Kayleigh McEnany’s viral "samurai sword" satire sparks Andrew Clavin’s defense of Trump-era press battles, framing mask mandate clashes as autonomy vs. government overreach while citing $6T economic rebounds under Trump. He accuses media of ignoring "ObamaGate" leaks and dismisses Biden’s "you ain’t black" gaffe as trivial, contrasting it with systemic racial critiques via The Age of Entitlement. Harvard’s Arthur Brooks counters with a happiness-focused conservatism—prioritizing family, faith, and work over political extremism—while warning divisions stem from misplaced focus. The episode blends media bias rants with a call for values-driven solutions, ending with DailyWire’s subscription pitch and a swipe at leftist hypocrisy. [Automatically generated summary]
Over Memorial Day, as America paid tribute to those heroes who fought and died so that Gretchen Whitmer could become the fascist queen of Michigan, a controversy broke out over Donald Trump's new press secretary, Kaylee McEnenny.
At a press conference with journalists and other Democrats, Ms. McEnenny was asked what time it was, whereupon she drew a samurai sword and in a series of motions too swift for the human eye to record, she dismembered the entire White House press corps, leaving them a mere collection of bleeding torsos writhing and shrieking wordlessly on the floor, which actually raised the intelligence level of their questions.
Ms. McEnenny then lifted a flamethrower and reduced what was left of the journalists to a pile of ashes that blew out the window into the rose garden where they acted as mulch, thus performing a useful function for the first time in their lives.
Chris Wallace of Fox News said Ms. McEnany had overreacted, saying, quote, back in my day when the press corps was interrupting Ronald Reagan's struggle against the Soviet slave empire by calling him a warmonger and an idiot actor, we would not have allowed anyone to suggest we were a bunch of biased and intellectually corrupt enemies of truth and decency, no matter how true it was.
Now, when the press corps is covering up for a senile hologram who hasn't spoken an honest word in decades and then shouting meaningless insults at the president during a crisis, I find it intolerable that we've been caught in the act, unquote.
In another incident, a reporter questioned the president's demand that governors allow houses of worship to reopen, whereupon Ms. McEnenny raised her staff and unleashed a series of plagues on the entire journalistic community.
Blithering Prevarication III, the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, a former newspaper, said the action was completely uncalled for.
He then continued to Arlington Cemetery, where he and the rest of the Times staff spent Memorial Day spitting on the graves.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm for hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
Ship-shaped, ipsy-topsy, the world is a-biddy-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray, it makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we're back for those few of you who survived a long, long, clavin-less weekend.
You can always go on my YouTube channel.
We've now got 45,000 subscribers.
We want to get that up to 50,000 if we can, maybe by the end of the week, even though it's a short week.
Let's do it.
We're watching your comments.
We have one today from Dangerous Spaces.
Dear Mr. Clavin, over the last couple of weeks, you have compared Brian Stelter to a woman multiple times.
The comparison is highly offensive.
No woman has ever become as hysterical, emotional, or irrational as Brian Stelter does during almost every single show.
Please consider retracting this unfair comparison.
Well, let me issue a clarification.
There he is.
Let me issue a clarification.
I have oftentimes said that feminists have put women in the position of, instead of being great women, they turn them into second-rate men.
And I think the problem with Brian Stelter is that he's a second-rate woman.
He's not like a woman woman, right?
It's always a problem.
Anyway, let's talk about the fact that over the long weekend, listen, I couldn't help noticing this.
I don't know if you saw this.
I was on social media.
There was a lot of rage and tension and hostility, people calling each other terrible things.
And I think as we continue to reopen the country and summer comes and we all want to get outdoors, there's going to be some nerves and tension that exacerbate our disagreements.
This is the way things work at the end of a crisis.
That's when the real tensions break.
Chief among our disagreements is the disagreement about where ultimate decision-making power should reside in these United States of America.
For instance, if wearing a mask in a crowded store might protect someone you don't know is vulnerable from a disease you may not know you have, I don't think it's a threat to your constitutional freedoms or your human dignity to ask you to put on a mask.
On the other hand, if a half-wit putz of a mayor or governor starts threatening you with police action, if you don't mask yourself every time you step outside, that's an abuse of power, which actually is a threat to your freedom and dignity.
Likewise, if crowding into a house of worship might entail a certain uptick in danger, you should be warned about that.
But clearly, it's up to you whether you want to risk that danger, just like it's up to you whether you want to smoke or overeat.
