Andrew Clavin’s Trump and the Freedom Agenda argues the right must abandon reactive politics, exposing how leftist media, corporations (like Apple), and Hollywood enable authoritarian regimes—such as China’s Uyghur abuses—while suppressing dissent. He ties liberty to Judeo-Christian traditions, condemns the 1619 Project’s revisionism, and accuses elites of weaponizing cancel culture while ignoring conservative views on free speech and abortion. The episode urges a proactive "liberty agenda," boycotting complicit brands, and recommends Shapiro’s How to Destroy America as a counter to leftist strategies. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Biden has announced that if he's elected president, he will call for $7 trillion in new spending on some damn thing or other.
In a speech delivered to a cobweb that had developed between a corner of the basement ceiling and his forehead, Biden announced the bold plan entitled, Marching Toward a Brave You Know the Thing.
Biden told a passing pair of legs at the basement window that the enduring problems caused by systemic whatever have caused a continued decline in America's ability to do that stuff he'd been talking about before his attention drifted last week, or maybe it was back in March.
Biden said he wasn't willing to settle for the sort of small measures that had been used by that other guy, or even the guy before him, or maybe it was after him because he was no longer sure which guy he'd been talking about, but it was the one who took the small measures that he wasn't willing to settle for in order to cure whatever problem it was he'd been addressing.
And while new spending of $7 trillion would definitely mean a large rise in taxes that would bring the economy to a standstill, it would be worth it for the change it would bring about in the absolutely crucial area that he may have been referring to, unless he meant something else.
Biden said he hoped to spend at least four of the $7 trillion on day one of his presidency before his nap.
In later remarks to a stain on the basement wall that sometimes looked like a spider and other times seemed more to resemble those elephant-like nightmares from the Winnie the Pooh stories, Biden said he would continue to be his own man unless he was someone else's and would not be pressured to do anything he remembered not wanting to do unless he forgot and did it anyway.
The news media hailed the new spending plan, saying it would be absolutely terrific by the time they finished it.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Birds are winging also singing hunky dunky doom.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back among you for a special Friday edition of the show.
We've got, I hope you're going to go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
It's my channel, my specific channel.
We've already got 82,000 subscribers.
We want to push it to 90.
We'd like to do it over this weekend.
That means you.
That means if you are an American and a human being of integrity and know how to use a computer, you should be subscribing.
And if you leave a comment and it's halfway intelligent, we will put it on this show as a way of raising the conversation level.
We have one today from Charles Lutzaus.
He says, as I saw time tick down at the end of yesterday's episode, a feeling of creeping dread began to accumulate at the pit of my stomach as I knew the Clavenless weekend would soon be upon me.
But then Hark, our shiny-headed sage, announced the good news.
A special Friday edition would be held at that very moment.
And not a second later, I expelled that dread from my body like the malodorous flatulence that it was.
I'm glad to hear that, and I'm glad I was nowhere near you at the time.
One of the great disadvantages of having ceded the power of communication to the left is that we're always on defense.
Because the left owns the news media, the entertainment media, and the academy, what I call the empire of lies.
They set the agenda and all we can do is fight back.
We think we're winning when we repulse their attacks, but you can't win on defense.
That they will keep coming back again and again until they win the point, even if it takes half a century.
They've done it before.
They'll do it again.
Take the subject of race, for example.
Why are we even talking about it?
As I keep saying, race is not a problem in this country.
A violent underclass, too often black, created and sustained by Democrat policies.
That's the problem.
Instead of babbling about police reform, we should be talking about education, marriage, and responsibility.
We never do it.
They always win the agenda.
The right has been dogged and creative enough to fight each leftist lie as it pops up.
We've been so successful, in fact, that Google and Twitter have to censor us to give the lies a chance to breathe.
But we spend all our time fighting on the left's territory, never establishing territory of our own.
Instead of debating nonsense race theories or nonsense gender theories or nonsense economic theories, we should be setting the topic ourselves.
And that topic should be liberty, not libertarianism, not capitalism, not even Christianity.
Liberty, the absolute right of each person to go his own way.
If liberty is not the first good, why was slavery wrong?
If liberty is not the first good, what are the complaints of gays or blacks or women or anyone?
What are they complaining about?
If liberty is not the first good, nothing the left says makes sense.
If liberty is the first good, nothing they say works.
Why is liberty essential?
How is it achieved?
How is it maintained?
Where did it spring up in history and why did it die?
Why did the founders create government in the shape they did?
Those are the things we should be talking about in the context of every problem that comes up.
Until the right has the power to set a positive liberty agenda centered on liberty, we will be winning the debate, but losing the country.
I'm going to talk more about this today since it's a special Friday edition.
