The Great Covid Screw-Up dissects how Phil Murphy, Fauci, and unions like Weingarten’s prioritized polls over science, turning masks into partisan tools while ignoring Omicron’s inefficacy. Florida’s defiance vs. blue-state lockdowns exposed economic harm and elite hypocrisy—like Abrams posing masked with unmasked kids or Johnson’s Downing Street parties—while Canadian trucker protests became a workers’ revolt against mandates. Henry Olson’s election data reveals Democrats’ coalition collapse, but Trump’s presidency remains a mixed legacy: economic wins overshadowed by post-election chaos and elite backlash. Meanwhile, Francis Collins’ NIH funded fetal tissue research while evangelicals ignored his pro-abortion stances, exposing faith’s surrender to cultural accommodation. The episode ends with linguistic warfare over gender terms and callers grappling with orthorexia, framing modern therapy as a threat to divine order—all while teasing the left’s latest culture-war absurdities. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrat governors and other perfidious nudniks are ending mask mandates in their blue states so that from now on, when photographs are taken in blue states, Democrat governors won't be the only people not wearing masks.
The governors say the removal of mask mandates is due to a change in the science, a gigantic green head that speaks in a thunderous voice until you discover it's really just a little mountebank behind a curtain manipulating a machine, whereupon Anthony Fauci is sent home to Kansas in a hot air balloon.
In New Jersey, governor and corrupt hypocrite Phil Murphy said, quote, while the science previously showed that wearing masks has no effect whatsoever on COVID infection or death rates, it now shows that wearing masks has no effect whatsoever on COVID infection or death rates, and Democrat poll numbers are in the toilet.
Scientifically, this means people should stop wearing masks until at least mid-November and then should put masks back on unless, like myself, they are medically exempt because they are myself, unquote.
In Washington, the president's chief medical advisor and running gag Anthony Fauci recently discussed the developments in a grating high-pitched wine that just made you want to dig your fingernails into his head and rip his face off.
Dr. Fauci said, quote, As a venal bureaucrat whose soul has been desiccated by a love of power and attention so that my statements have become untrustworthy to a degree that would be comical if it weren't so destructive, it is my carefully considered and wholly fabricated judgment that mask mandates should be lifted before voters wipe the floor with Democrats as if they were a mop in a sick bailout, unquote.
Fauci went on to say that an exception should be made for children in schools who should continue to be uselessly masked because teachers union head Randy Weingarten has her teeth clamped so tightly on the Democrat Party's testicles, it would be a dangerous mistake to try to make her union members earn a living for a change.
Ms. Weingarten was unavailable for comment because she was afraid if she opened her mouth to speak, the Democrat Party might escape intact.
Another of the blue states that is planning to cancel its mask mandates is California, but an exception is being made in Los Angeles, where County Public Health Director and walking dead person Dr. Barbara Fearmonger said masks will continue to be mandated until people stop calling her zombie face behind her back.
Dr. Fearmonger said, quote, children especially must wear masks because if we don't continue to turn our young people into neurotic, bitter, and mentally ill adults, there'll soon be no one left to join the Democrat Party, unquote.
The Los Angeles mask mandate will, however, now affect fewer people than before since any Angelinos who can will be moving to Nashville.
Pre-Order Clavinon!00:03:10
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I feel hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, 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, hurrah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
Today we're going to talk about what we can learn from what has to be one of the biggest cock-ups by Western leadership since World War I, the COVID lockdowns and mandates.
And also, I have been so impressed with Megan Basham's cultural coverage for the Daily Wire, I decided I'm going to bring her on once a month so she and I can discuss the culture and whatever she's working on.
We'll start today.
She's got a great story about the evangelical churches.
They have been attacking her online all week.
This is a good time to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
And if you leave a comment on the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel and it is sufficiently disgusting in some deeply immoral way, we will read it on the show because it'll fit right in with everything else.
This comment is from Brian Pulak.
He says, I use code Clavin on everything and it always ends with the same scenario, women swooning, but not because of me.
They come and ask me where the sexy white bald guy is.
What can I tell you, Brian?
You get the discount, you know?
I settle for the discount.
Also, I'm going to forget to do this, so I'm going to do it now.
The Truth and Beauty comes out in April.
It would help so much.
You will like it.
It is a book about poetry and God, all the things that matter.
So please go on and pre-order it.
It comes out in April, but if you pre-order it, the publisher will know that people are interested and they will order enough books, which would be great.
Well, we talk here all the time about free speech and keeping free speech alive, and big tech and big government have this in common.
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Why We Speculate on Evil00:11:49
That's K-L-A-V-A-N.
To put our conversation about the great COVID screw-up in context, I mean, so much harm has been done.
People have been forced to die alone.
You know, people haven't seen their grandparents or parents die because they weren't allowed into hospitals.
People have not gotten the health care they need and have died of other things that they might not have died of.
Children especially have been given deep psychological problems.
They've lost education.
People's dreams have been destroyed.
They're small businesses.
There's been a huge transfer of wealth to the rich.
Joe Biden got elected.
It has been an absolute disaster.
So I want to begin by talking about evil.
Now, this is a word you will notice that you almost never hear me use about a human being.
It's not that I never use it.
I mean, obviously, besides Knowles, it's not that I never use it, but I've never called Obama evil.
I laugh when people call Trump evil.
If Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer are evil, we need other words to describe other things.
In American politics, I think people have been spoiled because our leaders have not been evil.
You know, I mean, Obama was not an evil person.
And that's why it's so ridiculous when we start comparing them to Stalin or Hitler, even if we think that that's the way things are going.
There is an excellent movie, if you've never seen it, by Peter Jackson.
I've told this story once a long time ago, but still, it's worth repeating.
There's an excellent movie by Peter Jackson before he made Lord of the Rings called Heavenly Creatures.
It is one of his best films, I think, and it is a true story as ours Kate Winslet and Melanie Linsky.
It is a true story about a 1954 relationship in New Zealand that ended in murder.
It was between a girl named Pauline Parker and a girl named Juliet Holm, and they killed Parker's mother.
The two of them engaged in this intense, fantastical, it's what's called a folly adeu.
It's this obsessive relationship, had a kind of a sexual angle to it, though it wasn't a lesbian relationship.
And here's the moment from the film when they decide what they want to do because they don't want to be separated.
So what they want to do to Parker's mother.
I know what to do about mother.
We don't want to go to too much trouble.
some sort of accident people die every day so It's a really terrific, well-done movie.
So one day, when I lived in England, I was invited to a very fancy party at the Houses of Parliament for artists, for writers.
And I'm a tuxedo, and I met my colleague, a mystery writer, a very successful mystery writer named Anne Perry, who writes Victorian Mysteries.
And I chatted with her for quite some time.
And I liked her, but I like everyone when I meet them.
You have to prove to me that you're a terrible person before I don't like you.
And, you know, people here have done that, but usually that doesn't happen.
And my wife said to me, something a little off about her.
And I said, I didn't see it because I'm such a great judge of character.
We went home to America the next week and I opened the newspaper and Anne Perry had been outed as the grown-up who had been in 1954 Juliet Home, the girl played by Kate Winslet, who stood by and assisted while her friend beat her mother to death with a brick, hitting her repeatedly over the head with a brick.
Both of the girls were sent to prison for five years and then they were released and they changed their name and Anne went off and became a very successful mystery writer.
She was living at the time in nowhere, Scotland, like the absolutely up near Lands and Scotland.
She was really retreated.
She had found God.
She had become, I believe, a Mormon.
And the other girl became a Catholic.
And now she's moved to Hollywood because I think they're making her books into films, but she's like 83 now.
Shortly thereafter, I hosted a panel at a writer's conference in, I think it was in Nottingham.
And the panel was on evil.
And Anne Perry was invited to be on the panel.
And people were furious at her.
We discussed evil, and she would never make reference to the fact that she had just been exposed as having beaten a woman, helped beat a woman to death with a brick.
And people were just furious about her.
She didn't want to talk about it.
She wanted to talk about her religion.
She wanted to talk about God and the things that now sustained her.
And people came and complained to me about it.
But looking at her, I could see that this was not an evil woman.
It was a woman who was having trouble accepting what she had done.
She hadn't fully accepted.
She still would make excuses about it, but she was not an evil woman.
She had just done an evil thing.
And the thing is, I had lunch once with a gangster who had recently shot someone.
That was an evil person.
I could look in his eyes and I could see that the person that he was made to be by God had somehow, you know, maybe bad things had happened to him and somehow some force had gotten into him that had shriveled that soul to a little worm like the ones that are in the people who were captured by the witch in The Little Mermaid.
Remember, they become these little soul worms.
That guy, I would have said, yeah, this is an evil guy.
He had no remorse.
He had absolutely no feeling about it.
He just didn't care.
Now, what makes evil complicated is things like that, that you can do evil, like Anne did.
She had no question that she committed an evil act, but you can do it in a moment of anger or madness that somehow doesn't define your life.
You can do it in ignorance by not thinking through the results of a bad idea like communism or a cascade of events can be started by a bad decision, like when you get into a car and you've had maybe one drink too many, and then you kill someone.
Well, the killing of someone while driving drunk was evil.
But getting in the car and thinking, I can make it home, that's not exactly evil.