There are elevated health dangers out there right now, but the potential emergency of overwhelmed hospitals is past.
It's not up to politicians or the press whether we risk our health.
It's up to us.
This idea that power resides in the individual is the core idea we are fighting over right now across the board.
I believe in charity.
I believe the government taking my money and giving it to someone else is not charity and reduces charity.
I oppose racism, but I believe the government forcing me to hire someone or associate with someone I don't want to does nothing to stop racism and, in fact, makes it worse.
The left has managed the trick of making people think we are immoral because we oppose the government forcing their morality on us.
But that is a damned lie.
We on the right should focus on the real argument, which is not what's right and wrong.
It's who decides.
All right, we got the mailbag tomorrow.
And as I said, if you want to embed a video of you asking your question briefly in the mailbag, we will use that video.
But of course, if you don't want to do that, if you're asking a personal question, you don't have to do it.
But go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, the Andrew Clavin podcast, the mailbag button, and I will answer all your questions about anything you want to ask.
All my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
Will they change it for the better?
Don't be foolish.
Let's talk about brushing your teeth.
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My dentist, my oral hygienist told me that you've got to use these electric toothbrushes, and quip is a one you can travel with.
It's convenient, it's comfortable, it looks good.
But that doesn't help you to know how to spell Clavin.
You know how to spell quip, but clavin is K-L-A-V-A-N.
I just make it look this easy.
So, there really, you know, this really is something that happens to people.
You have a crisis, you kind of knuckle down, you say, okay, I'm going to deal with this.
And then, just as the thing is starting to lift, just as the crisis is starting to lift, that's when you kill your wife, okay?
That's when you suddenly lose it.
Administration Scandal Revelations00:11:29
And I really think that's what's happening to people.
Here's a video that went viral in Staten Island.
A woman walked into a grocery store without a mask and the masked customers ganged up on her.
Get out.
Yeah, don't ask women to act like a dirty kid.
What do you think?
We couldn't play a lot of that because they were cursing at her.
This is the thing.
Staten Island is the closest thing New York has to Trump country.
It's a conservative, it's the conservative borough.
This is not a political thing.
But it is funny that when people force you to do things, when the government forces you to do things, you're much more likely to get this kind of anger and rage coming up.
Whereas if you put a sign up and somebody in the store says, listen, please, when you come in, it's a closed space, use a mask.
People are much more likely to do it.
And so this is the kind of thing where I hate to see people going online and declaring that this is like the Boston Tea Party, that wearing a mask is a question of freedom.
That's not the question.
The question is who decides and how it's enforced and what we're going to do about it.
When you have a place in LA where they actually issue a diktat that if you walk outside without a mask, you're going to be subject to arrest.
That's a problem.
That's a real problem because it's an abuse of power, but it's not the mask.
And we really should need to clarify that.
Meanwhile, there's some really good signs.
The economy is starting to come back.
The Democrats are very worried about this.
They've been told that this could be, you know, remember, you get the news here first, right?
You get tomorrow's news today.
And I told you that when the economy comes back, it's going to become roaring back.
And one of the top economists in the Obama administration, Jason Fuhrman, has said we're about to see the best economic data we've seen in the history of this country.
And he says when he was asked about the level of concern among top Democrats, he said they are very, very concerned that the economy will come back.
So that's where the real divisions are.
You know, the real divisions are the blue states are doing poorly because they have too much lockdown, too many restrictions.
It's the red states that are doing well, and that's going to count in the next election.
But let's talk about the thing that really got me over this weekend.
A moment when two people I actually like and one I like and admire very much went after Kaylee McEnene.
Kaylee was asked, she's the new press secretary and she has been just ripping the press to pieces.
And she gave them a lecture about the questions they're not asking about ObamaGate.
This is cut number five.
Let's listen to that.
I would like to lay out a series of questions and perhaps if I write them out in a slide format, maybe we're visual learners and you guys will follow up with journalistic curiosity.
So number one, why did the Obama administration use opposition research funded by a political organization and filled with foreign dirt to surveil members of the Trump campaign?
Number two, why was Lieutenant General Michael Flynn unmasked?
Not by the Intel community entirely, but by Obama's chief of staff, by the former vice president Joe Biden, by Susan Rice, by the Treasury Secretary.
I mean, this is extraordinary.