I want to kind of reflect about this and maybe hope that you will write me and give me your thoughts because I think this is something that we have to do.
And when I talk to people, they don't understand how to move forward in a positive way.
We're so used to being on defense.
But let's first talk about something really positive, which is rockauto.com.
Not only is it a great service to get you the car parts you need straight from your computer, but while you're doing it, you also get to say rockauto.com.
If you're talking to your wife, you say, hey, honey, I'm going on rockauto.com.
Watch her reaction.
You will be so pleased.
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices on car parts.
They don't change prices based on what the market will bear.
So why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
Why drive your broken car down to the shop and have somebody else look on the computer when you can do it yourself?
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
The catalog is incredibly easy.
The prices are always low.
It's an amazing selection.
All the parts your car will ever need.
And you get to say rockauto.com.
So 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 I also want you to say Klavin the same way you say rock auto, Clavin, and then you have to know how to spell Klavin.
It's K-L-A.
I have been getting a lot of letters because I've attacked Ayn Rand.
And I attack Ayn Rand because she's a sociopath and she basically was really, really smart about socialism.
A lot of the stuff she said about socialism you can find in Bastiat's The Laws, which is only 70 pages, so you don't have to listen to guys named Rourke and Galt and Glock and Goof.
And you don't have to listen to all those Germanic, weirdly Nazi names making 30-page speeches again and again out of their wooden characters.
Instead, you can just read the 70 pages and get all the information.
So she was good about socialism.
She really was.
And she was good about the fact that the morality of socialism pretends to be for the poor and the weak, but it's really just the people who don't produce anything sucking the life out of the people who do produce things.
However, however, capitalism needs a moral structure.
It is just one of the things.
It is there for a purpose.
It is there because it serves liberty and creates more wealth and creates a better life for everybody.
It is not there.
It is not a good in and of itself.
It's like courage, like beauty.
It is a thing that can be used for good, and it is the thing that you may need before you can have good.
But it has got to be there to serve liberty, not to destroy it.
And I'm going to show you today.
I'm going to talk today, especially with China, who has figured out a way to use capitalism to destroy liberty.
And that's one of the things about it that Ayn Rand really doesn't deal with.
It's even true on the show, I mean, like where not just this show, but any show, that the people who tune into the show are of a conservative bent.
They want to hear conservative things.
And if I say something that deviates from that, they get very upset.
Or even if I have a guest on who expresses a different opinion, like Jonah Goldberg or Henry Olson was saying that the polls look bad for Trump, and everybody gets very upset.
So what does that put me in the position in a capitalist way?
It puts me in a position where I have to narrow my focus down to only those things that the audience will like to hear, right?
And so I have to say less and less and tell less and less truth in order to serve the audience.
And that is a genuine problem with capitalism.
You know, people always start out.
I've seen this in the book business and the movie business.
They always start out saying, well, we're going to publish these big blockbusters so we can afford to publish the great works of art.
And they do this all the time.
And then somebody comes along and says, wait a minute, if we publish two big blockbusters, then we don't have to publish any works of art and we'll make twice as much money.
Money, you can't serve God and mammon.
You cannot serve God and money.
And so capitalism is not enough to protect it.
And when I talk about liberty, I'm not talking about libertarianism like you can do anything you want, because liberty has to exist in a structure where each of us, each person's internal experience, is important.
So my liberty ends where it infringes on your liberty.
However, however, again, the left has used liberty to deter, to ruin liberty.
And I'll show you what I mean in just a second.
Because, you know, the one thing that we'll start with is free speech, right?
Let's stop off for just a moment at Knucklehead Row, which is the op-ed page of the New York Times.
We will take a journey to Knucklehead Row at The New York Times.
Oh, heavy head down to Knucklehead Row.
So Michelle Goldberg is one of the bigger knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row, and she has a piece today, Do Progressives Have a Free Speech Problem?
And she's reacting to this letter that was sent to Harper's Magazine, where everybody signed this letter and said, you know, the right is, they're the real villains.
Oh, my gosh, the terrible right.
And again, I was talking yesterday about begging the question.
They never prove this.
They never cite the right-hurting free speech.
But we just know, we know that the right is free.
But, you know, it's getting a little tough here with cancel culture to say anything.
So Michelle Goldberg now starts to look into this, you know, and she actually starts, she makes a long, long paragraphs and paragraphs about how Trump is destroying free speech.
Not a single example, not a single example.
When Trump criticizes a dishonest and corrupt press, they think that's infringing on free speech.
But when Barry Weiss or the op-ed editor is chased out of the New York Times for disagreeing, they don't think that's a threat to free speech.
And she says, a climate of punitive heretic hunting, a recurrent feature of left-wing politics, has set in, enforced in some cases through workplace discipline, including firings.