You can become evil by embracing an evil idea and not letting it go, like, you know, everything is to blame on the Jews or whatever.
You can become evil through idolatry, love of power, love of money.
You can become evil by justifying the evil act you've done because you're afraid to face the shame.
And I think that happens to some women who've had an abortion when they end up shouting their abortion, or like a preacher did the other day saying her abortion was holy, right?
And you can become evil for a lot of reasons.
Some of them that make the evil more or less comprehensible, like including brain damage, abuse.
There's a good play about this called Frozen by Brian E. Lavery, where she discusses whether or not you're to blame if you become evil through a brain injury.
But in every single case, in every single case, there is one thing all evil has in common, and that is why it's my definition of evil.
Evil is willingly and persistently turning away from what I have called the great speculation.
Remember, the great speculation is that other people's inner lives are just as important to them as yours is to you, and both are equally important to God, right?
That's where we get the sayings like, you know, how would you like it if someone did that to you or do unto others as you would have them do unto you?
That's why Jesus says, love even your enemies so you can start to see the world the way God sees it, in which each inner life is equally important.
That's why racism will take you to evil, because it discounts the inner life of another person simply because he is part of a race that you have decided to dislike.
And that's why both collectivism in an extreme way and individualism in an extreme way will put you on the path to evil because as a collectivist, you don't see people as individuals.
You see them as a group.
And as an individualist, you don't see other people because you're too busy thinking about yourself.
We all do this sometimes.
We all turn away from the great speculation.
Sometimes we do it to people we love, like when you snap at your spouse forgetting that you're the person he or she loves and you're going to hurt them when you say the things that you hurt.
We all do this.
But the reason that power specifically can lead people to evil is that it lifts people up into a high place where other people no longer seem like individuals at all.
They just seem like a mass and their problems seem to be fixable by moving them around.
There was a great column in the Wall Street Journal this week by historian Arthur Herman about what a disaster this lockdown has been across the West.
Remember, it's not just in America where they did this foolish stuff.
They did it all over.
Some people are now pulling the mandates back and the lockdowns back and all of that, but they've done it all over the West.
And here's what Herman says.
He says, the pandemic tempted governments and their elite allies to treat citizens as passive objects to be dictated to, bullied, and coerced en masse.
An attitude not unlike that found in China, Cuba, and North Korea, instead of as active thinking subjects with whom government is in partnership.
With few exceptions, the Nordic countries are the best examples.
Governments failed to find ways to affirm that despite the pandemic, citizens were still individuals imbued with inalienable rights and independent moral standing.
This is, after all, how most people see themselves in modern society as free, autonomous beings rather than as laboratory rats in a series of social science experiments.
The more powerful government becomes, the more powerful people become, the greater temptation to do this.
And this is what happened.
Brian DeSantis remembered the great speculation.
Glenn Youngkin, my man, he remembered.
But a lot of people in power forgot in the joy and delight and maybe desperation, maybe even good intentions of moving people around.
Now, remember, one of the reasons I hesitate to call people evil is even a gangster can turn back.
And that's the story of the prodigal son.
The father sees you coming in the right direction.
He will run down the road to meet you.
And so what matters now, that these people have done so much bad.
Our government, our elites, our academy, our entertainers, all of these people, they have caused so much damage to this country and its economy and its human beings and its children.
What matters now is what they do next.
They can't fix the past.
It cannot be fixed, but watch what they do now and what they say, especially the leaders who got it wrong.
It matters.
It matters if they change their mind.
It matters if they turn around.
It matters in a free country how the leaders see us, just like it matters how we see one another.
Jean-Paul Sartre was right when he said hell is other people, but the catch is heaven is also other people.
It all depends on how you look at them.
Inflation is wild.
I think it's at like the worst it's been in 40 years, something like that.
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Ottawa's Alarming Occupation00:12:54
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So now the masks are coming off.
In the blue states, they've been off in most of the red states already.
It really is a weird experience because I travel back and forth and it is a strange experience to go from a plague city to a city that's been free, that's remained free.
And it does remind me this whole thing, I've said this before, but it's worth repeating.
It reminds me of the Edgar Allan Poe horror story, The Mask of the Red Death, where the rich people think that they can escape the plague by locking themselves in the castle and they're having a party and they're having a masquerade.
So everybody's wearing a mask and at midnight everybody unmasks and one of the people who pulls off the mask is the Red Death and everybody dies.
And so all of this lockdown did not do a thing.
It didn't change the numbers.
And we know this.
We know it didn't change the numbers because the numbers in the non-lockdown states, the free states, were the same as the numbers in the mask states.
They weren't different.
It was all dependent on, you know, people being how close together people were.
So now all these are the states, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Delaware, all states we remember as places where they just would not leave people alone.
And it's easy to be cynical and say that they're just doing it for political reasons because they're obviously just doing it for political reasons.
It's got to be the polling, right?
The polling must be showing people have just had it.
And it's obvious because if DeSantis isn't doing it in Florida and their death toll isn't any worse than in New York, then why am I being treated like I'm in the Soviet Union in New York when I could be in Florida having a good time?
That is the problem.
It is obvious that has done nothing.
It hasn't helped.
And so, you know, why are people going to keep doing it?
Why are they going to not vote you out of office?
But it's not just the polling.
It is also our friends in Canada, what I call the truck fudot movement.
We have Let's Go Brandon.
They have Truck Fudot.
These truckers who just said we are not going to be vaccinated by force.
And it's the lies on the media.
They keep calling it the anti-vaccine demonstration.
It is not.
It is an anti-mandate demonstration.
And, you know, we make fun of Canada because it's just so damn boring, but not now.
Now we owe them.
They're protesting these vaccinations.
And they jammed up this bridge, which many of you have never heard of, but I have.
It's called the Ambassador Bridge.
It is one of the most important bridges in the world.
And certainly it may be the most important bridge in North America.
It's the bridge that goes from Detroit into Windsor into Canada.
And $323 million worth of goods cross that bridge every day and cross the border every day.
And by the way, the bridge is privately owned.
You see, if you're watching, you can see a picture of the trucks just jamming that thing up.
The bridge is privately owned, so Uber Sturmfuhrer, Gretchen von Wittmer, the governor of Michigan, is absolutely in a frenzy.
How are they going to clean this thing off?
So the hilarity of the reaction to this trucking union is just the fact that it's a workers' revolt.
And all these guys on TV and all of the lefties are supposed to be socialists, right?
They keep telling, all this time they've been telling us, socialism, you're going to love it.
It's like Halloween.
It's great.
You don't have something and somebody gives something to you and it's all so fair.
Workers of the world unite.
No wait.
Stop uniting workers of the world.
You don't unite against us.
You don't unite in disagreeing with us.
This is how, by the way, socialism turns to tyranny every single time.
Here's just a brief glimpse of the media reacting to this anti-mandate, not anti-vaccine, anti-mandate demonstration.
Sedition, insurrection, a threat to democracy.
This city is under siege.
They are now calling it an occupation.
Alarming situation there in Ottawa.
The police chief is calling it a nationwide insurrection driven by madness.
This is kind of our insurrection by air horn moment.
I think it's part of the globalization of Trumpism.
Canadians know where I stand.
There hasn't been as much violence as some had perhaps projected, but that does not necessarily mean that it has been peaceful.
Reports of severe vandalism and criminal behavior.
The streets are clogged.
The honking is incessant and deafening.
This pandemic has sucked for all Canadians.
Residents that I have spoken to who say they feel terrorized, intimidated.
Residents say they feel like hostages.
Residents in that area say that they are being held hostage, that this freedom has essentially, this freedom convoy, as they call it, has essentially imposed a lockdown on them.
Some protesters harassed a soup kitchen.
These anti-vaxxers actually took food from the mouths of the homeless.
Hungry, yeah.
Socialism, not so much fun when the workers unite against you, is it?
And Mr. Blackface Trudeau, Justin Bieber Trudeau, the first blackface prime minister of Canada, what was his father, Fidel Castro, thought, well, never mind.
He's losing friends.
Here he is.
He's losing friends on both sides of the aisle because the people are turning for the truckers and he can't back down.
He's furious.
He is furious.
He's an authoritarian like all these leftists.
Scratch a leftist, you find a fascist.
And he cannot back down.
My favorite comment he made was this one, Cut 16.
We've seen the curves lower in Canada than elsewhere.
We've seen lower death rates.
We've seen quicker economic recovery because Canadians stepped up, because Canadians got vaccinated.
And I can understand frustrations with mandates, but mandates are the way to avoid further restrictions or having to be restricted.
As people get vaccinated, as Canadians have gotten vaccinated, we've been able to get food.
So we have to restrict you so we don't have to restrict you.
That's basically, he doesn't have the right.
You do not have the right to tell somebody to take a vaccine.
You just do not have it.
You can convince them if they trust you, but they don't trust you if you're ordering them around.
That is the whole thing.
And listen, the reason usually we don't talk about Canada because let's face it, who cares?
But if you don't think that the venal house plant in the White House is looking at this and thinking, uh-uh, because if this spreads, if it spreads to America, if our truckers start to protest, if they start to block shipments back here, they're going to have more and more supply sides, more and more supply side problems, more and more empty shelves, more prices skyrocketing because of shortages.
This is not what Biden needs.
So magically, magically, the pandemic is over.
Here is Anthony Fauci.