And, you know, if it were political appointees in the Trump administration, I can guarantee you I'd have questions in my inbox right now, but apparently Obama's spokesperson does not.
Why was Flynn's identity leaked in a criminal act?
It is a criminal act to leak the identity of Michael Flynn to the press, but it happened.
Yeah, no kidding.
So I want to just make it clear that I'm talking about Chris Wallace, who does, he does a pretty fair job on Fox.
He does, you know, when he interviews people.
I don't always like his interview style.
I don't like the fact that he cuts people off all the time, but he gives it to both sides pretty evenly.
He didn't like this.
And so I just want to make it clear that I'm not hating on these people, but I'm strongly disagreeing here, okay?
So Chris Wallace didn't like this, and he went after Kaylee McEnany.
This cut too.
First of all, it's not extraordinary.
Unmasking is pretty routine, the effort by people in an administration to find out who a masked American person is.
It happens in the Trump White House.
It happened, I think, 16,000 times the year before last.
What's a crime is leaking it, but unmasking isn't.
In addition to which, I have to say that if Kaylee McEnany had told Sam Donaldson and me what questions we should ask, that would not have gone well.
So this is wrong on so many levels, okay?
It's wrong on so many levels.
First of all, to dismiss ObamaGate at this point as just normal unmasking, when the vice president of the United States is unmasking a guy something like eight days before he leaves office, when there is now evidence that the Obama administration at least considered withholding information from the incoming from the incoming administration on Russia over an idea that Trump had colluded with Russia that had already been exploded, that they already knew was utter nonsense.
This is a problem.
And when Trump taking hydroxychloroquine is a scandal, when him playing golf on the weekend is a scandal, when him putting on his tie or saying hello or saying this instead of that is a scandal, this is a scandal.
And the fact that it's not being covered is a genuine problem.
Let me just read you some of the things that people won Pulitzer Prizes for in 2017, all right?
Officials, this went to the New York Times and Washington Post staff for what?
For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, which were non-existent.
So this is what they gave to the Pulitzer Prize for.
Officials say Flynn discussed sanctions.
White House received warning about Flynn.
FBI was a pay author of Trump dossier.
Sessions spoke twice to Russian envoy.
In other words, they gave the New York Times and the Washington Post Pulitzer Prizes for running interference for the intelligence committee, which had misbehaved in their investigation of Michael Flynn and the Obama and the Trump incoming Trump administration and the Trump campaign.
At the very least, they misbehaved.
At the very least, they got FISA warrants they shouldn't have gotten to listen in on Americans and then leaked information to the press, which dutifully recorded that information as if it were sourced news story instead of a leak to protect the butts of the misbehaving intelligence community.
And you got a Pulitzer Prize for that.
And then you're telling me that Kaylee McInenney shouldn't be lecturing the press about what they cover.
Plus, Sam Donaldson, who used to scream at Ronald Reagan, and he used to do the thing that now they do at CNN, where they just yell at the president.
And this is after the Jimmy Carter administration, which damn near drove the country into the ground, which was almost a form of form of suicide, of Western civilization suicide.
They're going to tell me that this is a problem, that she is going after them?
No.
And the reason he's wrong here is because he's thinking about how it affects the press.
Well, we wouldn't let that happen.
I would stand on my dignity.
I would stand on my honor as a reporter.
It's not about him.
It's about the country.
It's about the people they're reporting to who have no voice while he's sitting there with a microphone and talking to people.
She's speaking for the people that the press as a unit will not speak for.
And Jonah Goldberg, whom I love, I love him as a person.
I love him as a writer.
He's a wonderful journalist, a wonderful observer of the political scene.
His book, Liberal Fascism, changed the game in political discussions.
He's an important conservative thinker, but he hates Donald Trump, and he sees this as an extension of the Trump regime.
This is Jonah talking about this.
And by the way, I'm inviting him on the show to talk about this with me because I just seriously disagree with him.
Deeply as I love him, truly, personally and politically, I seriously disagree with him on this.
This is Cut Three.
I think her behavior is indefensible and grotesque.
And I think that what she has done is she is, you know, there's this cliché in Washington that President Trump wants a Roy Cohn as DOJ as the at that head as his attorney general.
Donald Trump wants and a press secretary is a Twitter troll who goes on attack, doesn't actually care about doing the job they have, and instead wants to impress really an audience of one and make another part of official Washington another one of these essentially cable news and Twitter gladiatorial arenas.
