think about that, is there something, some way forward that you see?
Yeah, it's actually not that I'm careful.
It's that I don't believe in it.
I don't believe in a lot of books end with a, you know, like my five or 10 point manifesto to make this country a better place.
And I have no objection to that, but it's just not the way I write books.
I mean, what I'm trying to do is to analyze what has gone on.
And I think it's been, it's hard enough to do that.
So few people have done that that I think that if I manage to do it, I'm quite content, right?
But I mean, I'm not charting a way forward.
I'm describing the world as it is now.
I have to tell you, Chris, the parts of the book I've read, which, like I said, was an extensive excerpt, was absolutely terrific.
I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing.
I really appreciate your coming on.
I hope you'll come back.
Thanks a lot.
I'm delighted to be here.
Thank you, Drew.
Thanks.
All right.
A final reflection.
I finally got to finish Tiger King, which I know everybody has seen in America except for me.
But I, you know, I had a really interesting reaction.
I mean, I had a lot of reactions.
It's such an interesting, fascinating story, a fascinating story with all kinds of ins and outs.
And the characters are amazing.
It's a wonderful piece of documentary filmmaking.
Let's play just a little bit of the trailer.
It's not every day that a zipkeeper went to prison for murder for hire.
There are more captive tigers in the U.S. than there are in the wild throughout the world.
They old people are nuts, man.
They're all crazy.
I'm sure y'all got a story to tell.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
My name's Joe Exotic, and this is Sarge.
He was like a mythical character living out in the middle of mountain Oklahoma who owned 1,200 tigers and lions and bears and match-spoken, good-looking.
Love to party and have fun.
I don't think we're done blowing up today.
I don't think you are.
You know, this is pretty entertaining stuff.
One thing I got to say, though, you know, I love animals.
I truly do.
I love dogs.
I love, you know, I mean, I probably talk more to like squirrels and birds than I do to human beings.
But I have to tell you, human being, animals are not human beings.
And people who do not see the humanity in other humans frequently over-identify with animals.
I've seen this again and again.
It's kind of like the guy in Silence of the Lambs who can't understand the humanity of the women he kills, but sits around talking to his dog.
Okay.
And this show is about so many narcissists, so many narcissists who really don't care about what they're doing to other people, but are all about these animals.
And he sings a song in which he, you know, he's a country singer.
He's not a bad country singer either.
And he has a song called, I Saw a Tiger and a Tiger and the Tiger Saw a Man.
And the thing is, the tiger doesn't see a man.
The tiger sees an object moving in space, possibly food, possibly not food, possibly someone will give him food.
Tiger doesn't have the concept man, doesn't have the word man.
Only people have these concepts.
Only people have the concept of tiger.
Only people have the concept of wild and savage and beautiful.
All those things come from us.
They come from us.
They come from God, but they come from us here on earth.
And so the people who do not understand, do not understand that the humanity of animals comes from humans, right?
Overemphasize and over-identify with animals because animals will not argue with you.
Talk about a meta-point of view.
Animals do not require a meta point of view.
Animals just become what you say they are until they eat you, okay?
Only People See Tigers00:02:20
Until they eat you, they just become what you said they are.
And if you watch this show, what you see is people treating each other like absolute dirt, almost all of them, almost every single one of them, except the ones who have no power.
But almost every single one of them treating one another like dirt, arguing about the animals.
And then when the law comes down on them, they're all like, why are you picking on me?
And because you broke the law.
You know, maybe it's not fair.
Maybe one other guy got away.
But still, the narcissism that this is about is really, really startling.
And the only thing is, all I will say about it is this is about people who have country accents.
Some of them have bad teeth.
Some of them have meth addictions and so on and so forth.
But you could make the same story about the governing class in New York State as you made about these people, because a lot of these people are the same kind of narcissists.
But this thing with animals, man, these creatures are being mistreated.
They really are.
And they need to be set free.
They need to be given places where they can roam free like us, like human beings.
All right.
We'll be back tomorrow with the mailbag.
Get your questions in.
I'll answer as many as I can and poof, your life will be perfect.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This 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.
You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.