He has become like my, he's now my favorite bureaucrat, right?
He says, as we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, what change?
What ho, Anthony?
What could it have been?
So White House, unfortunately, White House spokeswoman Jen Pasaki says it's not the same.
It's not the same as when Ron Pasantis did it.
This is Cut 14.
There is a distinct difference between standing in the way, which Ron DeSantis did, or Governor DeSantis, I'll give him his full title, of teachers, school administrators, and others taking steps to protect the students in their school communities.
There's a difference between standing in the way of it, threatening to pull back funding, and allowing for local school districts to make choices, which is what a number of these states are doing.
That's utterly absurd.
Utterly, you know, this is what I mean.
This is what I mean about turning around on the road.
You made a mistake.
You know, what do you say?
You say, DeSantis got it right.
He got it right.
You know, they got it right in the places where they took the mandates down, which is what lets people make choices.
And who should make the choice?
Obviously, if it's your kid, the parents should make the choice, not the school.
What they've done in the red states is not told people not to get vaccinated, not told people not to mask up.
They have said the decision should lie with the people instead of with the government.
And that's what the left is fighting about right now.
And that's the actual comparisons he's making.
My favorite in all this has been Hakeem Jeffries.
He's the best.
I like, you know, I know that this gets on Ben Shapiro's nerves, because he gets so angry at the corruption and lying of politics.
But that's what makes me laugh about politics is just the open, raw dishonesty.
So Hakeem Jeffries of New York, he's the congressman from New York, he says the masks are coming off because Biden has solved the virus with CUT 13.
The Omicron variant is in retreat.
And that's not by accident.
That's because under President Biden's leadership, a public health infrastructure was put into place, beginning with the American Rescue Plan without a single Republican vote to ensure that we can do everything possible to crush the virus.
And that is what has been happening.
I just love, I don't know what it is about that politicians lying bald-faced lady with that serious face, you know, and sometimes with their pounding there.
I don't know what that is.
It just I find hilarious, but it is hilarious to watch a guy do that.
And of course, you know, all the American Rescue Plan was there because of the lockdowns.
By the way, you know, I gave them at the beginning this 15 days to slow the spread, and we didn't know about the disease, and we didn't know how many people would kill, and they didn't know if the hospitals would get jammed up.
I give them some leeway there.
You know, the God King, Jeremy Boring and Dennis Prager both said, no, this is the wrong thing to do.
And they turned out to be right.
They turned out to be right.
But they might have turned out to be wrong.
You know, it might have been.
And their distrust, because I grew up in an America where the government kind of worked.
You know, my trust of the government may be a little bit more intact than theirs.
I mean, at this point, our government is just a complete cluster.
So, you know, they were right.
They were right.
We never should have given them the power to shut down anything.
But the shutdowns, the lockdowns were the worst part about this.
They were worse than the masks.
You know, my son, Spencer Clavin, no relations, has written a piece where he said, you know, the federal government basically is in control.
The FAA is in control of air travel.
So if you want to know what it looks like to have a life controlled by the federal government, get on a plane.
It's uncomfortable.
The service is lousy.
There's no good food to eat.
You just feel like, you know, please get me out of here.
That's what it's like living under socialism on the plane.
So, look, it doesn't mean these people are evil.
It doesn't mean these people are evil, but they have done a lot of harm.
A lot of evil has been done.
And if they are not going to turn around and if they're not going to learn anything from it, then ultimately, ultimately, your soul shrivels up.
That's what happens.
If you have to keep telling yourself, you know, yeah, we did destroy children's lives.
We did take minority children's education away.
The one thing that helps minority children, education, we took that away from them.
We abused parental rights.
We've done terrible things to people's businesses.
Yeah, but not our fault.
It was just one of those things, all the fault of Ron DeSantis.
The person who sounds like that to me, the person who really I just find a wicked witch, an ogress, let's call it.
I don't want to insult ogresses because the one in Shrek is kind of nice.
But Randy Weingarten of the teachers union, the biggest teachers union, she has genuinely been wicked.
She has really done a wicked thing.
And she's a horrific person.
And remember, the American Federations of Teachers have more than 3 million members and they vote at high rates.
They make up a huge percentage of delegates who choose candidates in the Democratic Party.
And of course, the Democrats want to turn all our children into Marxist, racist, transsexuals, so they need the teachers.
And here's what she's saying.
I am in favor of an off-ramp on masks.
The real issue becomes, is the spread low enough so that there's no dissemination or transmission in schools.
And it's not the teachers transmitting to kids.
It's more kids and kids, particularly in elementary schools right now.
And she basically says she'll never take it off unless there's zero COVID.
That's not the issue.
That's not the issue.
The issue is whether masks are doing anything in schools, and they're not.
They are not doing anything.
And kids who get COVID don't get very sick.
And, you know, they get, you know what kids are like.
I mean, if you've ever had kids, they spread everything.
They get every single thing that's going on.
Kids Spreading COVID00:02:59
You're not going to keep them from getting it.
They all are going to get something.
And once Omicron came along, we knew the masks weren't doing anything.
So this is really, it really is wicked.
It really is the wrong thing to do.
And the damage that's been done to these kids, you know, kids need to see people's faces.
And, you know, they're having this big scandal.
I mean, they have this thing with Stacey Abrams, just yet one more.
She's a pseudo-governor, but one more governor who takes a picture while all the kids are masked and she's got her face hanging out.
And this is a big scandal in England where Boris Johnson has been caught having parties at Downing Street without masks while everybody else was locked down.
And people are talking about this as if that's nothing.
You know, they're saying, well, it's more important than Boris Johnson's scandal.
No, If you're doing this evil, this wickedness to people, if you're harming people's lives by making mandates, you had damn well better follow the rules because that is the definition of tyranny.
The definition of tyranny is making rules that you don't have to follow, forcing people to do things, but you're exempt.
Why?
Because you're you, because you've got the power.
Democrats at different levels will not turn back from the road they're on, and we've got to, we're forcing them back.
I think the truckers are helping to force them back.
Obviously, the voters in the polls are helping them to force them back.
But the first Democrat, the first Democrat comes out and says, you know what, we ruined your lives for nothing.
And the Republicans were right, the conservatives were right.
I'm going to vote for him.
I will vote for that Democrat.
I will vote for that Democrat.
And the first Democrat who says Trump was right, I will give him a big sloppy kiss on his head.
So I'm excited.
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Ring's Award-Winning Security00:16:07
Now I mentioned Donald Trump and there's a reason for that.
As we start to think about what did we learn from this huge, huge, destructive mistake that just went on and on, even after we knew, after the first few months, we knew everything we know now, just about, and then eventually we had the vaccine.
And again, that was kind of the turning point for me.
That was the point where I just said, I'm done.
I don't care what happens now.
You know, everybody dies, but I'm going to live.
I'm going to do what I'm going to do.
The lessons that we learned from this and the lessons that we learned from Donald Trump's presidency and his election and his loss in the last election are kind of wrapped up together.
You know, I have to say, I've talked about people who got things right.
I think two people in America got Donald Trump exactly right.
I was one of them, and the other one was Victor Davis Hansen.
And I think I got it right first, but I think Victor Davis Hansen wrote the best book about it.
He wrote a terrific book about Donald Trump.
I think the best book about Trump and his election and his presidency.
Both of us called him a tragic figure.
We called him a tragic figure, meaning that his greatest strengths were also his greatest weaknesses, and that the things that got him elected were going to foil him in the end.
Victor compared him to the bad man that you bring into town to clean up the town, but then you have to get rid of the bad man because he's a bad man.
And that's kind of the way I looked at him, that the things that made him great also made him unelectable in the end.
But I've been thinking about his presidency because once you realize that the lockdown was a terrible, terrible mistake and obviously brought his presidency low.
I mean, Sebastian Gorka is right about this.
Without the pandemic, he probably would have been re-elected.
But he did some amazing things when you go back and think about it.
He created that excellent economy before the pandemic, before the Chinese flu hit.
He created an economy that was lifting people from the bottom.
It was actually raising people, raised black people, raised all kinds of minorities, but it also raised low-level workers and it really helped people.
Suicides went down under Donald Trump, those suicides that were so bad that they were actually lowering the life expectancy of Americans and are doing so again today.
They're right back up again.
He let the military loose so that it could destroy the ISIS caliphate in Syria, which, if you remember, had become a huge inspiration to other terrorists all around the world.
He appointed terrific judges and justices who actually want to follow the rule of law.
They may not agree with us on every single thing, but they are trying to follow the rule of law instead of some faddish progressive nonsense that just happens to have come down the pike last week.
Donald Trump brokered a under his administration, they brokered an actual breakthrough in the Middle East peace talks, which is an amazing thing.
He facilitated the creation of a vaccine.
He would have kept the economy going or at least have opened it quickly if he hadn't allowed himself to be talked out of it by the experts around him.
And, you know, you got to give him some slack there, right?
I think a lot of us, you know, I think maybe any of us would have thought, I don't want zillions of people to die on my watch.
That's what they were telling him.
They were telling him these inflated numbers of the people who would die.
So, you know, he's not a doctor, so maybe he did the safest thing, but his gut, his gut, was right.
The guy was a hell of a president.
And I know you get angry at me for saying this, but he was also an obnoxious personality.