And it's a sign of the defining of deviancy down in our politics, and it's only going to make things worse.
You're wrong.
Here's why.
No, this is a real problem because if Kaylee McInenney is a Tritter Twitter troll, so is the entire press corps.
So is the entire press corps.
The questions they have been shouting during the Chinese virus briefings have just been troll questions.
They were not gathering information.
They were gotcha questions.
There were 2020 hindsight questions.
There were questions with no backing in facts.
And again, again, it's not about Donald Trump.
This is the thing.
It's not about the press and it's not about Donald Trump.
It is about half the country who has no voice.
They elected Trump.
They voted for Trump because they had no voice, because no one was listening to them.
No one, including the Republican establishment.
You know, this is the question that I've been asking myself.
I did not like Trump.
I voted for him because I could see it was obvious that he was a better choice than Hillary Clinton and there were only two choices.
So I voted for him.
I thought I think he's done an actually very, very good job.
It doesn't make him personally attractive.
He's been tweeting things over the weekend.
He too has been tweeting things over the weekend that I wanted to slap him upside the head for because they were politically stupid, not because of what he was saying, but because they were politically stupid and we need him to win.
However, however, from the very start, I asked myself, well, why did people vote for him?
Why, when the great, wise, powerful Andrew Clavin, who's always right, was saying that this is a bad guy, why did people decide no, he would do well and why did they turn out to be right?
And I think the thing is, is the establishment had lost touch with the American people.
Nothing, nothing the establishment was talking about, even the right-wing establishment, had anything to do with the heart of the American people and what was bothering them.
People were killing themselves in this country.
They're doing it again now.
They were slaughtering themselves because they had lost their jobs, because they had lost their communities.
And the left and the right, both, the media especially, were acting like it wasn't a problem, like it wasn't happening.
When you are part of a corrupt institution and the press is now a thoroughly corrupt institution, it's in a cycle of corruption.
It's in a cycle of corruption.
And we saw this, you know, there were a bunch of articles about the press over the weekend, and all of them mentioned Tara Reid because either they're all listening to my show or I'm just that far ahead of them.
But the Tara Reid story is the defining story of the media.
The fact that you can make an accusation against Joe Biden and have it treated with suspicion, and you can make an accusation against a conservative Supreme Court justice and have it the most hysterical, give it the most hysterical war has been declared coverage on earth.
Crazy Preparedness00:02:23
That can't be.
That can't be.
It cannot be that the institution of the press represents one half the country and the comedians on TV represent one half the country and the movies that are made represents one half the country.
What the hell do you think is going to happen?
What the hell do you think is going to happen?
And then you sit around scratching your chin and say, why are we divided?
Why is everybody so angry?
Why are people screaming at each other in stores?
We should be screaming at the press.
We should all be Kayleigh McAnenney.
Every single one of us, instead of screaming at one another, because we could get together and agree and compromise, we should all be screaming at the press because the division is their fault.
All right, let us talk about ready.
You know, one of the things about these conservative, crazy conservative shows like this one is we're always predicting some disaster where everybody's going to be locked in his house and you won't be able to get food.
You won't be able to get the things you need and the government won't be able to help you.
When has that ever happened?
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There are no easy things.
So now you've got this brilliant thing from Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's Speech Struggle00:15:35
Every time, you know, the polls show Joe Biden leading Trump, although the battleground polls are still very close.
And it's amazing.
How long, how long, oh Lord, are they going to keep this poor man locked up in the basement?
I mean, that's got to be their strategy because every time they bring him out, the guy cannot speak.
He cannot get the words out and he just makes a fool of himself.
And he even, you know, he was out for Memorial Day.
He went out and left a wreath on one of the memorials.
And even the way he walks, there's something wrong.
You know, I'm just telling you from my observation, there's something wrong with the guy.
I said this about Hillary when she was falling down and fainting and coughing all the time.
And, you know, I'm not saying it's to be mean, although it is kind of mean, but the guy is not ready to be president of the United States.
The guy is not in a condition to be president of the United States.
He's leading the polls.
He went on with a black radio guy, talk show host, and this is what he said as a cut 10.
Listen, you got to come see us when you come to New York, VP Biden.
I will.
It's a long way until November.
We got more questions.
You got more questions.
But I tell you, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump and you ain't black.
Charlemagne the God.
Is that the guy who's name?
So if you have a trouble figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, you ain't black.
And Joe Biden, and we know, I mean, look, it is fair.