It's the involvement of human resources departments in compelling adherence with rapidly changing new norms of speech and debate that worries me the most.
So she does say this, and that's really good.
The problem on the left, by the way, is they never talk to us.
They never listen to us.
They don't know what we're saying.
They hear occasional clips.
I read the New York Times every day, but they don't read the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.
They don't listen to the Daily Wire.
They don't listen to my podcast.
They don't listen to anything.
They don't know what we're saying over here.
So they have no idea what our ideas are.
They just have no ideas.
But she talks about, she talks about a rejoinder to this letter where a lady named Hannah Georges writes, facing widespread criticism on Twitter, undergoing an internal workplace review or having one's book pan does not, in fact, erode one's constitutional right or endanger a liberal society.
And to her credit, I have to say this because I'm not a big fan of Michelle Goldberg.
She disagrees with this.
He says, one reason many on the right want to be seen as free speech defenders is that they understand that the power to break taboos can be even more potent than the power to create them.
Even sympathetic people will come to resent a left that refuses to make distinctions between deliberate slurs, awkward mistakes, and legitimate disagreements.
Cowing people is not the same as converting them.
Here is the thing, though.
It really is true that Michelle Goldberg has no idea what she's talking about.
All she has to do, I mean, I sympathize with her, and I'm glad she does see that there is this heretic hunting, witch hunting thing going on on the left.
But all she has to do is walk into the New York Times breakroom, just a thought experiment.
I know she's not listening or she would do it, but a thought experiment, walk into the New York Times breakroom and say, you know what?
I believe that a transgender female is a female in fact.
You know, I just believe that if you think you're a female, poof, you're a female.
Absolutely, I'm on track with that.
I completely agree with the whole orthodoxy, but you shouldn't be able to force someone to use a pronoun because that's essentially forcing him to say that he believes what he doesn't believe.
Eight weeks later, she would have no column.
Eight weeks later, she'd be gone.
She would be gone.
If she said that and meant it, said it and pretended to mean it and stuck to it sincerely and kept saying it, she would be fired.
The same thing would happen to her as happened to Barry Weiss.
She would be tormented in their in-house, their in-house website, Slack, and they would just destroy her.
They destroy her reputation.
They destroy her career.
That's all she has to say.
Not that she disagrees with them, but that you should be allowed to disagree.
And the thing is, you know, Jill Abramson was on Fox, and she said something so that she was a former editor of the New York Times.
She was fired, allegedly, I believe, for trying to get equal pay as a female to the males who were working there.
Here's what she said.
I've heard her say this before, and she said this on Fox.
Listen to this.
I regret, of course, if anyone is bullied.
That's terrible.
But I don't think it's true that moderate voices are being hushed at the New York Times.
Most of the opinion columnists at the Times are centrists.
They're center to liberal.
But, you know, Barry Weiss is someone, you know, she has like thousands of Twitter followers herself.
She's been in there, you know, on Twitter, you know, throwing some punches herself at people she disagrees with.
I'm not saying she's a bully, but, you know, if you're going to dish it out, you got to be ready to take it.
I learned that a long time ago.
This is nonsense, you know, because first of all, the idea that the editorial board of the New York Times is centrist, these are people who've insulted whiteness.
These are people who believe.
They don't know where the center is because they're surrounded by leftists.
They don't know where the center is.
They have no idea.
They think the center is way, way, way to the left.
They think it's centrist to say that a transgender female is actually female.
They think, yeah, so, you know, that's kind of a maybe center left.
She has no idea.
But here's the thing.
We're not talking about a Twitter fight where two people have it out on Twitter and yell at each other and scream insults at one another.
We're talking about a fight where one of them loses their job and she was forced out.
I mean, they made it so that she had to leave.
There is a lady, Teresa Bajan.
She's an Oxford associate professor, I believe.
And she wrote this Twitter thread that I was referred to by Hot Air, so I hat tip to them.
Why Trust Matters00:02:51
But she said, in order to enjoy free speech, one needs not only to enjoy the legal right to speak in its material conditions, a voice, a platform, an audience, one also needs to be able to trust one's audience to be tolerant when it comes to things they don't want to hear.
Historically, audiences, large audiences especially, have not been very tolerant, and free speech has been dangerous.
It didn't go so well for Socrates, to take one famous example.
The old idea that free speech in the sense of just being able to say whatever you want requires extraordinary courage is captured in Foucault's phrase, fearless speech and the Quaker dictum, speaking truth to power.
John Stuart Mill had Socrates' punishment in mind when he wrote in On Liberty that the freedom of thought and discussion should be absolute, should be absolute.
And one thing he meant by that is that it should be made much, much less dangerous to say what you have to say.