He made our divisions worse.
He scuttled opportunities for lawmaking because of the way he treated people, the childish way he treated people who should have been treated with respect.
If only I think they should have been treated with respect on the merits of why you treat people with respect, but still, they should have been treated with respect if only you wanted to pass a law, get rid of Obamacare, do the things that you need to do when you're wrangling the cats in Congress.
And I still say his behavior after the election has been disgraceful.
And he lost us the majority in Congress, the Senate.
And, you know, he's basically mired us all in the past and when we need to move on.
But what does that teach us, right?
I mean, for a guy like Trump, who's a builder and a TV star, right?
For a guy like Trump to be that good a leader, to have done so many great things, it must be easier to do great things than all the other leaders are making it look like, right?
The only thing he had to do was to be belligerent enough, mean enough, rude enough, nastiness, nasty enough.
This is what I mean by his greatest strengths being his greatest weaknesses.
He had to be belligerent enough to say that all the experts and the elites and the State Department and all those people were wrong.
And he was right.
That's what he had to do.
That was how easy it was to make the country better and the world better.
He turned our attention to China when we needed to turn our attention to China.
He hobbled Russia by letting our energy industry thrive.
He did all of these incredible things just by saying the majority of the people of the elites was wrong, right?
So why, again, this is connected to what we learned from the pandemic.
Why did it take somebody that belligerent to do it?
I'll show you why.
You remember in 2020, he got the COVID.
He came back after getting COVID and he stood on the balcony of the White House and he took off his mask and the media and the elites and all the elites fainted like the woman throwing her apron over her face.
They all had the vapors.
And this is what he said.
This is Cut 25.
Don't be afraid of it.
You're going to beat it.
We have the best medical equipment.
We have the best medicines, all developed recently.
And you're going to beat it.
I went, I didn't feel so good.
And two days ago, I could have left two days ago.
Two days ago, I felt great, like better than I have in a long time.
I said just recently, better than 20 years ago.
Don't let it dominate.
Don't let it take over your lives.
Here is a montage of the reaction from the news media to his CUT 26.
This is so disrespectful.
I'm not even sure I can speak about this.
It's incredibly, incredibly disrespectful.
What does that mean?
Don't be afraid of it.
I mean, first of all, it's a contagious disease that kills people.
There's nowhere to even begin.
It's gross.
It's such a distressing moment.
It's just so horrible, so destructive to say, I feel better than I have in 20 years.
That he's saying this is so disrespectful.
The president says it's no big deal.
I mean, it's outrageous.
It is insulting to the people who have lost loved ones.
It is insulting to every American who wears a mask.
I mean, it's disgraceful, Wolf.
It's absurd.
Don't tell your supporters, don't be afraid of COVID.
Everyone should be afraid of COVID.
It's okay to be afraid of COVID, and it's okay that it's dominating your life because it has dominated your life.
Be afraid.
Let it dominate your life.
We have a living to make here for crying out loud.
That went on for four years.
That went on for four years.
Trump is Hitler.
Trump is with the Russians.
When Trump says good morning, it means I hate black people.
That went on for four years.
You have to be a genuine SOB to stand up to that and not break.
We're watching Joe Rogan, who probably seems to be kind of a nice guy.
It's hard to withstand that kind of opprobrium.
So what did we learn?
We learned the elites are very, very often wrong, right?
And it's better when things get better in the world when you ignore their wisdom.
And we've learned that ignoring them comes at too high a price.
We need to lower the price of ignoring the elites.
You know, what used to be, we used to have a system of checks and balances.
That's how the country was built.
You had the news media watching over everybody and the two parties fighting and the news media kind of playing.
Referee, that's gone.
It's been gutted.
That system has been gutted.
The consensus of government, media, corporations, Hollywood, you know, the academy is so complete and so misguided that it takes a guerrilla like Trump to simply do what's right.
And it shouldn't.
So that's another thing we should learn.
Free speech.
Free speech is essential to our country getting better.
And that means the speech of people we dislike and even people on the far left and everybody.
You know, there are things, there are things that I believe that are crimes that can legally be excluded, like committing violent speech acts like threats and extortion and so on.
But no, we have to be able to hear people talk because if we can't hear people talk, this consensus closes in.
It's this cloud of unknowing that closes over the elites and they will not change their minds.
And then you have to get a guy like Trump.
And I don't think it's altogether a good thing to have a guy who treats people like that in the White House.
I want a statesman in the White House.
I want a respectful guy in the White House.
But you got to lower the price of being right.
You have to lower the price of being right.
All of us should learn.
This is really something the left has to learn, but I think it's true on both sides.
We have to learn to be suspicious of fear and passion.
This is the wisdom of the ages, fear and passion, and suspicious of our own passions and our own desires to be taken care of and to be protected by powerful people.
Politicians and media and bureaucrats sell fear for one reason.
People buy it.
If people are ready to say, oh, the climate is going to kill me, oh, the disease is going to kill me.
You know, the reason you're not afraid is because it takes courage to live free.
That's why you're not afraid.
You're not afraid because you're not going to die.
You might die.
Tomorrow I could go home and get COVID and be gone or something else and be gone.
But I'm going to live.
I am going to live.
And that requires courage.
It requires courage to live free.
And that's what they should be preaching.
But they're preaching fear because they make a living off it and because it gives them control.
People are easily frightened.
They want to be taken care of.
And the more scared they are, the more they want to be taken care of.
And that's where you get these Karens, as they call them, who yell at people about their masks, screaming, you know, I know it doesn't work, but I'm afraid and I want you to be afraid too.
And I want people to tell me what to do.
And if you don't want people to tell you what to do, then there's something wrong with you.
You know, it takes courage to live free.
Elites are wrong.
The elite consensus needs to be broken by checks and balances and competition.
Free speech has to be protected at all costs.
We've got to get rid of canceled culture, which is, as I said last time, is a complete device of the left.
There is no left and right cancel culture.
This is because they have declared that everyone who disagrees with them is hateful, and that's what happened to Trump.
And that's why the cost of being right is so high.
We got to be suspicious of people selling fear and suspicious of our own hearts.
We have to be suspicious of our own hearts, because in the moment of passion, we get carried away.
And one other thing that I just have to, I'm going to close on this.
We cannot forget who these people are, who the people who told us what racists we are, what sexists we are, what phobes we are.
We're phobic about this, we're phobic about that, what Nazis we are.
These are the people who said it.
These people, the guys on CNN, they can't understand.
They can't understand why we like Joe Rogan better than them.
Joe Rogan, a leftist.
He's a Bernie bro.
Why the right likes Joe Rogan better than them.
Everybody likes Joe Rogan better than them.
Last week I played Brian Stelter saying, why do they trust him better than them?
So the comedian Russell Brand went over them.
This has gone viral.
It's hilarious.
Cut eight.
Which sounds great, but not all opinions are created equal.
No, it's a little funny, Jim.
You're not only making people not trust you.
You're not going to not trust me.
And then you have talk show stars like Joe Rogan who just wing it, who make it up as they go along.
And because figures like Rogan are trusted by people that don't trust real newsrooms.
They're like, why don't people trust me?
They trust Rogan, but I'm perfectly trusted.
Look how loose my tie knot is.
Joe Rogan's irresponsible.
He took horse mackeret medicine the other day.
Now tell me, sir, and don't tell me anything other than this.
Should there be a war?
Yes, there should be a war.
Interview's done.
I'd like to see you doing that, Joe Rogan.
That is great.
It's a good invitation, too.
We don't trust them.
They got everything wrong.
Here's cut seven.
We are not fake news.
We are real news.
Much of the dossier has been corroborated.
Some rioters were planning to murder lawmakers.
What does Putin have on Trump?
Has Trump been compromised?
That Kavanaugh aided and abetted in the commission of a gang rape.
But it does look like that young man to me is taunting the Native American Vietnam vet.
And he's in his face.
When you start whipping people with, and you want to split hairs between reins and whips.
There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden.
Looking ahead to 2020, one reason why I'm taking you seriously as a contender is because of your presence on cable news.
A widely held conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a Chinese laboratory.
Dr. Fauci, thank you for keeping it straight.
Thank you for fighting the good fight.
We know the science.
We know that masks work.
Why don't we trust those people?
And finally, there's this, and this is important too, because character counts, as they kept telling us about Trump, this is cut six.
I think this was made by us here at the Daily Wire.
This brand new research by Gallup says American trust in the mass media is at its lowest point since 2016 and near a record low overall.
Jeff Zucker has announced his immediate resignation as the president of CNN.
This comes amid an investigation into what Jeff Zucker calls a consensual relationship.
What happened and where CNN goes from here?
You were caught masturbating on camera.
You since then have been on leave from CNN.
Do I have all that right?
You've got it all right.
Sad to say.
The biggest media story this weekend, it's the firing of Chris Cuomo from this network, CNN.
Late Wednesday, a lawyer contacted CNN with a sexual misconduct complaint about Cuomo.
Joining me now, the man who accused Don Lemon of sexual assault.
His accuser claims Lemon started rubbing himself.
But the even bigger point, I think, is about what the press is.
Is it produced by reporters or by repeaters?
I love it.
These guys, these guys are telling us how bad we are, how evil we are, how rotten we are to have voted for the guy that they don't like.
This is the state of the union.
This is the state of the union.