Joe Biden is the man who determines who's black in this country.
You do, you know, not everybody knows this.
You have to pass by him if you want to be a black person.
You have to pass by, and he says, yes, you are black.
And you say, well, you know, I might vote for Trump.
No, sorry, you ain't black.
He walked it back.
Listen to what he said when he walked it back.
Okay, I know that the comments have come off like I was taking the African-American vote for granted.
Oh, really?
But nothing could be further from the truth.
I've never ever done that, and I've earned it every time I've run.
I was making the point that I've never taken the vote for granted.
And in fact, I know in order to win the presidency, I need the African-American vote.
And it was the driving force, as I said in the beginning of my campaign a year ago, to my being able to win in the first place and win the primary.
And it is going to be critical to my winning the presidency.
Did you hear the words, I'm sorry I said that in there?
I didn't hear those words.
But you'd think this didn't matter to the Democrats.
They came on in force to defend him and to announce that his apology, which I didn't hear, that his apology was enough.
It was a make-believe.
It was an invisible, silent apology, but it was enough.
It was there.
It was, what can I say?
It was an ideal apology, an ideal apology.
It didn't exist in the real world, but the idea of it was in the mind of God, and therefore that he's in the clear.
This is cut seven.
He apologized.
He clarified.
He said he shouldn't have been so cavalier.
But we need to move on to talk about the issues and what's really at stake here.
The vice president shouldn't have said it.
He apologized for it.
But I really think the gall and the nerve of President Trump.
I believe that Joe Biden was incorrect in saying the statement, you ain't black.
But I also believe that his apology was sufficient.
That apology was given quickly.
He was saying, I'm sorry, I was being too cavalier.
I apologize.
To his credit, Joe Biden recognized within minutes that he had gotten carried away.
I think he has apologized, and he should have apologized.
It was like, you know, one of those jokes that just falls flat.
It's almost the end of the interview, and you need to understand the context.
I mean, Biden made an error.
He apologized for it.
And just move up.
I mean, we can obsess on this, but this is, in the scheme of things, this is not going to mount to diddly squat.
That's why they're all talking about it.
But they immediately, they covered it for something like four minutes, and then they were done.
They just stopped covering it, so it'll go away.
The New York Times obviously panicked, a former newspaper, and they just panicked.
They had inside the dizzying efforts to pitch Trump to black voters, dizzying, because how could you possibly pitch Trump to black voters just because he virtually eliminated black unemployment before the virus hit and could do it again after we start to reopen unless Biden wins the election, in which case blacks are screwed.
You know they are.
I mean, the Democrats have never been able.
You know, Joe Biden has said the charter schools will be gone.
The only hope blacks have of getting out of poverty is education, and they're not going to get it from the public schools as long as the public schools are under the heel of the teachers' unions.
So it's only from the right that they're going to get help.
But here's their headline.
Inside the Disney efforts to pitch Trump to black voters, Joe Biden's You Ain't Black gaffe was immediate grist for an online show called Black Voices for Trump, but its cast of Trump advisors routinely ignores the president's history of divisive remarks.
Ooh, here's the problem with this, okay?
New York Times correspondent Nicole Hannah Jones, this is the woman who engineered the false dishonest 1619 project, right?
And who pulls the race card whenever anybody objects to anything she does, but she has got this dishonest thing that's going out there like the Howard Zinn book, selling anti-American propaganda to schools.
She said, she went out and sent a tweet saying, well, there's a difference between being politically black and being racially black.
I'm not defending anyone, but we all know this and should stop pretending.
She later deleted the tweet because she said it wasn't clearly written because it told the truth.
If I had would have obfuscated if I had known what I was doing.
Jamel Hill of The Atlantic, the issue wasn't what Joe Biden said because it was accurate.
It was accurate.
The issue was that it came from Biden.
It also was clearly a joke that didn't land.
But I'm wondering where all this outrage was yesterday when you all president declared his public devotion to a Nazi sympathizer.
See, here's the problem.
We have a problem in this country.
It's not actually a race problem.
It's a freedom problem.
Races have problems, and the black, we'll call them African-American.
I hate that phrase.
Let's call them black Americans.
Black Americans have a special set of problems that is long-lasting and entrenched.
And one of the problems we have on the right is that the left describes some of those problems more realistically than we do.
When a black person says, you know, there's such a thing as white privilege.
I believe that.
When he says police treat me differently than they treat you.