And the danger Mill feared did not come from the state.
The legal right alone does not make speech free.
The greatest threat was rather what Mill called, quote, social tyranny, the intolerance of the audience and their desire to punish speech and speakers they dislike.
You know, when I say we have to set a liberty agenda, I'm talking about all this stuff.
These are the ideas we should be talking about all the time, not just you did this and you did that.
We should need to explain this.
And you know who's doing this?
Our friends in the Trump administration.
Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has gotten ordered a report from a Commission on Unalienable Rights, which is chaired by Harvard legal scholar Marianne Glendon, who is one of his professors.
And they have brought out a remarkable draft report which says, which basically says, among the traditions that formed the American spirit, three stand out.
Protestant Christianity, widely practiced by the citizenry at the time, was infused with the beautiful biblical teachings that every human being is imbued with dignity and bears responsibility toward fellow human beings because each is made in the image of God.
Second, the civic republican ideal rooted in classical Rome stressed that freedom and equality under law depend on an ethical citizenry that embraces the obligations of self-government.
And classical liberalism three put at the front and center of politics the moral premise that human beings are by nature free and equal, which strengthened the political conviction that legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed.
Here is Pompeo II.
I want the second Pompeo cut talking about what is essential to liberty.
Foremost among these rights are property rights and religious liberty.
No one can enjoy the pursuit of happiness if you cannot own the fruits of your own labor.
And no society, no society can retain its legitimacy or a virtuous character without religious freedom.
Our founders knew.
Our founders knew that faith was also essential to nurture the private virtue of our citizens.
The Price of Data00:12:24
See, this is the thing.
When you say property rights are essential to free speech, and the thing about this report was he said to them, don't discover new rights.
Let's go back to the basic rights that became part of the universal Declaration of Rights at the UN because of America.
And the whole idea of human rights being essential to government comes from here.
Obviously, we inherited through a British tradition, just like the report said, through a Christian tradition, a Roman tradition.
All these traditions play into it.
All the traditions that they're trying to overthrow when they knock down these statues.
But all these things are essential to liberty.
And this is the problem with Ayn Rand pouring all liberty into capitalism.
It's the problem with all of us pouring all liberty into capitalism.
Capitalism will not sustain your freedom.
Capitalism can make just as much money selling communism as it can selling capitalism.
Capitalism doesn't have to sell capitalism.
And I'll show you what I mean by that in just a second because China has mastered this.
But we need to push not just the word liberty.
We need to push the entire liberty agenda.
That means we need to push our traditions.
We need to know our traditions.
We need to speak up for our traditions.
When you go into HR, you have to say, this is why I believe what I believe.
You have to know these things.
You have to learn these things, at least in a primer way, you know, at least the basics of them.
This report, by the way, is a good place to start.
So I'm going to show you what I mean about China in just a second.
But first, let us talk about Express VPN, because while you're online, you want to protect yourself.
You want to protect your internet liberty.
Social media companies get to decide what content is suitable for the sensitive snowflakes among us and censor whatever they don't like.
You should be the one to decide what you want to read or watch.
And here's one thing you can control, their access to your data.
I use ExpressVPN because the problem with big tech companies is not only do they censor what you read, but they track what you do online.
They track what you're searching for, the videos you watch, everything you click.
They use this data to serve you ads and can match your activity to your offline identity using your device's unique IP address.
When I use ExpressVPN, these tech companies can't see my IP address at all.
My identity is masked and anonymized by a secure VPN server.
Plus, ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from hackers and internet bad guys.
Why give these tech companies a free license to know everything about you and then turn around and sell off your information?
It's time to take back your privacy at expressvpn.com/slash clavin.
By visiting my special link, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free.
And who doesn't like to save money?
Again, that's expsvpn.com slash clavin expressvpn.com slash clavin to protect your data today.
You must have that shield on which it says clavin, which is K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy claves.
I was just going to say, it's amazing.
They read my mind.
Why doesn't capitalism?
Let me show you.
Bill Barr was in Michigan, I think he was.
And he was talking about what the Chinese have done.
Remember, we hoped, we hoped that when the Chinese started to have free markets, when they started to have freer markets, I hoped this.
I was one of the people who said this might happen.
That we hoped that when they had freer markets, they would have freer people.
Because in America, when you have capitalism, you realize you've got to let people free.
You've got to let people be free to think and create and invent and experiment and fail.
And those are all the things you have to be free to do.
You have to take the responsibility for your failures.
You shouldn't be bailed out for your failures.
And you want some guy in a garage to be able to invent something that takes down the biggest company around.
This is the problem with socialism.
When I say all the time that the elites love socialism, is it because it creates a wall of power between the elites and the underclass.