Our country, like, listen, I believe things are going to be better.
I think the tide is turning.
I think we have a real chance of changing things.
But these, it's only in this bubble of consensus, only in this place where the checks and balances have broken down, where free speech is being curtailed by social media and powerful corporations.
It's only in that bubble that obnoxes like this could even think, could even imagine that there was anything we needed from them but repentance and an apology.
It's only there in this elite bubble that Hollywood people, people in Hollywood who are wrong about everything, who are constantly in rehab, who are going through their fourth wife, should get up at the Oscars, which no one watches anymore, that they should get up to the Oscars and tell us what's wrong with them, what's wrong with us.
You know, it's only in that bubble.
We have to break that bubble, and that's why we have to speak.
That's why we have to have the courage to speak.
It's why we have to have the courage not to fire people when they speak.
They're not going to do it.
They're not going to change.
They're not going to apologize.
They're not going to recognize who they are.
And that doesn't make them evil.
But that way, evil lies.
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Midterms And Marketable Value00:11:02
Right, Clavin, you got to say it the same way.
Clavin, Claven, how did they, in their how did you hear about us box?
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We have one of my favorite guests today, Henry Olson, writes a daily column for the Washington Post.
He's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He also is the best reader of political tea leaves in the country, in my opinion.
And one of the reasons for that is he does not pay any respect to persons.
He's a conservative, but he doesn't let that change the way he reads the numbers.
That's why sometimes what he says might get on your nerves because he's telling you the truth.
But the truth will make us free.
Henry Olson, it's great to see you.
It's great to see you.
So I've been reading your columns, and Republicans obviously are feeling really good about the upcoming midterms.
And I always think about Glenn Reynolds at Instapund that he's always quoting Han Solo, don't get cocky, kid.
So let me just read just one sentence from a column of yours who wrote after Glenn Young won in Virginia.
You said, Democrats are right to be concerned that the upcoming midterm elections could be a disaster.
A close look at the data from 2021 elections in Virginia and New Jersey suggest it could become a bloodbath.
And there's likely little, this is the part that got me, there's likely little individual candidates can do to avoid it.
So what did you see in Virginia that made you feel that way?
Well, it was both Virginia and New Jersey, is that what it wasn't just that Yunkin won, that Winsom Earl Sears won for lieutenant governor, that Jason Maaris won for Attorney General, or that the Republicans took control of the House of Delegates.
All of those are amazing things.
It's that virtually everywhere you looked, you saw a nearly identical swing in the vote.
And when I looked at the state legislative races in New Jersey and in Virginia, what I found is that there's not a single state legislative district in either place that Democrats currently hold where Biden won by less than 11 and three quarters points the year before, not one.
So what these things tell me is it doesn't matter if your name is Joe Blow or Jane Gutierrez or whatever it is, if you're a Democrat, The odds are overwhelming that if you are below a certain line of partisanship on Election Day, you're going to lose.
And given how many Democrats nationally are below the line from last November, they should be terrified.
And one more thing, Biden is lower today by net five percentage points on his net job approval average than he was back then, which suggests the bar of endangered Democrats is even higher.
And even more people should be looking over their shoulders and wondering what their post-congressional careers are going to entail.
That's encouraging.
Now, I want to leave off.
It's encouraging if you're a Republican, these people.
Think of their retirement.
No, it's true.
I have a little violin that if I can find it, I'll play it.
I want to leave Donald Trump aside for just a minute, because we have to talk about him, obviously.
But what headwinds, are there any headwinds that the GOP is looking at?
Well, first of all, we're taking a look at something that's still nine months away.
Events can interfere.
And historically, events sometimes have interfered.
You know, what happens if there's another, God forbid, 9-11?
In the 1962 midterms, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke in the three weeks before Election Day.
Clearly, its positive resolution helped Kennedy somewhat.
You just don't know what you don't know.
To put it in the late Donald Rumsfeld's terms, this is a known unknown.
Second, there's a possibility that there's going to be people who are not going to like Biden, but they're going to say, I'm still not willing to vote for Democrats.
What we see in the polls right now is that there's a big gap between Biden disapproval and Republican voting behavior on the generic ballot.
And that is something that is due to people who don't like Biden, who haven't decided where they're going to go.
But other than that, the only major headwind is the quality of the candidate, is that even in wave years where one party wins overwhelmingly, you can just nominate a dud.
And if you nominate a big enough dud, voters are going to say, I don't want to vote Democratic, but this person is unacceptable and they're going to return the Democrat.
Barring that, this is the most optimistic I've ever been for Republicans nine months out because it's just unprecedentedly, Biden is in an unprecedentedly bad position.
Republicans are doing better in the generic ballot and in other positions than they were during the Obama years.
And you just look at this party and you look at this president and you say, how can they change it around without changing who they are personally and politically?
And those sort of surgeries, if they happen, happen very painfully and take a long recovery period.
Yeah.
And you said that no individual candidate can change this.
Is there anything, I mean, if you were advising the Democrats, is there something you would tell them that would help?
Yeah.
The thing is, there's always going to be an outlier, you know, the sort of person who can run ahead of the party.
John Caprow, the Republican who's retiring now from Syracuse, was continually one in an area he should not have won in.
So there's always going to be the exception that proves the rule.
Point is that we really have moved from the period of our use and middle age, Andrew, where both of us grew up during a period when people would cast votes for one party in one office and another party for another office, go back and forth.
Swing voting exists.
Split ticket voting really does not anymore.
Those are two different things.
So, what I would tell the Democrats is, you know, the problem is what you tell the Democrats is something they don't want to hear, is that the Democratic Party coalition is different than the Democratic voter coalition, which is to say that if you're an active Democrat, the center of public opinion among people who are self-described Democrats is decidedly center-left.
That creates what we've been seeing, the arguments between the center-left and the left within the party.
The problem is the Democratic voter coalition includes a lot of non-Democrats.
And these are people who wanted a centrist administration.
They wanted quiet competence, and they're not getting either.
And so, the thing that you would tell them is something that would require them to recognize how far out of step they are.
And there's lots of people telling them.
Democrats of all stripes are saying it.
They can't hear it because to hear it means the left has to understand that they can't get what they want most, which is rapid transformation of America.
And that's half of the Democratic Party.
It's 20% of America.
People don't have that sort of rapid, sudden self-realization or self-abnegation.
You wrote a column recently that said that candidates endorsed by Donald Trump are having trouble fundraising.
What does that mean?
What do you see in that?
Well, what it means is that people in the media like to say the Republican Party is the Donald Trump Party.
And at the level of issues, that's true, the sorts of things that Trump talks about, you know, strong immigration, nationalistic America first foreign policy, taking entitlement reform largely off the table.
That's shared by like 80%, 70% to 80% of Republicans now.
So too, do they have a positive opinion of him?
But Donald Trump personally is no longer the be-all and end-all.
And what it means is that there's no big donors in Trump's orbit who will come in, unlike in other factions of the Republican Party.
There's not a small donor of days that Trump's endorsement can mobilize.
You're pretty much on your own if you're in the Donald's corner because the normal party apparatus is not interested in funding you, and Trump can't fund you at any level.
And that is a sign of weakness, is that the Trump brand may be a mile wide and two and a half inches thick.
Everyone I know who knows Trump, I've never met him, but everyone I know who knows him and talks to him says he swears he's going to run.
Do you believe him?
Do I believe him?
Well, I think we've learned that anyone who believes Donald Trump, you know, I think Donald Trump would like to be elected president of the United States.
I do not think Donald Trump wants to be president of the United States.
And it's one thing to hold it out there.
It's another thing to actually recognize, I'm actually going to have to do this all over again.
Maybe he's up to it.
Maybe he's not.
One thing I know, I know, and I don't need to be told, is that to the extent Donald Trump has marketable value, he has marketable value as long as he holds himself out as a credible candidate.
So one of the things I'm looking for is when he puts his, you know, if he finally gets his social media platform together that he's been talking about building and that Devin Nunez resigned from Congress to run, what's the cash flow?
How much does the Donald get from that?
What's his ownership stake?
What's the business model?
Because I think that's going to have a lot to indicate where his head is at.
If it's not a big cash flow to Trump, then it's a political vehicle.
But if it is a big cash flow to Trump, remember how he made his name, his money for the last decade or so?
It was licensing his name to various things, not actually building things.
That was Trump this, Trump Stakes, Trump Wine, Trump Golf, Trump Hotels.
It was a licensing endeavor.
It could very well be that Trump's going to see a lot higher rate of return on having a political licensing endeavor than he ever did in business.
And that might be what he wants.
Yeah, yeah.
It would be helpful at this point, actually, to have him have a voice, or at least have people that have a voice that he's in control of with people being censored so much on social media.
Not many people know this, but I am a small business.
I contract out my wares to people.
And the thing is, people talk about small business, but my small business isn't small to me because it's me.
And my time actually is money.
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You're thinking, Clavin, why?
How can I possibly spell that?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
So my pal, Sebastian Gorka, I love him to death, but I had him on.
He is absolutely certain that the election was stolen.
A lot of time has passed.
A lot of more information has come in.
Molly Hemingway wrote a pretty incisive book about some of the shenanigans that went on.
Where do you stand on this now?
The election was not stolen.
I'm 100% certain about that.