I believe that too.
I may think there are different reasons for those things than you do, but still, I'm not going to deny your experience.
I mean, I'm not talking about that lived experience, which is just any phony thing you happen to say.
I'm talking about the real experience of actual human beings who are our fellow Americans who are telling us that things are bothering them that we on the right should listen to.
I'm willing to listen to that.
The question is, how can we solve those problems with freedom and maintain our freedom?
And the reason that's a question is because if you want in on America, if what you're saying is America isn't including you, it's not inclusive, you want to be included in America, not in something that's no longer America because in including you, we destroyed it, right?
That doesn't make any sense.
So when the left tells us, oh, you know, you have to give up your right to association.
You have to hire who we say you have to hire.
You no longer own your business and control your business if we deem that you have some kind of racial animus going on.
We now control your business and what you should do with your business, which is essentially what has happened.
That's not good.
It's not good for black people.
So in other words, just because the left describes an injustice that might exist doesn't mean the answer is what the left says it is, okay?
So this is a really important thing.
The problem between white conservatives, or maybe all conservatives, and let's say the mainstream of black opinion is not about racism.
We all agree that's wrong.
I mean, those people who don't agree with it are wrong or out of the civilized conversation.
That's not the point.
We all agree that the racism is wrong.
What we don't agree on is how you help people without damaging freedom.
Because what good is it to you?
What good is it to you to get full inclusion in an America that's not America anymore?
And that's the argument we've been having since the 1960s.
You know, it's that wonderful book we had Christopher Caldwell on, and he's got this wonderful book that I've just started.
Oh, I'm a chunk into it now, called The Age of Entitlement, where he talks about the fact that the civil rights laws that went into place destroyed some of the rights in the Constitution and now constitute a parallel constitution that cannot be melded with the Constitution that originally got us to where we got, right, to the heights of greatness that we actually did reach in the 60s and 70s.
And so the fact that blacks said, you know, we were excluded from that, that was true, right?
That was true.
The fact that blacks say, well, still, there's prejudice against us, still we have terrible problems in our communities, we all know that's the case.
And I think that too often we on the right say, well, you know, if you just, you know, don't have kids out of wedlock and you just go to school and you just do this, you know, in a completely dysfunctional neighborhood where your parents aren't there and the schools are crap and the gangs are out there, the only place you can belong, that's not that easy to do.
So right-wingers have to listen.
We have to listen to blacks, but the fact that the solutions on the left are wrong is an argument we have to make because Joe Biden was revealing something about the way they feel.
They feel that if you're black, you vote Democrat.
We know, we know that that is incorrect.
All right, we've got Arthur Brooks coming up in just a second, but first, you have got the, you know, do you have your leftist tears tumbler?
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Coming up, Arthur Brooks.
All right.
Arthur Brooks is professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Arthur C. Patterson, faculty fellow at the Harvard Business School.
His new podcast is called The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks, launched in April.
It's a companion project to his new bi-weekly column in the Atlantic called How to Build a Life.
Arthur, thanks for coming on.
It's good to see you.
Good to see you, T. How are you, sir?
I am doing very well.
You know, I saw what I think was your maiden speech when you were president of the American Enterprise Institute.
And I actually came up to you afterwards and told you that I thought you were going to be a big deal, which you have become.
And, you know, one of the things I've noticed, I mean, you've entered the public scene is essentially as a conservative, but you have a different voice than a lot of conservatives, and you seem to be moving into something more general.
Are you leaving the conservative fold or are you trying to reinvent it?
Well, the truth is, my views are my views, like yours.
I mean, you've had all kinds of different careers.
You're very, very well known as a writer.
I mean, not as a conservative writer, but as a writer.
I mean, I started my career as a French horn player.
I played in the symphony orchestra for a long time.
And, you know, the truth is, I came to conservative politics because poverty is the thing I care about the most.
And, you know, my concern for poverty, like yours, you know, you talk about this a lot, is that I have a sense of solidarity and love for my brothers and sisters, particularly those who have less power than me.
And, you know, when I think about it, it's rooted in what I want, which is the best life for everybody.
The reason I do a lot of work on happiness, and in point of fact, I'm a PhD social scientist.
My area of expertise is happiness and love.
You know, my politics are my politics.
And one of the reasons that I actually hold the politics that I do is that I believe that most traditional American conservative ideas are a better way of showing solidarity for people at the margins.