With capitalism, what you have is an open passage from the underclass to say, I'm going to take you down by inventing a better idea.
But with socialism and the government controlling everything and the incredible regulations on everything, I mean, you should look at Joe Biden's plan for his Green New Deal.
It's all inspired by AOC and Bernie Sanders.
It's really the Green New Deal.
It's $2 trillion, and it includes arresting people, arresting businessmen for not following their Green New Deal craziness, right?
But what you want is people to be free enough so that they can invent things and take the elites down.
And of course, do the elites want that?
No.
So they love socialism.
Listen, Google loves socialism.
They may pretend they love freedom, but they don't.
So Bill Barr was talking about, this is the Attorney General, obviously, he's talking about what China does to use business against us.
Let's play cut one of Bill Barr.
China is asshole!
I'm sorry, that was his mind.
That's what he's thinking.
That's what he's thinking.
Just play what he was saying.
For American companies in the global marketplace, free and fair competition with China has long been a fantasy.
To tilt the playing field to its advantage, China's communist government has perfected a wide array of predatory and often unlawful tactics.
Currency manipulation, tariffs, quotas, state-led strategic investment and acquisition, theft and forced transfer of intellectual property, state subsidies, dumping, cyber attacks, and industrial espionage.
About 80% of all federal economic espionage prosecutions allege conduct undertaken for the benefit of the Chinese state.
And about 60% of all trade secret theft cases have been connected to China.
So this is a big deal because China is offering you a market of a billion people and the people want that money.
And you say to your shareholders, well, you know, We're going to have all this new trade and your shareholders are great, great, great.
And meanwhile, the price for doing that is giving over your freedom and giving over our secrets and giving over our ideas to the Chinese so they benefit from everything we create without having to let their people be free, right?
The joke is that when you're dealing with China, the phrase win-win means China wins twice.
Now he starts to talk about, gets very specific about who is falling for this.
So let's play the second cut.
This is cut four.
Sadly, examples of American business bowing to China are Legion.
Take Hollywood.
Hollywood's actors, producers, and directors pride themselves on celebrating freedom and the human spirit.
And every year at the Academy Awards, Americans are lectured about how this country falls short of Hollywood's ideals of social justice.
But Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world's most powerful violator of human rights.
This censorship infects not only the versions of movies that are released in China, but also many that are shown in the United States theaters to American audiences.
He goes on to give examples, and I'll play that in just a minute.
But let me just play also, I think if we have it, there was a drone picture the other day of these Muslim Uyghurs who are being carted off in trains, and they're forced to kneel and their heads are shaved and they're put in trains, which they're playing.
I mean, it's difficult to talk about because it looks so much like the Holocaust.
This is Hollywood.
These are those glittering people.
He's right.
These are these glittering people who show up every Oscar and tell us that we're stupid, we're idiots for voting for Trump.
And that's essentially what they're saying.
And Barbara De Niro, how brave he is.
He's in such economic disaster because he only made $7 million last year.
And he gets up and he says, F Trump, and how brave that is.
But these are the Chinese.
And this is what Hollywood does.
Play the next cut from Barr.
For example, the hit movie World War Z depicts a zombie apocalypse caused by a virus.
The original version of the film reportedly contained a scene with characters speculating that the virus may have originated in China.
But the studio, Paramount Pictures, reportedly told producers to delete the reference to China in the hope of landing a Chinese distribution deal.
The deal never materialized.
In the Marvel Studios blockbuster, Dr. Strange, filmmakers changed the nationality of the major character known as the Ancient One, a Tibetan monk in the comic book, changed it from Tibetan to Celtic.
When challenged about this, a screenwriter explained that if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he's Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people.
So think about that for a minute.
If you acknowledge Tibet is a place, if you acknowledge that Tibet exists, you insult the Chinese.
And I don't know if you alienize 1 billion people.
It doesn't matter.
You alienate the Chinese Communist Party because the 1 billion people don't have a voice.
The 1 billion people, you know, it's not just the Uyghurs.
You know, I use that because it's so obvious and because those pictures are so powerful, it's so obvious this is fascism.
This is Nazi-like tactics that are being used against a race of people.
A race of people is being destroyed and they're being raped.
The women are being raped.
And, you know, it's just, it's as tragic and as cruel as anything that happened in the 20th century, which was a bad century the first half of that century.
And the people who are lecturing us about who we voted for are supporting this.
They're supporting it.
They are silencing themselves to feed these people.
And this is the thing, but it's not just them.
We know for a fact that Chinese women were tied down and sterilized and forced to have abortions while they screamed because they didn't want it to happen.
We know that people were starved to death by the tens of millions in China.
And we know this happened.
And it's like, it hasn't gotten any better.