I am certain there were shenanigans.
Molly wrote about some.
I can point you to others that she may or may not have written about.
But there is no evidence that mail and voting produced a wave of invalid ballots.
I did an analysis in Pennsylvania where I looked at two factors.
I looked at a turnout compared as a percentage of citizen voting population in 2016 and 2020.
And Pennsylvania was a great state to look because it did not have no excuse mail and ballot or any form of early balloting in 2016.
So it was like the perfect Trump model.
You all vote out on election day unless you're sick or out of town.
And then 2020, it had no excuse mail and ballot.
I did not find any relationship between the share of votes cast by mail and increases in the turnout, which is what you'd expect.
If mail ballots were producing phony ballots, you'd expect bigger turnout areas when there's more mail ballots.
And it didn't happen at all.
And the same is true under the other theory.
The other theory is, well, they just stuffed the ballot box the old-fashioned way when they were counting the votes.
Actually, some of the smallest increases in turnout were in the places that Democrats controlled the most.
So when you look at it and say, if it didn't happen in Pennsylvania, why do I think it happened anywhere else?
And I know enough about voting trends to be able to see, yes, turnout was up pretty much everywhere.
The same neighborhood, sort of neighborhoods moved towards Trump, whether it was a safe state or a swing state.
I was looking at Hawaii recently and found places, the few places where there are upper income Hawaiians, and they voted much less for Donald Trump in 2020 than they voted for Republican candidates in 2018.
It was just a nationwide phenomena.
And I do not believe there is a single state that was swayed by vote fraud, either in the counting or in the casting.
Yeah, yeah.
I know people don't like to hear this, but I think you're right about this.
And it certainly certainly was never proved anywhere near a court of law.
And no case was ever brought that was even mildly convincing.
Or that they ever, yeah, this is the thing is people will say it.
But my question is, okay, describe to me in three minutes or less how it happened.
Yeah.
With some degree of specificity.
I have never once heard any Trump acolyte be able to answer that question.
They'll throw buzzwords about or make claims, but I could say, okay, it's 11,000 votes in Georgia.
Exactly how did it happen?
Yeah.
They can't do it.
So one of the many ways you've been out ahead of the curve was talking about changing demographics and the effect they're going to have.
And you were screaming at the Republican Party to wake up to the fact that the coalition had changed and that the demographics of the country had changed.
And Trump actually did some of that.
I mean, you were also the only person who said he had a chance of winning and the only informed person who said he had a chance of winning.
And Trump, it seems to me, has changed something.
He's changed, he himself has changed the coalition.
Can you describe what you think has changed and what the Republicans should learn, what they should see and pay attention to now?
You know, what Donald Trump was was effectively the graphic novel version of what I had been calling for, which was a shift on issues and temperament to one that accommodated the non-left working class who were increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream Republican nostrums, but were also more dissatisfied with mainstream Democrat ideology.
Donald Trump spoke to them.
He was, you know, I was writing back in the early 2010s about immigration and trade.
They're two sides of the same coin.
If you want to attract the white working class that dominates the upper Midwest, you want to abandon or modify significantly Republican dogma on basically free immigration and free trade.
Trump did.
And lo and behold, he got exactly the voter base I was describing for people.
He took entitlement reform off the table, another big issue bugaboo with them.
And I always thought that what would happen is that for cultural reasons, the white working class would be the leaders, but that other ethnicity working classes would follow behind.
And that's what you're seeing now, is Trump began to bring Latinos and some Asians into the coalition, a little bit in the black.
And you're seeing that multiply over the last year in all the polls, that Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party in droves.
It doesn't mean that Republicans will win the nationwide Hispanic vote, but the Democrats have to win it by 40% or more to have a shot at winning the popular vote.
If they only win it by 15%, the Republicans are the majority party in this country.
And that's something that Donald Trump's dismissal of Republican ideology and his abandonment of a genteel style of talking and replacing it with a rougher, direct, I'm on your side style of talking, which, by the way, was the sort of talk in a more polite way that Franklin Roosevelt did when he attracted the working class away from the Republicans and created the New Deal coalition.
The combination of these things changed things irrevocably.
And as you're a Republican, the center of gravity in the Republican Party is they want a fighter who will talk about Trumpian issues who isn't Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a center of opinion.
And too many Republicans want to ignore where that is.
So they want to basically, without saying so, bring back the old Republican Party.
That dog don't hunt.
Yeah.
That's a dead loser.
That's what it looks like to me.
And you actually have the information to back it up.
You are the only person I want to ask this question of.
You're the only person whose response actually matters to me.
I'm looking at this Roe v. Wade case that the Supreme Court has.
And I think there's a small chance they'll overturn Roe v. Wade.
It's not a big one, but it could happen.
The common wisdom pumped in by the media has always been that if Roe v. Wade was overturned, Republicans would lose elections, that it would cost Republicans at the ballot box.
Do you think there's truth to that?
I think it is a debatable thesis.
I'll present the pro and the con for that.
The pro is that the clear majority at the center of American public opinion in most states, you know, not Alabama or Mississippi, but in most states, is restrictions after the first trimester, but free access during the first trimester.
So overturning Roe places the possibility of banning abortion in the first trimester.
So the argument would be that people who have this, what I call soft abortion rights viewpoint, but have never prioritized it before in voting.
They hold it, but they don't vote on it.
The argument in favor of that, of what you just said, is that suddenly this becomes activated and motivated, and it moves up the priority list a lot.
That's the best case scenario for the Democrats on the abortion issue.
The flip side of that is that, first of all, it seems to be a weakly held position.
Who's to say people will still hold that position when they hear more, when candidates, instead of trotting out the clichés we've heard for the last 40 decades or 40 years, four decades, actually start arguing about it?
Who's to say they couldn't become softly pro-life?
So don't think that a softly held opinion is written in stone.
Secondly, in light of their many years of behavior, it's not at all clear to me that even if they're worried about it, that they will activate it on a national basis unless there would be like a direct threat to them.
And that's one thing where I think a lot of places that Democrats could win, you're going to see Republicans act more in line with public opinion.
Like apparently the Florida Republican Party is not trying to push a Texas-style six-week fetal heartbeat ban, but they're trying to push a Mississippi-style 15-week ban.
Well, the public supports that.
The public wouldn't support in a place like Florida, an outright ban on abortion.
So a Republican Party that acts moderately in the response of the opportunity is one that I don't think will activate the pro-choice majority, the center of pro-choice.
And that's the argument, pro and con.
And I think it's a debatable hypothesis.
And if it happens, we'll see more evidence pretty quickly in the polls.
Yeah.
Henry, great talking to you.
Henry Olson, your columns with the Washington Post still, right?
Still at the Washington Post.
Absolutely.
Yep, absolutely great talking to you.
Really, really interesting.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
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There are no easy playbacks.
If you missed the world premiere of Shut In last night, you suck.
Francis Collins' Tone00:16:08
What a fool.
Not only did we get to share a film too gritty and thrilling for Hollywood, but we were able to tease out our next big film, Terror on the Prairie, a Western starring none other than the great Gina Carano.
We couldn't be more excited to be making good on our promise to bring you real entertainment.
And for the over half a million that tuned in, really half a million, we seriously hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
If you missed it, don't worry.
You don't really suck.
It's streaming on our website for members only.
And if you're not a member, head to dailywire.com slash subscribe and enter code SHUTIN for 30% off your membership.
All right.
As I said at the beginning of the show, Megan Basham, the Daily Wire entertainment reporter, has been doing such a great job covering the culture that I've decided we're going to bring her on.
She's agreed happily that we can bring her on once a month to talk about the stuff she is covering.
She is the author of Beside Every Successful Man.
Megan, thanks for coming on.
Well, thanks for having me and thanks for the opportunity.
I'm over the moon about it.
Well, the last time that my last cultural reporter was Michael Knowles, so he's got to be an improvement there.
But he, you know, he did well.
So maybe.
He does okay for himself.
Yeah.
He does.
He does.
So before you came on, when they were trying to hook up the link, I was on, just went on Twitter and I see you being beaten up by the evangelicals, which is really funny.
It's hilarious the way because you keep producing the receipts.
They keep saying they didn't do it and you keep producing the receipts.
So the story basically centers around Francis Collins.
And so before you get to what the story was, explain to people not just who Francis Collins is, but what he means has meant to the evangelical movement.
So Francis Collins was until recently the head of the National Institutes of Health.
He ran the Human Genome Project.
And so he's really a celebrated scientific mind.
He's also noted for being a professing Christian.
He identifies as an evangelical.
Now, some of his beliefs are a little outside of Orthodox Christianity.
He's something of a theist.
He doesn't believe in a literal Adam and Eve.
He's kind of in the camp where he believes that God started the evolutionary process and kind of let things unfold from there, but that God had a hand in that evolutionary process.
So I think a lot of the evangelical world has this sense of maybe inferiority, that we're not intellectuals, that we are not that smart.
And so you have someone like Francis Collins.
And I think there's an understandable desire to hold him out and say, this guy, this amazing intellectual, is one of us.
And so he runs in a lot of Tony circles.
He was appointed by Obama.
He holds a very powerful position in the federal government until just last December when he retired.
And he goes to places like Davos and he does book clubs with David Brooks at the New York Times.
So just, you know, a very fancy man.