It's to hold them up in the bonds of dignity.
You know, my wife's an immigrant.
I came from a family that didn't have very much money, like a lot of people in this country.
And I recognize that when people say, I'm an asset, not a liability, it's just what you were talking about before the break, that I'm an asset in the human family, not a liability to be managed by the government.
I have more dignity.
I have less despair.
And that has everything to do with happiness.
Is there something right now?
I mean, I was watching over the weekend on social media and there's this level of rage out there right now, which is typical of human beings.
As a crisis is ending, that's when they kind of let go a little bit and some of the pressure comes out.
Is there something in politics itself, just the very act of politics, that is antithetical to happiness?
I mean, can you be a political person and a happy person at the same time?
Yeah, you know, it's a great question.
It's such a great question.
And, you know, I thought about this a lot.
I've actually done a little research on this.
And one of the things that I've found is that the more time you spend paying attention to politics, the less actually informed you're going to be.
You will know less if you spend more time reading about politics.
I know it's paradoxical, but the reason is because you'll be stuck on websites and you'll be stuck on cable news where you're being indoctrinated.
You're actually not being informed very well.
That's number one.
Number two, the more time you spend paying attention to politics, the more obnoxious you'll become, even to people who agree with you.
And so people who are just really super into politics, nobody likes to have them around.
And number three, you will become less happy.
There's a huge reason not to be in the 5% fringes on either the right or the left.
Look, you and I have our views.
We agree on a lot of stuff.
But the point is, let's stay in the 90%, man.
That's the life in life.
Let's hang out with people who want to talk about baseball and they want to talk about their kids and not about politics all the time.
It's just so boring and it rips us apart.
You know, let me play devil's advocate here because I know what a lot of people think when you talk like this.
And, you know, the activists on the left have a lot of power.
The people, the activists on the right, the people, the 5% on the right tend to be in the comments section of the Breitbart website, where the far left tends to be in Congress and sometimes in the White House.
And especially in the media, especially in the media.
So what people feel is they feel like, hey, I can't turn on a late night comic without hearing my political views insulted.
I can't pick up the New York Times.
I can't watch network news without hearing my political views insulted.
American Spirit00:08:34
I send my kid to college.
I scraped and saved to send my kid to college and he's taught that America is a terrible country.
And then you tell me that I'm the one who's not supposed to fight back, right?
Is there some way to engage with the activists and yet remain in touch with the mainstream?
I mean, I really do believe that 70% of the people in this country could agree on 70% of the issues, which is a pretty good number.
Is there a way to engage with those people and yet fight back against the sort of wave of the extreme left?
Yeah, I think there is, actually.
And the way to do it is not by using our values as a cudgel, but to rather to use our values as a gift.
You know, people do this all the time.
I have these deeply held values and I use them as a weapon.
Well, you've eviscerated the value of your values.
I mean, unless they're a gift, look, I consider the things that I think politically and religiously.
I mean, I have deeply held views.
Man, these are my gift to you if I share them with you.
If I beat you over the head, look, nobody in history has ever been insulted into agreement.
And we do not have coercive power over each other.
I mean, people are like, I'm going to win the Senate.
I'm going to win the House.
I'm going to win the White House.
I'm going to pack the Supreme Court.
And we're going to have 100 years.
It's not going to happen.
That's not the way the system is set up.
We got to persuade each other.
And we only persuade each other with love.
It's the only way it's ever happened.
And it's the only way it ever will.
You know, I agree with what you're saying.
I really understand what you're saying.
Let's talk about happiness.
You know, happiness is always a kind of strange thing.
Whenever I read polls about happiness, I'm always thinking, well, I'm happy on good days and I'm not that happy on bad days.
Is that what you're talking about?
Are you talking about the happiness that comes and goes?
Are you talking about something deeper?
It's something deeper than that.
I mean, it's basically what's the term of art for those of us who are social scientists is subjective well-being.
And that means basically I say, hey, you know, you got good days and you got bad days, but all things considered, how happy would you say about your life?
And it's incredibly stable and, you know, it actually can measure a lot.
And that's really what I'm talking about.
You find that most people are pretty happy.
About a third are very happy about their lives and about 20% are not happy about their lives and everybody else is somewhere in the middle.
But it's stable and it's predictable and we can actually study it.
So what's the art of happiness?
I mean, you've got a new podcast.
It's about happiness.
What can we learn?
What can an ordinary person do?