These guys are just the same group of creeps doing this stuff.
So now he goes on and he talks about Apple.
He says, Apple recently removed the news app Quartz from its app store in China after the Chinese government complained about coverage of the Hong Kong democracy protests.
Apple also removed apps for virtual private networks, which had allowed users to circumvent the great firewall and eliminated pro-democracy songs from its Chinese music store.
The Hong Kong people have been crushed.
They have been crushed.
And, you know, these are the people flying the American flags while the D-bags in Portland are burning American flags while they're protesting America because of some imagined slight that they think or because one cop killed one person, which is bad, but it's not worth destroying the country over.
They just think they can get away with it, so they're going to do it.
So what does Apple say about this, right?
Trump's Huawei sanctions underscore U.S. dependency on China.
Tech Bar criticized Apple for transferring some of its iCloud data to servers in China.
And Apple spokesman Fred Sance referred to the company's past statements on the matters.
And this is what it said.
This is what Apple said.
Each country in which we do business has its own customs, culture, and legal process.
While our values and beliefs don't change from country to country, we are subject to each country's law.
So look, you know, one country believes in freedom of speech and worship and freedom of association.
The other country puts people in trains and sends them off to re-education camps from which they never return.
So you got to go, you know, who are we to say?
Who are we to say which is right and which is wrong?
And this is Apple.
These are the people who get up again and get again and lecture us.
What is it, Tim Cook?
Is Tim Cook the head of Apple?
This is the guy who said to us that the conscience of a CEO was sacred, and that was why we were going to ban hate speech from our sites.
That's the speech he said.
The conscience of a CEO is sacred.
And so, you know, in Texas, the Senate Democratic Senate nominee, MJ Heager, said, you know, we can't criticize China because our immigration policies are the same as their Uyghur concentration camps.
Boycotts and the Fight Level00:02:49
This is the way they think.
This is what they think about.
You know, and again, when I say we have to set in a liberty agenda, this counts.
We have to call this out.
When you put Black Lives Matter on an NBA jersey, you know, while you're doing business with China, you suck.
You suck.
We should not be watching this.
And, you know, we talk about boycotts and boycotts and all.
We should be boycotting.
I'm boycotting sports.
I'm never watching any of these guys again if they don't pay tribute to the American flag and if they put on their stupid Marxist t-shirts to tell me what I should think while doing business with China.
Let me go back to Mike Pompeo and just play the other cut because he talks about where our rights come from.
These rights, these unalienable rights are essential.
They are a foundation upon which this country was built.
They are central to who we are and to what we care about as Americans.
Now, I think Colonel Dolan referred to this, but America's founders didn't invent the unalienable rights, but stated very clearly in the Declaration of Independence that they are held as self-evident that human beings were created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
Among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So too, did these bright men know that each human being has inherent worth just by virtue of his or her own humanity.
A deeply biblical idea.
As Alexander Hamilton wrote, the sacred rights of mankind are written as with a sunbeam by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
The left is burning our cities and tearing down our statues because they know our liberty stands atop a structure that goes back to Israel and Rome and Greece and the cross.
They know that.
They know it.
We have to know it too.
And we have to fight at that level, fight at the same level they're fighting.
One thing that will help you fight is reading Ben Shapiro's new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
It's not a cookbook.
It is actually a way to prevent them from doing this.
The book goes on sale Tuesday, July 21st at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific, and Ben will be doing a virtual live signing event on the day of release with your purchase of a signed copy.
You can write in a question, which may be read and answered as he signs your book live on the air.
You can pre-order your signed copy and write in your question at dailywire.com/slash Ben.
That's dailywire.com slash Ben to get your copy of how to destroy America in three easy steps.
While you're there, you also want to subscribe.
If you can't afford an all-access pass because you're just selfish and cheap or you want to feed your children, one of those things, then you can get the Reader's Pass, which is our cheap version.
It's only three bucks a month.
Children Back to School?00:07:51
The first month is 99 cents.
You get access to our mobile app.
You receive push notifications for breaking news and special content, as well as being able to join the community of Daily Wire members who are actively commenting and discussing our content with each other.
I'll be on a discussion right after the show talking about Hamilton and why it's the opposite of the 1619 project.
You also get our top writers writing about breaking news, like Andrew Clavin.
I love that guy.
He wrote a piece called Republican Men Without Chests, which you should definitely read and can definitely read with a reader's pass.
So go to dailywire.com, get your copy of Ben's book and subscribe.
So, you know, another thing, of course, is is the the input.
When I say the empire of lies, the empire of lies, I used to say it was lies because of their assumptions.
I used to talk about their assumptions.
I used to say, you know, if you go to the movie, every housewife is insane, is dissatisfied.