So he's a Christian who's accepted by the elites, basically.
Yes, I think that's a great way to put it.
And so as COVID has been going on, he's particularly been important for his pushing of the COVID narrative.
So just as you saw Anthony Fauci out everywhere in the secular media, Francis Collins has been specifically dispatched.
And this wasn't really denied.
It was kind of openly covered in Time magazine and some other outlets that he was openly dispatched to convince Christians and church members to get on board with the government's COVID policies, things like masking, shutting your churches, staying home, abiding by lockdowns, and especially getting vaccinated, all of those things.
So he made the rounds to just a number of very high-profile pastors, high-profile media outlets and ministries, sort of preaching this message of follow the government guidelines regarding COVID.
And very particularly, he presented it as a gospel issue.
Follow the guidelines to show that you love your neighbor, to show that you're following Jesus.
And he was presented in that way as someone who is just like you, a Christian brother, and that's why you should listen to him.
So that was kind of the nature of the story.
But there's a little bit more to Francis Collins than that.
And that was the part of the story that was not presented on all of these podcasts and in all of these media interviews.
And that's the fact that Francis Collins, though he professes to be pro-life, has directed record-level funding to fetal tissue research.
And that has included some experimentation at the University of Pittsburgh that involved grafting the scalps of aborted infants onto lab rats.
It involved harvesting the organs of full-term babies 40, 42 weeks that had been aborted.
There were some charges.
This is not confirmed, but some doctors have alleged that that University of Pittsburgh research involved extracting the ureters, kidneys, and a couple other organs from still living infants.
So some fairly horrific stuff.
So to wrap up this somewhat long-winded answer, there's also another element of Francis Collins' work, and that is the fact that he launched an initiative in which he declared himself an LGBT ally and advocate.
And that funding went to something called sexual and gender minority research.
And one of those projects has involved directing $8 million to a research grant that gave opposite sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13.
So these are the things that all of these pastors and Christian ministries did not tell their audiences and their church members about Francis Collins.
Did they know it?
I don't know.
And so I reached out to try to find that out.
His record on fetal tissue research is pretty public.
He's given lots of interviews where he has advocated for it and admitted that he knows it's controversial in the pro-life world.
So I suspect they did know that.
Don't know if they knew about the sexual and gender minority research, and so you called Collins for comment.
Uh, what happened?
Well, I called everyone for comment, I called all the pastors, I called, and Collins I had an interview scheduled with.
And it was actually coincidental that after our article came out on the Daily WIRE uh, one of these PR companies got in touch with me and said, we're doing this, you know, curriculum launch with Francis Collins.
Would you like an interview with him?
And it happened to fall like two days after the article came out.
So I said oh yes please, I would love that interview.
So uh, interview was scheduled via zoom and I was very.
I just want to say that I did read through all the press materials and all of my questions were crafted to be related to those press material, press materials and the topic at hand.
So i'm sitting there waiting for our ZOOM meeting and you know, some time goes by.
They're running late, they're telling me not to worry and at about 15 minutes my zoom screen clicks off and says this meeting has been canceled, and I just get a text from the PR people saying we're sorry, we had to cancel the meeting.
They don't answer me for a little while.
Eventually I get an email from his people saying, because your article does not exhibit the kind of gracious tone that we are trying to elevate with Francis Collins's organization, we had to cancel your interview.
So that was kind of the end of my story with Francis Collins.
So one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the country, he ran away from a girl.
Is what you're telling me like this guy?
That is what i'm telling you.
Yes, that's what happened, I mean.
I mean you know when, when I found Christ, he made me weirdly fearless.
It seems like it didn't have that effect on this guy.
You know what?
Just to go back for a minute to whether these guys knew one of the guys he was with and from your articles, NT Right NOW, i've read a lot of NT Right and he's a very, very elevated, uh Christian intellectual.
I think he's overrated, but I don't think he's uh, completely overrated.
I think he's.
He's got some interesting stuff that he does.
But they were pals right, I mean they knew each other pretty well.
Oh yes, I mean all of these guys seem pretty close.
The NT Right UH interview in particular ended with a guitar duet where they sang together.
So I feel like that's a pretty tight connection when you're doing a duet with somebody.
That's like Nulls And Boring, right.
So now, just you know, on a personal note, when during, just before the Pandemic I, I for a while left the kind of Anglican, uh Catholic church because I got so disgusted with the church I was in because it was so left-wing that I, just I, the I was distracted by some of the sermons and I wound up in a Presbyterian church which I kind of enjoyed.
But ultimately, when they called for a shutdown, they shut down like this and I was really disappointed.
And these guys in your article you say these guys were making fun of John Macarthur, the guy who braved California's lockdown to stay open and fought them.
And they were.
They were kind of chuckling at him behind his back.
Essentially yeah, which is kind of funny to me, because now i'm hearing all this stuff about my tone and I I kind of look at these videos and go gosh, you guys, I I like Tim Keller.
I feel probably about Tim Keller like you do about Nt.
Right, i've learned a lot from him.
Yes, I benefited from his writing, but in this particular interview, he was right there agreeing with Francis Collins.
In fact, he said that churches who defied the COVID shutdowns, like John MacArthur's, and this was right at that time, represented the bad and ugly, good, bad, and ugly church responses to the coronavirus.
So an anti-right said that these churches that were not locking down had some idea like Jesus is my vaccine or Satan can't get into my church.
So really dismissive and kind of sneering.
So what bothers me about this, the fact that the government says shut down your church in a country like this where the government really is not supposed to have that power, and they shut down like this.
And, you know, it's not just the evangelicals because in Catholic theology, the body and blood of Christ, the mass is central.
If you're not getting the mass, you are not getting the benefit of the church.
They shut down instantaneously.
Meanwhile, as you say, they're listening to this guy who is supporting gender treatment for kids and possibly some level of abortion.
This speaks to me of something horribly wrong in the church.
Am I getting that right?
Am I seeing that correctly?
Yeah, I think you are.
And what's been probably most disturbing to me, you know, I didn't know what the reaction would be when the story came out, but I thought there would be some.
I thought there might be some argument of, look, given what we knew at the time, we felt this was the best thing to do or we stand by our mass decision, something like that.
I've gotten none of that.
All I've really gotten is some sort of back channel through ancillary voices like Eric Erickson, who I like also, conservative host, saying, hey, guys, I talk to them.
He doesn't say who he talked to, but he just says, I talk to them.
They're good guys.
This is more complex than you think, but doesn't really offer detail.
And then the whole thing turns into tone.
Let's not fight.
Let's not have this bickering and backbiting.
We need to love each other.
And I'm going, okay, at a certain point, though, we actually need to talk about the hard, concrete facts of this story, and we need to get to the truth.
And so I'm not really willing to brush it all under the rug under the umbrella of nice tone.
So do you, but do you have an idea, a larger idea of what you think has gone wrong?
I mean, something, something, you know, these churches, people are deserting them.
And a church that bows to the government is not the church.
We know this because we have all of church history from the year, literally the year zero, of churches standing up to oppressive governments and governments that are overstepping.
And certainly in terms of operating on children, I mean, there's no excuse.
There's just no excuse.
So do you have a bigger idea of what's gone wrong?
What happened to the evangelical church?
It was a force for conservatism.
It was a force sometimes for actual religion.
And it seems to have lost its way.
I mean, from my perspective, and at this point, this is not reporting.
This is my opinion because they wouldn't talk to me.
But I see this desire for cultural relevancy.
And it feels like it infects so much of what they do.
Like, you know, somebody kind of made the quip that evangelicalism is we'll do the same thing, but worse.
And five years later, and that kind of feels like what we're seeing.
It's just this very strong desire to be associated with people who are viewed as elite, intellectual, and we want to be culturally relevant.
We don't want to be thought as backwoods and backwards.
But you know what?
If you follow Jesus, they might think that you're backwoods and backwards.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's very corrupting.
It's something, you know, in some ways, they joined the Reagan coalition, basically, because I think partly because of Roe v. Wade, they wanted to, they felt they were being excluded, but now they've become part of power politics and it's just not a good fit.
I mean, you're going to be corrupted by power politics.
This is probably my last question, and it is an opinion question.
But I read recently in a book called Homo Deus by Yuval Harari.
I read this line where he said Christianity and the other theist religions have long since turned from creative into reactive forces.
And I can't help feeling that he's got something there, even though I disagree with a lot of what Harari says, that somehow churches are no longer part of the conversation of what should we, how should we live?
How should we deal with mental illness?
How should we deal with art?
How can we create art that matters?
None of those things that the church actually did for most of its existence happen anymore in this country.
They have become a sort of a crankfest sometimes, or they just surrender to the culture or they just crank about it.
Do you have any thoughts about why that should be?
Well, you know, I have to be honest with you.
I have felt that way for maybe the last 10 years.
And then, as much as we all sort of decry the effects of social media, lately I've been connecting with sort of these young, they dismiss them as theo-bros, but there's kind of these very young, strong Christian men who are talking about some really big ideas.
And I've kind of been hanging out in their Twitter spaces and listening to them talk about natural law and the application of the common good.
And I kind of feel like maybe the tide is turning and there's been a bit of a backlash to where they're going, no, we are here to have an impact on culture and we're not willing to just sort of follow along and look for contextualization or relevancy where we can find it.