Is there something I can do when I wake up in the morning that actually will increase my chance of being happy?
For sure.
For sure.
Now, the first thing is that a lot of people think they have more control over their happiness than they do.
50% of your happiness is genetic.
Sorry.
I wish it weren't true.
It's actually kind of.
Your mother did make you unhappy.
And then the other half is split between circumstances and habits.
Now, people are always trying to mess with their circumstances.
If I get that girl to marry me, if I can get my bachelor's degree, if I can get into law school, if I can get that promotion, then I'll finally be happy.
Wrong.
That stuff is transitory.
It doesn't last.
Circumstances, good and bad, they bum you out or they make you happy in the very, very short term, but they never last.
And the reason is for something that we call in the social science world homeostasis, which is to say, we have to readjust back to our baseline or we go insane.
The part that you can really manipulate to change your happiness permanently is the other part, which is your habits.
And there are four things.
They're basically four accounts into which you need to put a deposit every day.
So I'll slow down here because people listening to us, they need to get out the pencil right now.
If you actually, in my column, How to Build a Life in the Atlantic, I write about this.
So you can go back and look at it.
So don't write it down.
Just listen to us.
So there are four things, four accounts: faith, family, friendship, and work.
And the work part has to have only two characteristics.
It's not money.
It's not fame.
It's not power.
It's earning your success and serving others.
That's it.
And that means earning your success is accomplishment.
That's the reason that capitalism is the best.
It's because it's the best system that allows people to earn their success, but you also have to serve others, just making a bunch of money or exploiting other people or cheating other people.
It doesn't work.
So faith, and a lot of people neglect that, right?
But faith does not necessarily mean my faith.
I'm a Catholic.
I recommend it to everybody, but it's not the only one.
You have to have a sense of the transcendental, something bigger than you.
Why?
Because my focus on me, it's so boring.
I need something that's bigger, a way that I can serve.
Second is family.
And we all define that in different ways, but we know what it means.
Third is friendship.
Now, you and I, you know, we're these, you know, we say, you know, I'm 56.
How old are you?
65.
Good for you, man.
You look good.
You got the same haircut as me.
It's awesome.
Anyway, so we're effectively the same age.
The loneliest people in America are 60-year-old men, 60% of whom say their best friend is their wife.
Now, here's the bad part.
Here's the bad news.
Only 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband.
The loneliest people in America are the people who don't cultivate the skill of friendship, which is deposit account number three.
And the last is work.
So at the end of each day, we should do this little examination of conscience.
And this is a direct answer to your question.
What can everybody listening to us do today to improve their happiness?
Get to the end of the day with a little checklist.
Did I put stuff in my faith account, my family account, my friendship account, and my work account?
And it shouldn't all be in the work account.
And if we do that, we've got the best shot at living the best life and the happiest life possible.
Let me ask you the last question.
When you look at the country right now, the division seems so great.
The rage seems so intense.
Are you hopeful for your country right at this minute?
Yeah, I'm always hopeful.
Sometimes I'm not optimistic, but I'm always hopeful because there's something that can be done and we can do them.
I mean, that's the American spirit.
You know, that's the spirit.
I mean, I'm going to guess that the Clavins didn't come here as landed gentry.
You know, they were probably trying to get some God-forsnaken shtetl in Central Europe or something.
Lord Clavin, Lord Clavin of Shrewsbury.
You know, it's like, it's like Oral of Brooks.
Not likely.
Anyway, the point is, you know, we come to this country because we can do something about our problems because that's what America is all about.
The entrepreneurial spirit is to look at problems and see opportunities.
That's how we're different than every other country.
Right now with a coronavirus epidemic and people at their throats in terms of politics and all of these problems that we seem to have, these are the opportunities for true social and spiritual and cultural and financial entrepreneurs.
This is the time for everybody listening to us to say, what's my opportunity right now, not just what's the problem?
Excellent.
Listen, remind me of the name of your podcast again and where can we find it?
The podcast is on any place through you find your fine podcasts.
It's through Ricochet Audio Network and it's called The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks.
It's four editions in and it's going really well.
And the column is called How to Build a Life with The Atlantic.
Arthur, thanks so much for coming on.
Come back again.
I'd like to talk to you more.
I'd love to.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
We have run out of time.
I went a little long there because I was fascinated in what we were talking about.
I hope you were too.
But we will be back tomorrow.
Tomorrow is Mailbag Day.
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