If you go to the movies, all business is bad.
If you go to the movies, the military is always wrong.
You know, it's the assumptions that were embedded in it.
It was very subtle, and I think that was a kind of toxin.
But, you know, now with Trump, they just lying.
They're just lying.
They've just moved just completely.
So when he gave his speech on July 3rd, you know, from Mount Rushmore, suddenly a Mount Rushmore, which they had praised to the skies when Obama went there and when Bernie Sanders went there, suddenly Mount Rushmore became a symbol of slavery.
That was sudden as a form of lying.
But also they described his speech as dark and divisive without just letting people hear the speech, which wasn't dark or divisive, and make their own decisions.
So yesterday, Kaylee McIname now, I mean, you know, if Trump wanted to get children back to school, all he would have to do, this is absolutely true, all he would have to do is come out and say, our children should never go back to school.
Children should not be in schools.
The one thing we don't want is children in schools.
It would be like that, like that.
You would be hearing, we've got to get our children back to school.
But because Trump said our children should go back to school, suddenly we can't go back to school.
Suddenly, the children can't go back to school.
And who is this hurting?
You bet.
You bet.
It is hurting the poor.
It is hurting black kids.
It is hurting people whose mothers have to work to support them and can't school them at home.
And in poor neighborhoods, the schools are not stepping up and doing online learning.
And of course, online learning doesn't work as well as personal learning.
Of course, it doesn't.
And so, of course, it's the poor.
Of course, it's black kids who are being punished.
Now we're being told, oh, if you know, if you send the kids back to school, they'll all die.
So Kaylee McAnenney, the species lady, paused from ripping the spines of men out with her tongue and was talking about this.
And here is what the press, how the press reported what she said.
I'm taking this from Beckett Adams and the Washington Examiner, which did a Beckett Adams does good work about stuff like this.
Here is Jim Acosta.
Jim, look at me.
I'm Jim Acosta at CNN.
He says, the White House press secretary on Trump's push to reopen schools said the science should not stand in the way of this.
CNN's Anna Cabrera claimed, White House press secretary, when Trump says open, he means open and full.
The science should not stand in the way of this.
From the White House podium, CBS News White House correspondent said science should not stand in the way of this, said Kaylee McAnenney.
NBC News, the science should not stand in the way of this, said McEnenney.
They all said that she said the science should not stand in the way of opening these schools, as if what she meant was that the science said the kids would all die, but we're not going to let that stop us.
Here's what she really said.
The president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open.
And I was just in the Oval talking to him about that.
And when he says open, he means open and full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school.
The science should not stand in the way of this.
And as Dr. Scott Atlas said, I thought this was a good quote, of course we can do it.
Everyone else in the Western world, our peer nations, are doing it.
We are the outlier here.
The science is very clear on this.
That, you know, for instance, you look at the GMA pediatric study of 46 pediatric hospitals in North America that said the risk of critical illness from COVID is far less for children than that of seasonal flu.
The science is on our side here.
We encourage for localities and states to just simply follow the science, open our schools.
It's very damaging to our children.
There's a lack of reporting of abuse.
There's mental depressions that are not addressed, suicidal ideations that are not addressed when students are not in school.
Our schools are extremely important.
They're essential and they must reopen.
So she was saying the science should not stand in the way of this because the science is on the side of reopening the schools.
So they lied.
I mean, it's just lying.
And, you know, I always wonder about this, just as a matter really of human curiosity, because obviously the human, I'm a novelist, the human condition is kind of my beat.
I always wonder, like, what, if you're a journalist and you lie, what is the point of you?
Like, what do you, when you look in the mirror, like, I know why I do what I do.
I know what I'm trying to accomplish.
If your job is to spread information and instead you're spreading disinformation, what do you think of yourself, you know?
But again, again, these people are so sequestered.
They don't know.
You know, they say they accuse white people.
They say whiteness is like the water you swim in.
You're like a fish in water.
You don't even know you're in water.
Tyranny is the water the left swims in, and they don't even know they're tyrants.
This is true.
You know, they don't know that cancel culture is ruining people's lives, has destroyed our education system, is turning Americans into frightened children who have to kind of keep their head down and their mouths shut.
They don't read the letters I get, like, how can I say this?
How can I say that?
I have to support my family.
I'm getting this all the time.
They don't even know because they all agree with one another.
So they don't even know anybody would even think to disagree with them.
And if somebody thinks, well, don't they deserve the social opprobrium?
Don't they deserve it?
And my question to each of them when they say that is, what is the difference between that and McCarthyism?
You know, it used to be that if you were a communist, you got chased out of your job.
It didn't take the government to chase you out of your job.
In Hollywood, they passed around the blacklist.