So for me, I think that has happened, but I'm kind of hoping maybe we're reaching a tipping point because these young guys, they're not messing around.
Oh, that's great.
That's great to hear.
I'm glad I asked the question.
That is excellent to you.
Megan Basham, the excellent cultural reporter for The Daily Wire.
It is great to see you and we will see you again in March.
Thank you.
I'm looking forward to it.
Thanks a lot.
You know, there's an old Bing Crosby song that goes, wrap your troubles and dreams and dream your troubles away.
But here we say, wrap your troubles in today's issue of the New York Times and just toss them out because it's time for the mailbag.
I think what annoys me most about white people is when they pretend like they're the victim.
Yeah!
Yeah, that's what annoys me most about white people too.
From Ashland, thanks for doing your show.
I appreciate your insights.
I saw the clip of Matt Walsh on Dr. Phil.
It was funny to see some of the inconsistencies of the left in regard to transgender issues.
This is Matt asking the transgender person, what's a woman?
And the guy can't answer.
But, says Ashland, I don't think it's a good idea to go down that rabbit hole with too much judgment.
I think you do a good job of that.
Biology Is Messy00:09:08
The truth is biology is messy.
Some people do have different combinations of chromosomes.
Also in nature, for example, ducks can change from female into male.
The human experience is not just defined by biological science, but also presumably by the patterns in which neurons are wired and presumably a spirit potentially living outside the physical science that we currently know.
You make a good point that technology will exist that will create a baby in a machine, a la brave new world, and the choice to live in that world may, and we may be able to live in that world and choose biological genders.
Instead, well, Ashland, this is a thoughtful letter, and I agree with some of what you're saying.
The duck thing is extraordinarily rare, by the way.
I mean, it does weirdly happen if a duck's ovary gets infected and dies.
It stops blocking the male hormones.
And the duck can, in very rare cases, change from female to male, not the other way.
But they have a very different genetics than we do anyway.
Anyway, the bigger point is well taken.
And that's why I thought that Walsh did such a great job, because what we're arguing about is our ability to communicate truths.
And we can't do that if words cease to have meaning.
And here's the point about this.
If I told you that it's true that some people are born with two sets of genitals, but if I told you that a person was born with one leg, you would still say that mankind is a two-legged creature, as a biped.
You would still say that.
So if a person is born with the double set of chromosomes, you would still say that people are born as male and female, and male and females are different.
You have to be able to generalize in order to think.
And they can't change at this moment.
A man who thinks he's a woman is an effeminate man.
That's what he is.
And that's describing him accurately is important so that we can have a vigorous, open debate, not be censored on social media and not be called names and not suffer boycotts, but simply talk about what it means when a guy says, man, I feel like a woman.
I think that I do feel, I have said from the very beginning on this issue, that I do feel that there is compassion to be had.
I can understand that's a painful thing.
We should talk about how that's done.
But we certainly do not have anything like the information to cut up young people or to declare that somebody is hateful for thinking that, no, a guy who puts on a dress and pearls is not, in fact, changing his sex.
Otherwise, words stop meaning anything.
And I think that is what the left wants.
The left wants words to mean what the parties say they mean.
And that's why I thought Walsh did such a great job because he hit on the fact that it really was about language and their control of language and not letting people talk.
From Charlie, good evening, Mr. Clavin.
First, thanks for your excellent show covering culture, religion, and God.
I'm 20 years old, and I've been out of the house now for two years.
I recently moved to a new city, away from any close or extended family, and I've been plagued by intense feelings of nostalgia from my youth and loneliness.
I started attending church down the road with that purpose in mind.
I remember reading The Great Good Thing, that's my memoir, about how you saw your wife, the Amazon, hitchhiking, and you almost literally chased her until you were married.
My wife is a very tall, very beautiful lady, and she was hitchhiking.
And the first thought that went through my mind when I saw her, I thought, look at that gorgeous Amazon.
So that's what he's talking about.
That is in The Great Good Thing.
He says, now, I've seen my Amazon, or rather heard her amazing voice at church because she sings with the choir.
I'm planning to pursue her any idea of the best way without scaring her away.
You know, it's an interesting question, actually, coming from a 20-year-old man.
I would think by 20, you would know how to approach a lady that you like.
But, you know, there's no, you don't have to pursue her.
I mean, you go to her church.
I'm sure she hangs around at coffee hours.
You should walk up.
I mean, I'm just explaining what I, or I think most guys would do, is you go up and say, you know, my name is Charlie.
I just have to tell you what a lovely voice you have.
And you ask her questions about herself and you tell her a little bit about yourself.
And after about 10, 15 minutes, you say, well, I don't want to take up all your time, but I would love it if you would let me call you and ask you out.
And if she says, you know, I never want to see you again, make sure she never sees you again.
But hopefully you will be charming and pleasant enough where she'll love having even just a drink to get to know one another.
I mean, I think that's good luck.
Good luck.
Let me know how it goes.
I mean, good luck.
From Sarah, I'm 22 years old.
I struggle with OCD in the form of orthorexia and exercise addiction.
Self-diagnosed.
She says, my body is not getting enough energy from what I'm asking of it, but I still can't seem to get out of the cycle of disordered eating.
I'm a Christian.
I recognize my lifestyle to be an idol.
So this is really affecting my relationship with God.
I would love any advice you have on overcoming idols that aren't necessarily bad, but are idols when we put them above God.
You know, this is another one of those things.
It's not really a theological.
You know, psychological problems act as a sort of shell over your theological problems or your spiritual problems.
Until you solve the psychological problem, a lot of times you can't get to the theological problem, the spiritual problem, because the psychological problem causes you to use God as an excuse.
You think you're talking to God, but you're really, like alcoholics do this all the time.
They think they're talking to God.
They're having all kinds of, oh, I have a tremendous revelation.
Everything's going to be different now.
Nothing's going to be different until you stop drinking.
Nothing's going to be different until you get over this eating disorder.
You have an eating disorder.
You have a psychological problem.
And one of the ways you can tell the difference is psychological problems are repetitive.
They keep you addicted to the same patterns of thought, the same patterns of action over and over again, OCD and alcoholism and these things.
And you have to break that pattern so that you can open up and become a creative, changing person with a relationship to God.
I think you need a doctor here.
Doctors can be really stupid about eating disorders, but if you get a therapist who specializes in this, he or she will help you find hopefully a doctor who will help you do this because it's dangerous.
What you're doing is dangerous, and you have to stop it.
This is not idolatry.
This is something wrong in your brain that you have to fix.
And I think that fixing it is a godly thing to do.
Fixing it is a spiritual thing to do.
Just putting your spirit above your body, saying, I'm not going to let my body control my life because that's what's happening right now.
I'm going to break through, but you're going to need help to do that.
Don't try and do that alone.
You've got to get a doctor.
You've got to get medical attention.
And you should get some therapy for this.
From Tyler, I'm currently working to obtain my MSW to work as a therapist at the location I'm completing.
Oh boy, this is a long question, but I'll try and get to some of it.
My field placement, they had us read an article on a treatment modality of therapy called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, DBT.
They have a part called Radical Acceptance.
The article discusses how, quote, spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom, and compassion.
And then they point out in the next paragraph how, quote, our guiding myth is the story of Adam and Eve's exile.
And this is what they say, this quoting, the message of original sin is unequivocal because of our flawed nature.
We do not deserve to be happy, loved by others, at ease with life.
We are outcast and we are to re-enter the garden.
And if we are to re-enter the garden, we must redeem our sinful selves.
We must overcome our flaws by controlling our bodies, controlling our emotions, controlling our natural surroundings, controlling other people.
We must strive tirelessly, working, acquiring, consuming, achieving, emailing, overcommitting, and rushing in a never-ending quest to prove ourselves once and for all.
He says, I find myself a religious individual, but not quite knowledgeable on the teachings or readings.
I'm working to change that.
Reading this, I felt the author got this story and it's meaning completely wrong.
Completely is the right word.
They got it completely wrong.
What are your thoughts on the story of Adam and Eve and its teachings?
Yeah, I don't have time now to go into the whole thing, but this is completely untrue.
Everything in it is completely untrue, except that, of course, we have to control our bodies and we have to control our emotions sometimes.
You know, that's naturally.
If you don't control your body, as I was saying to the lady before, then your body is going to destroy you.
You have to eat well.
You have to live well as well as you can.
You have to have your pleasures where you can, but also control the pleasures and control your emotions so you don't do stupid stuff all the time.
All of that is spiritual and right behavior.
And the notion of permissiveness, which is supposed to be, oh, you know, you're going to be free, it actually enslaves you.
And, you know, permissiveness actually enslaves people and makes them get lost.
But that is not at all what the story of Adam and Eve is about.
It is the story of the disobedience toward God, of the breaking of our natures so that our natures are operating against us, so that we want things that we shouldn't want, that hurt us.
We want to destroy ourselves.
We want to destroy other people.
We do the worst thing for ourselves when we know what the best thing is.
That's a spiritual problem.
And so that's the problem we have.
And anyone who thinks he doesn't have that problem just isn't paying attention because that is the way life is.
With that, I must cast you out of the garden of Clavan-y goodness into the exterior darkness where there is wailing, there is gnashing of teeth, broken glass flames.
It's a mess.
Production Credits00:01:49
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