There was a blacklist of people who were accused of being communist.
You lost your job.
So how is this any different?
How is it any different when a college professor says, you know what, cops don't kill black people any more than they kill white people, and he has to rescind his work.
How is it not cancel cult?
How does cancel culture not exist when professors, there's one petition being sent around to fire a professor because she rested her eyes during an anti-racism lecture.
It's like in the old days, if the last guy to the first guy to stop applauding for Stalin after a speech was carried off and shot.
I mean, that's the same kind of thing.
She closed her eyes during an anti-racism lecture, so she was accused of being a racist for that.
They don't even know.
Here is a wonderful, wonderful episode on MSNBC.
Craig Melvin is the anchorman.
And so they go out and they ask top pediatricians to whether they should open schools.
And they interview some of the top pediatricians in the country.
And then they cut back to Craig Melvin.
You have to wait for it at the end of this, the look on his face.
And you can hear it even in the tone of his voice.
Would you let your kids go back to school?
I will.
My kids are looking forward to it.
Yes.
Period.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
As much as I can.
Without a hesitation.
Without a hesitation.
Yes.
I have no concerns about sending my child to school in the fall.
I would let my kids go back to school.
Dr. John Torres, NBC News.
They all said yes.
The look on his face, because he doesn't know.
He doesn't know.
You know, he doesn't know that women are against abortion.
He doesn't know that, you know, that some people feel, oh, you know, I don't care if you wear a dress, but I'm not going to call you a woman because you're not a woman.
Vision Of 194800:02:54
And so I have a right to free speech.
They don't know what the arguments are.
They have no idea.
Tyranny, tyranny is the water they swim in.
They say whiteness is the water we swim in.
I say that's wrong.
I say I know the water I swim in.
I swim in Western culture.
I swim in Western culture.
I know where it comes from.
I've read all the books.
I know exactly why I think the things that I think.
I know exactly why I believe in the things that I believe.
And it has to do with my vision of human beings.
Their vision of human beings is that they can be perfected.
And therefore, if you stop them from saying things, suddenly they will become wonderful people.
No, my vision of human beings is that they're broken and they need restrictions on them.
And those restrictions have to be brought in in order to preserve liberty.
The restrictions you put on people are don't stop people from speaking because that's how you preserve liberty.
These are the things that we have to be talking about.
And when they put forward their agenda, we have to translate their agenda into ours.
We have to translate it into the agenda of liberty.
We've got to start doing this because otherwise we're going to be playing defense for the rest of our lives.
A final reflection.
I just want to talk about this one book.
I don't get to talk enough about books and the things that I think are just wonderful ways to entertain yourself and to learn things.
But I have discovered this writer named Josephine Tay.
And I shouldn't say I've discovered her.
I've known about her for a long time.
She was a British mystery writer back in the 40s.
And she famously wrote a book called The Daughter of Time, in which her series character breaks his leg and spends the entire novel trying to find out who killed the princes in the tower during the reign of Richard III.
And so that's a very famous book.
But she wrote a book called Brat Farrar, which I talked about on the show, which is great.
I just finished a book she wrote, and I really recommend this called The Franchise Affair.
And it's a very quiet little British mystery, not that long, about two women who are accused of having kidnapped and beaten a child.
And it takes place, it's written in 1948.
And in a quiet British way, at first you just think it's a mystery story, but as it goes on in a quiet British way, you realize she's talking about all the things we're seeing now, the radicalization of a successful society, the acceptance of leftist ideas, the demonization of people without full information, and the corruption of the Christian church into essentially an excuse for criminal behavior.
It's so exact.
It's so much like today, although it is, like I said, a little bit more restrained because it's British.
And when you think about this, this is 1948.
Within 30 years, their empire was gone and their economy was gone.
And it's just a tremendous entertaining mystery, The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tay, but it also is a warning to all of us.
It really is.
It really is that socialism, leftism is a form of decay.
It is not a philosophy.
It is a form of decay.
It is what happens to free societies when they get so rich that people forget.
When Rich Societies Forget00:01:51
They forget the traditions that they're standing on.
They forget the bodies that they're standing on.
The people who had to die for the things they have.
They forget the hard work they're standing on, and they have to work to pass it on to the next group.
That's when socialism, leftism, decay set in.
All right.
On that happy note, I'm going to leave you for a weekend, but it's only a two-day Claven weekend.
So you have some chance, some chance of crawling across it, clawing your way through the desert of the Clavenless weekend to get back to this oasis of Clavin-y goodness, which will reappear on Monday.
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 Wall Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Assistant Director is Pavel Wadowski.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio mixed by Robin Fenderson.
Hair and Makeup, or Head and Makeup, by Nika Geneva.
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.